After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems.
But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to The Guardian, Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City.
The agreement brings Branson's Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin's base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom.
It's an interesting arrangement that further expands the activities of Virgin Galactic, which is trying to find new ways to put people and satellites into space. The company recently debuted the second version of its spaceship, VSS Unity, that it hopes will one day fly customers paying $250,000 into space for a brief weightless experience. Virgin Galactic also has begun modifying a Boeing 747-400 aircraft it intends to use to boost small satellites weighting up to 450kg into orbit, perhaps before the end of 2017.
Now the company will move into supersonic territory with Boom, which is located in a hangar just south of Denver at Centennial Airport. On the company's web site, Boom says its aircraft will travel at Mach 2.2—faster than the Mach 2.0 of the Concorde and far faster than the Mach 0.85 of many commercial airliners. A $5,000 round trip will take just 3.4 hours, the company says, cutting the seven-hour travel time between London and New York by more than half.
"At Mach 2.2, you don't merely save hours," the company advertises, on its site. "You can travel across the Atlantic or Pacific, get business done, and be home the same day. Spend more nights at home."
Former astronaut Mark Kelly has signed on to Boom's leadership team.
The Virgin Group spokeswoman said the partnership remains in its "early days," although Boom says it could begin test flights at the end of next year. The new partnership gives Branson's Virgin Galactic three areas in which it is now pushing modern flight: launching passengers into space, using a former commercial airplane to launch rockets into space, and now shuttling people across the Atlantic while breaking the sound barrier. It is not clear whether any of these ventures will prove profitable, but there is certainly no lack of ambition.
And despite the failure of the Concorde, Virgin and Boom are not alone in seeing the potential for commercial value in supersonic flight. In President Obama's latest budget request for NASA he has sought an increase of $3.7 billion over the next decade for aeronautics, with the enabling of supersonic flight as one of the program's flagship goals.
In an interview with Ars last month, Jaiwon Shin, the associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, said one of the biggest barriers to viability is a complete ban by the Federal Aviation Administration and other international flight agencies on supersonic flight over land due to sonic boom issues.
However, Shin said, NASA has developed designs that break one big shockwave into several smaller shocks as the aircraft passes through the sonic barrier. If Congress grants the funding NASA has requested, the agency will build prototypes to fly over developed areas. Much of that testing could be done from Edwards Air Force Base, near Mojave, where Virgin will be working on developing the Boom aircraft.
