Supersonic III

We'll close out this short diversion to the supersonic era that never was, and look at the original Boeing design. In competition with Lockheed, Boeing submitted a winning design that included a massive swing wing. The Boeing 2707-100/200 was revolutionary in all aspects; titanium structure, a powerplant that was capable of propelling the aircraft to Mach 3, and an internal seating arrangement that included onboard television. Here is how the original mockup looked on display, all done up in Boeing house colors.

Unfortunately, the swing wing doomed this design. It made the aircraft way too heavy. As shown in this video, Boeing engineers said the aircraft would fly....only without the added weight of passengers! The following are segments taken from the PBS/Nova episode entitled "Supersonic Spies."

Supersonic II

The supersonic mockup was the highlight of the SST museum, but there were other interesting things on display. Inside the building, there were several glass cases containing scale models built by local modelers. There was even a factory model of the SST in Delta airline livery.

This is a photo taken inside the Boeing SST plant showing the 2707-300 mockup as it was being fabricated. The mockup was complete, but was missing the starboard wing and tail plane.

Another interesting display was one of the original Sea Dart prototypes. How this ended up in Florida, is a mystery to me. I recently saw another nicely restored Sea Dart at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. I'll show a picture of that in a future post.

Supersonic

Speaking of the world of tomorrow, here is something that was promised in our future, but never came to be. In the early '60s, the US embarked on a competition to build a civilian supersonic transport. Both Lockheed and Boeing submitted designs, with the latter being awarded a contract in 1966. The initial design, however was deemed to heavy to fly. A new concept was unveiled, but pressure from environmental groups, and a cutoff of funding from the the US Congress doomed the program (which was cancelled in 1971).

The full scale mockup of the 2707-300 was purchased from Boeing, and was transported to a site in Kissimmee, Florida. A small museum opened with the mockup as its centerpiece, along with other hardware. I visited the museum in the fall of 1980.

Visitors could walk through the entire length of the fuselage and up to the cockpit. All of the seating, and most of the instrumentation, however, was stripped out.


Due to the immense size of the mockup, the tail actually protruded from the roof, and could be seen from the outside.

The Florida museum eventually closed. A portion of the mockup (i.e. the restored nose and cockpit section) is now on display at the Hiller Aviation Museum in California.