Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [11]
Mulally said, “This is the airplane our customers have asked us to concentrate on. They share our view that this new airplane could change the way the world flies as dramatically as did the introduction of the jet age.” Airline talks, he said, showed that “they would strongly value an airplane that can fly faster, higher, and more quietly over very long ranges.
“We have an airplane that will open a new chapter in commercial aviation, and we are changing our new product development efforts to focus more strongly on this airplane that has caused such excitement among our customers. It will be an ideal complement to our current family.” Walt Gillette, the 747X program manager, was appointed to lead Sonic Cruiser development.
To the rest of the world, the first real view of the Sonic Cruiser was nothing less than astonishing in its audacity and innovation. Designed with a double-delta or “cranked arrow” planform, it combined a high-speed inboard section with a higher aspect-ratio outboard section. Twin tails, slightly canted inboard, were mounted on the inboard sides of the engine nacelles, which were semirecessed into the wing. Inlets with S-shaped ducts were tucked away beneath the leading edge of the wing, invisible on all the first artist impressions.
At about 200 feet in length and with a maximum takeoff weight of about 450,000 pounds, the twin-engine aircraft was designed around 777 powerplants to shorten the design cycle. The configuration was designed for cruise speeds between Mach 0.95 and 0.98, and altitudes between 40,000 and 50,000 feet. This was aimed at cruising high above the rest of the world’s lumbering subsonic jet fleet, and slashing flight times by more than one hour for every 3,100 miles flown. The speed would shave about two hours from transatlantic trips and more than three hours across the Pacific.
Both Gillette and John Roundhill, who was named marketing vice president, knew that the key to success was breakthrough technology, making it more dependent on technical achievement than any Boeing commercial program since the 707.
The number one challenge was proving the viability of the unusual cranked delta configuration, which was key to the entire transonic concept. “It’s all a question of how we arrange the pieces to allow area rule,” said Gillette. “The final shape is more drawn by evolving up from a subsonic aircraft with a constant cross section, than coming down from a supersonic design.”
Officially the Sonic Cruiser was designated a “near-sonic transport” and used a classic Sears-Haack cross-sectional area distribution. This was named for William Sears, a leading American aerodynamicist who was responsible for the flying wing designs of Jack Northrop; and German mechanical engineer Wolfgang Haack, whose mathematical analysis was used to design low-drag sniper bullets in World War II.
Sonic Virgin? Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airways was one of the first carriers to put its name publicly behind the high-speed Sonic Cruiser concept. Gareth Burgess
Although never built, nothing quite captivated the minds and imagination of the aerospace world like the Sonic Cruiser. Couched in dry language, the patent application was titled simply “Integrated and/or modular high-speed aircraft,” but arguably did more than any commercial project since the Concorde to excite widespread public interest.
Designers were forced to use increasingly novel aerodynamic solutions to meet the seemingly insatiable appetite for high-speed travel in the late 1950s. Convair pushed toward the high-drag transonic area by mounting antishock bodies on the trailing edge of the CV990’s thin, thirty-nine-degree-swept wing. The bulbous pods, resembling inverted canoes, delayed the formation of the drag-inducing supersonic shock wave, taking advantage of the recent discovery of “area ruling” by legendary aerodynamicist Richard Whitcomb. The pods, also called “Küchemann Carrots,” after their inventor, are seen to good