Dreams of super-fast jet travel revival face headwinds

Supersonic passenger travel, which died out with the Concorde’s demise in 2003, will make a comeback by the mid2020s if three entrepreneurial US-based companies can make jets quiet and efficient enough to win over buyers and fliers. Fifteen years ago, Boeing Co cancelled plans to build the near-supersonic Sonic Cruiser, the last big attempt by a major manufacturer to speed up commercial travel.

Now Japan Airlines Co Ltd and Virgin Group are backing one of the three US supersonic projects, Denverbased Boom Technology Inc, which plans a 55-seat all business class jet.

Lockheed Martin Corp is partnering with Aerion Corp to develop smaller supersonic business jets, with Spike Aerospace Inc also targeting the private jet market given many see the superrich as the likeliest early adopters of supersonic travel.

Concorde was developed 1960s, meaning this is hardly in the a new technology. But the programme was government-backed, with only 14 jets ever delivered to then-government owned British Airways and Air France. Other airline orders evaporated as the purchase price soared and they were eventually retired as maintenance costs rose and passenger revenue fell.

New players are relying on venture capital funding models.

“This is more about engines and economics than it is about airframes,” Richard Aboulafia, the vice president of analysis at aerospace research firm Teal Group, said of the challenges of a supersonic revival.

To make the project economics stack up the engines need to be far more fuel efficient and less noisy than those used by Concorde or fighter jets.

That has proven tough to engineer, especially at higher speeds like the Concorde’s Mach 2, which halved the travel time from London to New York to 3.5 hours.

Engine manufacturers and jet makers have spent decades improving fuel efficiency, expanding range and reducing noise.

But to get up to mach speed, a supersonic jet requires an engine core more like those on the commercial jets of the 1970s and 1980s which noisily gobble more air and fuel.

“A large fraction of the benefits we have in efficiency and noise reduction we are going to lose as soon as we have to go back to that sort of architecture,” said Daniel Edgington-Mitchell, an aerospace engineering lecturer at Melbourne’s Monash University.

Aerion, the most advanced of the proposed supersonic jet projects, is working with GE Aviation to develop an engine based on a core used in F-16 fighters and Boeing 737s that was developed in the 1970s, a GE spokesman said.

In a sign of the challenges involved using an older engine core rather than spending $1 billion-plus to engineer a new one, Aerion has reduced the jet’s planned speed from Mach 1.6 to 1.4.

Today’s top business jets fly at around Mach 0.9 and commercial jets at Mach 0.85.

Jeff Miller, Aerion’s head of marketing, said the speed had fallen to meet noise standards and due to temperature limits involved with adapting an existing engine core.

Aerion, chaired by billionaire businessman Robert Bass, plans for the 12-seat, $120 million jet to make its first test flight in 2023, with entry into service in 2025.

“Aerion has researched the problems since 2003 and therefore reached the highest degree of realism,” Leeham Co analyst Bjorn Fehrm said, comparing it to the loftier supersonic ambitions of Boom and Spike. “If one wants to go faster, a suitable core is harder to find.”

Boom wants a $200 million jet capable of Mach 2.2 and Spike aims for a $100 million jet at Mach 1.6, down from an earlier Mach 1.8.

Both want their jets to enter service in 2023, two years earlier than Aerion.

Several industry sources said those timelines appeared unrealistic because the companies have yet to select engines and will face testing and certification challenges.

Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl said the company was examining an adaptation of an existing engine as well as a clean-sheet option, with more to say next year. Spike CEO Vik Kachoria said his company was in talks with two engine suppliers.

Both are working on smaller demonstrator aircraft with different engines designed to prove the concept is achievable within their proposed timeframes.