Finally! America Introduces Its New Supersonic Jet!

[00:00:00]This is the X59. NASA's $632 million experimental aircraft. Loheed Martin Skunk Works built it to do something every other supersonic airplane on Earth has been banned from doing for the last 53 years. NASA pilot Nils Larson is about to put it to the test. If this airplane works, the FAA tears up a regulation that has grounded supersonic flight over American soil for half a century. and a New York to LA flight in under three hours stops being science fiction. If it doesn't, NASA just spent $632 million proving the ban was right.

[00:00:39]Nobody on the ground at plant 42 this morning knows which one they're about to watch. The brakes release. 15 tons of experimental aircraft starts rolling forward across the apron at Loheed Martin's skunk works facility as the pilot watches the taxi way through a video monitor mounted exactly where the windshield would be on any other aircraft. The camera generating that picture sits bolted to the upper surface of the nose 8 ft ahead of his face pointed straight down the center line.

[00:01:08]What you see here is something called the external vision system, which is NASA's polite way of describing what is essentially a television. Two 4K cameras feed a display inside the cockpit. The field of view runs 33x19°.

[00:01:23]Collins Aerospace built the hardware and NASA tested the system for years on a King Air at Langley before it ever got bolted onto a real airplane. Larson has been flying it in a simulator since 2018. The team that built it spent that same period of time eliminating every millisecond of lag they could find between the camera shutter and the monitor refresh. Because at landing speed, even a fraction of a second of delay is the difference between greasing it on and cratering it on the runway.

[00:01:51]The number that we're chasing is under 20 milliseconds end to end. 20 milliseconds is roughly the time it takes the human eye to register that a light is turned on. A live sports broadcast runs at five times that delay and nobody watching it at home can tell.

[00:02:06]A pilot rounding out a flare at 200 m an hour can. 20 milliseconds is the line between watching the world and watching a recording of the world. The X59 does have side windows, by the way. Two of them contoured to the airframe, offering a partial view down each side of the nose. They're useful for situational awareness on the ground. They're not useful for landing an aircraft at 200 mph. The screen is every pilot in the program has asked the obvious question.

[00:02:35]What happens if the screen fails mid-flight? The honest answer is that nobody wants to find out which is why NASA engineered the XVS with the redundancy most fighter cockpits don't approach. Backup cameras, backup processors, a separate display feed.

[00:02:50]He's trained for partial XVS failure in the simulator dozens of times. He'd rather not find out for real. What Larsson doesn't know yet, sitting on the apron at plant 42, is that the screen in front of him is the least controversial part of the airplane he's about to fly.

[00:03:06]But here's the part most people don't immediately understand about the XVS. It isn't a walkound. It's not NASA's clever solution to a design problem. It's actually the entire point of the design.

[00:03:17]Because the reason there's no windshield is sitting right out in front of the cockpit. The X59's nose stretches 38 ft.

[00:03:26]The whole airplane runs 99 ft 7 in from nose to tail, which means more than a third of the aircraft Larson is taxiing right now is just nose, painted red, white, and blue, handbuilt by an outside contractor called Swift Engineering and then made it to the rest of the airframe at Palmdale. Building a 30-foot composite nose is a tolerance problem masquerading as a fabrication problem.

[00:03:50]Every panel joint along the length is a potential shockwave source. Too loose and air finds the seam and trips into turbulence the rest of the airframe will inherit. Too tight and the panel warps when the desert heats at 40° between sunrise and noon. Swift engineering had to glue together what amounts to an enormous ruler in a workshop where the ruler kept trying to bow itself. But the nose isn't just decoration. It exists to solve a physics problem. Every supersonic aircraft Larsson has ever flown drags a wall behind it. At speeds above Mach 1, the airplane is moving faster than the pressure wave it generates. The air in front of it can't move out of the way fast enough. It piles up, compresses, and forms a sheet of high-press air the aircraft toes behind it like a plow blade. When that sheet hits the ground, it sets off car alarms across the entire neighborhood.

