the wind tunnel carried out at the TU Delft. The LBA Type Certificate was obtained in 1997. Torenbeek was the co‐founder of the European Workshop on Aircraft Design Education (EWADE), which is held every two years and included one day for informal discussions where new ideas were discussed in a nice setting. The Journal Aircraft Design was started by Elsevier in 1998. Egbert Torenbeek and Jan Roskam acted as editors in chief. Torenbeek served two years as vice‐rector and continued as professor emeritus. His early retirement was closely related to political discussions in the wake of Fokker's bankruptcy. In 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from the Moscow Aviation Institute, which he sent back in 2014 as an act of protest immediately after the MH17 disaster. The book Flight Physics (co‐authored with H. Wittenberg) was published by Springer in in 2009. His book Advanced Aircraft Design was published in 2013 by Wiley and translated into the Chinese language. In 2013 the Aircraft Design Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) was given to Torenbeek and in 2016 he received the Ludwig Prandtl Ring from the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the field of aerospace engineering. Torenbeek presently acts as Honorary Guest Editor for the Continuous Special Issue Aircraft Design of the journal Aerospace at MDPI.
What will the future bring for supersonic commercial transport? Several supersonic business jets are in the design stage, whereas several such projects have already been given up. It is difficult to get the economics right. Development costs to cope with technological challenges will be high and numbers produced in the end will be rather limited. Currently, the US law prohibits supersonic flight over land unless authorized by the FAA for purposes stated in the regulations. There are supersonic rule‐making activities, but none of them would rescind the prohibition of supersonic flight over land. Environmental questions remain due to high fuel consumption in the stratosphere and the considerable take‐off noise produced by Concorde will have to be considerably reduced, although the last chapter promises to have a possible solution for the conceptual design problem. First of all, it is important to understand the essential conceptual design concepts. This book by Egbert Torenbeek delivers this knowledge.
Prof. Dr.‐Ing. Dieter Scholz MSME. Hamburg University of Applied Sciences Hamburg
1 June 2019
Series Preface
The field of aerospace is wide ranging and covers a variety of products, disciplines, and domains, not merely in engineering but in many related supporting activities. These combine to enable the aerospace industry to produce exciting and technologically challenging products. A wealth of knowledge is contained by practitioners and professionals in the aerospace fields that will benefit other practitioners in the industry, and to those entering the industry from University.
The Aerospace Series aims to be a practical and topical series of books aimed at engineering professionals, operators, users, and allied professions such as commercial and legal executives in the aerospace industry. The range of topics is intended to be wide ranging covering design and development, manufacture, operation, and support of aircraft as well as topics such as infrastructure operations, and developments in research and technology. The intention is to provide a source of relevant information that will be of interest and benefit to all those people working in aerospace.
This book extends the author's previous excellent and informative treatises on concept design to focus on supersonic transport aircraft for commercial use. The heady days of supersonic aircraft designs from the UK, USA, and USSR are long gone with the demise of SST for a number of programme and operational reasons, largely related to operating and support costs. A surge in leisure and business travel together with savage competition to reduce ticket prices led to the emergence of very large aircraft and ETOPS which made long distance travel relatively comfortable and affordable. This, and an increase in e‐commerce and environmental concerns, seemed to indicate that the days of supersonic business travel would never return. However, modern business and diplomacy still requires face to face discussions and rapid responses that can be made easier with supersonic travel, so there is a potential market, if not for mass travel then certainly for business users for whom time is valuable.
The author has taken a practical view of the possible re‐emergence of supersonic transport by examining the history of the previous projects and the lessons to be learned from that era. He has developed this by considering contemporary circumstances that have an impact on concept design, such as modern design methods, modern materials, modern aircraft shapes, and environmental issues. This provides a fund of invaluable experience and material for concept designers to examine the engineering and operational aspects of supersonic transport. This knowledge will contribute to the study of the feasibility of supersonic commercial types that will be viable in today's economic and political climate. This is a valuable book for concept engineers, politicians, operators, academics, and forward thinkers.
Peter Belobaba, Jonathan Cooper and Allan Seabridge
November 2019
Preface
This book is intended to be used by members of a team producing an initial design concept of an airliner with the capability of making supersonic cruising flights. Since the demise of the Concorde more than half a century ago there are no designers left with the experience and knowledge required for developing a new initial design proposal. On the other hand, since Concorde's birth there has been a wealth of scientific publications on topics, such as the development of supersonic cruise vehicles, aerodynamics, propulsion, structural design, and flight physics, and in particular the analysis of the sonic boom. Moreover, there appears to be a considerable niche market for relatively small high‐speed aircraft, in particular business jets.
The development of supersonic technology since the end of the twentieth century has primarily advanced in the field of transonic and supersonic aerodynamics. For example, many studies have been carried out in the field of configurations with oblique wings, promising improvements in flight efficiency of up to 20% as well as large gains in reducing the sonic boom, take‐off noise, and low‐speed performance improvements. From this point of view, a new generation of supersonic passenger aircraft could have a commercial future a decade from now.
Although the present generation of aircraft designers has enjoyed an introduction to the physics of supersonic flows during their academic education, not many of them have actually experienced activities associated with the design of a supersonic cruise vehicle. Fortunately, a wealth of high‐quality information on applied supersonic aerodynamics is available in classical books such as the well known books of D. Küchemann, J.D. Anderson and D.L. Raymer. Together these texts provide a comprehensive introduction into the fundamentals, and analytical and computational treatment of high‐speed flows.
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to Professor Leo Veldhuis for his hospitality by offering me a room to continue writing this book during many years after my retirement. Moreover, many colleagues have assisted me in solving problems in the application of the LATEX program, in particular Dr. Roelof Vos, Dr. Maurice Hoogreef and Ir. Reno Elmendorp.
1 History of Supersonic Transport Aircraft Development
At the end of the 1950s military jet aircraft made routine flights at speeds faster than sound, and the first generation of long‐range high‐subsonic jet‐powered airliners had only just been introduced into service, when it was realized that supersonic airliners could become a reality. The commercial potential for supersonic flight came under serious study in the four nations that fostered their development: France, UK, USA and USSR. Companies in the USA coupled experience obtained from the development of military vehicles
