Well its only one step beyond how the first supersonic planes worked, so yes, the start of the hypersonic era. One thing that everyone seems to overlook is that its not just the Atlantic crossing that would be aided by supersonic travel, there is also the Pacific, which is almost twice as wide, making the time savings far more potent. Australia to America could be done in half a day, not a full day, Plus there is Japan, South Korea, China all capable of ocean travel to America's West Coast. Less travelled, but there could also be Australia to Africa and South America. Also any flights which go over the north pole could engage supersonic. And that could all be done with Concord's 40 year old design.
I strongly support using only metric measurements, but I really appreciate you putting the mph and miles in the descriptions in parentheses... because I am old and set in my ways.
I used to live under the flight path of concorde in London when I was little :) it didn't bother me much but I remember it drowning out the tv for a few seconds and making little things shake on tables and stuff
We were stationed at RAF Finningly where they had the Vulcans....same problem but more often....and at 3am sometimes....it's amazing what you learn to sleep through
I'm actually one of the NASA engineers working on this project, and I wanted to clear up a couple of things. the description of "the sound barrier" was pretty incorrect, but based on a common misconception. "the sound barrier" and the shockwaves you see around supersonic aircraft have nothing to do with sound "piling up" but rather with the compression of air caused by the fact that the vehicle is moving faster than the air can move out of the way. The air compresses all at once, all of the sudden, and that sudden change is what we call a shockwave. What we hear as a sonic boom is actually that wave, as it propogates down to the ground. The Low Boom or Shaped Boom aircraft being designed will cause that air to compress more gradually, so the pressure rise is gentle rather than a sudden crack.
+MrDRSMAX There were a number of factual 'errors' in this video, disappointing for a funded channel. For example Concorde was profitable for the last 25 years of its service, lack of money was not the reason it was retired.
+MrDRSMAX i am sorry, not trying to sound rude or anything but i kind of dont get it You basicly say that the whole problem isnt sound waves pilling up but rather plain old friction ? Or is it something connected to that ?
SciShow, the show that gets you hyped up with new technology and then crush your dreams 30 seconds later by telling you how extremely far into the future they're expected to become reality...
The horrible story of a man that was forced to connect his youtube account to google+ don’t trust their “gmo” videos. Hank is EXTREMELY BIASED on those issues.
because the Concord faild not because of the crashes, but ppl not willing to pay the extra $900 to get there only an hour or 2 faster.. sure first flights to go that fast, but after that noone seen the advantage.
I remember in the early 90's my grandfather bringing home a small model of what looked like the X-43. He worked at McDonnell Douglass at the time. He talked about the issue of making an engine work as both a ram and scram jet. Wish I could remember more, I was 7 at the time, lol.
See when our grandparents say "I didn't have a Tv when I was your age" well when we are their age it'll be "when I was your age it took us 8 hours to get to New York". Technology is amazing.
Don the first Think about the next 100 years... At current estimation, I'll die around 2100. So I'm going to witness the 21st century, the century that has brought forth more inventions than any other, in all of its glory.
I did read and search a lot about this subject and this video had the best explanation I've ever seen so far, Impressive That was a very good job done Thank you, Hank! Also all Sci-show team as well Cheers
My understanding is that the heat issue at high speeds is not caused by friction with the air, but rather by the massive heating of air directly in front of the plane via compression.
Yes, even invicid (ie frictionless) fluid experiences compressive heating. Because a shock wave is adiabatic, the total temperature is conserved across the wave. However, the Mach number of the flow is greatly reduced, which increases the static temperature. In other words, think of it as the kinetic energy of the air rushing into the wave being converted into thermal energy. For more info, see: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/normal.html
+PINGPONGROCKSBRAH It's both, but you're correct, the spike in total temperature caused by the bow shock is a big problem. The overall temperature increase is dramatic. Pilots of the SR-71, which cruised above Mach 3, would heat their meals on the windscreen. It routinely reached temps of several hundred degrees F.
Hank, the "sound barrier" was not about sound waves building up and "tearing away" at the aircraft as you assert. It was due to various symptoms of "compressibility". All pressure information (in all mediums) is communicated at the speed of sound. This includes the high pressure area just in front of the aircraft fuselage, wing, and tail surfaces which causes the air molecules to start to move out of the way (over/under/around) as the aircraft passes through the air. It includes the lower pressure area above the wing, and higher pressure below the wing which imparts lift. At subsonic speeds, there is a pressure and velocity gradient all around the aircraft which causes the vast majority of the air directly in front of the aircraft (within its cross sectional profile) to flow around the aircraft, making no contact with the skin at all. The air closest to the aircraft skin, moves very slowly, or is even stationary. See: Laminar flow When the aircraft approaches the speed of sound, the air molecules closest to the skin of the aircraft lose the ability to communicate pressure information to the air molecules upstream because the aircraft is moving faster than the pressure information can be communicated. The air molecules upstream of the aircraft experience no high or low pressures so they do not deviate around the aircraft fuse or wing, but instead simply crash directly into it, and only then abruptly change directions. This constant crashing of the air molecules into the skin of the aircraft produces a highly non-linear increase in platform drag that does not occur at subsonic speeds. While this huge drag spike cannot be eliminated, it can be reduced by minimizing the cross sectional profile of the aircraft at every point along its entire length. The wings are made as thin as possible, swept back, and where they must be thicker, the fuselage is made thinner (they hadn't learned this at the time of the Bell X1). The first aircraft to encounter the sound barrier (before the X1) had thicker wings and stabilizers, and the thickest part of the wing or stabilizer could punch a big low pressure hole through the air. The air on either side of the hole can only fill the hole back in as fast as the pressure information can be communicated (at the speed of sound), so it may rejoin on the control surfaces as severe turbulence causing flight instability, or rejoin entirely behind the control surfaces, rendering them completely inoperable. One of the innovations on the X1 (and many other early supersonic aircraft) was the use of full flying stabilizers. The entire surface can deflect the air up or down, at any speed, sub or supersonic. The use of hydraulically assisted controls, also helped overcome the huge resistance that supersonic flow could impart to flight surfaces.
EFR2000 It's obviously not "literally exactly" what he said. He said "sound waves" which by definition are vibrations transmitted through a medium via pressure oscillations (his diagram and explanation of sound waves is correct). The problem here is that the pressure transmissions which push and pull most of the air around an aircraft fuselage, its wings and stabilizers at subsonic speeds are continuous relative to the aircraft (they are not oscillations) thus are not sound waves, by definition. These same continuous pressure transmissions stop working at Mach 1+ because the aircraft moves faster than the pressure changes can propagate. That is compressibility. His subsequent description of huge pressure oscillations (literally large sound waves) that "rattle and shake planes like toys" is fundamentally wrong. If that were true, all supersonic aircraft would still rattle and shake today as they cross the sound barrier, but they do not. His underlying mistake comes by confusing two frames of reference. Yes there are sound waves generated by the passing supersonic aircraft heard by a stationary observer as air is violently pushed out of the way and then collapses back on itself creating a large pressure pulse (extreme oscillation), but from the moving frame of reference of the aircraft itself, the process of colliding with air molecules is continuous and smooth. No sound waves can be transmitted forward of the aircraft faster than the aircraft itself is moving, thus every molecule of air it encounters is undisturbed until it splats directly into the skin of the aircraft.
Great video, hope we can solve those engineering challenges soon! A quick correction: the heat created during hypersonic flight is not due to friction, it is due to the air in front of the craft compressing when it meets the plane, because it doesn't have time to move out of the way. The principle is the same as when a bicycle pump gets hot when you pump up a tire, or when you put kindling in a syringe, and quickly press down on the syringe, igniting the kindling (this actually works, look up some videos!).
+Joe Roth It's neat to see they have the same system I do for projects and papers. I will save the final copy with "final" at the end. With big projects I sometimes get "final 1" or the infamous "final 2."
Its nice that we get to know about the challenges in the current technologies through this show as everywhere else people seem to never talk about the things where the knowledge is incomplete.
The first time I saw the vapor cone successfully explained (with this red rings (cones) of compressed air behind the aircraft at sightly supersonic speed). Very good. Thank you. Amazing
well..... there is also the SABRE engine that's being tested for the Skylon Spaceplane that could work at hypersonic speeds (though barely above the limit) by just pre-cooling the air as it goes in the engine
Thank you so much for this video. the concept of supersonic flight and the issues involved have always interested and confused me. This is the clearest explanation of what the sound barrier is and sonic booms are that I've ever seen.
