Energy & Industry / Transport & Mobility

Supersonic Flight (X-1 to Concorde)

Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound in the rocket plane Bell X-1 on 14 October 1947; from 1976 to 2003 Concorde carried passengers at twice the speed of sound.

The X-1 was dropped from a B-29 over the Mojave Desert and reached Mach 1.06 on a four-chamber rocket motor; many US experts had expected a swept wing to be necessary, but its wing was straight, and the X-1A reached Mach 2.44 in 1953. Concorde flew first on 2 March 1969 and entered service on 21 January 1976 with four Olympus 593 turbojets with afterburners; it cruised at Mach 2.02 and was the first airliner with analogue fly-by-wire controls. It was retired in 2003, after only 20 aircraft had been built, because of cost and a drop in passengers, and the new supersonic airliner projects of the 2020s try to repeat its speed at lower cost.