Ever wondered why the old lady of the skies, the Boeing 747 jumbo, has such an odd, oblong shape with a bubble at the front? It's because Boeing feared that it would be a short-lived design that would be overrun by the faster, sexier supersonic Concorde flying at twice the speed of sound.
The 747, therefore, was designed primarily for a second life as a freighter where its entire contents could be loaded and unloaded through a huge front door by putting the cockpit on a giant hinge that swings upward.
You can actually see this marvellous configuration regularly on the freight apron at Sydney or Melbourne airport when a 747 freighter is in town.
The demise of the 747 and the rise of supersonic flight was actually forecast before the 747 first flew 40 years ago but, unlike the relentless march of new technology in all other fields of endeavor, the human race has collectively decided to go backwards when it comes to air transport.
We had the technology to fly us to London in 12 hours instead of 24 or to Los Angeles in six hours instead of 13 hours in the early 1960s: it was just a matter of getting the price right and putting a lid on the noise it would create.
In the 1990s, the supersonic revolution seemed a certainty to begin early this century. America's space agency, NASA, had spent about $US1 billion in the 1990s proving the technology for a 300-seat plane that could fly at twice the speed of sound for only 20 per cent more than the price of a subsonic airline ticket.
The sticking point was that such a supersonic transport (SST) would still be limited to over-water routes while research continued on new body shapes limiting the sonic boom - a shock wave of noise that radiates from an aircraft flying supersonically for up to 40 kilometres radius.
Researchers now believe they can minimise the sonic boom for flights over land and maximise the fuel economy for supersonic flight - but the horse has already bolted. In the 1990s, the airlines told the manufacturers that economy was king and they weren't prepared to wait for technology that could deliver supersonic flight if it cost any more than the fare for subsonic flight. Soon after, supersonic research programs in Europe and the US were abandoned.
Ironically, one of the manufacturers, Boeing, is now in deep strife as a result of an ambitious program to certificate the airliner with the cheapest unit operating costs in the history of flight, the 787 "Dreamliner", which is running at least two years late because "plastic" composite materials designed to radically reduce the aircraft's weight keep failing stress tests.
It's doubly ironic that the 787 design started life as as the "Sonic Cruiser", designed originally to fly faster than any other subsonic design, saving up to 20 per cent on flight times.
Now the voice of 26 million Australians and New Zealanders may not count for much on a global scale, but I'm tipping that people Down Under, already probably the most travelled in the world, are getting heartily sick of the time it takes to get where they're going.
The same goes for Europeans and Americans, for whom 12-18 hours is a major disincentive to get to the Asia Pacific region, which is expected to be accounting for more than half the world's air travel in the next few years.
Sumber : sidney morning herald
