why did supersonic travel fail

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Concorde: The real reason why the supersonic passenger jet failed

Why did the concorde, one of the greatest supersonic aircraft ever designed and built, touch down for the last time in 2003.

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In 2003, three years after the crash of Air France Flight 4590, one of the greatest aircraft ever designed and built touched down for the last time. After 27 years of service, the world’s most famous aircraft, the Concorde, was retired. Air France was the first to ground their Concorde followed quickly by British Airways, putting an end to supersonic passenger flight, at least for the time being .

To some, it was a graceful and beautiful aircraft, to others, it was a noisy, polluting chunk of aluminum. The real question, though, is whether it was a great plane and whether it was grounded by politics and fears over its safety or because it was an expensive luxury for the super-rich.

Concorde: A great airplane

Technically speaking, there can be no doubt that the Concorde was a revolutionary aircraft.

Eduard Marmet/Wikimedia Commons  

As a joint program between the United Kingdom and France, it was well ahead of its time in many ways. It was the first aircraft to have computer-controlled engine air intakes, a very significant leap in aviation at the time. This allowed the plane to slow the air flowing into its engines down to 1,000 mph in as little space as 4.5 meters. The designers weren’t just showing off as this prevented the engines from exploding.

The Concorde aircraft featured carbon-fiber brakes and fly-by-wire controls. This might not sound impressive as they are the norm today, but during the 1960s this was a technological marvel and decades ahead of Airbus who made this technology mainstream.

Concorde aircraft’s signature feature, apart from the wings, is probably its long, drooping nose. This innovation allowed the aircraft to be streamlined during the flight but could be dropped lower to give the pilot a good field of vision during takeoff and landing. This interesting design feature made the Concorde airplane and its company instantly popular among the media and passengers.

With all these improvements you were able to fly long distances in half the usual time. Soon enough, passengers started to visit New York and other places across the Atlantic Ocean in larger numbers, traveling at twice the speed of sound (2.04 Mach).

Selected events in Concorde’s history

Concorde’s history begins in 1962 when France’s Geoffroy de Courcel and UK’s Julian Amery signed the Anglo-French supersonic airliner treaty. Seven years later Brian Trubshaw made his first flight in the British-built prototype. The same year the Concorde’s first supersonic flight takes place 1st October 1969. 

The Concorde’s first commercial flights take place on the 21st of January 1976, when the British Airways Concorde flew from London to Bahrain and Air France’s Concorde flew from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. Between 1976 and 2000, the Concorde continued to service the wealthy traveler and the aircraft fanatic alike, until a tragic crash in Paris in 2000 kills 113 people. 

The Concorde returned to active service in November of 2001, after £71 million was spent on safety improvements, but just two years later, in 2003, British Airways and Air France announced that they were retiring the Concorde. The final flight of the Concorde occurred in October 2003.

Why was Concorde retired?

Despite its innovations, the Concorde wasn’t a monument to efficiency. The Concorde was designed well before the oil-price shock of the 1970s, so even though it was a masterpiece in engineering, it was effectively a fuel-to-speed converter. Its high energy consumption simply made it unprofitable in an era of high fuel prices.

The Concorde put prestige over efficiency, a principle that was possible in an era when passengers were willing to pay for it. From a modern-day business point of view, the whole project should probably have been grounded well before the 1980s.

The Concorde could barely fly from the UK to US East Coast, indeed it lacked the range to make it the US West Coast. The aircraft had a total passenger capacity of 100 but consumed the same amount of fuel as a Boeing 747, while the 747 could fly twice as far and had four times the passenger capacity. The Concorde was also incredibly noisy.You may think that the crash in 2000 was the reason for the Concorde’s retirement, but in reality, Air France and British Airways were already planning to phase it out of service. 

Loved By Many 

For some though, the grounding of the Concorde was a tragedy. Ben Lord of the Save Concorde Group said, “It was probably more advanced than Apollo 11, which put the first men on the Moon.” 

The longest-serving Concorde pilot Jock Lowe, also the former president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, said “No military plane came anywhere close. It was so maneuverable and there was so much spare power, even ex-fighter pilots weren’t used to it.” 

“The time we took it to the Toronto International Airshow, 750,000 people turned out to watch. I’ll never forget that sight.”

Lowe recalled a time when air traffic controllers instructed the pilots of an SR71 Blackbird, a high-altitude spy plane, to get out of the way because a Concorde was coming through for a landing. The two spacesuit-clad pilots were made to give way to a passenger jet full of celebrities and champagne-sipping businessmen. Such was the esteem given to the Concorde, a plane that had fewer pilots than the United States has had astronauts.

