kushan mitra meets Royal Air Force Wing Commander Andy Green OBE, whose day job is to fly supersonic fighter jets. He is also the man who holds the World land Speed Record. Now, in his new car, Bloodhound SSC, he wants to touch 1,000 miles per hour — a scarcely believable 1,600 kmph
Speed is a relative thing, as anyone who has driven a car fast would know. Driving at 30 kilometres per hour on congested Indian roads seems too fast, while cruising at 250 kilometres per hour on an unrestricted German Autobahn feels like a stroll.
However, there is no doubt that going supersonic, that is above the speed of sound, is incredibly fast. And there is only one man in the world who has broken the sound barrier while still being planted on the planet.
But does it ‘feel’ fastIJ “You would think that,” Green says, as the car he broke the sound barrier in, the Thrust SSC, barreled across the Blackrock Desert in Nevada, USA, at over 300 metres a second. let us put that number into perspective; at that speed one would reach from Bandra in the Mumbai suburbs to Nariman Point on the southern edge of the city in a minute. But Green remembers the drive for other reasons, “It was very noisy and I was putting in 90 degrees of steering input.”
The latter point seems almost scary, steering a vehicle at speed is not easy, but putting in an extreme amount of steering inputIJ “Well, I needed to prevent the car from going out of line,” Green points out, “In 1997, when we did those runs, we did not truly understand the forces that acted on the car, the computer power required to make those computations did not really catch up until a few years ago. Now we understand what we did wrong, and the new car will not have any of these issues.”
The other notable thing about going faster than the speed of soundIJ The noise. “It is incredibly loud, first because of the vast amounts of air the engines are sucking in, but then because turbofan engines cannot take in supersonic air into their inlets, the air has to be slowed down, and slowing air down releases an immense amount of energy, and with the inlets being next to my head, well it was noisy. But like with a supersonic fighter jet (Green flies the Panavia Tornado for the Royal Air Force), you do not hear the sonic boom.”
Oddly, the day Green broke the land speed record becoming the first man to break the sound barrier in a car — October 15, 1997 — was 50 years and one day after man broke the sound barrier for the first time when American pilot Chuck Yeager piloted the Bell X-1 experimental plane barely a few hundred kilometres away over California.
The new car that Green is talking about is the Bloodhound SSC, an incredible new machine with which he hopes to break the world land speed record again. The current record, that he holds stands at 1,227.986 kilometres per hour (for a standing mile) but the aim of Green and his partner Richard Noble is to break the 1,000 miles per hour mark, over 1,640 kilometres an hour. And this time they are doing things a bit differently.
For one, the project is an ‘open source’ project. “More than anything else, we want to highlight that the Bloodhound SSC is an ‘engineering adventure’; we want it to be something that gets young children excited in engineering. This is about the limits to which man can go with modern engineering,” Green points out. He is in India as a guest of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and is meeting young Indian engineering students to tell them about the project.
“The world needs more engineers; India produces so many engineers but so many of them go into software. You need roads, bridges, trains, things like that for which you need young people to be excited about engineering. If you look at high-tech companies across the world, they are crying out that there is not enough talent. And that is what this project wants to encourage.”
The Bloodhound SSC programme is already working very closely with The University of Swansea in Wales, where large parts of the engineering student body is actively helping the project. “There is a software programme that has been written by a student from Swansea that helps us calculate how the airflow moves about the car,” Green says, but adds that all the data from the Bloodhound SSC project is in the public domain.
“Have you ever heard of thatIJ You would not expect a race car team to put out their data in the public domain because every small advantage could be the difference between winning and losing. In the military, where I work, you do not let out your secrets. But in this project, we are being very open. If people, particularly young engineering students, want to go and view and download information about the project, they can do so from the website,” Green points out. “In fact, they can download and view the technical drawing, and actually if they wanted to, they could build their own Bloodhound SSC,” he adds jokingly.
The Tata Group has also been actively involved in the project; Jaguar provides the smallest engine in the car, a 400-plus horsepower V8 motor that will act as a pump for the rocket engine. Tata Steel Europe has provided a lot of the high-strength steel used in the Bloodhound, particularly in the rear of the vehicle. “You can say that there is an Indian angle to the car.”
In fact, while researching places to make the speed run, for which the car will need a flat surface at least 20 kilometres long; the car will cover that distance in just two minutes from a standing start to a stop; Green had considered the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. “It was perfect in all but one aspect, it is far too low in altitude; the lower the altitude, the thicker the air and therefore the tougher it is to go fast.”
As the desert in Nevada was also ruled out, ironically because of the drought there as even occasional rains help in smoothening out the surface, the record-breaking run will take place on a dry lake bed in South Africa. “The lake bed in South Africa is at about 800 metres of altitude; perfect as the car will cut through the air a bit more easily.”
There is still some more work to be done on the Bloodhound and kinks need to be worked out. This car, unlike the Thrust SSC, which used two Rolls-Royce jet engines from a Phantom fighter jet, will use a combination of a Eurofighter EJ200 engine and a Nammo hybrid rocket engine.
“The car rolls forward at the start line, so it does not have a pure 0-100 acceleration time, but if it did, it would be just about a second with the rocket,” Green mentions.
The fastest supercars made in the world accelerate from 0-100 kilometres per hour in just under three seconds. And then there are the brakes, the Bloodhound does not rely on traditional ‘disc’ brakes, instead it spreads out spoilers from its body which act as air brakes. “The braking power in this car is immense. To put it in perspective, if a normal road car had the Bloodhound’s braking prowess, it would decelerate from 100 kilometres per hour to a standing stop in just a second,” he adds.
The speed run is still a long 18 months away. Next year, Green and Noble expect to break the existing land-speed record and touch 1,300 kilometres per hour, and they will attempt to touch the 1,000 miles an hour mark (1,600 kilometres per hour) by 2016. If Green does indeed manage to break his own land speed record, it might stand for years to come and will be a remarkable feat of engineering and human ingenuity. We wish him well.