Briggs Aerospace Technologies
 

Hypersonic flight: guidelines 

With the introduction of commercial hypersonic airliners into conventional operations, comes the problem of integration of operations with much slower air traffic, both from subsonic airliners, military jets, general aviation, business jets, and sports aircraft.

Briggs has developed the models for successfully blending the Neecenow airliners into frequently congested airports and the surrounding airspace. With the introduction of hypersonic travel gives new airspace to track, navigate and provide aircraft separation.

Neecenow will use satellite-based technologies for general navigation, as well as radio cross-bearings on existing navigation beacons. This provides multiple forms of redundancy and thereby safety for Neecenow air transports.

Neecenow will need to transition through to and from its cruise airspeed and altitude, and prior to the introduction into service there will be set guidelines introduced to enable the type to integrate in with other air-traffic. This serves the purpose of slowing the airliner to acceptable speeds and routes to avoid subsonic airliners and join with these types in an airport traffic pattern. The Aceson-funded FXG Vancoollins test aircraft will design most of the necessary guidelines and airspace for safe operations.

What Briggs has designed is Supersonic Transition areas, to be located around 50-100 km away from city airports, in sparsely populated regions, or over the ocean. Both AFG and ARFG Neecenow’s will transition from altitudes of up to 150,000 feet and Mach 7.4 to 50,000 feet and speeds of under Mach 1.3. The aircraft can then be vectored in to the airport for landing using a steeper than normal descent. The same zone is used for climb and acceleration vectoring to altitude and speed for departing airliners.

By reducing the speed to below Mach 1.3, it will relieve the airports surrounding population of any possible sonic boom activity, since sonic booms do not reach the ground if the aircrafts speed is Mach 1.2. Any shock waves from the type usually heard as booms - which may be audible in unusual weather circumstances - are not audible due to the distance of the supersonic transition area from the airport.


 
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