No. Bad Hank. The temperature of hypersonic planes has almost nothing to do with friction with the air and everything to do with adiabatic compression.
I remember walking to school while there was fighter jet training going on at the very nearby airfield. An F16 took off at full afterburn, and I didn't just _hear_ it break the sound barrier - I _felt it_. Another problem with breaking the sound barrier is that, in order to do so without ripping the plane, you need to spend as little time as possible at trans-sonic speeds. This is because the air flow over different parts of the aircraft is not all the same speed, and if one side of the wing experiences supersonic airspeed, while the other experiences subsonic, that puts _huge_ amounts of stress on that wing.
You have two choices 1: spend half your day flying in a tight ass cabin with a loud ass child yelling behind you and turbulence waking you up here and there 2: spend 1 hour of your day flying with loud noise from the engine. I will take number two please
I saw the Concorde once when I was a kid in '77. We were at the beach at Far Rockaway, it flew right over--no one cared but I couldn't take my eye off of it. It was a beautiful aircraft!
It isn't friction with air that causes objects to heat up in the atmosphere. It's Boyle's Law. When a gas is compressed, it heats up as pressure and temperature have a direct relationship.
I grew up in cornwall (most westerly part of the UK), I remember, that at 9 o'clock each evening you could hear the sonic boom of the concord as it made oceanfall, as it flew over land's end and went supersonic. I wish I had the chance to fly on it, so cool!
Also with the Mach cone and the vishal aids in the video depicting the sound waves as you approach and pass the speed of sound, in supsonic speeds, a convervent duct produces thrust (increases velocity) and a divergent duct increases pressure. In supersonic speeds, it reverses. Divergent ducts produce thrust, and convergent ducts increase pressure. (Sorry for the run-on sentence at the beginning of this comment. LOL)
Everyone's forgetting the biggest problem though, ATC services need to be updated to accomodate faster radar and comms. equipment, not to mention better range for handling high speed jets which need to fly at higher levels, also, seeing the current condition of air traffic, the probability of these ever reaching commercial airspace is potato divided by 1.
+Adnan Bhuiyan It's not that big a deal. The supersonics would be flying much higher than commercial traffic when going at full speed, and would be cruising subsonically as they descend into the traffic pattern to land, so they wouldn't be harder for ATC to handle than Concorde. ATC mostly depends on aircraft transponders anyway, so it would be easy for the regulators to require high speed airliners to carry much more powerful ones.
The ATC system is already reaching its limits. Its already starting to fail, and we are already finding a solution. As for comms... well, radios travel at the speed of light, so I doubt we are gonna see that become an issue in our airspace.
Just a small note on the Bell X-1, it did take off under it's own power and break the sound barrier once. It was the day before the Navy's test plane was scheduled to do that and Chuck Yeager and crew wanted to one up them, so they did the math on how much weight the landing gear could take and not collapse and then went out and did it.
I would like to see a system of underground high speed trains with vacuum or low pressure rail lines. Air drag would be no issue and you could probably get from one side of the US to the other in an hour or so depending on how fast you want to go. Maybe minutes. And it'd take much less energy than what jets would take. No sonic boom either. Only problem would be slowing down.
I went to elementary school near JFK airport in NYC where the concord used to land/take off from. It stopped flying the year after I left that school and went to high school. Anyway, I remember the distinct sound it made when it flew overhead - very different and much louder than standard planes. Regular planes never interrupted class and were almost never even noticed but when the SST (as we called it - standing for Super-Sonic Transport) flew over there was no ignoring it. If a lesson was in progress the teacher had to stop until it passed because no one could be heard over it. If there was a substitute who hadn't taught at our school before the surprise when they heard it was always fun to watch. Lucky it didn't take very long for it to pass - it being faster than the average plane of course. If you happened to be at recess or outside for gym when it passed everyone would stop and look up. After years of hearing that plane go by everyday we still looked up. It was one of those fantastic things that sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity. Whenever I go back to that neighborhood I wait for that sound but it doesn't come anymore, and when I realize that it won't be there I feel just a bit sad. Just thought I'd share the story.
Am I the only one bothered by him saying "Tupolev" when meaning the Tu 144? Tupolev has made quite a few other planes that are still in service with militaries and airlines across the globe.
It's not so much the friction that generates an obscene amount of heat, but rather the rapid compression of a gas (across a shock wave) and the changes in its properties associated with that. For example, a plane flying at Mach 4.5 can experience an increase in temperature (across the shock wave) by a magnitude of 5; meaning that if the surrounding temperature were 250 Kelvin (which is pretty damn cold), across a shock wave that value would to leap to 1250 Kelvin...and that change increases exponentially. Source - I am an Mechanical Engineering student and I just took a course on gas dynamics
just in case you didnt know, the x1 was not the first plane to fly supersonic, it was the first to fly sustained in supersonic. many ww2 fighters could break the soundbarrier in a dive but fell apart in the air, the korean war jets did the same with out falling apart, they only had control and engine problems.
.. or you could make plane travel comfortable with good food, drink, entertainment, wifi, cushy chairs, leg room, people to talk to, places to sleep, separate scream zone for kids .. Then who cares how long the trip takes?
+Brad Evans That already exists! It's called flying in a private jet. If you want this just buy one. If you can't afford it, then ride along in a metal tube with 200 other passengers like the rest of us.
Slight correction here. The friction with the air moving across the skin of the craft is not the dominant source of heat. The compression of the air into those high pressure areas you mentioned causes the majority of the heating. Common misconception.
I don't know how I feel about this on the one hand it's like I hate a 14 hour flight while on the other hand, going 5000 Km/h faster than the speed of sound doesn't sound safe or economically effective.
+12tone, It is part of the new government health program. Only the fit fly in these things. You have to pass a test pilot physical in order to buy a ticket.
12tone The Concorde was comfortable- just SLIGHTLY louder, and with a SLIGHTLY greater feeling of acceleration than other commercial jets. Once at altitude & cruise speed, as you know, there are NO additional g loads on the passengers. There was no ‘comfort problem’...
Just had an air show take place near my house this weekend. Last week I could hear these loud, continuous booms. Couldn't see any planes but the sound came from that direction of the airport. It sounded like thunder, or what I would imagine an earthquake to sound like. After watching this video, I'm assuming it was jet planes entering supersonic speeds during their practice flights! It was amazing how loud it was. I felt like the entire sky was going to crack open.
Kind of worried about the potential effects on bird and insect migration with sonic booms permeating the air, considering the effects of large ships on whales.
That is a really interesting thought, I hadn't thought of that! I suppose if the flights went supersonic only over the ocean then the sonic boom would mostly be dissipated in the sea, causing minimal impact to marine life. I don't know that there are that many insects out at sea either. Maybe flights would have to be tailored around bird migration patterns though.
So if a ramjet just relies on incoming air, and I'm guessing Concorde had ramjets, did it also have regular turbojets for getting into the air/coming down?
+SheosMan117 That's correct. (sc)ramjet based planes require some other means of propulsion to get them up to the required speed before activating the ramjet engines.
+SheosMan117 The Nasa X43 was launched from a B-52 at high altitude then reached supersonic using the Pagasus rocket booster and only then could fly hypersonicly. For commercial application you would need a turbojet/turbofan to make it reach supersonic speeds to make use of the sramjet and for landings. Its not really safe just relying on the scramjet unless you want a scrambled jet by the end :P
+SheosMan117 some planes like the SR-17 used a mixture of turbine and ram engines (turbo ramjet) basically. At low speeds the turbojet would get all the air intake then at high speeds it would bypass the air to the ram part of the engine and burn it.
My flight to Japan is going to take me about 12+ hours and it is the most long and uncomfortable thing ever. The day this form of travel become commercial I might cry from joy.
+SimplyAlly Tea I feel you. I've traveled to and from South Korea a number of times being in the military, and those flights are just... I mean... eugh I USED to like flying.
+SimplyAlly Tea A trans-pacific supersonic flight would almost certainly cost more than a 1st class ticket on a conventional airliner, and it would be an additional engineering challenge to achieve the range needed to avoid refueling in the Aleutian Islands.