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The inefficiency of the Concorde was ultimately responsible for its grounding, though the shaken consumer confidence after the Paris crash in 2000 didn’t help. This doesn’t change the fact that the Concorde was a fantastic feat of engineering, designed in and built for a less cost-conscious era. Its focus on speed, glamour, and luxury was both its great strength but also its downfall. Will it ever fly again or will it remain an exhibit in an airport museum? Only time will tell .

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Why the Concorde (And Supersonic Flight) Never Took Off

By jake rossen | dec 27, 2017.

It had been an ambition of British and French aviation experts since the mid-1950s: What if they could design and build a commercial aircraft that could travel at up to twice the speed of sound, ferrying passengers from one corner of the world to another in less than half the time of conventional jets? Was there enough money, know-how, and government interest to facilitate such a project? And if there was, would it ever get off the ground?

The answer came on November 4, 1970, when test pilot Andre Turcat flew  the plane—dubbed the Concorde—over the Atlantic and achieved speeds of 1320 miles per hour. British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) and France’s Sud-Aviation, the two companies investing heavily in the technology, were convinced passengers from all over the world would soon be streaking through the skies and making record times during air commutes. Turcat might be the passenger plane’s equivalent of Neil Armstrong, guiding mankind into an unlikely new frontier in the stratosphere.

The Concorde would eventually become a commercial plane, holding up to 100 passengers at a time and moving so quickly that people departing London’s Heathrow Airport at 9 a.m. would arrive in New York City at 7 a.m. But instead of being the next evolution of air travel, the model would become an untenable nuisance, crippled by complaints from environmentalists and burdened by seemingly incalculable expenses. By 2003, all 14 operating planes would be permanently grounded—long doomed, naysayers said, before they ever got off the ground.

The excitement over supersonic air travel had its roots in the 1950s, when the British aircraft industry came to a sobering conclusion about the burgeoning airline business. Having been relegated to manufacturing cargo and combat planes during World War II, the UK had no firm footing when the war’s end brought about a surging interest in air travel. It was the United States that had been experimenting with passenger planes, and it was the U.S. that had the market on subsonic travel cornered.

Rather than try to compete, British and French engineers decided to create an entirely new category. Fighter planes that had recently broken the sound barrier provided hope that passenger models could do the same. In creating the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee, or STAC, the British imagined a future where they could sell 150 to 500 supersonic planes to airlines by the 1970s.

As space exploration had already proven, that kind of ambition came with a hefty price tag. STAC was able to successfully interest France enough to enter a partnership to develop the planes in 1960, with the first prototype ready in 1968. In between, the cost to develop and refine the project reached a reported $2.3 billion (although some economists declared it might have been three times as much).

Throughout that period, the Concorde suffered from wavering support from both governments. In 1964, Prime Minister Harold Wilson nearly ceased development before being threatened with a lawsuit by supporter Charles de Gaulle. Supporters believed the U.S.’s flourishing air travel industry would demand Concordes in their fleet in order to not be left behind.

Instead, the Concorde was met with outright opposition. After the first passenger flight was completed from London to Bahrain in January 1976, the U.S. allowed for a 16-month trial at Washington’s Dulles Airport, but New York City's JFK Airport begged off entirely. (They relented in 1977.) The hesitancy stemmed from concerns over both noise pollution and environmental consequences. Producing a sonic boom at airports near residential areas annoyed residents; the 100 tons of fuel burned from New York to London was thought to exhaust dangerous emissions that could threaten the ozone layer. Some incoming flights were met with protestors with signs reading “Ban the Boom.” Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh spoke out against supersonic travel, citing these hypothetical dangers. Meanwhile, major airlines like TWA and Pan Am turned away, believing the cost-to-profit ratio would never be worth the effort. Only Air France and British Airways wound up buying the plane, purchasing seven each.

What kept the Concorde aloft despite operating at a loss for the first six years was business travelers. Often in higher income brackets and charging company accounts, they were willing to pay steep ticket prices (a round-trip ticket could cost more than $5000 in the 1980s, $1200 more than a subsonic flight) in order to cut their commuting time in half or more. A meeting in Tokyo for people departing from San Francisco could be scheduled six hours from take-off; getting to Australia from Los Angeles took just seven hours. A standard 737 traveled at 485 miles per hour; the Concorde eventually crept up to 1495 miles per hour, close to the speed of a bullet .

Strangely, the Concorde didn’t indulge these customers with an abundance of luxury. Cabins on the model were said to be cramped, with hand-sized windows and uncomfortable seats. Engineers had built the plane to travel at incredible speed and worried about how to accommodate passengers later, not the other way around. The craft took off at a steep incline, and travelers felt like they were in a rocketing dental chair.

