They're playing with our minds again ... and they're on a sure-fire winner. Aeronautical designers last week again unleashed their trusty headline-grabber about the imminence of a "Son of Concorde".
London to Sydney in four hours, they were saying, in the run-up to next month's Farnborough air show outside London in the UK, which is one of the aerospace industry's main annual sales jamborees.
Importantly, the boffins were talking about the technical details of breakthroughs in computer-aided design that they reckon can finally overcome the biggest obstacle - Concorde's inability to fly supersonically over land.
I was sucked in despite a knowing warning yesterday from former
Sydney Morning Herald aviation editor
Ben Sandilands. "Every single story about a Concorde successor ever written has been wrong," he told me bluntly.
But the
highly technical report by veteran aviation writer Guy Norris and colleague Graham Warwick in
Aviation Week and Space Technology was very specific about the progress that has been made.
"The biggest barriers to development of economically viable and environmentally acceptable supersonic transports - sonic boom and airport noise - may be about to be breached," they wrote. "Through development of design tools allowing aircraft to be shaped to produce quieter booms, and noise-reducing nozzle concepts, NASA and industry are growing confident that routine supersonic overland flight is within reach."
