EP69 – G700 Speed Record; Virgin Galactic Problems; Will the Archer SPAC Merger Actually Happen?

STRUCK: An Aerospace Engineering & Lightning Protection Show

The Gulfstream G700 broke a transatlantic speed record, reaching Mach 0.88 - can they break the sound barrier in the near future? The FAA is investigating Virgin Galactic, asking why they departed from their flight path; they'll be grounded until the answer is satisfactory. And, Archer Aviation just received their G-1 certification, but the ISS nonetheless has issued a warning to investors to decline the intended SPAC merger deal. Will it go through? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! EP69 Transcript this episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy you're listening to the struck podcast i'm Dan Blewett i'm Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast i'm your co-host dan blewett on today's episode we're gonna talk about golf stream setting a new transatlantic speed record at 0.88 mach from savannah to katar uh we'll talk about faa and virgin galactic some of their woes ryanair also with boeing and talks to get some 737 max 10s out the door but it looks like those talks might have collapsed in our evt well segments say we've got a bunch about archer the faa has approved a g1 uh certification for them and the iss on the other hand is advising against the arger spac merger so we'll talk about that some big stock news there and lastly uh interesting uh article from the vertical flight society uh explaining that they've taken a directory of what now includes 500 evtol concepts a which is up from 200 from last summer so we'll talk about some of that and what we can expect if maybe all 500 designs will come to fruition um i'm sure Allen has a lot of thoughts on that so first let's talk about golf stream so Allen this is a g700 that reached 675 miles per hour or mach 0.88 on the flight across the atlantic from savannah georgia here in the u.s to qatar and then they also hopped over to paris uh reaching mach 0.90 which is 690 and a half miles per hour so this is pretty fast but i mean how fast is this it's pretty good for a business jet yeah for especially as large as it is i think the cessna citation 10 which was the fastest at the time was like 0.9192 maybe on mach yeah so it it's it's really moving aerodynamically the gulfstream's earthcraft have gotten better and better as it gotten bigger and bigger obviously it takes bigger engines yeah yeah i mean i mean if you're going to have a top-end business aircraft gulfstream is definitely leading the pack at the moment it's beautiful airplane so obviously supersonic flight is a big one um is that just breaking mach 1 like or is it are we really looking like mach 1.5 like companies like the now defunct arion and now boom who are looking in the supersonic jet realm i mean is this not is this not close enough or i mean what's the big difference here well it just takes a lot more fuel to go faster uh and a different kind of aircraft to break this sonic sound barrier gulfstream has pushed the envelope pretty well in terms of subsonic flight the aircraft is very clean and as they as they develop and continue to develop they have better computational models better aerodynamic cfd models for the aircraft so the aircraft keeps getting cleaner and cleaner if you look at a g3 to the g700 it's it's almost a different aircraft in terms of its aerodynamics and its performance i always think it's really interesting when they do these sort of like speech trials or world records on speed because they used to happen the united states quite a bit they would go from the airplanes would go from like new york to los angeles or new york to miami places where the busines...