By the 1980s, it was becoming clear that business would never climb to heights that could possibly underwrite the massive expenditure of both governments. While the Concorde began showing a profit, it was due in some part to political sleight of hand: British government employees were required to fly at supersonic speeds, underwriting their own investment.

Despite being called a failure as early as 1986, the Concorde’s 14-plane fleet hung on until 2000. That year, a Concorde crash that killed 113 passengers led to all of the planes being grounded for a year until the cause was determined. (It was eventually determined that an errant piece of metal punctured the fuel tank, and ignited a fire.) Once flights resumed, the pall cast by 9/11 over the entire airline industry proved to be a crippling blow. The Concorde was retired permanently in 2003. Many of the aircraft ended up in museums.

For the most part, consumers invite technological advances, and it’s bizarre to think the airline industry failed to capitalize on a plane that could cut travel times in half. But the consumer has to sense a perceived benefit, and it didn’t seem as though enough travelers considered the additional cost to be worth the time saved.

Currently, companies like the Denver-based Boom are experimenting with supersonic planes that can be built more affordably with reduced noise levels; Boom expects their model to be airborne in 2018, with commercial service opening up by 2023. Whether it can improve on the Concorde’s track record remains to be seen. Despite radical innovations across the spectrum of technology, supersonic flight couldn't be moving slower.

Supersonic flights are set to return – here’s how they can succeed where Concorde failed

Senior Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering, University of Hertfordshire

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Peter Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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United Airlines has announced it will purchase up to 50 Boom Overture supersonic jets for commercial use by 2029, heralding the return of supersonic passenger flights nearly 20 years after the Concorde was decommissioned .

You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here .

Supersonic planes halve the time it takes to fly from New York to London, from seven hours down to 3.5 hours, but such airliners were abandoned following Concorde’s final flight in 2003. Concorde had become financially unworkable after a high-profile crash in 2000, combined with excessive ticket prices, high fuel consumption, and increasingly high maintenance costs.

If Boom’s supersonic aircraft is to succeed, it will depend on overcoming these issues that derailed Concorde. So can it be done?

Breaking the sound barrier

Supersonic flights are so called because they travel faster than the speed of sound . To do this, the aircraft must break through the sound barrier, which requires an efficient aerodynamic design to reduce drag, and considerable thrust from powerful engines to overcome the turbulence caused by shock waves.

Breaking the sound barrier also requires engines which burn through lots of jet fuel – one of Concorde’s key drawbacks and something that’s only become more contentious in recent years. You’d therefore expect Boom, which is in the prototype stage of developing the Overture, to concentrate its designs on increasing fuel efficiency.

The Colorado-based company is likely to choose between a turbojet and turbofan engine. A turbojet produces all of its thrust from its exhaust gas when it is moving at faster speeds. A turbofan engine, meanwhile, derives most of its thrust from the amount of the air it accelerates with its fan blades. The amount of this air defines the engine’s “bypass ratio”.

Higher bypass ratio turbofan engines are more fuel efficient than turbojets. Their lower exhaust speed makes them quieter, but they tend to be larger, resulting in higher drag at supersonic speeds. This drag penalty has outweighed the efficiency of turbofans for prolonged supersonic flight in the past.

A good compromise might be a low bypass turbofan with an afterburner, which injects additional fuel to significantly increase the available thrust, and is commonly used on military jets. Such an engine was used in early production versions of another supersonic passenger jet, the Russian Tupelov Tu-144 , but was too inefficient because it needed to keep firing its afterburners to maintain supersonic cruise.

The Tu-144’s afterburner also contributed to a very noisy cabin, humming loudly at 90 decibels – roughly the sound generated by a hairdryer – which exceeds regulatory safety limits. The Concorde’s turbojets, meanwhile, only needed afterburners at take-off and to break through the sound barrier, improving its fuel economy and lowering cabin noise while supercruising.

Supersonic jet noise

Due to the noise they generate, supersonic jets aren’t allowed to fly over land. But these restrictions could be lifted with refined aerodynamic design. For example, research by Nasa on its X-59 QueSST programme hopes to produce optimised airframe shapes which could significantly reduce overland sonic booms to a much quieter “thud” – coming in at 75 decibels rather than the Concorde’s 105 decibel boom.

Getting the aerodynamics right could also open up the possibility of using modern, lightweight composite materials to enable better thrust-to-weight ratios – perhaps eliminating the need for afterburners at take-off.

Substantial developments in computational fluid dynamics software and other simulation programmes since the 1970s will be crucial in evaluating these designs and getting them certified to Boom’s tight production deadlines.

