Today, the vision of Commercial Supersonic Travel is often dreamed possible with innovation. Modern tech-business plans to reinvent commercial SuperSonic Transport (SST), while gaining reliable venture capital investment and proactive social backing. However, the concept’s global viability remains questionable, as regulation opposes its integrability. As a result, SST has become industrially forgotten. This research paper challenges the neglect of SST through routing optimizations derived from an industry’s collective research, while outlining decisive use-cases. Initially, this paper describes the difficulty in SST’s integration through its logistical tasks, demanding designs, and lacking efficiency. After that, the paper defines an optimization strategy, through software-analyzed flight paths, for overall supersonic operations. This strategy was proven to shorten established SST flights by 6%, while enabling the implementation of newfound SST paths. Here, optimization averaged 3.3% on density-derived routes and 5.4% on software-derived routes. More importantly, this paper demonstrated routing optimization enables MACH 1.6 aircraft to achieve MACH 2 flight times. Further, this paper attempts to justify SST through an analysis of its market, financials, and social perspectives. With that, the paper justifies an ideal SST customer earns 630$/hr, while such measurements vary amongst flight types. Finally, this paper conceptualizes that SST, with optimization, promises a noteworthy business, while developments in aircraft designs may revamp the aerospace industry completely.

The objective of this thesis is to conduct a case study into the Bell X-2, an early supersonic research aircraft utilizing a modern perspective and computational tools. The Bell X-2 was the second in a series of supersonic research aircraft created by Bell Aviation Corporation, designed to help engineers to explore this new region of flight. The goal of the X-2 was to gather data on high Mach Number and high-altitude flight as well as aerodynamic heating. The X-2 had poor lateral stability resulting in it being unstable at high Mach Numbers and moderate angles of attack. The program was full of new and unforeseen technical challenges resulting in many delays and tragedies. The program ended when stability problems resulted in a fatal crash destroying the aircraft and killing the test pilot. This case study addresses the historical background of the program, human influence, the stability problems encountered and conducting a stability analysis of the aircraft. To conduct the stability analysis, the potential flow solver, VORLAX, was used to gather aerodynamic coefficient data of the X-2 and determine if these stability problems could be determined from the data obtained. By comparing the results from VORLAX to a wind tunnel study, I determined that the poor lateral directional stability and control coupling issues were foreseeable in the initial design.