+Command & Conquer Fitness you've clearly never driven 140 mph down a German highway. Acceleration is really fun but good lord is going fast enough to take off awesome just on its own. Especially as you pass some soccer mom in a minivan going 70 mph on the lane beside you.
+Kami K That's not exciting to anyone I know. GETTING to the 140 in 4 seconds from 0 is exciting, staying there shouldn't be exciting to you. If it is, you probably need to find some creative outlets or other fun hobbies to entertain yourself more often.
hmm... interesting when you see what you studied in college suddenly in you awaited sci show episode. I'm impressed, but I keep thinking "sort of, but there is so much more to it". but overall well done. maybe a whole crash course should follow flight in history and then over each type. I would love that, even would pull out my books and help that
The future of air travel is traveling without air. before hyperloop i knew vacuum tube transport was the future because it removes all the issues with resistance and friction air has. if you want to go further in the future and not have speed be a factor, using magnetic fields to go into space or slow air travel is the future but i am not comfortable discussing that any further.
CuriosityKilledTheMartianCat not viable economically but once automated systems and construction becomes widely accepted than it becomes viable. it is possible by even today's standards but it would require international cooperation. a large investment but it would solve job issues. it is a large project but humanity needs to regain the motivation to strive for achievements that was once thought of as impossible. as the moon landing for example but something that has more practical use for the everyday person.
+VectorShiftZero hypersonic jets are probably more practical than a tunnel that long. It's not just construction, it's the fact that if something goes wrong, e.g. a fire or collapse, everyone inside is entirely screwed because you are literally thousands of miles from safety.
+CuriosityKilledTheMartianCat there would be many safety systems in place, if there is any integrity issues senors would alert the control room. these issues can be checked by remote survey drones or camera feeds. if something happens and travel needs to be halted than a retrieval team will be sent out. air travel is far more dangerous if something goes wrong and rescue teams can have a hard time finding a downed plane. PS: Steel or fiberglass tubes are very unlikely to collapse, a underground tunnel would take to much effort to seal for a vacuum and preform maintenance.
+VectorShiftZero the problem is that any help could be potentially half or a whole day away via conventional travel (assuming a broken hyperloop) and that's too long. Planes tend to be close enough to an airport to land in most emergency situations
Since you mentioned the Wright brother, as a Brazilian I must ask for a video about Santos Dumont. He flew without a rail or a catapult before anyone else.
+guilherme siqueira The Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903 (fyi, they didn't use catapults in their first flights, they flew against the wind instead). Dumont's 14-bis first flew in 1906, 3 YEARS LATER, so cut the patriotic crap already. It's like watching patriotic fools in Spain, Portugal and Italy fight over the nationality of Columbus... I mean, who the fuck cares? Btw, Wilbur Wright was already flying gliders in 1902, as you can see in this photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_the_pioneer_era#/media/File:1902_WrightBrosGlider.jpg Note that the design of that older glider is much cleaner than the crude design of the 14-bis... I mean, from the engineering standpoint, Santos-Dumont was kind of a butcher, if you ask me. Anyway, does it really matter who flew their ugly contraption first? What matters is that people around the world got interested in aviation and developed all sorts of aircraft. You should be celebrating that, instead of trying to revive dead and pointless arguments over a fucking minor and irrelevant technicality (such as the use of catapults). Sure, the 14-bis didn't use catapults or rails, so what? It was still ugly, unstable and cumbersome as shit.
The chief aerodynamicist for Boeing once said when asked about the future of supersonic commercial flight that it wasn't so much a technical issue but a societal issue. The engineering problems can be solved with enough time and money. The question is if its worth it to use such a vastly larger amount of resources to propel a few very important people to their destination faster.
Heat was a major issue with the Concorde as well. The nose cone had a heat resistant glass part that lifted up to protect the pilots' windshields. If you notice how the nose looks when it lands, like the beak of a bird, that is the nose cone/heat shield moved down so the pilots had an unobstructed view to land the plane. The plane was designed to expand with the heat from air friction - it would actually get longer. The Concorde could not start its engines while on the ground because it would burn up too much fuel. They designed a huge fan that was mounted to be self-powered and mobile. It would hook up to an engine and blow massive amounts of air to get the engine spun up to operating speed. At that point the engines would get fuel and would ignite. Some really neat tech on the old bird.
It might be possible to develop an engine that can change itself between the two. Kinda like an engine that can run off both oxygen from an air intake and liquid oxidizer from a tank. This would probably not be easy to do though.
extra weight = need extra fuel, and extra fuel = even more extra weight.. it's counterproductive.. it's problems like these that make launching spacecrafts so expensive
Deathshredder58 Well, good news. The SR-71 Blackbird's engines can switch between ordinary turbojet and afterburner ramjet modes via a sophisticated bypass mechanism and a retractable middle cone, which, at high speeds, is able to regulate the pressure of incoming supersonic air so it achieves better fuel efficiency at Mach 3.2 than at Mach 1. It was a marvel, engineered on paper with slide rulers in a time before computer-aided design and simulations.
Erh... Tupolev is an airplane manufacturer, like Boeing or Airbus, (except Tupolev is Russian.) Their Tu-144 was a supersonic airplane based on Concorde.
This reminds me of the Skylon and other 'single stage to orbit' spaceplanes concepts, Where they take off of a runway and convert from a conventional jet to a scram jet. Then finally to a rocket to reach low Earth orbit.
+Luciano Silva Alberto Santos-Dumont and his useless 14-bis, ^^ By 1905 Wilbur Wright was making flights of around 40Km, while Santos-Dumont was still working on his crude 14-bis... which would fly a year later, for about 50 meters before crashing. After some tweaking, in late 1906 they could get the 14-bis to maintain flight for 200 meters... so still nowhere near the 40Km flown by Wilbur Wright the previous year. I mean, do you honestly think that the 14-bis is something you can boast about? ^^ It's funny to see Brazilians like yourself trying to undermine the achievements of the Wright brothers, focusing on a minor and absurd technicality like the use of catapults... The fact is that the 14-bis couldn't even maintain flight for 300 meters, whereas the Wright's flier (older design) could stay in the air for several dozen kilometers. So stop embarrassing yourself and cut the patriotic nonsense.
Dumont and Wright brothers had contributed immensely to the modern aviation. It wasn't a race for who will fly first, but a race for who will fly better. Wright brothers developed a plane that was easily maneuverable while Dumont made a self "throwable" one. Chronologically speaking, 14-bis made the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe to be certified by the Aéro Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. But the Wrights came and showed a better and easier planer, for example implementig a three axis control system. The three of them made your flight from Rio to NY possible, without one of them we could be yet traveling by ship.
Subsonic < Sonic < Trans-sonic < Super Sonic < Hyper Sonic < High Hyper Sonic < Re-entry speed. It would be awesome to fly at the latter two speeds. Few hours to go around the planet.
why not just travel at mach 2? at that speed, wouldn't the sound waves not be as compressed, like mach 1? Then you would only need to worry about sonic booms during takeoff and landing. (both could be done along a coast, for example) perhaps I'm wrong here, feel free to correct me.
+chipmonk434 Not 100% on this, but I pretty sure as long as your traveling at Mach1 or higher there are going to be a constant sonic boom do to the plain moving at a constant mach+ speed. The Sound barrier is a constant that the plain needs to fly through.
+chipmonk434 Sonic booms aren't exactly caused by just "breaking the sound barrier". To explain it you have to consider air as a fluid, just like water. At high speeds air becomes thick and dense--like water but not to that extreme degree. Any time an aircraft is flying above mach 1 (actually, a bit BEFORE mach 1, sometimes around .8 but this depends entirely on the wing shape), it needs to move through that air. Basically there's lots of undisturbed air in the atmosphere, and then suddenly a plane smashes into it. The air is accelerated while flowing around the aircraft, and due to the properties of air at high speeds it becomes compressed. That 'compression wave' is shot away through the remaining air, just like ripples in a pond. This can't be avoided by flying faster, because the air has to be compressed by the jet no matter what. Sonic booms are literally explosions in the sky; they're the pressure wave you'd see of a slow-motion explosion. They're not...exactly compressed "noise" but compressed air. Sound is just pressure, though, which is why it's correct to call them "compressed sound waves". It doesn't explain the full picture though.
xGatoDelFuegox Yeah, I knew about most of this, and the heating effects, and the fact that it gets harder to move through the faster you're moving. My theory was that at or around mach 2 or faster, the compressed waves might cancel themselves out, but that's obviously not the case as you're correct, the compression is a constant rather than like "just sound waves" where the compression comes as an oscillation. Thanks for putting the effort into that reply.
