(sparse, dramatic music)
We live in an exciting time in human history,
a time when the world has never been smaller,
a time when we can drive,
sail, and fly to almost anywhere.
We can even leave our planet.
How did this happen?
This is the incredible story
of our civilization's ceaseless desire to move.
(laughing)
I'm Sean Riley.
I've always been fascinated by speed.
Come with me on a journey
to better understand the game-changing engineering,
courageous innovators,
oh God, it really fights you,
and the machines that take us further, higher,
and above all, faster.
(expansive peaceful music)
Throughout human history, we've dreamt of flying,
to experience an unrivaled sense of freedom,
allowing us to see our planet in a unique way.
Living in today's world, it's easy to lose perspective,
to forget that what we have achieved is truly mind-blowing.
Today, over 40 million aircraft
take to the skies every year.
Over a million of us are in the air at any moment.
I'm taking
Open the throttle!
A journey to discover
(zapping)
(cracking)
(laughing)
just how this revolution in speed has occurred.
(triumphant music)
(tense, exciting music) (airplane engine)
We all want to travel faster,
but in the skies, it comes with considerable risks.
Moving through the air is a matter of life and death,
a fact that's led to a revolution
in technology on the ground.
This is the UK's National Air Traffic Services,
NATS for short.
The team here are responsible for preventing disaster
in the busiest skies in the world, above Britain.
With so many of us speeding through the air,
communication is critical.
How's it goin'?
Hi Sean, are you well?
Yeah, I'm doin' great, man.
What is this?
This is a radar display.
Right.
So showing 80 miles of airspace.
Walk me through a day in the life
of an air traffic controller.
So every time you talk to a pilot,
you have to use their identifier, which is a call sign.
Right.
Let's say I wanted to talk to this plane right here.
So that would be Lufthansa 8-1-Hotel-Lima.
Lufthansa 8-1-Hotel-Lima.
Turn left, heading 1-8-0.
And then the pilot will repeat that back,
so you have to listen to it to make sure he's understood it.
And he would probably come back and say,
"Why do you want me to turn due south?
"I'm trying to go to London." (laughing)
Exactly. (laughing)
(tense, atmospheric music)
Wow, look at this.
Where are we?
This is London City Airport,
the digital control tower.
Okay.
So we are a hundred miles away from this airport,
but this is where it'll be controlled from.
At London City Airport,
14 high-definition cameras
are strategically placed around the runway.
High-resolution pictures, the latest weather information,
aircraft flight numbers, speeds, and headings
are all transmitted to NATS,
providing controllers with a 360-degree view of the airfield
and its surroundings in real time.
The control at the top of the airport
is all about, you know, the safe landing and takeoff
and moving of aircraft around the airport.
And to do that you need lots of information.
What we can do with this is actually
put the same information on the window.
I get it, so I've actually got all the planes,
even if I couldn't physically see them,
laid out there digitally in front of me.
Yep, even if they're in clouds,
you can still see where they are.
(tense, exciting music)
But airports don't just operate during daylight.
Wow, look at this.
Yeah, I was wondering how it would work at night.
It's pretty good.
Yeah, so at night,
you actually see much more detail,
much more clarity than you do with the naked eye.
What we can also do is draw on the windows as well.
That's cool, so you've got augmented reality.
I can see that plane, and because you've laid those lines on
I know it's right on the runway.
Very cool system.
Thank you. -: Thank you very much.
The UK's virtual control tower
is nearing the end of its trials.
And with global passenger numbers predicted
to top seven billion by 2030,
virtual reality promises to land a major role
in managing this aviation boom.
And yet, just over a hundred years ago,
powered flight is still blue-sky thinking.
To most people, it's laughable,
but not to a few audacious engineers
who aren't laughing at all.
They're hellbent on trying to make it happen.
(energetic, exciting music)
Today, everyone knows of bicycle makers
Wilbur and Orville Wright,
but it's their humble mechanic, Charlie Taylor,
who will play a pioneering role
in getting the Wright brothers airborne.
The challenge: build an engine light enough to fly.
Taylor weighs up the problem and has a flash of inspiration.
Instead of using iron, he turns to a new material
that's strong, malleable, but above all, light: aluminum.
(inspiring ambient music)
In only six weeks, he's built his engine,
weighing just 152 pounds.
It sparks the aviation revolution.
December 17th, 1903, Taylor's lightweight engine
powers the Wright brothers into the history books,
ushering in the dawn of a monumental evolution
in human speed, powered flight.
