Wave Drag Characteristics of a Low-Drag Supersonic Formation Flying Concept

In the past 50 years, although the technology for transonic flight has matured, commercially practical civil supersonic transport has not been realized. The two major problems that have been preventing supersonic commercial transportation are wave drag and sonic boom. Many attempts have been made to minimize the wave drag and the sonic boom in the past. Among them, many studies approached this problem by optimizing the shape of the wing-body configuration. However, most studies have shown a strong tradeoff between wave drag and sonic boom, making it impossible to minimize wave drag and sonic boom simultaneously, for a given aircraft overall length. In this paper, wave drag characteristics of this concept is investigated using Euler simulations. The dependence of wave drag to the relative position of the aircraft is investigated to evaluate the effectiveness of this concept and gain insight on the wave drag characteristics of supersonic formation flying.