Boy you guys missed that by a mile. You needed an aerospace adviser on this one. It isn't friction that makes the plane hot. It's the air that does and the air is made hot because of compression. The biggest mistake you made is that the sonic barrier is more of an economic one. After that it gets enormously inefficient. The Concord cost 16 times more than a 747 to operate. Not just build. Not 10% more which is normally enough to put you out of business. Now why was there a market for a plane ticket that cost 16 times as much? Tax support brought the price down some, but the main reason was important people did not like being away from their communications and staff for very long. Well guess what. That problem went away when satellite phones were invented. Now having an office in your airplane is the future. Not speed. There are somethings that are timeless, like propellers and there are things that will forever be in the future like monorails and SSTs.
Exactly, the ideal gas law is PV=nRT ignoring the constants it becomes pressure times volume = temperature. If the pressure is abruptly raised astronomically the temperature will too.
+Nick “Grifplex” Rasmussen Yes and that is actually the reason ram jets won't work. Unmentioned in the video is that in a ram jet you have to compress it before heating it up to extract energy in the form of faster exhaust. But in compressing it even a little bit it gets the combustion chamber to be white hot even before you add the fuel and it has to get hotter than that or it won't speed up enough when allowed to expand. Isn't that about right Nick?
As a kid growing up in Nova Scotia, I remember distinctly hearing semi-loud booms in the middle of the day. We finally looked up schedules only to find that it was the directly correlated to the Concord that would pass by nearly 150 km off the coast. Before we figured it out, we thought it was someone doing road work with explosives because it used to give everything a slight shake.
Hawtsaus Yes, but there's thousands of moving parts in the plane. We can even use a magnetic sultions. Or as it heats up muscle wire will slowly expand or a rush of plasma by a spark plug will expand it
Dumont and Wright brothers had contributed immensely to the modern aviation. It wasn't a race for who will fly first, but a race for who will fly better. Wright brothers developed a plane that was easily maneuverable while Dumont made a self "throwable" one. Chronologically speaking, 14-bis made the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe to be certified by the Aéro Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. But the Wrights came and showed a better and easier planer, for example implementig a three axis control system. The three of them made your flight from Rio to NY possible, without one of them we could be yet traveling by ship.
I heard a sonic boom once, back when I was a kid. I lived near Tamworth UK and I heard it while I was playing in my back garden. I knew what it was immediately, looked up and sure enough I saw a Concord. Was a cool moment.
Nice. This may be too much information for this video, but I feel like it may have been helpful to explain how sound waves are just compression waves, the speed of touch.
When he says "when you go hypersonic it gets really hot." He's serious I play KSP flying at Mach 3 is not very fun, it's mostly melting and explosions.
+Nicholas Budzynski I once tried to fly faster than Mach 4 at sea level. I tried to change course slightly when the nose cone began to melt, and the deflection cascade instantly destroyed the plane. Fun stuff.
Another alternative might be for planes to fly higher instead of faster: a flight from Salt Lake to Atlanta goes up over Iceland to take advantage of the shortened flight distance due to the curvature of the Earth (distance from the Equator, or the Earth's widest lateral distance). Also, does SciShow have a mailing address if we'd like to send fan mail? I really enjoy SciShow and would like to send some! :D
1234kalmar One Concord crashing is 1 out of 14. 1 Boeing crashing is 1 out of 10000 (or how many there ever were). Also after the crash in 1999 (or 2000) no one wanted to fly in them anymore so they didn't even have the passengers. It cost far more than it was making. The decision was part safety but mostly an economical one.
+sliestspider0 weight. Engines are really heavy, and the more you put on the plane the harder it is to keep it efficient. Loading down a plane with more engines and more fuel to actually make the flight and any necessary course corrections is not necessarily the best idea when you're wanting to go into Mach 5 where you've got more serious problems to worry about than just getting there.
+sliestspider0 then there would be more wight, needing more power to take off. Needing more fuel to fly and room to house fuel. both engines need more refining before commercial viability.
A plane that launches a rocket, that launches a plane. YES!!
* I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE *
Well its only one step beyond how the first supersonic planes worked, so yes, the start of the hypersonic era.
One thing that everyone seems to overlook is that its not just the Atlantic crossing that would be aided by supersonic travel, there is also the Pacific, which is almost twice as wide, making the time savings far more potent.
Australia to America could be done in half a day, not a full day, Plus there is Japan, South Korea, China all capable of ocean travel to America's West Coast.
Less travelled, but there could also be Australia to Africa and South America.
Also any flights which go over the north pole could engage supersonic.
And that could all be done with Concord's 40 year old design.
The other problem (apart from costing millions per flight) is that it eats up mega ridiculous amounts of oxygen (which we kinda need to live).
I'd be up for that if they could get it down to my price point.
Then the small plane carries a shark with rockets attached to its head. NO?
I made a similar video last week, focusing more on the development of high critical mach number planes.
Incredible that this comment has only received 5 likes
I strongly support using only metric measurements, but I really appreciate you putting the mph and miles in the descriptions in parentheses... because I am old and set in my ways.
I used to live under the flight path of concorde in London when I was little :)
it didn't bother me much but I remember it drowning out the tv for a few seconds and making little things shake on tables and stuff
We were stationed at RAF Finningly where they had the Vulcans....same problem but more often....and at 3am sometimes....it's amazing what you learn to sleep through
Jenny M That'd so cool actually
That was not the supersonic boom, as that happened far from London and over water. Concorde was really noisy even at subsonic speeds.
I'm actually one of the NASA engineers working on this project, and I wanted to clear up a couple of things. the description of "the sound barrier" was pretty incorrect, but based on a common misconception. "the sound barrier" and the shockwaves you see around supersonic aircraft have nothing to do with sound "piling up" but rather with the compression of air caused by the fact that the vehicle is moving faster than the air can move out of the way. The air compresses all at once, all of the sudden, and that sudden change is what we call a shockwave. What we hear as a sonic boom is actually that wave, as it propogates down to the ground. The Low Boom or Shaped Boom aircraft being designed will cause that air to compress more gradually, so the pressure rise is gentle rather than a sudden crack.
+MrDRSMAX There were a number of factual 'errors' in this video, disappointing for a funded channel. For example Concorde was profitable for the last 25 years of its service, lack of money was not the reason it was retired.
+MrDRSMAX pretty much, as , you know, sound can't be seen.
+MrDRSMAX i am sorry, not trying to sound rude or anything but i kind of dont get it
You basicly say that the whole problem isnt sound waves pilling up but rather plain old friction ? Or is it something connected to that ?
Not friction, compression of the air. The air is essentially squeezed, because it can't move out of the way when the plane hits it.
TheSporewow
Compressing any gas generates heat, so the air-frame gets hot and the air frame expands, Concorde got 300mm (1 foot) longer at peak speed.
SciShow, the show that gets you hyped up with new technology and then crush your dreams 30 seconds later by telling you how extremely far into the future they're expected to become reality...
Your name is awesome 😂
B0bb217 Thx mate! ^^
thsoamtwftchyatg+, do you hate that now, when respond to comments, you go back to the video you left it on?
The horrible story of a man that was forced to connect his youtube account to google+ don’t trust their “gmo” videos. Hank is EXTREMELY BIASED on those issues.
because the Concord faild not because of the crashes, but ppl not willing to pay the extra $900 to get there only an hour or 2 faster..
sure first flights to go that fast, but after that noone seen the advantage.
I remember in the early 90's my grandfather bringing home a small model of what looked like the X-43. He worked at McDonnell Douglass at the time. He talked about the issue of making an engine work as both a ram and scram jet. Wish I could remember more, I was 7 at the time, lol.
We gotta figure out how them aliens fly so fast in those discs
w
+Braxton Claflin Message received.
+Alex GhostHammer wut
They have these big ass mofos throw them off their planet. That's why they alway crash land
+Oscar S or giant trebuchets!
Listening to Hank is like listening to Bob Ross in the joy of painting but with more sciencey :)
See when our grandparents say "I didn't have a Tv when I was your age" well when we are their age it'll be "when I was your age it took us 8 hours to get to New York". Technology is amazing.
