Supersonic air travel is coming back: The Concorde revisited

The dawn of the jet age brought us smooth air travel with jets flying twice as fast as the propeller aircraft they replaced in the early 1960s and changed travel forever. One of the odd aspects of modern air travel is that it’s not really getting any faster.

Ever since Air France and British Airways retired their money-losing Concorde supersonic Mach 2 jet (twice the speed of sound, or 1,350 mph, 2,200 kph) in 2003, airliners have generally stuck to top speeds of around 600 miles per hour, or Mach 0.85 (85% of the speed of sound, or supersonic). That’ll get you from New York to San Francisco in five or six hours, depending on the winds, but you can’t find a plane that will get you there significantly sooner.

We’ve largely learned to tolerate our slow, boring aircraft. But there’s a compelling case that we shouldn’t — that air travel should actually be much, much quicker.

Right now there are a host of energetic startups and NASA engineers working on sleek new supersonic jets that could fly twice as fast as today’s commercial planes, if not faster. These jets would be major upgrades on the noisy, fuel-squandering Concorde SSTs designed in the 1960s, and they could be ready within the decade.

When you talk to people working on these super-fast planes, it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement. Take Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom, a startup that’s working with Virgin Galactic to put a new supersonic business jet into service by the early 2020s. He envisions a day when anyone could cross the Pacific or Atlantic in just a few short hours. “It changes how you think about the world,” he tells me.

“In aerospace, there are two great passions,” Scholl says. “You either want to build rockets and go colonize Mars — or you want to go really, really fast. People like Elon Musk are focused on the former. We’ve built a team that’s obsessed with the latter.”

So what’s the holdup? For some, it’s mostly politics. In a new paper for the Mercatus Center, titled “Make America Boom Again,” policy analysts Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond make the case that outdated regulations are hindering innovation in air travel. Since 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned civilian aircraft from flying faster than sound over land, to avoid the house-rattling sonic booms that the Concorde use to make. Yet recent technological advances have enabled supersonic designs that don’t create loud booms. So why not replace the FAA’s blanket ban with a simple noise standard, and let supersonic travel flourish?

Yet there are also skeptics who argue that regulations aren’t the only thing holding back our supersonic future. In practice, faster air travel isn’t always worth it, and airlines have excellent reasons for preferring those slow, boring planes — from fuel efficiency to airport noise to concerns about climate change. “I wish them all the best!” says longtime aviation consultant Robert W. Mann Jr. of the push for supersonic flight. “But it’s still not clear that there will be a market for this.”

That is to say, there are two tricky questions to explore here: Can we actually bring back supersonic flight? And even if we can — should we?

The Concorde, revisited: Why early attempts at supersonic flight failed

Anyone who wants to build a supersonic plane today first has to grapple with the tragic failure of the Concorde jet, a joint venture between Britain and France that began carrying passengers in 1976.

The Concorde was a technical marvel, flying at at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound, or 1,350 mph, 2,200 kph) to go from New York to London in just 3.5 hours, instead of the usual seven or eight. But it suffered its share of economic woes, and British Airways finally retired the jet in 2003:

The Concorde’s demise is a complicated tale, but it suffered from two mortal flaws. First, it was a horrendous fuel-guzzler and expensive to operate. Under the laws of physics, the air resistance or drag that a given object faces in flight increases rapidly as you approach Mach 1. So a plane flying supersonic requires a lot more energy than one flying below the speed of sound.

The Concorde’s designers tried to reduce drag by giving their plane a sleek body and short, slender delta wings. Even so, the Concorde required staggering amounts of fuel, burning roughly eight times as much fuel per passenger mile for a trans-Atlantic trip as a modern-day 777. That made tickets forbiddingly expensive: $10,000 or more for a New York–London round trip. As oil prices rose, British Airways and Air France (which operated the jets) struggled to consistently fill the jets’ 100-125 seats. Bad for profits.

A second problem, meanwhile, is that whenever the Concorde traveled faster than the speed of sound — about 767 miles per hour — it created noisy sonic booms in its wake. To put it simply, the air in front of the Concorde couldn’t get out of its way fast enough, so it bunched up into large shock waves in a cone trailing the plane. Wherever those shock waves reached the ground below, they’d be heard as a loud “BANG, BANG” that could rattle windows, shake structures, and startle people.

Opposition quickly mounted, and in 1973 the FAA banned civilian aircraft from traveling at supersonic speeds over the United States. The Concorde could only exceed Mach 1 over water, limiting its market. British Airways and Air France mainly flew the Concorde out of New York and Washington DC to London and Paris, though there were a number of other international routes over the years.*

After the Concorde went bust, airlines shied away from supersonic flight. The extra speed didn’t seem to justify the hassle. At least, until recently.