BOOM SUPERSONIC PARTNERS WITH JAPAN AIRLINES
Boom Supersonic plans to announce Tuesday that Japan Airlines will join its quest to build next-generation supersonic jets for commercial routes at an affordable price. Instead of typical eight-hour red-eyes from New York to London, Boom hopes to offer threehour, 15-minute flights for about $5,000 round trip.
The Denver-area supersonic aircraft developer, headquartered at Centennial Airport, said Japan Airlines will invest $10 million in the company and collaborate with Boom to refine the aircraft’s design and passenger experience. JAL also gets dibs on 20 aircraft orders for jets that can fly 2.2 times the speed of sound, or 1,461 miles per hour. Typical airplanes are more in the range of 650 mph.
In a statement, Boom founder Blake Scholl said the two companies have been working “behind the scenes for over a year now,” he said. And the final product is something that Scholl hopes will be part of any international airline’s fleet.
The company is still responding to additional questions.
Boom is tackling supersonic airplanes with some common sense. It’s relying on technology improvements learned since the days of last
century’s supersonic Concorde. There’s also savings in fuel efficiencies, new and lighter materials such as carbon fiber for the 50-passenger plane.
Supersonic flight still has other complications that Boom must overcome. There’s a U.S. land ban on noisy supersonic booms that occur when objects travel faster than the speed of sound. That would limit Boom’s aircraft to ocean flights instead of over land and across the country. Boom has also mostly done much of its testing in labs and using software and computers.
This year, its 4-footlong model plane passed wind-tunnel tests conducted by the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. In June, it showed off a prototype, the two-seater XB-1 Su- personic Demonstrator that could take off from Centennial Airport in 2018.
The other unknown is whether airlines would buy the planes. But slowly, customers are making their names known. JAL is not the first airline to place an order. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, one of the first to work with Boom, has an option to buy at least 10 planes at $200 million each. In June, Scholl said Boom had orders for 76 planes that includes five world airlines.
In March, the company raised $33 million from investors, which included tech accelerator Y Combinator and Greg McAdoo, formerly with Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital venture. That was enough “to go and build an airplane,” Scholl said at the time.
If all goes well, Boom’s passenger supersonic jet could fly its first paying customers in the mid2020s, the company said.