What's Up After Concordes?

(AP)  After the crash of an Air France Concorde two months ago, the future of supersonic passenger travel remains uncertain. With all the European-built Concordes grounded, the Air France Concorde flight out of New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on Thursday may be the last anyone will see for several months.

As CBS News Correspondent Thalia Assuras reports, despite nearly 10 years of research costing millions of dollars, some experts say that an American version of a supersonic plane is still not viable.

"It's always been a disaster economically," said Ron Davies, a curator at the Air and Space Museum. "and you've only got to only reflect on the fact the fact that for every seat it carries across the Atlantic it has to carry a hundred pounds of fuel …"

Davies says the decision to produce passenger jets that travel at supersonic speeds boils down to one crucial factor:

"The development costs alone to put one airliner in the air would be about $20 billion dollars," Davies said.

Despite the hefty price tag, the Japanese are forging ahead. They have begun building their supersonic passenger plane, one with an engine capable of propelling the jet at five times the speed of sound, cutting most international flights in half.

Davies believes that it's not speed the American traveler wants. Most American travelers, he said, want more point-to-point service with less congestion at the airports.

"The most promising development, in my view, is the airbuses — air efforts to build a 600-seat super jumbo jet, and that would be more economic than the existing 747s," he said.

Willie Turner of the Hiller Aviation Museum disagrees with Davies' point-of-view. He said that upgrades in passenger flight technology are long overdue.

"We live in nanoseconds, yet the technology in aviation to fly — let's say from here to Japan — hasn't changed in 30 years," Turner said.

The only surviving artifact of America's supersonic programs is a Boeing-built fuselage at the Hiller museum in California. Turner said he believes it was a mistake not to finish the project.

"Well, it's extremely important to show where we should be in aviation technology," he said. "When people walk in it, it will stimulate the questions about why aren't we flying more supersonic transport."

Supersonic flights may not be the future of American aviation, but there is another concept getting government funding — the hypersoar plane. It's a hypersonic craft that looks a bit like a flying surfboard, and is expected to be able to skip between any two cities on earth in less than two hours.

"We have the technology to do this in the future, it's just the business and dollars, when it's feasible to tool up companies to build these aircraft," Turner said.

The proposed hypersoar plane has a top speed of 6,700 mph — yes, that's 6,700 mph — almost 10 times the seed of sound.


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