Tag: Flight

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The return of supersonic travel has been remarkably slow for something faster than the speed of sound, but a major milestone is set to be hit on January 28.

Boom Supersonic, the American company building what promises to be the world’s fastest airliner, is preparing to break the sound barrier for the first time with a test flight at 7.45 a.m. local time in Mojave, California.

The XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, which has completed 11 successful test flights since it first took to the air in March 2024, is the precursor to the development of Boom’s supersonic commercial airliner, Overture.

The hotly anticipated plane already has 130 orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines.

A livestream will record what should be a historic moment for the first civil supersonic jet built in America and the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet.

The aircraft, which is usually flown by Boom’s chief test pilot Tristan “Gepetto” Brandenburg, will — if all goes to plan — accelerate to Mach 1.1 (around 844 miles per hour / 1,358 kilometers per hour) after reaching target altitude.

The fastest speed the XB-1 has reached so far is Mach 0.95, just below the supersonic threshold of Mach 1, which it hit during its last test flight on January 10.

When the XB-1 takes off from the Mojave Air and Space Port it will be in the same historic airspace where legendary pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time in 1947.

It’s now almost 55 years since the 002 prototype for Concorde first flew at Mach 1 on March 25, 1970, and more than 21 years since commercial supersonic travel ended with the Anglo-French airliner’s final flight in November 2023.

There have been several challengers in the supersonic space while the remaining Concordes gather dust at museums in the UK, US and France, but so far no one has succeeded.

Boom Supersonic’s ambitions remain high. CEO Blake Scholl told CNN last year that he expects supersonic planes to replace conventional airliners in our lifetime.

“I very much believe in the return of supersonic air travel, and ultimately to bring it to every passenger on every route. And that’s not something that takes place overnight,” he said in March 2024.

Boom’s plan is that Overture will be in operation before the end of the decade, carrying 64 to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7, about twice the speed of today’s subsonic airliners.

Back when CNN Travel spoke with Scholl in May 2021, he told us his dream was for people to one day be able to “fly anywhere in the world in four hours for $100.” In 2024, he confirmed that was still his “north star.”

The company’s plan is for Overture to one day operate on more than 600 routes worldwide.

“A faster airplane is much more human-efficient, and it’s much more capital-efficient. You can do more flights, with the same airplane and crew,” Scholl said.

“We can significantly reduce all of the cost and impact that goes into airplanes by making them faster. if we have faster airplanes, we don’t need as many.”

The XB-1 test craft has been used to prove new technologies developed by Boom Supersonic.

Like Concorde, the XB-1 and Overture both have a long nose and a high angle of attack for takeoff and landing, which interrupts the pilots’ view of the runway.

While Concorde dealt with this by having a moveable droop nose, Boom’s augmented reality vision system enables excellent runway visibility for the pilots without that extra weight and complexity.

“The advent of digital engineering is a huge enabler for why supersonic flight’s coming back,” Scholl told CNN in 2024. “Aerodynamics, materials, propulsion: Those are the big three areas where we’ve made huge progress versus Concorde.”

Back in the 1960s, Concorde was developed in wind tunnels, which meant building costly physical models, running tests, then repeating.

“You just can’t test very many designs, when every iteration costs millions and takes months,” explains Scholl. But Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel. We can run the equivalent of hundreds of wind tunnel tests overnight in simulation for a fraction of the cost of a real wind tunnel test.”

XB-1 is made almost entirely from carbon fiber composites, selected for being both strong and lightweight.

Overture is designed to be powered by conventional jet engines and to run on up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

We’ve covered the so-far slow adoption of SAF before here on CNN Travel, and Scholl told CNN last year that he was well aware of its current problems.

“There’s not enough of it, and it costs too much, but it is scaling,” he said, but he reckoned that one day it’ll be used for all long-haul air travel. It’s the “future of aviation,” he declared.

Construction was completed last year on Boom’s Overture Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s been designed to scale to produce 66 Overture aircraft per year.