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Re: breaking sound barrier movie



On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Wes Davis wrote:

Hi, Folks:

Concerning the photograph mentioned in J. Marsh's post:
could someone explain the accompanying description claiming
that "part of the plane is supersonic and part isn't"?

Ah, the explanation is easy: they make it so much simpler when they make
it horribly wrong! Think as a child, where the "sound barrier" is
obviously a wall of invisible bricks which the aircraft must penetrate.
That white stuff isn't a cloud generated by a shockwave. Instead it is
the very "Sound Barrier" that you've heard so much about. The F14 is
breaking it! But part of the aircraft that hasn't gone through the white
wall, so that part of the plane must not have "broken the sound barrier"
yet. :)

But seriously, as soon as somebody starts talking about "sound barriers"
which must be "broken", you should regard everything else they say with
great suspicion.

The cloud in the video is conical, which suggests that the aircraft is
already flying faster than sound. As I understand it, the shock wave
would be a flat disk when the aircraft flies at slightly above the speed
of sound, and becomes more and more conical as the speed increases.


That website states that the cloud goes away at higher aircraft speed.
Really? I thought that a shockwave was a shockwave, and if the
temperature/humidity was right, a cloud would form, and at higher speeds
it would simply be more conical.


http://www.navy.mil/homepages/cv64/soundbarrier/soundbarrier.htm



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