NASA's X-59 Aircraft Revolutionizes Supersonic Flight with Sonic Thump Technology

A “sonic thump” may not have the same awesomeness factor as a sonic boom, but it still has the right stuff. And like it or not, it’s the new standard in supersonic flight. NASA’s Quesst mission (“Quiet SuperSonic Technology”) is demonstrating the ability to fly faster than the speed of sound, but without generating the sonic booms that come with breaking the sound barrier.

The X-59 aircraft the space agency developed to achieve this instead creates a sonic thump, which NASA says is an acceptable threshold that could make supersonic commercial flight over land possible. Basically, if NASA can make flying faster than the speed of sound a lot quieter, we can all do it—without breaking all the windows below.

With its needle-like tip, the X-59 was made to travel at more than 1,000 miles per hour, twice as fast as a commercial jet and 1.3 times the speed of sound. It’s not just the tip, however, that reduces the sonic boom to something akin to the sound of distant thunder. It’s the entire airframe design.

When a normal aircraft approaches the speed of sound, it begins to move faster than the pressure waves it creates. Those waves start to compress and stack, then begin to spread in a cone shape. Despite its name, the boom created is not a single noise, announcing that a plane is going faster than sound, it continues as long as the plane is pushing air molecules aside in flight. The boom’s intensity changes with the aircraft size, weight, and altitude. The larger the plane, and the closer to Earth it is, the louder the sonic boom.

The X-59 is 99.7 feet long, but its needle-like nose alone is 30 feet long. Its design spreads the pressure waves out, preventing them from forming the high-pressure cone that produces the sonic boom we’ve all come to know and love. The position of its engines, canards, and tail direct shockwaves away from the ground. All of these features also separate the initial shocks to weaken them before they can reach the ground.

Probably the most interesting feature is how the pilot sees. There’s no forward-facing cockpit window. That would create a large shockwave, defeating the purpose of the entire plane. Instead, the X-59 has an external vision system (XVS), a series of 4K cameras fed into the cockpit, and allowing the cockpit to remain an unbroken part of the smooth shape of the nose.

NASA will one day fly the X-59 over residential neighborhoods to gather feedback from the people below, which could lead to resumed commercial supersonic flights.

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