Lockheed-Martin X-59; Meet Your Mach-er
Concorde made its last commercial flight on 24 October 2003, flying from New York to London at Mach 2.0—twice the speed of sound—in about 3.5-hours. Twenty-years on, no commercial airliner has exceeded—or neared, for that matter—supersonic speed. NASA, by dint of its Quesst mission, an ostensibly clever acronym connoting Quiet SuperSonic Technology, has set out to return supersonic flight to the purview of the world’s commercial airlines. The program is predicated, in part, on Lockheed-Martin’s X-59 Quesst, an experimental supersonic aircraft being developed at the storied defense contractor’s famed Skunk Works.
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