[00:04:41]The Concord dragged it across every mile of every flight it ever flew. 105 dB of thunder anywhere the route crossed inhabited land. What most people don't know is that the boom isn't one shock wave. It's a stack of them formed at every angle and edge of the airframe and merged into a single wall by the time they reach the ground. The merging is what makes the boom loud. The X59's job is to never let them merge. NASA's bet on the X59 is that the merging is the part you can prevent. spread the shock waves out far enough, make the airplane long enough, the surface contours gradual enough, and the individual shock waves arrive at the ground separated instead of stacked. A series of soft pressure changes instead of one sharp crack. The shock waves are still there, they just don't add up. Think about it the way a recording engineer thinks about sound. Clap your hands once, sharp crack. Take the same total energy and smear it across two seconds. hiss. Same jewels hitting your ear, completely different brain response. Every change in the X59's cross-section, nose tip, canopy, wing route, engine inlet, tail, generates its own shock wave. The trick isn't to get rid of them. It's to space them so far apart that by the time they hit the ground, the brain hears a thump where it used to hear a bang. The trick is in the nose. The longer and more gradually shaped the nose, the weaker the shock wave coming off the tip, too weak to combine with the shock waves forming behind it a fraction of a second later, the X59's nose is 38 ft long, shaped to shed pressure as gradually as physics allows. That's why this airplane has a knitting needle for a nose. And that's why Larson is taxing without a forward window. He holds short for the active runway at US Air Force Plant 42.

[00:06:32]He runs through the final system checks.

[00:06:34]The aircraft beside him on the apron. A NASA F-15 chase plane taxis into position to escort him through the entire flight. The tower clears him for takeoff. The afterburner ignites. The X59 surges forward and accelerates down Plant 42's runway while Larson watches the world blur past through a screen that doesn't shake even when everything else does. Rotation speed comes up fast.

[00:06:58]The nose lifts, the main gear unsticks, and for the first time since assembly, every wheel on this aircraft is off the ground. It flies. As for the engine pushing him into the air right now, NASA went shopping. Designing a brand new power plant for a one-off research aircraft would have cost more than the rest of the program combined. So, they grabbed one off the shelf. The General Electric F414 GE 100 normally powers the FA18 Super Hornet through combat maneuvers and the EVA18G Growler through electronic warfare missions. 13 ft long, 22,000 lb of thrust with the afterburner lip. Bolting it onto the back of a 15tonon experimental aircraft was the easiest part of building this airplane.

[00:07:42]The unusual part isn't the engine itself. It's where the engine sits.

[00:07:47]Right now, the air that the F414 is breathing isn't coming from below the airframe. It's coming down from above it. The engine's inlet sits on top of the fuselage behind the cockpit, scooping air from a direction no other supersonic aircraft in the American inventory pulls it from. On every other plane, the intake mounts on the bottom or the sides of the fuselage. F-16, F-18, F-22, F-35, underneath or alongside, every one of them. On the X59, the intake faces the sky, fed by a divertterous bump design borrowed straight from the F-35 to push the slow turbulent layer of air that hugs the fuselage away from the inlet. The same kind of air that chokes engines if it gets sucked in. If you think that it looks wrong, you're not wrong. It looks wrong. It just isn't. The reason it's there is the same reason for the long nose. The wing has to sit between the engine and the ground. Engine shock waves are a big chunk of the boom that hits the ground, and the X59's design has to push those shock waves up away from anyone below. The wing acts as a sound shield. Both the engine underneath and the shock waves go straight down toward the people on the ground. Bolt it on top and the wing eats them. The same principle that makes the passing freight train sound different depending on whether you're standing on the bridge or under it. The rest of the airplane is held together by parts pulled out of museums. The landing gear underneath him came off an F-16 Fighting Falcon, a fighter design that first flew in 1974.

[00:09:20]The cockpit and the ejection seat came from a Northrup T38 Talon, a supersonic trainer that first flew in 1959.

[00:09:28]He's sitting in a seat older than the Moon Landing, controlling an aircraft that rolled out of Skunk Works in 2024.

[00:09:36]And that's not a story Lockheed's embarrassed about. The landing gear of a one-off subsonic to Mach 1.4 Fourth demonstrator doesn't need a redesign when the F-16's gear already does the job. Every dollar Lockheed didn't spend on landing gear is a dollar they spent on the nose. About 200 aerospace workers and their families watched this takeoff from the ground at Skunk Works. They were the only audience NASA was legally allowed to have. The federal government had been shut down since October 1st, and the agency couldn't issue a press release about the most important first flight it had launched in over 20 years.

[00:10:11]Most watched aircraft in NASA's history lifted off in front of an audience of 200 relatives. The X59 is in cruise now.

[00:10:19]F-15 chase plane stationed off its wing.

[00:10:22]Gear hanging down where you can see it.

[00:10:24]43,000 more feet of altitude in the airplane's design envelope above him.