+Edward Bowers
and advancing quite quickly.
+Don the first
Indeed. Think about it; It took us not even 100 years from building the first plane to send probes outside of our solar system...
FieryWingedAngel
True! ;) Voyager 1 and 2 have gone beyond Pluto's orbit less than 100 years after Wilbur and Orville first flew.
Don the first Think about the next 100 years...
At current estimation, I'll die around 2100. So I'm going to witness the 21st century, the century that has brought forth more inventions than any other, in all of its glory.
FieryWingedAngel
;)
How to get hyprsonic?
Strap a plane to a rocket to a bigger plane.
'Murica.
+Chocl8215 Hyper Sanic speed!!!!!
+Chocl8215 How to go ultrahypersonic?
Strap THAT to a rocket to an even bigger plane!
+Chocl8215 That's the turducken of air travel.
+Jordan Shank just stop u ruined the joke
FOCK YAHHH
I might have to tell people I can run at subsonic speed for fun.
Ok
We just need a drug called Velocity 9 😊
+Just Another Atheist yes
I run at subsonic speed for the exercise.
Also capable of humping at subsonic speed
This video was very well written! It had me smiling the entire way through, and it just kept getting better and better. Thanks. #DFTBA
I did read and search a lot about this subject and this video had the best explanation I've ever seen so far, Impressive
That was a very good job done
Thank you, Hank! Also all Sci-show team as well
Cheers
My understanding is that the heat issue at high speeds is not caused by friction with the air, but rather by the massive heating of air directly in front of the plane via compression.
+PINGPONGROCKSBRAH Isn't that what air resistance is? Just compression of air molecules on fast moving objects?
+PINGPONGROCKSBRAH You'd get both.
that's what I thought as well
Yes, even invicid (ie frictionless) fluid experiences compressive heating. Because a shock wave is adiabatic, the total temperature is conserved across the wave. However, the Mach number of the flow is greatly reduced, which increases the static temperature. In other words, think of it as the kinetic energy of the air rushing into the wave being converted into thermal energy.
For more info, see: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/normal.html
+PINGPONGROCKSBRAH It's both, but you're correct, the spike in total temperature caused by the bow shock is a big problem. The overall temperature increase is dramatic. Pilots of the SR-71, which cruised above Mach 3, would heat their meals on the windscreen. It routinely reached temps of several hundred degrees F.
Hank, the "sound barrier" was not about sound waves building up and "tearing away" at the aircraft as you assert. It was due to various symptoms of "compressibility". All pressure information (in all mediums) is communicated at the speed of sound. This includes the high pressure area just in front of the aircraft fuselage, wing, and tail surfaces which causes the air molecules to start to move out of the way (over/under/around) as the aircraft passes through the air. It includes the lower pressure area above the wing, and higher pressure below the wing which imparts lift. At subsonic speeds, there is a pressure and velocity gradient all around the aircraft which causes the vast majority of the air directly in front of the aircraft (within its cross sectional profile) to flow around the aircraft, making no contact with the skin at all. The air closest to the aircraft skin, moves very slowly, or is even stationary. See: Laminar flow
When the aircraft approaches the speed of sound, the air molecules closest to the skin of the aircraft lose the ability to communicate pressure information to the air molecules upstream because the aircraft is moving faster than the pressure information can be communicated. The air molecules upstream of the aircraft experience no high or low pressures so they do not deviate around the aircraft fuse or wing, but instead simply crash directly into it, and only then abruptly change directions. This constant crashing of the air molecules into the skin of the aircraft produces a highly non-linear increase in platform drag that does not occur at subsonic speeds. While this huge drag spike cannot be eliminated, it can be reduced by minimizing the cross sectional profile of the aircraft at every point along its entire length. The wings are made as thin as possible, swept back, and where they must be thicker, the fuselage is made thinner (they hadn't learned this at the time of the Bell X1).
The first aircraft to encounter the sound barrier (before the X1) had thicker wings and stabilizers, and the thickest part of the wing or stabilizer could punch a big low pressure hole through the air. The air on either side of the hole can only fill the hole back in as fast as the pressure information can be communicated (at the speed of sound), so it may rejoin on the control surfaces as severe turbulence causing flight instability, or rejoin entirely behind the control surfaces, rendering them completely inoperable. One of the innovations on the X1 (and many other early supersonic aircraft) was the use of full flying stabilizers. The entire surface can deflect the air up or down, at any speed, sub or supersonic. The use of hydraulically assisted controls, also helped overcome the huge resistance that supersonic flow could impart to flight surfaces.
that's literally exactly what he said, but you just expanded on the concept.
EFR2000 It's obviously not "literally exactly" what he said. He said "sound waves" which by definition are vibrations transmitted through a medium via pressure oscillations (his diagram and explanation of sound waves is correct). The problem here is that the pressure transmissions which push and pull most of the air around an aircraft fuselage, its wings and stabilizers at subsonic speeds are continuous relative to the aircraft (they are not oscillations) thus are not sound waves, by definition. These same continuous pressure transmissions stop working at Mach 1+ because the aircraft moves faster than the pressure changes can propagate. That is compressibility. His subsequent description of huge pressure oscillations (literally large sound waves) that "rattle and shake planes like toys" is fundamentally wrong. If that were true, all supersonic aircraft would still rattle and shake today as they cross the sound barrier, but they do not. His underlying mistake comes by confusing two frames of reference. Yes there are sound waves generated by the passing supersonic aircraft heard by a stationary observer as air is violently pushed out of the way and then collapses back on itself creating a large pressure pulse (extreme oscillation), but from the moving frame of reference of the aircraft itself, the process of colliding with air molecules is continuous and smooth. No sound waves can be transmitted forward of the aircraft faster than the aircraft itself is moving, thus every molecule of air it encounters is undisturbed until it splats directly into the skin of the aircraft.
this was one of the most interesting ep i saw so far
One of the best videos this channel has made. You guys do a wonderful job!
This was an extremely good episode!
Great video, hope we can solve those engineering challenges soon! A quick correction: the heat created during hypersonic flight is not due to friction, it is due to the air in front of the craft compressing when it meets the plane, because it doesn't have time to move out of the way. The principle is the same as when a bicycle pump gets hot when you pump up a tire, or when you put kindling in a syringe, and quickly press down on the syringe, igniting the kindling (this actually works, look up some videos!).
Was the title supposed to say finally, or is that "final" an accident from the editing room?
+Joe Roth Fixed. Thank you!
+SciShow I'm watching you.....
+Joe Roth It's neat to see they have the same system I do for projects and papers. I will save the final copy with "final" at the end. With big projects I sometimes get "final 1" or the infamous "final 2."
+Joe Roth Started thinking about the song The Final Countdown when I saw that.
+Oizem Mushroom what does happen?
Its nice that we get to know about the challenges in the current technologies through this show as everywhere else people seem to never talk about the things where the knowledge is incomplete.
You've explained supersonic flight better than my lecturers and I'm studying aerospace engineering!
The first time I saw the vapor cone successfully explained (with this red rings (cones) of compressed air behind the aircraft at sightly supersonic speed). Very good. Thank you. Amazing
Science is so damn cool.
This is one of the best episodes of scishow i have ever watched
well..... there is also the SABRE engine that's being tested for the Skylon Spaceplane that could work at hypersonic speeds (though barely above the limit) by just pre-cooling the air as it goes in the engine
+Spearka and then using that liquified fuel in something like a traditional rocket engine i think.
LupinYonder
yeah, basically switching to a closed-cycle mode, very efficient if you ask me.
Spearka I was going to mention closed-cycle and some russian engines but I forgot what it was called, cheers!
Thank you so much for this video. the concept of supersonic flight and the issues involved have always interested and confused me. This is the clearest explanation of what the sound barrier is and sonic booms are that I've ever seen.
No. Bad Hank. The temperature of hypersonic planes has almost nothing to do with friction with the air and everything to do with adiabatic compression.
One would think they knew that.
I know I could just google it, but could you explain it to me nonetheless?
Werner Beinhart if yoz compress air it gets hot
There's a lot wrong with this episode. It even says X-72 instead of X-15 at 6:44.
I remember walking to school while there was fighter jet training going on at the very nearby airfield. An F16 took off at full afterburn, and I didn't just _hear_ it break the sound barrier - I _felt it_.
