NASA (www.nasa.gov) has achieved a significant milestone in its effort to make supersonic passenger jet travel over land a real possibility by completing the preliminary design review of its Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) aircraft.

This is the initial design stage of NASA’s planned Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) experimental aircraft, otherwise known as an X-plane.

Senior experts and engineers from across the agency and Lockheed Martin concluded that the QueSST design is capable of fulfilling the LBFD aircraft’s mission objectives, which are to fly at supersonic speeds but create a soft ‘thump’, instead of the disruptive sonic boom associated with supersonic flight today.

The LBFD X-plane will be flown over communities to collect the data necessary for regulators to allow supersonic flight over land in the USA and elsewhere in the world.

NASA partnered with Lockheed Martin in February 2016 to establish the preliminary design for QueSST. Last month, a scale model completed tests in the 8 x 6ft supersonic wind tunnel at NASA’s Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland.

Flight testing of an LBFD X-plane could begin as early as 2021.

David Richwine, manager for the preliminary design effort under NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology Project, said: “Managing a project like this is all about moving from one milestone to the next.

“Our strong partnership with Lockheed Martin helped get us to this point. We’re now one step closer to building an actual X-plane.”