Meet NASA’s new X-planes: “Quiet” sonic booms and engines at the back

NASA wants to build a new series of X-planes to increase fuel efficiency and reduce noise and pollution from commercial aircraft. (credit: NASA)

NASA wants to build a new series of X-planes to increase fuel efficiency and reduce noise and pollution from commercial aircraft. After years of flat or declining budgets in aeronautics research, NASA will seek a substantial increase for the coming fiscal year and beyond. The agency's administrator, Charles Bolden, will speak more about this request later today at Reagan National Airport in Washington DC, but Ars has learned details of the plan.

The proposed budget increase of $3.7 billion (2.7 billion) over the next decade would allow NASA to work on dramatically improving both subsonic and supersonic flight. In an interview, Jaiwon Shin, the associate administrator for NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, told Ars that the agency has been working with industry and academic partners to research several "revolutionary" technologies. To take the next step and begin actually flying these concepts, however, NASA needs to build a new generation of X-planes. And that costs money.

Shin said the design-and-build phase will take about four to five years, after which time the planes would be tested at Armstrong Flight Research Center in California and Langley Research Center in Virginia. If successful, these concepts might be incorporated into commercial fleets within about a decade, and through fuel savings, noise, and emission reductions, they could save the aviation industry as much as $255 billion (183 billion) over 25 years, NASA estimates.

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