is it possible, and how long would it take, to fly from Phoenix, Az to Tucson, AZ at Mach 10?
If you’re already at speed (and at altitude), at mach 10 you would be going around 7000 statute miles per hour (at ~110,000 feet MSL); the straight-line distance between for example KPHX and KDMA or KTUS is maybe about 115 statute miles, so you’d cross that distance in about a minute.
On the other hand, if you mean take off from a Phoenix area airport and land in Tucson, without going into a bunch of flight planning I’d probably say that you’d probably barely start the part of the initial climb and acceleration before you have to get ready to land. In my flying (for the Navy, many years ago now) in real life, we generally started getting ATIS about 100 nm out and then expected to switch to approach frequency and start setting up for the approach procedure maybe 50-70 nm out.
It’s just like flying the SR-71 Blackbird: At subsonic speeds the thrust-to-weight ratio is paltry, so to get the plane through the sound barrier you have to climb to 40,000 feet and then nudge it over in a dive to get it past Mach 1.
Once you’re supersonic, the jet engines will generate far more thrust and you’ll be climbing out at Mach 3 easily enough.
Where else can you strap on a pair of scramjets? Thank you Asobo and Microsoft. Took me three tries to get her up, but so much fun. The sound alone. lol
Thanks this was great instructions … don’t need the inverted flight to reach Mach 3 but do to get the mission instructions
quoted from above
Take off with full throttle + afterburner (I don’t even touch the throttle afterwards to be honest)
Climb at 10 degrees up to around 30-35000 ft
Slowly push the nose down to -20 degrees and start descending down to about 20000 ft
Very slowly raise the nose and climb at 10 degrees again
The aircraft should have no problem reaching Mach 3 (the higher you climb the faster the Mach will go up)
At Mach 3, turn the scramjet batteries on and enable the scramjet. It will spool up, kick in and kick the vehicle out into oblivion (the regular turbines will stop working above 50,000 ft)
this all worked out … now I’m at 40,000 ft descending and have no direction to cape canaveral ??
so
I had to restart and do the inverted flying to get the next directions to canaveral …
success … landed 1AM
During the first transition make sure you go down longer after the roll out. Gaining speed is all it takes. Then follow the promts to flip switches and activate scram.
