HAMPTON, Va. - An airplane designed to break the sound barrier quietly is entering a new round of testing.
NASA's X-59 aircraft was recently moved to the flight line at a Lockheed Martin facility in California, where engineers will begin ground testing to ensure the plane is ready to fly.
The X-59 is part of a mission called QueSST — Quiet SuperSonic Technology — that more than 100 local scientists and engineers have worked on at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton.
Right now, when jets reach the speed of sound, it creates a disruptive sonic boom. As a result, federal and international law prohibits supersonic flight over land, limiting how quickly commercial airlines can travel from one location to the next.
The design of the X-59 lowers the sonic boom to a quieter "sonic thump."
The project goes back years at Langley, where researchers have not only played a major role in the design, but in wind tunnel testing and in the technology aboard the plane.
“It’s kind of almost an emotional investment for me. I’ve been working on it for so many years," said David Richwine, the Deputy for Technology in the QueSST mission. "Just to see the thing pull out of the hangar and be outside on its landing gear and being towed down the runway and doing these outdoor tests is kind of exciting."
Richwine is based at Langley and tells News 3 he's been working on the mission for nearly a decade, integrating all the new technologies.
One of them is called the eXternal Vision System, which will replace the front-facing windshield in a typical plane, as the X-59's design doesn't allow for one. The eXternal Vision System projects visuals from a multi-camera on the plane into the cockpit on a 4K screen.
Once testing on the ground is completed, Richwine says the X-59 will be tested in the air, eventually flying supersonic over real communities to get input on the sound from people below.
"I want to get an honest answer, honest assessment. We may fly over your house for four to six weeks and not even let you know when you’re going to hear it and you would respond back and tell us how you feel about it," he says.
NASA Langley researchers are already testing the impact of the sound by bringing members of the community to a special facility on center. Designed to look like a home, people can understand how loud a sonic boom is inside a home compared to the sonic thump of the X-59.
Richwine adds that, over the next few years, NASA could turn that data over to federal regulators.
Should the aircraft work as it should, the hope is commercial supersonic travel would be approved, cutting cross-country flight times in half.