Another problem with breaking the sound barrier is that, in order to do so without ripping the plane, you need to spend as little time as possible at trans-sonic speeds. This is because the air flow over different parts of the aircraft is not all the same speed, and if one side of the wing experiences supersonic airspeed, while the other experiences subsonic, that puts _huge_ amounts of stress on that wing.
SI504 Future of Air Travel Final
jinks
Do you mean the SU 35 ? I've never heard of the SI504
Sick video, one of my favorite ones so far!!
You have two choices
1: spend half your day flying in a tight ass cabin with a loud ass child yelling behind you and turbulence waking you up here and there
2: spend 1 hour of your day flying with loud noise from the engine.
I will take number two please
+robert karas But then you won't have enough time to enjoy your delicious in-flight meal of nondescript gloop!
+robert karas Ear plugs work for both cases but why waste time, quicker is better.
CasMullac Because some overpaid ceo needs to spend half the day like ZefVolk said eating premium caviar and a bottle of champagne to his next meeting.
+robert karas
How about option 3: Hyperloop
Do you want to lose you hearing before 30? Then you can't hear your potential grandchildren
I saw the Concorde once when I was a kid in '77. We were at the beach at Far Rockaway, it flew right over--no one cared but I couldn't take my eye off of it. It was a beautiful aircraft!
It isn't friction with air that causes objects to heat up in the atmosphere. It's Boyle's Law. When a gas is compressed, it heats up as pressure and temperature have a direct relationship.
+TheFeebleSpark YES! Air friction has a lot less to do with it than air compression.
I grew up in cornwall (most westerly part of the UK), I remember, that at 9 o'clock each evening you could hear the sonic boom of the concord as it made oceanfall, as it flew over land's end and went supersonic. I wish I had the chance to fly on it, so cool!
Actually, the X-15 was skinned with Inconel-X, a Nickel-based alloy, not Titanium as reported in the video.
Also with the Mach cone and the vishal aids in the video depicting the sound waves as you approach and pass the speed of sound, in supsonic speeds, a convervent duct produces thrust (increases velocity) and a divergent duct increases pressure. In supersonic speeds, it reverses. Divergent ducts produce thrust, and convergent ducts increase pressure. (Sorry for the run-on sentence at the beginning of this comment. LOL)
Everyone's forgetting the biggest problem though, ATC services need to be updated to accomodate faster radar and comms. equipment, not to mention better range for handling high speed jets which need to fly at higher levels, also, seeing the current condition of air traffic, the probability of these ever reaching commercial airspace is potato divided by 1.
+Adnan Bhuiyan It's not that big a deal. The supersonics would be flying much higher than commercial traffic when going at full speed, and would be cruising subsonically as they descend into the traffic pattern to land, so they wouldn't be harder for ATC to handle than Concorde. ATC mostly depends on aircraft transponders anyway, so it would be easy for the regulators to require high speed airliners to carry much more powerful ones.
+Harold Weaver Smith Ah, I see, thanks :)
The ATC system is already reaching its limits. Its already starting to fail, and we are already finding a solution. As for comms... well, radios travel at the speed of light, so I doubt we are gonna see that become an issue in our airspace.
Just a small note on the Bell X-1, it did take off under it's own power and break the sound barrier once. It was the day before the Navy's test plane was scheduled to do that and Chuck Yeager and crew wanted to one up them, so they did the math on how much weight the landing gear could take and not collapse and then went out and did it.
I would like to see a system of underground high speed trains with vacuum or low pressure rail lines. Air drag would be no issue and you could probably get from one side of the US to the other in an hour or so depending on how fast you want to go. Maybe minutes. And it'd take much less energy than what jets would take. No sonic boom either. Only problem would be slowing down.
+Mr.chang cooler You should read about Elon Musk's Hyperloop idea.
I went to elementary school near JFK airport in NYC where the concord used to land/take off from. It stopped flying the year after I left that school and went to high school. Anyway, I remember the distinct sound it made when it flew overhead - very different and much louder than standard planes. Regular planes never interrupted class and were almost never even noticed but when the SST (as we called it - standing for Super-Sonic Transport) flew over there was no ignoring it. If a lesson was in progress the teacher had to stop until it passed because no one could be heard over it. If there was a substitute who hadn't taught at our school before the surprise when they heard it was always fun to watch. Lucky it didn't take very long for it to pass - it being faster than the average plane of course. If you happened to be at recess or outside for gym when it passed everyone would stop and look up. After years of hearing that plane go by everyday we still looked up. It was one of those fantastic things that sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity. Whenever I go back to that neighborhood I wait for that sound but it doesn't come anymore, and when I realize that it won't be there I feel just a bit sad. Just thought I'd share the story.
Am I the only one bothered by him saying "Tupolev" when meaning the Tu 144? Tupolev has made quite a few other planes that are still in service with militaries and airlines across the globe.
Mike Miller awful episode
It's not so much the friction that generates an obscene amount of heat, but rather the rapid compression of a gas (across a shock wave) and the changes in its properties associated with that. For example, a plane flying at Mach 4.5 can experience an increase in temperature (across the shock wave) by a magnitude of 5; meaning that if the surrounding temperature were 250 Kelvin (which is pretty damn cold), across a shock wave that value would to leap to 1250 Kelvin...and that change increases exponentially. Source - I am an Mechanical Engineering student and I just took a course on gas dynamics
A jet launched from a rocket launched from a plane. Im sold.
just in case you didnt know, the x1 was not the first plane to fly supersonic, it was the first to fly sustained in supersonic. many ww2 fighters could break the soundbarrier in a dive but fell apart in the air, the korean war jets did the same with out falling apart, they only had control and engine problems.
.. or you could make plane travel comfortable with good food, drink, entertainment, wifi, cushy chairs, leg room, people to talk to, places to sleep, separate scream zone for kids .. Then who cares how long the trip takes?
+Brad Evans They already do, it's called "first class" =P
+Brad Evans That already exists! It's called flying in a private jet. If you want this just buy one. If you can't afford it, then ride along in a metal tube with 200 other passengers like the rest of us.
Then invest in hybrid airships
The flying isn't the important part then, take a cruise
Fly in a private jet or splurge for first class. Those things exist, and they aren't cheap. Never have been
Slight correction here. The friction with the air moving across the skin of the craft is not the dominant source of heat. The compression of the air into those high pressure areas you mentioned causes the majority of the heating. Common misconception.
I don't know how I feel about this on the one hand it's like I hate a 14 hour flight while on the other hand, going 5000 Km/h faster than the speed of sound doesn't sound safe or economically effective.
What an excellent video! :D Thanks Hankie :>
But how do they solve the comfort problem? I can't see this being commercially viable without somehow reducing the G-force that passengers feel.
+12tone, It is part of the new government health program. Only the fit fly in these things. You have to pass a test pilot physical in order to buy a ticket.
12tone The Concorde was comfortable- just SLIGHTLY louder, and with a SLIGHTLY greater feeling of acceleration than other commercial jets. Once at altitude & cruise speed, as you know, there are NO additional g loads on the passengers. There was no ‘comfort problem’...
Just had an air show take place near my house this weekend. Last week I could hear these loud, continuous booms. Couldn't see any planes but the sound came from that direction of the airport. It sounded like thunder, or what I would imagine an earthquake to sound like. After watching this video, I'm assuming it was jet planes entering supersonic speeds during their practice flights! It was amazing how loud it was. I felt like the entire sky was going to crack open.
No mention of Santos Dumont = disappointed in you Hank.
+CelloRockz No one gives a shit about second place. Although it was him that gave the inspiration for the invention of the wrist watch.
apburner1 He was the *first* to be officially recognized. Check your facts.
This is the most science-ey SCI show ever.
Kind of worried about the potential effects on bird and insect migration with sonic booms permeating the air, considering the effects of large ships on whales.
That is a really interesting thought, I hadn't thought of that! I suppose if the flights went supersonic only over the ocean then the sonic boom would mostly be dissipated in the sea, causing minimal impact to marine life. I don't know that there are that many insects out at sea either. Maybe flights would have to be tailored around bird migration patterns though.
Cool video. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
We just need to figure out how to use the speed force!⚡️⚡️
Brilliant! Thanks so much.
So if a ramjet just relies on incoming air, and I'm guessing Concorde had ramjets, did it also have regular turbojets for getting into the air/coming down?