(airplane engine humming)
We're on in three, two, one.
(airplane engine roaring)
But reaching today's incredible acceleration
in the skies requires one of the most
influential innovations in human history.
The story of the jet engine's invention
is every bit as remarkable
as the engineering that goes into it.
It's the story of one man's determination
to succeed against the flying establishment.
(upbeat adventurous music)
1928, Cranfield, England.
A young Royal Air Force cadet, Frank Whittle,
is obsessed with flight, and in particular, speed.
In the 1920s, planes are powered by propellers,
and that's a problem,
if like Whittle, you're looking to fly faster.
Increasing the speed of propeller planes
requires larger, more powerful engines.
But there's a limit to engine size.
Bigger engines weigh more, slowing an aircraft down.
But Whittle dares to think differently.
What if you could do away with propellers altogether?
Whittle's challenge is to invent a new kind of engine.
His ingenuity is combining a turbine and a compressor,
rotating at super-fast speeds.
First, to draw in, and then compress air,
which is then mixed with fuel
and ignited in a combustion chamber,
generating enough thrust to power an aircraft
at much greater speeds.
It's a bold innovation.
In fact, it's a little bit too bold
for his bosses at the Air Ministry,
and they shut the whole idea down,
but Whittle doesn't give up,
and after a decade of dogged determination,
he and his team fire up a working prototype
for a jet engine, with disastrous consequences.
Whittle's first engine has a single combustion chamber,
but each time he ups the thrust,
(exploding) the engine fails.
Eventually, Whittle realizes the single combustion chamber
is the weakness in his design.
He devises an ingenious solution:
an engine with a series of smaller,
multiple combustion chambers,
which should be more stable when delivering greater thrust.
To everyone's amazement, it works,
and Whittle's jet engine provides a revolution in speed.
With World War II on the horizon,
both Germany and the Allies
invest heavily in jet engine tech.
Now, at the end of the day, the results come too little,
too late to shift the balance of the war.
However, Whittle's remarkable feat of engineering
does cause a seismic shift in the way humans travel.
(tense, intriguing music)
Seizing on Whittle's innovation,
British airline manufacturer De Havilland
is the first to hatch an audacious plan,
a commercial aircraft powered by the jet.
May 2nd, 1952, De Havilland is trying
to revolutionize air travel with this,
the Comet.
It's about to take its maiden flight.
Embarking on a journey of nearly 7,000 miles,
two captains will fly the Comet from London to South Africa.
Powered by jets, the revolutionary airliner
cruises at 460 miles an hour,
a full 100 miles an hour faster
than the top speed of a propeller-powered plane.
(applauding and cheering)
Eagerly awaited by crowds of people,
the Comet arrives in Johannesburg about 24 hours later.
It's about 14 minutes behind schedule.
This slashes the travel time from England to South Africa
basically in half, and overnight,
the world becomes a smaller place.
On board, passengers can fly from New York to London
in under nine hours, down from 18.
Flying times from London to Tokyo used to take
around 85 hours.
The Comet covers it in just 35.
This is the speed the jet engine provides.
Just being here, looking at these engines,
I wonder if there was some fear,
some trepidation about going on to this new technology.
I think there was an element of
wariness rather than fear.
It was a whole new era.
(upbeat swing music)
Everybody was dressed up in their Sunday best,
and all 36 passengers were feted as glamorous stars
just because they were going on an air trip.
Right, and not just any air trip,
but they're going on to a brand-new airplane
with no propellers, mind-blowing.
Oh yeah, flying on a proper aircraft.
There was a lot more noise.
Your seat would be vibrating, and it'd be much more tiring,
but put this thing on an airliner, and it's much smoother
because you've just got a simple turbine spinning around
so the ride for the passengers
was literally a whole lot smoother.
It was the start of the jet-set.
This is one of the
smoothest-flying airliners in the world,
not so much as a tremor.
Yes, in passenger comfort as well as speed,
the Comet 4 is a powerful challenge to the world.
(pleasant, expansive music)
Not only is the plane faster,
but it's flying at a higher altitude,
which means it's smoother, and they don't have to deviate
and go around big thunderstorms.
They just go straight where they want to go.
Very cool.
Graham, thank you so much for your time.
The Comet streaks us into a world of contrails,
cruising altitude, and airport expansion.
Buckle up, 'cause this is the jet age.
