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Right now when it comes to comes to sonic
boom overland flight, it’s based on just

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a speed.

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Right now, it is for civil aircraft, thou
shalt not go over Mach 1.

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What we want to do is we want to change that
regulation and base it on the noise and not

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on just an arbitrary speed.

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So the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project’s
goal is to design, develop, and test a vehicle

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that has a low noise sonic boom signature.

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The new sonic boom from the LBFD airplane
or X-59A will sound more like a thump, we’re

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hoping.

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Your traditional sonic boom typically sounds
like two big cracks.

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Right now we can fly F-18’s get some sonic
booms, record them, measure information about

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the weather and then use that to build models.

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We’ve done bits and pieces of tailoring
the boom in flight and through the design

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tools so this project is actually the culmination
of activities like the Quiet Spike project

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that  we had on the F-15 with Gulfstream.

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We’ve done tests such as FAINT where we
studied Mach cut off and the extent of the

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carpet size.

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It’s six decades of sonic boom research,
so it’s sixty years in the making

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A shaped-boom demonstrator, this X-59, is
the next logical step.

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The interesting thing about the X-59 is that
it looks really sleek and fast, and it is,

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and it looks like a fighter but it’ really
not.

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As you’ve seen, it doesn’t have a forward
field of view, there’s no windscreen.

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So, because of that we’ll have an Ultra
HD camera and an Ultra HD screen and thats

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what will be essentially our forward window.

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You know there’s a big bunch of the field
of view that would be blocked by the nose

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itself.

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Well the FVS camera’s on the bottom, so
they can actually kind of fill in that whole

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picture to make it look like I don’t have
a nose on the airplane at all.

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But now, you know, we’re in the design phase
and it’s really cool to be in on the ground

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floor of the design and helping write the
requirements and helping when it comes to

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some of the little design issues and then three years
from now it’s going to be really awesome

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to go fly that thing.

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Flight tests will start in 2021, we’ll do
a handful of checkout flights followed by

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envelope expansion.

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And then from there on we’ll go into our
next phase which will be what we call validation.

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That’s making sure that the sonic boom is
as quiet as we designed it to be and then

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we’ll go into phase three.

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And then phase three is community response
testing.

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So that’s when we actually take the airplane
out across the country, go to different communities,

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and see how people respond to the noise we’re
generating.

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Once we clear the way for a new regulation
then basically aircraft manufacturers can

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say “Hey if I can build to the regulation,
I can go build a whole new class of aircraft

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that’ll get people from, you know, from
point A to point B twice as fast.”

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If we can create an aircraft that can perform
like that, that can fly supersonic and not

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bother anyone and not have any problems with
it then that’s awesome.

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I mean look at X-59 it looks like the airplanes
we always saw in the 50’s and 60’s - the

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big ol’ pointy airplane.