NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

theregister.com

7 pointsrntn5 comments

Unfortunately its configuration, even if successful, is wholly impractical to scale up to a commercial aircraft.

Being able to generate a softer thump with a needle-like aircraft is technically interesting but practically irrelevant.

The SSBD program had more potential, playing around with more capacious configurations that could possibly have been expanded upon:

Uhm, why? Does it look that different from concepts like these?

Question is, can it circle in a stack? Concord was excused that problem.

What?

I think they're talking about joining a holding pattern as inbound traffic to an aerodrome