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Kind of strange how we are celebrating breaking the sound barrier nearly 78 years after we first broke the sound barrier…
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It was always military before in the US. And the Concorde’s engines were adapted from military use, while Boom is all clean-sheet design.
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The coverage was very nice.
I find it curious no dev has done the XB-1 for MSFS, it wouldn’t be, I think, that hard of a project and it would be a very cool experimental plane to fly around.
I think anyone wanting to develop it for sim would have to license it, and I doubt the company would grant a license until commercially ready. Just my guess
Interesting press release too:
If Miltech could release a Dassault product then anything is possible. Just name it the BSXB and you are set.
Interesting that to avoid having a drooped nose like Concorde (for the Overture airliner, XB1 being the test plane) the take off and landing will essentially be done by the pilot wearing an “augmented reality” VR headset:
I see a lot of possibility for this setup. First, the cameras for the headset could easily be on a gimbal and set up with head following like the guns and cameras on both the Cobra and Apache attach helicopters. You could even tie the head tracking to the nosewheel steering, but I’d hate to see what would happen if the flight attendant were to tap the pilot on the shoulder at the wrong time!
They have to have some sort of back up though, yes? What if the camera/headset has technical issues during landing?
The XB-1 missions have chase planes and even Landing Signal Officers (two ex-carrier Navy vets) that stand at the end of the runway calling out the plane’s position relative to the glide slope. I’m pretty sure that those won’t be feasible for commercial flights, but I’m betting the Overture will have redundant systems just like all the other critical systems on other commercial planes.