+SheosMan117 The Concorde had four turbojets that used afterburner systems (like in fighter jets) for more power!
Ah. But I'm still guessing (sc)ramjets all have the issue of not working subsonically.
+SheosMan117 That's correct. (sc)ramjet based planes require some other means of propulsion to get them up to the required speed before activating the ramjet engines.
+SheosMan117 The Nasa X43 was launched from a B-52 at high altitude then reached supersonic using the Pagasus rocket booster and only then could fly hypersonicly. For commercial application you would need a turbojet/turbofan to make it reach supersonic speeds to make use of the sramjet and for landings. Its not really safe just relying on the scramjet unless you want a scrambled jet by the end :P
+SheosMan117 some planes like the SR-17 used a mixture of turbine and ram engines (turbo ramjet) basically.
At low speeds the turbojet would get all the air intake then at high speeds it would bypass the air to the ram part of the engine and burn it.
My flight to Japan is going to take me about 12+ hours and it is the most long and uncomfortable thing ever. The day this form of travel become commercial I might cry from joy.
+SimplyAlly Tea I feel you. I've traveled to and from South Korea a number of times being in the military, and those flights are just... I mean... eugh
I USED to like flying.
+SimplyAlly Tea A trans-pacific supersonic flight would almost certainly cost more than a 1st class ticket on a conventional airliner, and it would be an additional engineering challenge to achieve the range needed to avoid refueling in the Aleutian Islands.
Holy shit it would probably be so cool to be inside a plane doing 5000+km/h
No dude, acceleration makes life exciting, not constant velocity.
+Command & Conquer Fitness you've clearly never driven 140 mph down a German highway. Acceleration is really fun but good lord is going fast enough to take off awesome just on its own.
Especially as you pass some soccer mom in a minivan going 70 mph on the lane beside you.
+Kami K That's not exciting to anyone I know. GETTING to the 140 in 4 seconds from 0 is exciting, staying there shouldn't be exciting to you. If it is, you probably need to find some creative outlets or other fun hobbies to entertain yourself more often.
+Kami K Then you "clearly" haven't gone through the stereotypical 4 years of high school. I didn't say what I said above to offend you at all btw
Command & Conquer Fitness 3edgy5me ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
hmm... interesting when you see what you studied in college suddenly in you awaited sci show episode. I'm impressed, but I keep thinking "sort of, but there is so much more to it". but overall well done. maybe a whole crash course should follow flight in history and then over each type. I would love that, even would pull out my books and help that
The future of air travel is traveling without air.
before hyperloop i knew vacuum tube transport was the future because it removes all the issues with resistance and friction air has.
if you want to go further in the future and not have speed be a factor, using magnetic fields to go into space or slow air travel is the future but i am not comfortable discussing that any further.
+VectorShiftZero That will never be viable for inter-continental travel because you need a tube.
CuriosityKilledTheMartianCat
not viable economically but once automated systems and construction becomes widely accepted than it becomes viable.
it is possible by even today's standards but it would require international cooperation.
a large investment but it would solve job issues.
it is a large project but humanity needs to regain the motivation to strive for achievements that was once thought of as impossible. as the moon landing for example but something that has more practical use for the everyday person.
+VectorShiftZero hypersonic jets are probably more practical than a tunnel that long. It's not just construction, it's the fact that if something goes wrong, e.g. a fire or collapse, everyone inside is entirely screwed because you are literally thousands of miles from safety.
+CuriosityKilledTheMartianCat
there would be many safety systems in place, if there is any integrity issues senors would alert the control room. these issues can be checked by remote survey drones or camera feeds.
if something happens and travel needs to be halted than a retrieval team will be sent out.
air travel is far more dangerous if something goes wrong and rescue teams can have a hard time finding a downed plane.
PS: Steel or fiberglass tubes are very unlikely to collapse, a underground tunnel would take to much effort to seal for a vacuum and preform maintenance.
+VectorShiftZero the problem is that any help could be potentially half or a whole day away via conventional travel (assuming a broken hyperloop) and that's too long. Planes tend to be close enough to an airport to land in most emergency situations
Great video! Thanks!
Since you mentioned the Wright brother, as a Brazilian I must ask for a video about Santos Dumont. He flew without a rail or a catapult before anyone else.
+
+guilherme siqueira
The Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903 (fyi, they didn't use catapults in their first flights, they flew against the wind instead). Dumont's 14-bis first flew in 1906, 3 YEARS LATER, so cut the patriotic crap already.
It's like watching patriotic fools in Spain, Portugal and Italy fight over the nationality of Columbus...
I mean, who the fuck cares?
Btw, Wilbur Wright was already flying gliders in 1902, as you can see in this photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_the_pioneer_era#/media/File:1902_WrightBrosGlider.jpg
Note that the design of that older glider is much cleaner than the crude design of the 14-bis...
I mean, from the engineering standpoint, Santos-Dumont was kind of a butcher, if you ask me.
Anyway, does it really matter who flew their ugly contraption first?
What matters is that people around the world got interested in aviation and developed all sorts of aircraft.
You should be celebrating that, instead of trying to revive dead and pointless arguments over a fucking minor and irrelevant technicality (such as the use of catapults).
Sure, the 14-bis didn't use catapults or rails, so what? It was still ugly, unstable and cumbersome as shit.
The chief aerodynamicist for Boeing once said when asked about the future of supersonic commercial flight that it wasn't so much a technical issue but a societal issue. The engineering problems can be solved with enough time and money. The question is if its worth it to use such a vastly larger amount of resources to propel a few very important people to their destination faster.
i hope one day to go supersonic.
I got childishly excited at the mention of the Concorde. I freaking love planes, this whole episode had me bouncing in my chair with excitement.
+KivaPwnguin The joy of bouncing in your chair is often lost after infancy so I'm glad to find a fellow bouncer.
And now all I want to do is play Kerbal Space Program again...
Great episode! And topic, Keep it up :)
we gotta make airtravel great again
Heat was a major issue with the Concorde as well. The nose cone had a heat resistant glass part that lifted up to protect the pilots' windshields. If you notice how the nose looks when it lands, like the beak of a bird, that is the nose cone/heat shield moved down so the pilots had an unobstructed view to land the plane. The plane was designed to expand with the heat from air friction - it would actually get longer. The Concorde could not start its engines while on the ground because it would burn up too much fuel. They designed a huge fan that was mounted to be self-powered and mobile. It would hook up to an engine and blow massive amounts of air to get the engine spun up to operating speed. At that point the engines would get fuel and would ignite. Some really neat tech on the old bird.
You could have all 3 engine types on the same plane & switch between them like switching gears.
Extra weight isn't really wanted on commercial planes
It might be possible to develop an engine that can change itself between the two. Kinda like an engine that can run off both oxygen from an air intake and liquid oxidizer from a tank. This would probably not be easy to do though.
extra weight = need extra fuel, and extra fuel = even more extra weight.. it's counterproductive.. it's problems like these that make launching spacecrafts so expensive
Deathshredder58 Well, good news. The SR-71 Blackbird's engines can switch between ordinary turbojet and afterburner ramjet modes via a sophisticated bypass mechanism and a retractable middle cone, which, at high speeds, is able to regulate the pressure of incoming supersonic air so it achieves better fuel efficiency at Mach 3.2 than at Mach 1. It was a marvel, engineered on paper with slide rulers in a time before computer-aided design and simulations.
I love that you've gone primarily metric, SciShow ❤ I've been aboard the prototype Concorde, but never flown in one, unfortunately :(
Erh... Tupolev is an airplane manufacturer, like Boeing or Airbus, (except Tupolev is Russian.) Their Tu-144 was a supersonic airplane based on Concorde.
He'd already established the actual model of the plane. Its not really a big issue, like how you might call a Silverado a Chevy or a MiG-15 a MiG.
This reminds me of the Skylon and other 'single stage to orbit' spaceplanes concepts, Where they take off of a runway and convert from a conventional jet to a scram jet.
Then finally to a rocket to reach low Earth orbit.
Irmãos Wright e seu estilingue.
+Luciano Silva
Alberto Santos-Dumont and his useless 14-bis, ^^
By 1905 Wilbur Wright was making flights of around 40Km, while Santos-Dumont was still working on his crude 14-bis... which would fly a year later, for about 50 meters before crashing. After some tweaking, in late 1906 they could get the 14-bis to maintain flight for 200 meters... so still nowhere near the 40Km flown by Wilbur Wright the previous year.