It's a radical leap in speed, almost 500 miles per hour,
compared to around 300 for prop planes.
The Comet's speed creates fierce demand among the wealthy.
It only has 90 seats, but where there's a demand,
there's profit, and where there's profit,
there's competition.
Boeing and Douglas join the party in the late '50s
with the competing 707 and DC-8, both dwarfing the Comet
and doubling the passenger carrying capacity.
All commercial jet planes travel at around the same speed,
so driving ticket prices down
and staying ahead of the competition
means airlines need to pack in more passengers per plane.
In 1970, Boeing introduces the gold standard,
the 747, the queen of the skies.
With a unique double-decker design,
this jumbo jet is able to carry more of us
than the Comet, 707, and DC-8 combined, over 500 people.
It's a magic number,
opening the floodgates for the movement of the masses.
More passengers per flight
means the ticket price comes down, way down.
That's what makes this plane such a big deal.
The 747 brings the skies within reach.
It makes air travel affordable for millions.
(airplane engine roaring)
But out of the blue comes a crisis
that threatens to ground the airlines.
October 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo hits,
turning off the taps,
leading to a tripling in the cost of fuel.
With soaring prices, many airlines brace for bankruptcy.
But the oil crisis pushes one man
to radically redesign a fundamental element of flight:
the wing.
(fast, intriguing music)
Enter aeronautical engineer Richard T. Whitcomb.
He understands the fundamental physics
of how a wing allows us to fly.
As air passes over the curvature of a wing,
lower pressure on the upper surface results in lift,
pushing the plane upwards.
But as the wing passes through air,
it experiences another force: drag.
Drag is the enemy of aircraft,
a force that slows its speed.
Overcoming it means burning more fuel to go faster,
which, in turn, increases the cost of flying for all of us.
Now, accelerated by the Oil Crisis of 1973,
engineers start looking for a new way to reduce drag.
Whitcomb thinks the key might lie
in the design of the wing tip.
Here's why.
Conventional aircraft wings form swirls of air
at their tips called vortices.
Vortices increase drag and counteract lift.
A keen observer of anything that flies,
Whitcomb makes an incredible connection: birds.
Birds have a series of end feathers
which gradually bend upwards.
Whitcomb realizes these feathers
weaken drag-inducing vortices at the bird's wing tip.
Placing the engineering equivalent of end feathers
at the tip of an aircraft's wing should reduce drag.
Whitcomb's winglets have a significant impact
on flying efficiency,
reducing fuel consumption by around 5%.
Currently, that translates to a saving
of over $9 billion a year,
greater than the Gross Domestic Product of a small country.
(airplane engine roaring)
(thundering)
But other advances in aviation technology
have come at a much higher price.
This is the tragic scene
of the current disaster near Calcutta.
Wreckage of the aircraft smashed almost beyond recognition.
37 passengers and the crew of six all lost their lives.
Less than two years
after its groundbreaking flight to South Africa,
the Comet suffers a series of fatal crashes,
baffling engineers,
and leading to one of the greatest
engineering investigations in history.
Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment
plunge an entire Comet under the weight
of 200,000 gallons of water,
subjecting the aircraft to a series of stress tests,
the equivalent of 15,000 hours flying time.
Only now is the flaw discovered,
a small rectangular aperture,
corners that concentrate repeated stress
on the plane's fuselage, causing metal fatigue,
and eventually, catastrophic failure.
The lessons learned from those tragedies
are the reason that the windows
you and I look out of have rounded corners.
With safety paramount, today's aircraft are engineered
to survive almost every eventuality.
(thundering) (tense, exciting music)
If you average it out, planes in flight
get hit by lightning about once a year.
Now, that is something I would really like to see.
Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to predict
when and where a bolt of lightning is gonna strike.
But I do know one place where they have lightning
(warning tone blaring)
in a bottle.
(zapping)
That is awesome!
Understanding what happens
when planes are struck by lightning in the air
is best done on the ground.
So, why a car?
A car and an airplane have in common,
they both act as a Faraday cage,
and a Faraday's cage means
that all people sitting inside that cage
are totally protected against the lightning strike.
So they cannot be hit directly.
A Faraday cage is metal encasing the people,
and the current wants to flow around the outside?
Yes, yes.
So the fact that you are safe
is that you are totally surrounded by a metal body.
So, that's the theory, but does it work?
Here we go.
I'm trusting the science here.
Go in, please. -: Okay.
