TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930200.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 165 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 48

AEROSPACE

Supersonic Boom


The Concorde was a financial dud, but planemakers around the
world are racing to design the next generation. Has its time
finally come?

By JEROME CRAMER/PARIS -- With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/
Los Angeles


    Even after 22 years in service, the Concorde still seems
like a vehicle from the future. It can fly from New York City
to London in just three hours, for which passengers pay an
astronomical $4,167 each way. Yet for all its speed and
prestige, the Concorde has always been a money loser for its
operators, Air France and British Airways. The SST guzzles too
much fuel, carries too small a passenger load and makes so much
noise that 30 countries have restricted its use.

    So why are aerospace engineers around the world scrambling
to build the next generation of this billion-dollar white
elephant? In a word: Asia. The booming market for transpacific
flights is expected to help create a lucrative new market for
a plane that can shrink long distances. By the end of the
decade, transpacific travel is expected to reach 315,000
passengers a day, or 15% more than will cross the Atlantic
daily. A plane flying at Mach 2.5 (2 1/2 times the speed of
sound, or 1,800 m.p.h.) could more than halve the duration of
a Los Angeles-Tokyo flight to just 4 1/2 hours.

    The race to build what has been dubbed the High Speed
Civil Transport (HSCT) is a multibillion-dollar gamble fraught
with technological challenges. To be profitable, the plane will
have to carry more than twice as many passengers as the
Concorde, operate at higher speeds, span greater distances, use
less fuel, run quieter and produce far less pollution. Can do,
say the plane's advocates, though any such plane isn't likely
to fly until at least the year 2005.

    The payoff could be enormous. The nation or group that
successfully develops the HSCT is likely to dominate the
aircraft market well into the 21st century.

    The job is too big for any one company. Aerospace firms
are forming joint ventures and seeking government subsidies to
foot the research bill. NASA is spending $284 million over five
years to develop technologies that U.S. companies can apply to
their work on the HSCT. Rival U.S. aircraft builders Boeing and
McDonnell Douglas have teamed up to design an airframe, as have
British Aerospace and France's Aero spatiale, the same
partnership that built the Concorde. American jet-engine builder
Pratt & Whitney is working closely with its nemesis, General
Electric, to build a power plant that is quieter, more
economical and clean burning. France's Snecma and Britain's
Rolls-Royce have launched a similar joint project. Gulfstream,
which makes business jets, is working with British and Russian
designers to build a 19-passenger supersonic business jet. "Our
clients will pay almost anything to go faster," says company CEO
Allen Paulson.

    Like shrewd roulette players, the Japanese are spreading
their money around, spending millions on overseas research
projects. Since the country lacks the experience to build an
HSCT on its own, the Japanese are investing "just enough in both
European and American projects so they can jump in with the
winner and become partners," says John Swihart, a U.S. aerospace
consultant.

    British Aerospace has a team of 50 engineers working
closely with France's Aerospatiale on a "son of Concorde" that
will carry 250 to 300 passengers at Mach 2 as far as 5,500
miles. The Germans, for their part, have an even loftier plan.
Deutsche Aerospace has been developing the Saenger project, a
hypersonic plane that would fly as fast as Mach 25 by the year
2030. As a first step, the company is experimenting with a
version that would fly at Mach 5-6, launch a satellite into
orbit and then glide back to earth. "The Germans have spent
several hundred millions of dollars developing Saenger, and it
could give them a head start with the HSCT," says Jerry Grey,
a director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.

    American plane builders have been down this runway before
-- and got burned. In 1971 Lockheed dropped its plans for an
SST. Later that year Boeing too killed its project, after
Congress scrapped subsidies because of concern about noise,
pollution and cost. The $4 billion Concorde project went ahead,
but only 16 planes were built, and aviation experts believe the
original investment has never been recouped. Many aerospace
executives now believe the supersonic transport's time will
finally come, but its success will depend on the scientific
ingenuity brought to bear on a host of technical problems.

    Probably the biggest concern is environmental. To save
fuel, the plane will have to cruise in the thin atmosphere at
about 60,000 ft., close to the ozone layer, which protects the
earth from ultraviolet rays. But jet engines produce
nitrogen-oxide emissions, which at that altitude could
potentially destroy more ozone than chlorinated fluorocarbons
did before they were banned in 1978. Engineers at Pratt &
Whitney and General Electric are working on several concepts to
reduce such emissions by heating and burning the fuel in gradual
stages. The goal is daunting: to reduce nitrogen-oxide exhaust
to as little as 10% of the volume emitted by conventional
airliners.

    To achieve high speed and long ranges, the HSCT will
require an airframe that is proportionately 30% lighter than the
Concorde's. The answer lies in modern composites of silicon and
carbon, which will be able to withstand aircraft-skin
temperatures that reach 600 degreesF or more at Mach 3.

    Noise reduction may be the biggest political problem for
the plane to overcome. By tinkering with the plane's
silhouette, engineers believe they can reduce the impact of its
sonic boom, though probably never enough to allow supersonic
flight over populated areas. To reduce noise during takeoffs and
subsonic travel, designers hope to build a combination engine
that can operate in a quiet, turbofan mode on flights from, say,
Chicago to Los Angeles but then kick in to a more powerful,
turbojet mode for the supersonic trip from California to Japan.

    But will the plane be economical? Boeing officials believe
the HSCT needs to break even with no more than a 10% to 15%
surcharge over regular ticket prices. "I'm not interested in
building a plane that only rich people can fly," says Boeing
senior vice president Benjamin Cosgrove. The Concorde's ticket
prices, which barely cover its fuel costs, run about four times
as high as conventional fares. Aircraft manufacturers predict
that the HSCT will be economically feasible to build and operate
only if the fleet is large, from 1,000 to 2,000 planes. This
means that two or perhaps three competing designs for the HSCT
may eventually emerge.

    Engineers hope that full-scale production of an HSCT could
be under way by the end of the decade, with commercial
operation a few years later. One obstacle might be a decision
on the part of Boeing and Europe's Airbus to build huge new
subsonic aircraft that could carry 600 to 800 passengers. If
manufacturers switch their attention to the new subsonic craft,
the drain on resources could delay the HSCT until 2015. But as
business and tourism grow ever more global, the lure of a
high-speed aircraft increases. "I never thought a supersonic
civilian aircraft was needed," says Thomas Donahue, general
manager for advanced technology at General Electric. "But I just
got back from doing business in Australia, which means a 14-hour
flight. Believe me, now the prospect of such a plane seems very
real."