Yes a plane ! Can you believe ?…

This is a model of the Boeing 2707-200 SST project.

The aerodynamic concept was very sound, having a delta wing platform for supersonic cruise, best shape for it, and a low sweep wing platform for takeoff and landing, permitting slower speeds and engine regime ,hence less noise. That was a problem for the Concorde, it had to use a lot of power at low speed.

Here a small screencast showing how this mess of flaps and landing gears doors works… Took me a while to understand :

The problem is just before they started building it they discovered the design could brake-up during certain maneuvers and under certain g loads. Requiring heavy strengthening on the structure that would have risen the weight to over 340 tons… This in turn would have shorten range, requiring calls on routes a 747 could do in one flight.

So they went back to a plain Delta wing platform, that is the 2707-300 project; but then couldn’t make it very much lighter, interest from the airlines faded, fuel crisis, government funding cut and many other problems. End of story.

But very interesting story. Shows what panic it was in the US airplane business when the Concorde flew, in certain circles they thought they could loose commercial aviation market lead, hence government funding for this project , thinking all airliners would be supersonics in the future They had to do it faster, bigger, stronger…

would have been longer than a 747. In the end we are still flying under Mach 1 in big tubes with wings, and Airbus is rivaling Boeing.

Ok, let say…

We are the 11th of october 1971, they are rushing the prototype to 1st flight, making it fly unpainted, cause they want to move on fast to the testing schedule. And want to be able to shown the monster at the 1972 Paris air show.

Here are photo shots from that very first flight, taken from the chase plane. testing various configurations above clouds layers.

Model done in Blender 2.75, Cycles render of course, post in Photoshop.

Wanted to have very fine and subtle bump details, hardly visible when the all thing is is view, but visible at close-up renders. So tried two 8192×8192 pixels size maps, was hard work for my poor computer. But now have Hires maps that can be

used at close-ups, and that I can downsize if I need for doing views from a distance.

Some WIP images :

I will dirty it more a bit when I’ll do an airline livery. Though airliners seldom gets very dirty, and usually underside, near landing gears/flaps and such, with hydraulic fluids, dust and such…

And again, for non-commercial and only personal use of course.

Please be so kind to read the – TERM OF USE – of the images and files included in this site.

Thanks