Before the Concorde even began regular flights, protests over its sound levels caused the U.S. and many other countries to ban overland commercial supersonic flight. Those restrictions have stood for Keep reading
Tag: sonic boom
Challenges of Commercial Supersonic Flight
Years ago as I sat on a plane taxiing at Heathrow, I caught a glimpse of a Concorde out on the tarmac. My classmates couldn’t understand why I was so Keep reading
Shock Waves in Flight
Schlieren optical systems have been used to visualize shock waves in labs for more than a century, but the technique did not translate well to photographing shock structures outside the Keep reading
Schlieren in Flight
Schlieren photography is a common method of visualizing shock waves in wind tunnel experiments, but it’s much harder to pull off for aircraft in the sky. This video from NASA Keep reading
Shock Waves in Flight
Schlieren photography allows visualization of density gradients, such as the sharp ones created by shock waves off this T-38 aircraft flying at Mach 1.1 around 13,000 ft. Although shock waves are Keep reading
Supersonic
Moving supersonically–faster than the local speed of sound–can cause some awesome effects. Among these are vapor cones (a.k.a. Prandlt-Glauert singularities), shock waves, and, of course, the sonic boom.
Breaking the Sound Barrier
The shock waves propagating in front of an Atlas V rocket after launch decimate a rainbow-like effect called a sun dog. #