I mean, do you honestly think that the 14-bis is something you can boast about? ^^
It's funny to see Brazilians like yourself trying to undermine the achievements of the Wright brothers, focusing on a minor and absurd technicality like the use of catapults... The fact is that the 14-bis couldn't even maintain flight for 300 meters, whereas the Wright's flier (older design) could stay in the air for several dozen kilometers. So stop embarrassing yourself and cut the patriotic nonsense.
Dumont and Wright brothers had contributed immensely to the modern aviation. It wasn't a race for who will fly first, but a race for who will fly better.
Wright brothers developed a plane that was easily maneuverable while Dumont made a self "throwable" one. Chronologically speaking, 14-bis made the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe to be certified by the Aéro Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. But the Wrights came and showed a better and easier planer, for example implementig a three axis control system.
The three of them made your flight from Rio to NY possible, without one of them we could be yet traveling by ship.
Subsonic < Sonic < Trans-sonic < Super Sonic < Hyper Sonic < High Hyper Sonic < Re-entry speed. It would be awesome to fly at the latter two speeds. Few hours to go around the planet.
why not just travel at mach 2? at that speed, wouldn't the sound waves not be as compressed, like mach 1? Then you would only need to worry about sonic booms during takeoff and landing. (both could be done along a coast, for example)
perhaps I'm wrong here, feel free to correct me.
+chipmonk434 Not 100% on this, but I pretty sure as long as your traveling at Mach1 or higher there are going to be a constant sonic boom do to the plain moving at a constant mach+ speed. The Sound barrier is a constant that the plain needs to fly through.
+chipmonk434 Sonic booms aren't exactly caused by just "breaking the sound barrier". To explain it you have to consider air as a fluid, just like water. At high speeds air becomes thick and dense--like water but not to that extreme degree. Any time an aircraft is flying above mach 1 (actually, a bit BEFORE mach 1, sometimes around .8 but this depends entirely on the wing shape), it needs to move through that air.
Basically there's lots of undisturbed air in the atmosphere, and then suddenly a plane smashes into it. The air is accelerated while flowing around the aircraft, and due to the properties of air at high speeds it becomes compressed. That 'compression wave' is shot away through the remaining air, just like ripples in a pond. This can't be avoided by flying faster, because the air has to be compressed by the jet no matter what. Sonic booms are literally explosions in the sky; they're the pressure wave you'd see of a slow-motion explosion. They're not...exactly compressed "noise" but compressed air. Sound is just pressure, though, which is why it's correct to call them "compressed sound waves". It doesn't explain the full picture though.
xGatoDelFuegox Yeah, I knew about most of this, and the heating effects, and the fact that it gets harder to move through the faster you're moving. My theory was that at or around mach 2 or faster, the compressed waves might cancel themselves out, but that's obviously not the case as you're correct, the compression is a constant rather than like "just sound waves" where the compression comes as an oscillation. Thanks for putting the effort into that reply.
Cool video! Keep up the great work!
Just get all 7 Super Emeralds and you can go Hypersonic.
Hank is the best. I like SciShow but damn is it better when Hank is doing the presentation.
Boy you guys missed that by a mile. You needed an aerospace adviser on this one.
It isn't friction that makes the plane hot. It's the air that does and the air is made hot because of compression.
The biggest mistake you made is that the sonic barrier is more of an economic one. After that it gets enormously inefficient. The Concord cost 16 times more than a 747 to operate. Not just build. Not 10% more which is normally enough to put you out of business. Now why was there a market for a plane ticket that cost 16 times as much? Tax support brought the price down some, but the main reason was important people did not like being away from their communications and staff for very long.
Well guess what. That problem went away when satellite phones were invented. Now having an office in your airplane is the future. Not speed. There are somethings that are timeless, like propellers and there are things that will forever be in the future like monorails and SSTs.
Exactly, the ideal gas law is PV=nRT ignoring the constants it becomes pressure times volume = temperature. If the pressure is abruptly raised astronomically the temperature will too.
+Nick “Grifplex” Rasmussen
Yes and that is actually the reason ram jets won't work. Unmentioned in the video is that in a ram jet you have to compress it before heating it up to extract energy in the form of faster exhaust. But in compressing it even a little bit it gets the combustion chamber to be white hot even before you add the fuel and it has to get hotter than that or it won't speed up enough when allowed to expand.
Isn't that about right Nick?
Great episode! thanks
They're going to PLAID!
As a kid growing up in Nova Scotia, I remember distinctly hearing semi-loud booms in the middle of the day. We finally looked up schedules only to find that it was the directly correlated to the Concord that would pass by nearly 150 km off the coast. Before we figured it out, we thought it was someone doing road work with explosives because it used to give everything a slight shake.
Doesn't the SCRAM jet use the sound wave to compress the air? And why don't we make a RAM jet that can shift into a SCRAM jet
+Adam Hartstein I have a feeling moving parts might be an issue. But great idea.
Hawtsaus Yes, but there's thousands of moving parts in the plane. We can even use a magnetic sultions. Or as it heats up muscle wire will slowly expand or a rush of plasma by a spark plug will expand it
Dumont and Wright brothers had contributed immensely to the modern aviation. It wasn't a race for who will fly first, but a race for who will fly better.
Wright brothers developed a plane that was easily maneuverable while Dumont made a self "throwable" one. Chronologically speaking, 14-bis made the first powered heavier-than-air flight in Europe to be certified by the Aéro Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. But the Wrights came and showed a better and easier planer, for example implementig a three axis control system.
The three of them made your flight from Rio to NY possible, without one of them we could be yet traveling by ship.
I have the solution to all problems!!
Teleportation.
+FireFraction I think I'll stick with planes.
I heard a sonic boom once, back when I was a kid. I lived near Tamworth UK and I heard it while I was playing in my back garden. I knew what it was immediately, looked up and sure enough I saw a Concord. Was a cool moment.
They fire that plane out of a missile!
Nice. This may be too much information for this video, but I feel like it may have been helpful to explain how sound waves are just compression waves, the speed of touch.
When he says "when you go hypersonic it gets really hot." He's serious I play KSP flying at Mach 3 is not very fun, it's mostly melting and explosions.
+Nicholas Budzynski I once tried to fly faster than Mach 4 at sea level. I tried to change course slightly when the nose cone began to melt, and the deflection cascade instantly destroyed the plane. Fun stuff.
Hunter2129 when that happens before you get past the end of the runway... FASTER
Another alternative might be for planes to fly higher instead of faster: a flight from Salt Lake to Atlanta goes up over Iceland to take advantage of the shortened flight distance due to the curvature of the Earth (distance from the Equator, or the Earth's widest lateral distance).
Also, does SciShow have a mailing address if we'd like to send fan mail? I really enjoy SciShow and would like to send some! :D
How come Concord crashes once and everybody abandons it, while dozens of Boeing crafts crashed, and they still fly?
+1234kalmar That is a brilliant point, sir.
+1234kalmar Because literally over a thousand times more Boeings flew than Concordes?
lolpauve The question still stands.
1234kalmar One Concord crashing is 1 out of 14. 1 Boeing crashing is 1 out of 10000 (or how many there ever were). Also after the crash in 1999 (or 2000) no one wanted to fly in them anymore so they didn't even have the passengers. It cost far more than it was making. The decision was part safety but mostly an economical one.
lolpauve That's really sad.
Awesome! finally commercial flights will get intersting again 👌✈
just have both hypersonic and supersonic engine
+sliestspider0 my thought too
+sliestspider0 weight. Engines are really heavy, and the more you put on the plane the harder it is to keep it efficient. Loading down a plane with more engines and more fuel to actually make the flight and any necessary course corrections is not necessarily the best idea when you're wanting to go into Mach 5 where you've got more serious problems to worry about than just getting there.
Um, weight, fuel/oxygen routing, and power to operate that would be insane.
+sliestspider0 then there would be more wight, needing more power to take off. Needing more fuel to fly and room to house fuel. both engines need more refining before commercial viability.
+sliestspider0 Not to mention you need subsonics too.
Awesome episode!
My grandfather flew on the Concorde.Just a random fact. I dont care wether or not you give a shit.
I do
lol
pics or it didnt happpen
video or the pics are null
null?
well put together. wow