Supersonic is coming back. Will the airlines buy it?

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 45seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (1,451 mph), faster than the defunct Concorde and certainly faster than the standard 550 mph, with fares no more expensive than a current business-class round trip, which ranges between US$5,000 and US$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.

Boom is likely to encounter deep scepticism in a conservative industry that still relies heavily on a fundamental airplane design devised 70 years ago.

“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?”

Boom touts its design as a radical update of the Concorde .

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 summarising 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 US$15,000 to US$20,000 in current dollars.

Boom says it plans to address all of these shortcomings.

— Bloomberg photo by Peter Foley The Concorde takes off at sunrise from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on its last flight on Oct O4, O003, ending the supersonic era for all but military pilots. It landed at London’s Heathrow airport.