SUPERSONIC FLIGHT
Startup company hopes to bring jet travel into the mainstream at business-class prices,
Ask a harried air traveller about the basics of modern flight and you’ll probably elicit surprise when they discover commercial airplanes fly only as fast as they did in the 1950s.
Given the range of aerospace advances in the past half-century, plus the technological leaps in almost every other area of human endeavour, it seems reasonable to ask: Why can’t we fly faster?
That’s the question driving a startup called Boom Technology, which says it’s time to bring supersonic jet travel into the mainstream — in a modern way. The company is pursuing speed with an audacious idea: a 45-seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (about 2,716 kilometres per hour), faster than the defunct Concorde and certainly faster than the standard 885 kilometres per hour, with fares no more expensive than a current business-class round trip, which ranges between $5,000 and $10,000.
Yet long before travellers can marvel at a quick hop across the Atlantic, Boom will need to sell the airlines not just on a technically disruptive aircraft, but also on one that can accomplish such feats of velocity costeffectively. It must earn a solid profit — no middling returns allowed — and this, of course, has been a key reason the Concorde was an aberration rather than the harbinger of universal supersonic travel.
Boom is likely to encounter deep skepticism in a conservative industry that still relies heavily on a fundamental airplane design devised 70 years ago. The major global airlines Boom will court operate with two cardinal maxims: It’s really hard to make money with small airplanes and it’s really, really hard to make money with supersonic airplanes, which are renowned for their fuel inefficiency.
“I have no problem seeing the demand for this airplane,” says Marty St. George, a JetBlue Airways Corp. executive and industry veteran. “The issue is, can you do it and make the numbers work?” Radical update of the Concorde Boom will face a numerical gauntlet as it seeks to sell airlines on the advantages of a small, supersonic craft, with airlines posing tough questions about weight, range, fuel burn, main- tenance, dispatch reliability and dozens of other issues.
In response to skeptics, Boom touts its design as a radical update of the troubled Concorde, which was operated by only two airlines over 27 years. Airlines no longer abide such loud, kerosene-gulping equipment, which means new engine designs must be fuel-efficient and coupled with meagre emissions and low noise.
Boom has diagnosed Concorde’s operating flaws as twofold.
First, the plane had ferociously high operating costs, driven primarily by its voracious appetite for jet fuel. “Grossly uneconomic,” in the words of a 1978 New York Times article summarizing critiques of the aircraft.
Second, the Concorde’s load factors were generally lean because of the steep fares Air France and British Airways were forced to charge, typically around $15,000 to $20,000 in current dollars.
Boom says it plans to address all of these shortcomings. The startup’s signature city pairing is New York to London, which would take little more than three hours to fly and give a corporate traveller the opportunity to make a day trip across the pond and back.
“It’s about making the economics work and then delivering the aircraft we say we can deliver,” says Boom’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Blake Scholl, a pilot and former app developer.
Boom has already struck a deal with the Spaceship Co., the manufacturing division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, to use that company’s engineering, design and flighttest support services. The Spaceship Co. also has options for Boom’s first 10 aircraft as part of the arrangement.
Another unidentified European airline has taken options for 15 aircraft, Scholl says, and Boom is talking to carriers about options for an additional 170 aircraft.