NASA’s aeronautical innovators are one step closer to confidently crafting a viable commercial airliner that can fly faster than the speed of sound, yet produce a sonic boom that is quiet enough not to bother anyone on the ground below. The key to this recent advance came when wind tunnel tests of scale model airplanes verified that new approaches to designing such aircraft would work as hoped for when aided by improved computer tools, which were used for the first time together in each step of the design process. “That was really the breakthrough for us. Not only that the tools worked, but that our tests show we could do even better in terms of reducing noise than we thought at the start of the effort,” said Mr Peter Coen, NASA’s supersonic project manager at the Langley Research Center.
Source: Bangalore Mirror
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