Jul 262009
As a followup to this post, here are some Boeing designs for transonic airliners from 1972. There is a clear familiy resemblance to the artwork posted before; however, I believe the artwork represented the 1980’s state of the art (with tip-fins and all), while these are substantially earlier.
Boeing examined a number of 200-passenger designs for cruising at Mach numbers of 0.9, 0.95 and 0.98. As the cruise speed approached Mach 1, the necessity for using a highly convoluted supercritical fuselage increased. Boeing estimated that the 1985 market for such an airliner would be about 500.
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