Supersonic business jet heads for UW testing

Seattle, hometown to Boeing’s never-flown SuperSonic Transport, which was canceled in 1971, plays a small role these days in development of another faster-than-sound civil aircraft: the Mach 1.5 business jet that Aerion formally launched this past week.

The dartlike, three-engine AS2, which can now be ordered for $120 million, will undergo low-speed wind-tunnel testing in September at the University of Washington Aeronautical Laboratory.

The scale model built for the occasion by Arlington-based Aeronautical Testing Service is about 8 feet long and weighs roughly 300 pounds, says Aerion director of finance and planning Jason Matisheck.

The actual plane, scheduled for entry into service in 2022, will be 170 feet long with a 30-foot-long cabin interior. Aerion says the jet will cut travel time between Paris and Washington, D.C., by three hours, and save 6 ½ hours on flights from San Francisco to Singapore.

The company expects to sell about 30 of the sleek aircraft per year over 20 years. “We’re confident that the market is there. We’ve done our homework,” says Jeff Miller, Aerion vice president of marketing.

The planned tests won’t be Reno, Nev.-based Aerion’s first visit to the Kirsten Wind Tunnel at UW. “We’ve been up there at least five times now,” conducting experiments with wings, flaps and so on “to refine the low-speed handling of the Aerion jet,” Matisheck says.

He expects to run tests on the mock-up of the full plane for about two weeks.

UW wind-tunnel business manager Jack Ross says the facility charges $500 an hour for a 9-hour day.

That’s not cheap, but two weeks at that rate aren’t even a rounding error in the $100 million reportedly spent so far on the AS2.

Ross can’t talk about current clients of the UW lab. But its history includes testing for a diverse array of planes over many decades, as well as the space shuttle’s 747 “piggyback” ferrying system, Kenworth trucks and Ford pickups, motorcycles and even bicycles.

While the airflow around a model just a few feet off the ground isn’t precisely the same as a full-size version in open air, the differences are well understood and the data can be adjusted, Ross says.

“What we’re trying to do is predict full-scale performance,” he says.

If Aerion’s project succeeds, the AS2 would be only the third supersonic passenger aircraft ever built, after the British/French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev Tu-144.

(The Seattle Times)