The 'Waverider' infographic makes me think of something I find terribly amusing: in about fifty years we went from the Wright brothers to making B-52s, yet here we are
sixty years later and we're
still flying B-52s.
Obviously improvements have been made but the fundamentals are all the same. Great advances like stealth technology have not seen widespread acceptance and use. The last B-52 was built in 1962; they're not slated to be out of service until 2046
at the earliest. Think about it: those planes will be 80-90 years old. At
least.
We were all supposed to be flying to Europe and Asia on supersonic airliners by now, meeting people in London for lunch. Instead we fly on the same old 747s we have flown on for the past 40 years. What about those supersonic airliners? We had one, we called it 'Concorde'. It dates to the '70s, and we don't fly them anymore.
Kind of sad in a way, that we haven't seemingly progressed any farther. Perhaps the best exemplification is the fastest plane ever built: the SR-71 "Blackbird".
It was built as a spy plane, a glorified camera. The fastest camera in the world. I still remember studying the design when I was in my last year of university, how the inlet cones to the engines worked to enable supersonic flight. Those planes were meant to go fast, and nothing else.
They spewed fuel when they were on the ground because they were built with very wide tolerances to account for thermal expansion at Mach 3.2. The SR-71 went so fast a new type of fuel had to be formulated especially for it, "JP-7"; the Waverider is the only other plane to use it. The airframes could go even faster than the speed record of almost 2,200 mph (~ Mach 3.3) but the engines would have melted (the fuel was used as a coolant). The skin of the fuselage would reach temperatures of almost 300 °c. The pilots couldn't touch the canopy; it got so hot it would have melted their gloves. Massive air conditioning systems had to be installed to prevent the pilots from being boiled alive. The pilots wore full pressure suits, just like astronauts. To get the big J58 engines started big carts with a pair of V8 automobile engines were wheeled in and connected to the turbojet's driveshaft; it took about 700 hp just to get the engines to turn over and start, let alone run.
They were faster than any plane ever built before and since. They were so fast that the only dangers they faced from the enemy were supersonic missiles, since no other aircraft in the world could catch them. For most planes the standard operating procedure for avoiding missiles is either evasive manoeuvres, using chaff or both. For the SR-71 the SOP was to simply throttle up and
go faster: no missile in the world could catch it at top speed, the missile would run out of fuel.
