Nov 232011
From a 1968 LTV report on a hypersonic test vehicle: a projection of the speeds of aircraft in the future. At the time, it was thought that by the late 1980’s passenger transports would be cruising along at Mach 3 to Mach 4; fighters and bomber would cruise at Mach 5 to Mach 8; and research aircraft would get to Mach 12 to Mach 16.
And it turned out, all three categories of aircraft actually slowed down.
5 Responses to “We were supposed to go this fast”
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Pretty easy to predict when you ignore all of the real issues.
Hmm, a Mach 4 C-5A. That’d be a sight. An incandescent one. For a very short moment.
Remember when you were a kid–and had a lot of ‘great’ ideas about the spectacular things you were going to do when you grew up? And then as you grew up you discovered that they either violated the laws of physics, cost more than the effort was worth, just made no sense to you as a grownup, or any combination of the three. Same thing. No regrets.
Not sure I agree with the reasoning above — it was hard and expensive and we diverted the resources to other things, plus there were major negative political forces involved. Therefore it wasn’t worth doing?
A Mach 4 transport might be highly useful, in the same way air frieght is often more useful than motor freight. That doesn’t mean it’s less expensive or equally flexible, but for certian purposes it’s the best option. It wouldn’t look or act like a Lockheed C-5, just like a C-5 doesn’t look or act like a Peterbilt, so I don’t understand the argument.
Scott, will you be making this available through APR?
When it says “transport,” what it means isn’t so much cargo transport… but *passenger* transport. You know, SST’s & Stuff.
> will you be making this available through APR?
You’ll see…
The spirit of Dandridge Cole is well and truly dead. You see CGI re-constructions of things we once actually made. To me, the nadir of aviation are drones. Yes they are useful and cheap. Rutan would be better advised to abandon high flying ME-163 Komets and build Voyager based drones to compete against Global Hawk.
Still, for things to be flying in 2011–we can do better.