I remember reading once that pilots need to be broken into supersonic aircraft and airforces which lacked a supersonic trainer (such as the West german airforce in the 60’s and the Indian Airforce today) tended to suffer very high rates of accidents.
Yet as the West Germans and Indians have shown, its not something that is strictly necessary to be able to fly supersonic jets.
What additinal skills and knowledge would a pilot need to be able to fly such an aircraft?
They basically just need good piloting skills which they already have if they are the ones sitting in an airplane that costs tens of millions of dollars. As a supersonic capable plane approaches the sound barrier, there is some buffeting and instability in controls but, once it punches through it, the air smooths out almost completely and there is little issue after that. Breaking the sound barrier in the first place was an engineering problem combined with lack of knowledge of the unknown. Chuck Yeager was disappointed when he first broke it because he didn’t really notice much of anything at the time except for calmer flight and a single instrument that went off-scale. Today’s supersonic fighters are built to go supersonic and we already know that there isn’t any true, unbreakable, barrier. The instability at .9+ mach just has to be dealt with by the aircraft engineers and the pilot. It tends not to be a big deal these days.
As a passenger on Concorde I didn’t notice any buffeting at all approaching Mach 1. At Mach 0.95 the afterburners were lit in pairs, which gave two gentle punches to the back of the seat, but otherwise nothing. Don’t know if Concorde pilots felt anything or if the engineers did such a good job designing it that it was not an issue.
I don’t think it’s so much buffeting of the entire aircraft; it’s just that the instability of the airflow tends to be concentrated in certain spots–and those spots happen to be where the control surfaces are. IIRC, there is a kind of strange dichotomy between the yoke wanting to slap around and then just going limp.
There’s an analogy there that I won’t make, for this is GQ.
If you look up my user name on Wikipedia, you’ll see one of the effects that occurs as an aircraft goes supersonic. This was an issue in the early days, but nowadays I believe aircraft designers are able to makes it a non-issue.
The fighter guys I know say going supersonic is pretty much a non-issue except for the noise bothering people on the ground.
So besides passing through the sound barrier, there is nothing inherently different about flying a mach 1+ aircraft?
From my extensive reading on the subject, I would say no in terms of aerodynamics. Things obviously happen much faster than in a Cessna 172 and supersonic planes tend to have complex systems but, other than that, there is nothing inherently different about the way that they fly.
The aerodynamic forces are a bit higher, and things come at you a bit faster. I suspect you need a bit more room to work.
I’ve spent the last 14 years in Naval Aviation (although I’m not a pointy-nosed guy). There are no special mach>1 procedures in the Navy or Air Force because there’s no difference in flying procedures and required skill. The only difference is the number of knots. The general requirements to get fighters right out of flight training are a bit tougher, but even that is a variable and not always true.