You should not leave the car during our experiment.
Sean, the door must be closed, as I told you.
(tense, sparse music)
(warning tone blaring) Okay, here we go.
About to hit the car with a bolt of lightning.
I'm gonna keep my hands and feet inside the ride.
It's a little nerve-wracking.
I mean, it's one thing to understand a Faraday cage,
another thing to climb inside one.
I can hear the electrics.
Oh, I can start to hear the electricity's coming now.
Just kidding.
At some point, it's gonna jump through the air
(zapping)
to the top of the car, like that right there.
Hundreds of thousands of volts
flowing along the outside of the car,
and I'm completely fine.
I can hear it just zapping the car,
and I know what's happening on the outside,
but on the inside, there's nothing.
(zapping) That was amazing.
See, I trusted the science.
Now, you might say I'm crazy,
but you do the same thing every time you fly.
Any plane that you're flying in could get hit by lightning,
and you wouldn't even know it
because you're protected
by the metal cage that surrounds you.
(zapping)
(airplane engine roaring) (thundering)
The metal of the plane protects you,
but what happens if your plane's not metal?
What happens if it's made out of this, carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber technology is a stronger
and lighter alternative to conventional aircraft materials.
That is a piece of carbon fiber material.
And so we will inject a current
of roughly 100,000 amps through this plate material.
So let's do it, okay?
But using carbon fiber alone comes with a catch.
Watch this.
Here it is, bolt of lightning.
We're close to triggering.
(zapping) (shattering)
(laughing) Oh, that is raw power right there.
It's this percussive wave
that comes out and hits you in the chest.
Yeah, satisfied? (laughing)
That is no joke.
That is being next to a bolt of lightning.
Yeah, so we have to check the result, so you can go in.
The jolt of lightning knocked over the stand,
and it kicked the sample out of the whole jig
that they had set up, but look at that,
it's all burnt up on the back,
and if you look at it right there,
it's completely de-laminating, right?
The layers are coming apart,
and the sample's really weak right there.
It's also extremely hot, even through the gloves,
and it smells terrible.
A plane made of purely carbon fiber
is unlikely to survive a single bolt of lightning,
(zapping)
but add a conductive metal coating,
and you've got this,
Boeing's Dreamliner.
At first glance, it looks like any other commercial jet,
but its fuselage is made
from over 80% carbon composite materials,
making it one of the safest
and most efficient aircraft in the skies today.
When it comes to making airplanes lighter,
the material that you make the fuselage out of is key,
but if you want to make 'em go faster,
it's the shape that's critical.
(tense, exciting music)
October 1947.
Aviation pioneers plan a daring flight,
one which promises us even faster speed,
one that tests their ingenuity to the limit,
breaking through an invisible barrier,
the speed of sound.
The challenge is to build a plane aerodynamic enough
to fly over 760 miles an hour.
Their inspiration comes from one of the few man-made objects
that they already know can break the speed of sound.
(gun shot blasting)
The shape of this bullet helped inspire a collaboration
between NASA engineers and the US military
to design that.
The Bell X-1.
In a master stroke of ingenuity,
engineers designed this experimental aircraft
to mimic the shape of a bullet.
So this team sets out to build an airplane
that will break the sound barrier.
So we knew that things could travel
faster than sound, right?
They know this rifle bullet has a great shape.
It flies very, very well supersonic.
But scaling up a plane to carry a pilot
at such speeds means flying into the unknown.
Those who've strayed close to the sound barrier
tell stories of their aircraft shaking violently.
Many think that flying faster is a death wish.
Built to withstand the force of the flight,
the Bell X-1 will find out.
They know propellers can't do it, jets can't do it.
They're gonna use a rocket.
Right.
Four are built into the back of the Bell X-1.
Now all that's needed is someone brave enough to fly it.
(exciting, fast-paced music)
They had this really young, brash,
incredibly talented test pilot.
The people who knew him talked about how good his hands were
at being able to control aircraft.
His name was Chuck Yeager.
24-year-old Yeager agrees to attempt the flight.
A B-29 bomber lifts the X-1 to an altitude
of around 30,000 feet, where Yeager is released.
Inside the cockpit, Yeager prepares to accelerate.
He lights off one rocket motor, and it's good.
(roaring)
Two, three,
and he decides it's time, and he lights off the fourth one,
and he's pulled up,
and he's climbing a little bit in altitude now.
