Supersonic air travel is coming back: The new players

How new technology could make supersonic flight viable again

Over the past decade, a number of aerospace engineers and entrepreneurs have been revisiting the Concorde’s demise. And some of them have walked away thinking that supersonic flight could work today — with just a few important (if difficult) tweaks.

A few years ago, Blake Scholl, a former coder and longtime amateur pilot, was messing around with spreadsheet models and realized that a number of recent advances in aerodynamics and engine technology could, in theory, allow engineers to build a plane that was far more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. “If you could do that, you could have a plane that was competitive with existing business travel,” he says. “I started running these numbers by various experts and realized it wasn’t just science fiction.”

Supersonic commercial air travel is, according to aerospace startup Boom Supersonic, coming to airports near you in the future, with commercial flights expected by 2029. In 2014, Scholl founded Boom, an aviation company based in Denver, Colorado. He has since assembled a team that includes accomplished former NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin engineers to design a working successor to the Concorde.

They’re not alone. Back in 2002, a group of investors led by Robert Bass formed a company called Aerion that aimed to harness innovative new drag-reducing technology to create a much more efficient supersonic business jet. Aerion is pretty far along in this task: In 2014, the company announced a partnership with aerospace giant Airbus to build and certify a supersonic craft within the decade. (Gulfstream, an established jet manufacturer, is also working with NASA on its own designs for supersonic flight.)

The race is on

So what makes these companies think they can do better than the Concorde’s designers and build a vastly more fuel-efficient plane? In interviews, Boom and Aerion pointed to three broad technical advances that make this all seem feasible:

1. First, modern-day computer modeling makes exploring new aircraft designs far easier than it was in the 1960s. If the Concorde’s designers wanted to test a new shape to see how it affected drag, they had to build a scale model and put it through large wind tunnels — a clumsy process that could take months. Nowadays, genetic algorithms can explore and tweak new shapes much more quickly and effectively.
2. Newer composite materials, like carbon fiber, allow aircraft designers to pursue shapes and contours that weren’t possible for the Concorde’s designers, who worked with aluminum. (These materials can also better deal with the serious heat that builds up on the leading edge of the plane’s wing at speeds above Mach 2.)
3. Today’s jet engines are far more efficient than they were in the Concorde’s heyday.

“The breakthrough will be in the sum of those parts, not any one invention,” Scholl says. Put those three factors together, and he thinks Boom can build a plane that goes at top speeds of Mach 2.2 while being 30 percent more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. It will still create sonic booms, though quieter than the Concorde’s.

The proof, of course, will be in the testing. Boom plans to publicly unveil its design for a supersonic plane in the near future. The company will then team up with Virgin Galactic to build and test a prototype at Edwards Air Base in California by the end of 2017. The hope, Scholl says, is to have a working plane in service by “the early 2020s.”

Aerion, meanwhile, is pursuing a different design that harnesses supersonic natural laminar flow, a concept it developed (and tested with NASA) to reduce the turbulent airflow around wings and reduce drag. Aerion will work with Airbus on the engineering and is in the process of selecting suppliers to manufacture the engines. The plan, says spokesperson Jeff Miller, is to get the plane into service by 2021.

Boeing-backed supersonic aircraft manufacturer Aerion (Reno/Tahoe) has ceased operations in May 2021 after failing to secure new capital in the current economic environment, the company announced. With the financial and technical support from Boeing, the Reno, Nevada-based company was building a 12-passenger supersonic jet, the AS2, capable of reaching a speed of Mach 1.4.

The new markets

Assuming these planes work, the next challenge will be finding a market. Scholl’s goal is to introduce a plane that will cost just $5,000 to fly one-way between, say, New York and London. At that price, his market research suggests, there will be enough business travelers willing to pay a premium for speed that he can fill small 45-seat jets. (As part of their deal, Virgin has an option to buy 10 of Boom’s planes.)

Consider the advantages: A flight between San Francisco and Tokyo might take just four hours instead of 11. A flight between New York and London, three instead of eight. “You could leave early in the morning from New York, have afternoon meetings in London, and be back home in time for dinner,” Scholl notes.

Still, it’s far from clear that Boom can succeed in luring enough passengers to turn a profit. For one, notes Mann, the aviation consultant, their planes will still be less fuel-efficient than conventional planes, which means they could be more vulnerable to sharp swings in oil prices. Plus, there are market risks. The most profitable Concorde route lay between the great financial centers of New York and London. But what happens if, say, Brexit ends up shrinking the size of London’s banking industry?

“Obviously we’ll have to see,” says Mann. “But those are just examples of the sort of external shocks that could impinge on the practicality of supersonic travel.”

Boom remains optimistic. The broader hope is that if supersonic flight gains a foothold with business travelers, costs will eventually come down as technology improves. Scholl’s ultimate goal is to make supersonic flight affordable to everyone. “It’s the same thing that Tesla did,” he says. “They started with the luxury Roadster and are now focused on mass-market cars.”

Because Boom jets would only fly supersonic over water at the start, they could coexist with the FAA’s current ban on overland travel (although both companies could face regulatory hurdles around the noise their planes will make on takeoff and landing; more on that below).

That said, oceanic flights are still a relatively limited market. For supersonic travel to truly conquer the entire world, someone would have to take the next step and develop a plane that doesn’t produce terrifying sonic booms over land.

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