Page 36 - Spring 2015

Peter H Rogers
Postal:
School of Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia 30326 USA
Email:
peter.rogers@gatech.edu
Domenic J. Maglieri
Postal:
Eagle Aeronautics, Inc. 732 Thimble Shoals Boulevard Building C204 Newport News, Virginia 23606 USA
Email:
maglieri@eagleaeronautics.com
Concorde booms and the Mysterious east Coast noises
Concorde's primary and secondary booms significantly altered the role it set out to play in scheduled commercial supersonic travel. Could the Mach 2 Concorde have been the source of the alarming East Coast Mystery Booms of the late '70s?
Introduction
The last commercial flight of the only operational civil supersonic transport (SST), the Concorde (Figure 1), was completed on October 24, 2003. This brought an end to almost 30 years of civil supersonic travel and the cessation of its sonic booms. Over its life span, much has been learned from this 400,000-pound, 100-passenger, Mach 2.0 commercial supersonic transport and its operations that is of signifi- cant value toward the development of the next generation of commercial aircraft that will be designed to cruise supersonically over land. It has been 60 years since the concept of bringing to life an aircraft that would provide the public sched- uled commercial supersonic travel. It is the purpose of this article to provide to present and future generations a brief overview of the Concorde, how its sonic
Figure 1. The Concorde Supersonic Transport on its last ever flight in 2003. Photo by Adrian Pingstone.
boom altered the role it was expected to play in scheduled commercial supersonic com- mercial travel, and the noto- riety it gathered during the 1977-1978 mysterious east coast acoustic disturbances.
Concorde
Before the Concorde, the civil aviation market was dominated by US subsonic aircraft. Britain and France, anxious to have a more sig- nificant role in the design of the next generation of com- mercial aircraft, jointly de- cided to take a giant leap in air travel and go with the su-
personic transport. This decision was based in part on the assumption that the ex- perience gained regarding supersonic operations through their military programs could be applicable to passenger travel. The Concorde project began with a request from the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the early 1950s to form a committee to study the SST concept. This group met in February 1954 and issued their study report April 1955. On October 1, 1956, the Supersonic Transport Advisory Com- mittee was formed with the task of developing an SST design and finding industry partners to build it. Two prototypes were built in 1965: the French 001 and the British 002.
34 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2015 , volume 11, issue 2 ©2015 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.