Violently shaking, Yeager speeds into the unknown.
And he is trying to keep the airplane going
in the general direction that he wants it to go.
And he breaks the sound barrier.
Yeager has entered a new realm of speed:
supersonic flight, and to his relief,
he discovers flying faster than sound is as smooth as glass.
For 20 seconds, Chuck Yeager is moving faster
than any human had ever gone before.
Now that audacious flight, his courage and his talent,
clears the way for a revolution in human speed.
(sparse, pleasant ambient music)
Concorde, a masterpiece of aviation.
The only airliner ever to carry passengers supersonic.
(airplane engine roaring)
Engineered to cruise at over 1,300 miles an hour,
twice the speed of sound.
But the story of how Concorde actually came to be
begins just after World War II
with the ingenuity of one man.
This is Dr. Dietrich Kuchemann, an expert in wing design.
To make the leap to commercial supersonic flight,
Kuchemann must solve a weighty problem.
Conventional flaps and slats,
which provide extra lift at slow speeds,
are too heavy and expensive for supersonic flight,
but Kuchemann thinks he has the solution,
the delta wing.
(exciting, thoughtful music)
He scraps the conventional wing with heavy flaps and slats
and draws on the delta wing's classic triangular shape,
which he hopes will be lighter and aerodynamic enough
to survive supersonic speeds,
but will it work?
In the early 1950s, Kuchemann's theory is put to the test.
The experimental HP.115 is one-of-a-kind,
a delta-winged aircraft designed not to fly fast, but slow.
The test flights are risky,
but to the relief of Kuchemann and his team,
their modified delta wing
handles better than anyone imagines.
The success of the experimental delta wing
is ground-breaking.
It redefines what's possible.
See, the delta wing promises much faster flight,
and that turns the dream
of commercial supersonic travel into a reality.
January 21st, 1976, a date that goes down in history,
as Concorde makes the first supersonic passenger flight.
It is to be a flight of triumph.
Concorde takes Britain and the world
into the supersonic age.
It's the beginning
of over a quarter of a century of service,
allowing those on board to sip champagne at 60,000 feet
while traveling at twice the speed of sound.
Concorde slashes flying times between London and New York
from seven hours to under four.
And on February 7th, 1996, it enters the record books again,
carrying passengers across the Atlantic
in just two hours and 53 minutes,
the fastest time in human history.
(cheering and applauding)
Wow, it really is a spectacular airplane, isn't it?
It is the most awesome sight,
and it never ceases to amaze me.
I flew this one when it was brand-new,
and I flew it just before I retired.
This very airplane.
This very airplane, Alpha Foxtrot, yes.
Knowing that we're about to blast off across the Atlantic
in under three-and-a-half hours.
Just look at the awesome shape of that wing.
You don't realize how many contours there are in it.
Yeah, it's not a straight line.
It's all these individual curves all kind of put together,
and then it actually bows out down there.
It's so unlike anything else we would see.
Also unique are Concorde's four Rolls Royce engines,
designed with afterburners,
fighter jet technology to rapidly increase acceleration,
providing a punch that makes it an unforgettable ride
for passengers and pilot.
What was it like to fly?
Awesome, one of the top experiences
that you can have in this world.
Really?
Come second, anyway.
Yeah, second, fair enough, I'm with you.
(exciting, expansive music)
Sean, this is the closest you're gonna
get to flying a Concorde.
Look at this, oh!
You be the captain.
What is it I'll do?
I shall teach you everything I,
stop fiddling with things, okay?
I shall tell you what to fiddle with.
Look at all this cool stuff.
Well look, I'm probably never gonna get
to fly the real thing,
so this is about as close as I can get.
I have a simulator, and I have an actual Concorde pilot,
so Colin, teach me.
We're gonna skip all the preparation,
which will take an hour.
Good, I hate preparation, let's just go.
Okay, right, we're just gonna take off, okay?
See those? Yeah.
Throttles. -: Throttles, got it.
So let's start the takeoff.
Three, two, one, now, open the throttle.
Whoa, okay.
Okay, and you're off down the runway now.
The engines are spooling up.
Little lights are gonna come on
to show that the afterburners have lit up successfully.
You're looking down the runway,
and I'm calling out the speeds.
V1, which is decision speed.
We're continuing with the takeoff.
Rotate, pull the stick back, okay?
Gradually raise the nose off the ground.
Gradually getting it into the flying attitude, okay.
