At the very beginning, I said the ban on supersonic flight is dumb and that the law should instead have been based on acceptable noise levels. You clearly stated “I vehemently disagree”, which I can only interpret as you saying that the ban was reasonable in the first place. You went on to argue against supersonic flight in general, saying no one “needs” to fly faster than sound and generally threw cold water on further development.
If I have completely misread your argument and you are not actually against the ban, then so be it, but my position hasn’t changed, either about this particular issue or about how regulations work in general–and I hope that LSLGuy’s sense that the FAA is slowly moving away from mandating processes and toward outcome-based regulation is accurate. It’s not just supersonic flight but autonomous air taxis and electric planes and other things as well.
Regarding Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, I’m saddened that his suggested greeting—“Ahoy!”—never caught on. Instead, we got Edison’s “Hello,” which stuck like velcro. I mean, “Ahoy!” just sounds so much more chipper and swashbuckling than the polite-but-lackluster “Hello.”
Ahoy, matey! How about we rendezvous at the galley for a bottle of grog?
Of course if we’d all been answering the phone with “Ahoy” for the last ~100 years it would be a pretty mundane tired word by now, whereas the esoteric archaic “Hello” would be wild and dramatic.
Perhaps it should be mandated that we change the greeting every 10 years to keep things fresh and prevent linguistic stagnation. Next up: “Yo,” followed by “Hey there,” then “Beep boop” (in preparation for our inevitable AI overlords).
Alexander Graham Bell was an early experimenter in manned flight. He was testing large tetrahedral box kites and other designs. He came nowhere near the Wright Bros. effort with his kites but was one of many inventors looking for a solution. I assume the precise reason this thread started was to meander through a list of inventors less well known for their important discoveries followed by a discussion of sonic booms and finally tie Bell back into the equation with a mention of his failure to succeed or gain notoriety in the field of aviation. Or maybe not.
Recently, the majority of calls are made via LINE, a social media platform, and that usage no longer is widely used. Instead, the caller usually say the person’s name.
One of his designs for an aircraft is featured in the book The World’s Worst Aircraft. My copy is packed away. From memory
‘After the success of the Wright Brothers, every inventor tried their hand at an aircraft. Bell used his tetrahedral box kite design. The result was a plane with a built in headwind’
The book goes on to explain what other flaws his design had,
The only possible environmental benefit is if it (1) reduces the number of private jet flights while (2) having less environmental impact per seat-mile. Of course what we’ll likely end up with is supersonic private jets…
My understanding of the economics of private jets is that the main benefit is schedule flexibility, not airspeed. I.e. a plane that I can hop right on to take to my event and that will wait for me if my event runs late to take me to my next one. It’s a rare commercial flight where the additional airspeed would compensate for having to go through security and leave on the airline’s schedule.
That’s true in many cases, but there is also a certain amount of flying private as status or not having to hobnob with the hoi polloi. My recollection of Concorde was that many passengers took it for similar reasons, not because business required them to be in London two hours faster. I can’t see supersonic flight being anything other than Concorde-style ultra first class in my lifetime; if it does I fear the environmental impact would be far worse than current flying.
Of course, I have not seen any projection of environmental impacts (specifically fuel efficiency) other than noise. Maybe supersonic flight at extreme altitude is actually more efficient than conventional flight at 35000 feet? (Note: my gut says that is unlikely.)
One way Bell tested aircraft engines was by attaching them to boats which led to him to build The Ugly Duckling in 1905 which is credited as the first airboat.
Well, not necessarily what I had in mind, but that’s what makes it so much more interesting to ask questions here than to just pull up ChatGPT.