Supersonic travel revolution Mk II soars into limbo – for now

Is there a market for ultrafast transport in a world of video meetings and onboard wi-fi?

United Airlines ordered 50 Supersonic Overture aircraft in June.

The four engines screamed and the seat seemed to kick me in the back when the Tupolev Tu-144 hurtled towards takeoff on the first passenger flight of Russia’s version of the Concorde. Sitting in that airliner on a grey Moscow morning in November 1977, I felt the future had arrived.

The Soviet Union was the first to fly a supersonic civil transport – four months before Concorde in 1969 – and now the Tupolev was offering cheap, faster-than-sound travel to its masses.

It did not work out like that: a Tupolev crashed within weeks and “Concordski” was grounded.

The Concorde, which opened its passenger service just ahead of the Tupolev, fared better. For 26 years patrons sipped champagne while zooming over the Atlantic at almost 2200km/h. However, a catastrophic crash in Paris in 2000 sealed its fate and three years later the Anglo-French marvel was gone for good. The first age of civilian supersonic travel was over.

Now a second age may be dawning: Boom Supersonic, an American start-up, this week rang up its 130th order for the 80-seat Overture, a needle-nosed son of Concorde for the green age that is planned to enter service by 2029 and offer affordable 3½-hour flights from London to New York.

“Supersonic travel will be an important part of our ability to deliver for our customers,” Derek Kerr, chief financial officer of American Airlines, said.

The world’s second-biggest airline has ordered 20 Overtures, with an option for 40 more after United Airlines booked 50 in June. In comparison, only 14 Concordes ever flew passengers.

The snags are huge and sceptics abound: the Overture has not yet been built and it does not have engines, while its “green” fuel, made from organic material, is scarce and costs five times more than jet kerosene.

Is there a market for ultrafast transport in a world of video meetings and onboard wi-fi? How do you justify sonic booms and carbon-spewing engines in an age of flight shaming?

Boom’s venture is not a one-off. Half a dozen supersonic projects have been under way over the past two decades. NASA is well advanced, with a design to curb the sonic bang that barred Concorde from flying faster than sound over land, which helped end its commercial prospects.

Working with NASA, aerospace company Lockheed Martin has produced a test plane at its Skunk Works facility in the desert that will turn the bang into a thump no louder than a car door being slammed.

The X-59, which Lockheed says will “open up a whole new type of aviation”, is due to make its first flight this year before flying over American cities to test public reaction.

Elsewhere, start-up Spike is developing a smaller supersonic business jet and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has plans for its own ultrafast transport.

The Overture has been in development since 2014 and a scaled-down demonstrator, the XB-1, is due to take off this year.

Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and boss, insisted that the technology is within reach to put paying passengers on the Overture by the end of the decade.

“The aircraft today are no faster than the ones when my parents were growing up,” he said. “There is no good reason for that.

“We can fix it. I want to be anywhere in the world for 100 bucks. That’s not where we start, but it’s the goal.”

Reviving the 1960s pitch for Concorde, Scholl called the Overture a revolution that will change how the world thinks about distance. “There are tens of millions of passengers every year flying business class on routes where Overture will give a big acceleration and airlines will be able to do it cost-effectively,” he said.

Despite noise-reducing technology, the 2092km/h Overture will produce a Concorde-like bang and will be limited to oceanic routes. Even so, Boom claims it will be able to fly to 600 destinations in half the time, such as Miami to London in under five hours and Los Angeles to Honolulu in three hours, at today’s business-class prices.

It unveiled its latest version at the Farnborough airshow last month. The plane, which has a contoured fuselage and a gull wing, is built from carbon fibre, like the latest Boeing 787. It features four wing-mounted engines rather than the three built-in engines of its earlier design. Unlike the Concorde and Tupolev, the Overture’s nose is not lowered in slow flight so pilots can see the runway. They will rely on video.

The company is working with Rolls-Royce on a custom engine aimed at powering Overture with no more noise than other modern turbofan jets. It will not use afterburners, the power-boosting blast that produced the racket made by Concorde’s military-derived Rolls-Royce engines on its departures.

Sceptics, however, are yet to be convinced. An analyst at AeroDynamic Advisory, an American company, said the Overture “is nothing more than a collection of freehand drawings until that engine is produced”.

On the carbon front, Boom denies claims its planes will emit five to seven times as much per passenger as subsonic jets. It says emissions will be lower and all flights will be “net-zero carbon” because they will burn sustainable aviation fuel.

Produced from carbon-absorbing plants or waste, SAF is supposed to offset the greenhouse gas from jet combustion, but the amount produced is small and will account for only 2 per cent of airline fuel in 2025.

Big doubts surround Boom’s ability to find the billions of dollars needed to develop any airliner, let alone a revolutionary one. The company has raised about $US300m of the $US6bn to $US8bn it says it will need to launch the Overture, which has a list price of $US200m. Aircraft launches invariably run over budget, as do timetables. Some industry experts say it will take up to $US15bn for Overture to fly.

American Airlines pilots took a dim view of its claims this week to be blazing a trail to the future. Their union predicted “supersonic cancellations” and Captain Ed Sicher, its leader, urged the airline to solve existing problems. “We urge management to stay focused on the here and now. That’s what passengers care about,” he said.

So is a second age upon us? Keep the supersonic champagne on ice, at least for a while.

The Times