(airplane engine roaring)
Once airborne,
it's time to put Concorde through its paces.
Let's say I want to go supersonic.
You want to go supersonic,
you're going to select the autopilot into pitch hold,
push that button there.
Pitch hold. -: Right there, pitch hold.
And now open the throttles fully.
Okay, push them forward.
Okay, we're now starting to accelerate.
We're just going to put the afterburners on,
put the two inboards on, and we'll put the two outboards on.
And there's a kick with each one.
There's a kick when you do it,
and you're now starting to accelerate,
and you're just coming up to Mach One now.
There we are, Mach One.
We are now at the speed of sound.
Okay.
And you let the airplane accelerate and climb
all the way through to Mach 1.7,
until you get to 60,000 feet.
So you're flying over everyone.
You're flying over everyone,
and you're flying twice as fast as them,
and if you see them below, they're going backwards.
They look like it?
It really looks as though they're going backwards.
Because you're just blazing over the top of 'em.
You're just blasting across over the top,
and occasionally, somebody will come up on the radio
and say, "Heard your boom there, Concorde."
I mean, this has gotta be
the coolest job in the world, right?
Without doubt.
Yeah, wow, even though this is just
a mock-up of the cabin, this is almost overwhelming.
It's so exciting to get a chance to be able to be in here.
I get a sense of what it was like.
I'm really glad I got to do this with you,
and thank you so much, man.
Sean, it's been great fun.
Oh, it has been fun,
and I still want to push all these buttons, though.
(laughing)
Concorde shrinks the globe like never before.
The people who sit in those seats can wake up in London,
have breakfast, fly supersonic to New York, have lunch,
close a business deal, get back on Concorde,
and be home in time for dinner.
It is a game-changer,
but flying that fast does have one serious pitfall,
(tense, sparse music)
the sonic boom, formed by the rapid change in air pressure
over the fuselage at supersonic speeds.
And because there's a pressure change at the nose
and at the tail, it's not one but two, a double boom,
and it's loud enough to rattle the windows
all the way on the ground.
(soft, sad music)
Concorde's unavoidable sonic boom
means it's banned from flying over populated areas,
including mainland United States.
In 2003, the Concorde fleet is retired.
So, is commercial supersonic travel
banished to the history books forever?
Well, maybe not.
(sparse ambient music)
Engineers may have mastered
the science of supersonic flight,
but tackling its noisy side effect,
the sonic boom, that's a tougher nut to crack.
To get commercial supersonic flights airborne again,
NASA is joining forces
with aviation specialist Lockheed Martin.
Together, they're researching ways to radically redesign
the supersonic aircraft of the future using the F-18 jet.
So a large part of the research is understanding
how the sonic boom travels from the aircraft and makes it
down to somebody on the ground that would hear it
and maybe be bothered by it.
(tense, exciting music)
But how loud is the boom?
With a little help from James, I'm about to find out.
The F-18.
Two onboard engines are capable of propelling the aircraft
up to about 1,200 miles an hour.
That's nearly twice the speed of sound.
At these speeds,
the impact on the ground should be unmistakable.
(booming)
Wow, you feel that shockwave in your chest, that is loud.
Can you imagine what it would be like
to live in the flight path of that every day?
This remarkable image shows supersonic shock waves
from an F-18 as it passes in front of the sun.
So if you can't get rid of the sonic boom,
can you deaden it a little bit?
Yes, so you can spread it out.
Long, skinny aircraft with a series of weaker shock waves
will produce a wave that hits the ground
that sounds more like a thump than a sharp crack.
A thump. -: Right.
And that's just about spreading it out
so you don't get that crack.
You get a (humming).
It's like focusing a flashlight or spreading out the beam.
Supersonic aircraft create powerful shock waves
at the nose and tail,
creating two distinct booms on the ground.
(booming)
But research shows, planes that are longer and narrower
spread out the shock waves,
making them weaker and quieter at the surface.
So I guess the obvious question is, how's it going?
We're in the process of building the X-59 QueSST aircraft.
The test aircraft to prove these principles?
Yes, it's going to demonstrate
that you can make a low-boom aircraft.
The research looks promising.
Scaled model experiments and computer simulations
show the next generation of supersonic aircraft
will be much quieter,
as soft as closing a car door. (airplane engine roaring)
We hope in the future supersonic aircraft
can crisscross the country, fly over land,
fly over cities, and nobody really hears them.
