NASA is officially trotting out the finished version of an experimental aircraft that looks like a stretched-out arrowhead. Painted in red, white, and blue, the plane is called the X-59, and it has a lofty goal: to fly faster than the speed of sound over land, but do so in a quiet enough way that no one below is startled by a sonic boom.
The aircraft’s most noticeable feature is a nose that measures 38 feet long, which represents more than one-third of its total length of 99 feet and 7 inches. Tucked into a compartment behind that nose will be space for one pilot. But because the cockpit sits totally flush with the top surface of the aircraft—it’s embedded in the body of the plane—there is no forward windshield for the test pilot to look out of when they fly. Instead, they’ll fly using a camera system and a screen inside the cockpit to reveal what’s in front of them.
“We jokingly asked Lockheed if we could get the Wonder Woman mod,” says David Nils Larson, the lead test pilot, referring to Wonder Woman’s fictional invisible jet and the idea of a see-through metal canard. “They said yeah, ‘You don’t have that kind of money.’”
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