[00:10:28]Mach 1.4 for of speed it isn't using for the next 40 minutes this airplane is going to do almost nothing it was built to do 40 minutes is also all NASA has the X59 was certified for a 67minute first sorting past that fuel reserves dropped below the safety margin to reach Edwards the clock that started when his wheels left the runway in Palmdale is the only thing keeping this flight from being the most boring 40 minutes in aerospace history 12,000 ft 200 knots landing gear extended. F-15 holding station off the left wing. This is what a $632 million aircraft looks like flying. The X59's design envelope tops out at Mach 1.4, roughly 925 mph at 55,000 ft. Mach 1.4 isn't an arbitrary line. The shockwave spacing map the airframe is built around optimizes inside a narrow speed window. Below it, the airplane isn't fully exploiting its sound shaping geometry. Above it, the shock waves strengthen faster than the airframe length can spread them, and the boom starts merging again. The X59 is a tuning fork. It only rings the way it's supposed to at one note. The sorty right now is happening at less than a quarter of that speed, less than a quarter of that altitude, with the gear deliberately stuck out in the slipstream, creating drag the airframe wasn't supposed to need. First flights of experimental aircraft don't push envelopes. They prove the airframe holds together at the speeds and altitudes engineers already think they understand.

[00:12:03]Geared down, low altitude, slow air speed. Because if anything goes wrong with this airplane on its first sorty, those conditions give him the maximum chance of getting it back on the runway intact. Envelope expansion comes later, months later. In this case, the flight you're watching right now isn't the test. The flight is the proof that everything is healthy enough to start testing. The actual test, the thing this airplane was built for, happens between 25 and 55,000 ft at speeds north of 900 mph. When the X59 finally makes the shock waves it's built to break up, remember the double bang. Concord hit 105 dB on the perceived loudness scale.

[00:12:45]NASA's target is 75. 75 dB is roughly the sound of a car door closing 30 ft away. Concord was thunder. The perceived loudness part matters more than the number. PLLDB doesn't measure pressure on a microphone the way a regular decibel reading does. It measures how a human brain rates annoyance, frequency weighted, time weighted, the way a mixing engineer rides a fader. Two sounds delivering identical energy to your eard drum can come in 20 PLB apart.

[00:13:17]NASA isn't trying to make the X59 quieter on a sensor. NASA is trying to make it boring to a person. The decibel scale is logarithmic. So a 30 decel drop is enormous. 75 PLB is roughly 16 times quieter than 105. That's how NASA's own engineers describe it. Not a little quieter, not noticeably quieter. 16 times. That's the math NASA's going to prove. The X59 isn't a prototype for a production aircraft. There's exactly one of them. NASA has no plans to build more. Lockheed has no plans to sell it.

[00:13:54]And the data this airplane generates over the next several years isn't going to a manufacturer. It's going to the Federal Aviation Administration and the International Civil Aviation Organization. the two regulatory agencies that decide whether civilian aircraft can fly supersonic over inhabited land. After NASA finishes the envelope expansion over the desert, the actual mission begins. The airplane will fly at Mach 1.4 over selected American communities. Then NASA will send teams doortodoor to ask the residents what they heard. That's the entire point.

[00:14:28]Each community gets multiple overflights at different times of day and on different days of the week. Morning rush hour, weekend afternoon, late evening.

[00:14:37]Because a sound that registers as nothing at noon might wake somebody up at midnight. Teams will go doortodoor with questionnaires. NASA borrowed the playbook from environmental noise studies, the same kind that have measured highway and airport noise for decades. NASA isn't trying to measure sound. NASA is measuring how people feel about sound on the same scale every commercial airport in the country already uses for noise certification. If enough Americans answer some version of nothing worth mentioning, the FAA has what they need to rewrite 14 CFR 91.817, 817, the 1973 regulation that bans civilian supersonic flight over American land and the reason you can't fly from New York to Los Angeles in under 3 hours. Concord was allowed transatlantic only because the boom hit the ocean.

[00:15:28]Every other supersonic project of the last 50 years has run a ground on that one rule. He's still in the holding pattern over the Mojave. The chase plane hasn't moved off his wing. The airplane keeps making the data. The political machinery to lift the ban is already moving. An executive order, a bill through the House. But executive orders don't replace data. The FAA needs a number. A number measured over real American neighborhoods, validated and impossible to argue with. The X59 is the only thing on Earth that can produce that number. And the answer those neighborhoods give NASA might be worth more than every dollar in every year this program has cost combined. or it might be worth nothing at all. Either way, the X59 is the only thing on Earth that can produce that answer. The flight pattern he's holding over the Mojave isn't aimless. Larsson is running through the in-flight system checks NASA needs before any of the future testing can start. Avionics performance, handling characteristics at low speed, control surface response, the XVS in actual flight rather than simulation. 60 data streams pumping 20,000 parameters down to engineers on the ground in real time. Every voltage, every angle, every system, all of it visible the second the airplane does anything. The airplane is talking, the engineers are listening. 40 minutes of test cards over the desert, the chase plane shadowing him the entire time, and an F-15 pilot calling out airframe condition over radio while NASA's telemetry rig pulls every measurement into the feed. Everything works. Now it's time to test. Larsson takes the airplane higher the next flight and higher still the one after.

