[bangaroo]

there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.

[creer]

There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.

And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.

[adastra22]

Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.

[dmitrygr]

> there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation

There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.

This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part

[WillPostForFood]

The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.

[bangaroo]

i don't disagree with any of that, i'm extremely skeptical that they will ever scale this up

however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.

[mshook]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).

And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.

Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.

So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...

As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...

[ctippett]

We've already been to the moon before, but I for one would be excited to see it happen again.

[rvz]

Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.

This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.

Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.

[dingaling]

> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.

They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.

Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.