A softer sonic boom
could allow commercial aircraft to double their speed,
accelerating us once more to supersonic speeds,
and slashing our travel times around the world.
And when it does, it won't just be fighter pilots
flying supersonic, it'll be the rest of us.
But there are some engineers who still won't be satisfied.
They want to go much, much faster.
(intriguing, delicate music)
Today's aviation pioneers are aiming high.
Their dream is to accelerate from supersonic
to hypersonic speeds, almost 4,000 miles an hour,
at the very edge of space.
Nestled near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains,
plans for hypersonic flight are taking shape.
I'm standing on the future site of the Colorado Space Board.
In the years to come,
sites like this will be launching aircraft
that will revolutionize the way we fly,
taking passengers higher and faster than ever before.
(airplane engine roaring)
(fast-paced, exciting music)
This is an exciting vision of the future,
a plane so fast you could breakfast in New York
and lunch in Australia 10,000 miles away on the same day.
But such a leap in speed requires a new revolution
in engine technology.
Reaction Engines Limited are trailblazing the way.
So we call it SABRE.
It's an air-breathing rocket engine,
and the idea is to take the incoming air at high velocity,
cool it down, and flow it through an air-breathing engine,
and then eventually into a rocket cycle.
So this differs from other rocket engines
in that it breathes air from the atmosphere.
Exactly, so you can take off normally,
and then you can cruise at high speed.
Rather than burning up all your propellants,
you can sit and burn just like a jet.
The SABRE engine is a fusion of technology.
It breathes air like a jet,
but utilizes rocket engineering for increased power.
But operating at Mach Five
comes with a new set of challenges.
So what are the things you need to accomplish
to make a SABRE engine?
So you do have to slow the air that's coming in,
and you need to cool that air
before it enters the cycle of the engine.
Right, so the incoming air is going too fast,
and it's way too hot, and it's so hot
because you're moving so fast, and there's so much pressure.
Correct, you need to cool it down very rapidly,
in a fraction of a second.
How do you do that?
I mean, that seems like a tall order, right?
For sure.
So we have a very efficient heat exchanger
made up of thousands of tubes,
each of which is the thickness of a human hair.
The SABRE's heat exchanger
is an engineering marvel.
30 miles of lightweight tubes are crammed
into a space the size of a small fridge.
The tubes carry supercooled helium,
designed to chill the incoming air
by over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a fraction of a second.
Simulating the blistering heat that SABRE will experience
means building a test rig and heating it
with the hottest air source the team can find,
(roaring) a jet engine.
But before placing SABRE's heat exchanger inside the rig,
Dan needs to be sure the apparatus alone
will withstand the searing temperatures.
All right, oh, I can see the whole system
laid out here, nice.
That's right, so we've got
all of our data parameters going,
and we're about ready to start the engine.
Advancing from idle to mil power.
What is mil power?
Military power. -: Military power, right.
Afterburners lit.
We're gonna cycle through some of the valves now.
(roaring)
Afterburner boost pump is active.
I can hear it.
LA one at 100%.
So that's 100%, that's full open, right there.
That's right, and we're gonna watch
some of these temperatures creeping up
as the afterburner continues running.
The jet's exhaust heats the rig
to over a thousand degrees, and thankfully,
the test apparatus withstands the searing temperature,
meaning soon, the team can conduct a similar test,
this time with the SABRE's heat exchanger inside.
Reducing throttle to idle.
So far, so good, huh?
So far, so good.
(sighing)
(intriguing, energetic music)
It's a significant step forward,
one of many stages in a long line,
which promises even greater speed in the skies.
Hypersonic flight might still be a few years off,
but when it comes, it's going to lead
to another seismic shift in the way we experience our world.
With the SABRE engine comes the promise
of a new breed of aircraft
that will speed us around the world
at an altitude of 100,000 feet,
three times higher than today's commercial jets.
From up there, you'll be treated to a spectacular view,
one normally reserved for astronauts.
Flying in this aircraft, look up,
and you'll stare into the blackness of space.
Look down, and you'll clearly see
the curvature of the Earth.
But what's really mind-blowing is your speed.
You'll be traveling at almost 4,000 miles an hour,
allowing you to experience something incredible.
Flying at hypersonic speeds
is perhaps the closest we'll get to time travel,
reaching anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours.
Do that, and the world could truly change
as the boundaries and borders that divide us
vanish with speed.
(expansive, inspiring music)
(airplane engine roaring)