[00:17:12]The first weeks of envelope expansion creep upward in increments small enough that nothing the engineers see surprises them. Mach.5 Mach 7 Mach.85.

[00:17:23]The flights pile up in pairs. Two test sorties some days. Each one verifying a piece of the airframe nobody has flown before. The chase plane follows on every sorting. The data pours back to Armstrong every time the airplane leaves the apron. The airframe never gives anyone a reason to slow down. Here is what NASA expects to happen the day this airplane finally goes supersonic. The X59 climbs through 50,000 ft over the Mojave Desert. The cockpit is quiet. The pilot is watching the same screen he's watched the maiden flight through. Half a mile off his left wing, an instrumented F-15 hold station. a separate aircraft purpose-built to fly into the X59 shockwave cone and photograph the wave pattern from inches away before the individual shock waves have a chance to merge. NASA calls it imaging. The F-15 is the only camera platform on Earth that can capture what's about to happen. Sharan imaging works because light bends when it passes through air of different densities. The same shimmer you see rising off hot asphalt in July. A shock wave is just an extremely sharp version of that density gradient. Point a high-speed camera at a bright contrasting background. The disc of the sun works best, and the shock waves passing between the camera and the background bend the sunlight enough to show up as ripples on the image. The F-15 is photographing the X59's own pressure waves against the sun. 20 mi below the airplane, the high desert is rigged. Microphones planted in rows across the test range. Each one calibrated to pick up pressures measured in fractions of a pound per square foot.

[00:19:01]Every sensor pointed at the sky. 40 acoustic stations on the ground, plus mobile stations in instrumented vehicles, plus monitoring posts in residential neighborhoods downrange.

[00:19:11]NASA has been building this measurement infrastructure for 9 years to capture a single moment. Mach.95.

[00:19:19]He advances the throttle. The F414 spools up. The afterburner ignites. The airframe transitions through Mach.99 to Mach 1.0. The boundary every supersonic aircraft has crossed at some price.

[00:19:33]Joerger broke it for the first time in 1947. Airframes have come apart, crossing it in the hands of pilots who didn't know what was about to happen to them. The X59 crosses it without protest. No buffeting, no flutter. The flight controls feel exactly the way the simulator felt every day Larson sat in it for the last 8 years. The instrument panel reads 1.0, then 1.1, then 1.2. The airplane is generating shock waves now.

[00:20:03]The thing it was built to do, the thing nobody has watched it do before. He holds the climb. Mach 1.3, Mach 1.4 at 55,000 ft. The numbers the design has waited 9 years to read. Below the airplane, the shockwave cone rolls toward the ground. 20 mi below the aircraft, the microphones across the test range pick up the boom signature one row at a time. The first row reads pressure rise, but the rise is gradual, not a single spike. The second row reads the same gradual rise, slightly louder, slightly later. The third row, the fourth. Every microphone records the same waveform, not the sharp double bang the Concord made. A soft, spread out pressure change. A thump. The data streams back to Armstrong in real time.

[00:20:52]In a control room behind the runway, 40 engineers watch the waveform draw itself across the screen. Not a sharp spike like the Concord made. A series of soft pressure changes separated, never stacking. The shape the design has waited 9 years to see. The number beneath it, the one the FAA cares about, comes in within a single decel of NASA's bet. The math worked. Except none of that has happened yet. As of today, the X59 has flown 16 times. The fastest it has ever flown is Mach.95 at 43,000 ft.

[00:21:27]The acoustic sensor array has been built, but never measured a real X59 boom. The Chase F-15 has flown formation with the airplane, but never inside the shockwave cone of a supersonic X59. The community overflights have not started.

[00:21:42]The boom number 75 PLDB or 80 or 95 does not exist yet because the airplane hasn't generated the boom. The first supersonic test is scheduled for the second half of 2026. The community overflights begin in 2027. The number the FAA needs to rewrite the regulation could be the number the design predicted, or it could be a number that ends the program. Nobody on Earth knows yet because the airplane has not yet broken the sound barrier, but it should.

[00:22:13]If you want to see another amazing NASA aircraft, watch this video right here.

[00:22:18]Bye for now.