Sustainable aviation fuel

Boom is also promoting its aircraft’s green credentials. Part of the United deal involves collaborative development in establishing a reliable supply of sustainable aviation fuel . This will ultimately benefit other aircraft in United’s fleet and the industry at large, which currently produces around 2.8% of all global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

Read more: How a 1940s treaty set airlines on a path to high emissions and low regulation

Sustainable aviation fuels include biofuels and synthetic kerosine that are manufactured using renewable and sustainable materials. An impressive 80% reduction in lifecycle CO₂ emissions is often quoted. The key word here though is “lifecycle”; it doesn’t necessarily mean less harmful emissions from the engine.

These sustainable fuels are compatible with conventional jet fuel, which means no changes to airport fuelling infrastructure or engine design will be needed for them to be introduced – a critical factor in their uptake. But these fuels are very expensive, because the raw materials needed to make them aren’t available at scale. The total amount of sustainable aviation fuel currently being used amounts to just 0.1% of the total fuel spent in the air. Projections estimate this needs to reach somewhere between 1.4% and 3.7% before such fuels become economically viable.

A return to supersonic flights?

Boom will be optimistic that it can overcome fuel efficiency challenges by the time its aircraft begins carrying fare-paying passengers in 2029. Those fares look set to be high, with Boom anticipating a £3,500 price tag per seat. In 1996, British Airways charged around £5,350 – £8,800 in today’s prices – for round-trip tickets from New York to London.

This means that, like Concorde before it, the Boom Overture looks aimed at the luxury market – beyond the reach of even business class passengers. It is likely to be frequented only by those who currently travel via private jet, who may be enticed by Boom’s claims to be a sustainable aircraft manufacturer.

So, while supersonic passenger jets may return to our skies by the end of the decade, the closest most of us will get to experiencing them will be when they unleash their characteristic sonic booms above our heads.

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Why the Concorde Supersonic Jet was Grounded: The Demise of an Aviation Dream

• by history tools
• November 19, 2023

The Concorde was a beautiful, pioneering aircraft that captured imaginations worldwide. But this supersonic jet was ultimately grounded not by engineering limits, but by harsh economic realities. This is the story of how this iconic plane rose to prominence and why it could not defy gravity indefinitely.

The Origins of the Concorde Dream

To understand how the Concorde came to be requires looking back to the postwar years when aviation technology was advancing rapidly. The Americans, British, French, and Soviets were all intent on pushing the boundaries of flight. National pride was tied up in going faster and farther.

In this ambitious environment, Britain and France independently began researching supersonic transport (SST) designs in the 1950s. Neither wanted to be left behind in the high-stakes aviation technology race. However, developing an SST was extremely expensive.

After years of parallel work, the British and French governments realized collaboration could share the substantial financial risks. This led to the signing of a treaty in November 1962 to jointly pursue an Anglo-French SST. Sud Aviation and the Bristol Aeroplane Company were handed design duties.

Given the long history of animosity between the two nations, this collaboration was groundbreaking. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan hailed it as “a great day in the history of international collaboration.” They named the plane “Concorde” meaning “harmony” to symbolize this new spirit of unity.

Pushing the Boundaries with the Concorde‘s Design

Several key innovations in the Concorde‘s design were required to achieve efficient supersonic flight:

• Aerodynamic shape: The graceful delta wing shape reduced drag at high speeds. The droop nose provided visibility during takeoff and landing.
• Engines: Four powerful Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus engines with reheat (afterburning) provided the massive thrust needed to accelerate past Mach 1.
• Materials: Parts were made from advanced aluminum alloys to withstand the significant heating effects of sustained supersonic flight through the atmosphere.
• Height: By cruising at 60,000 ft compared to 30-40,000 ft for conventional jets, the Concorde experienced less drag and enabled passengers brief views of the curved Earth.

The end result of years of research was an aircraft that could maintain supersonic cruising for hours. Crossing the Atlantic took just 3.5 hours compared to 8+ hours on regular jets.

But as we‘ll see, the Concorde was a masterpiece of engineering rather than business.

The Steep Costs of Supersonic Speed

The Concorde was not economically viable largely due to its extremely high costs:

• Development costs: The project burned through over $1.3 billion by the time the Concorde entered service in 1976, with overruns. And with only 20 aircraft produced, costs per plane were massive.
• Operating costs: Maintaining the specialized engines, heat-resistant materials, and avionics was incredibly expensive, as was accommodating the noise abatement and airport modifications needed. Fuel consumption was also astronomical.

Trying to recoup these investments by selling 100-200 supersonically priced tickets per Concorde flight was a losing game.

Waning Public Interest After Early Buzz

When the Concorde first entered service in 1976, it generated substantial buzz and interest from the public and media. British Airways and Air France had no problem filling the plane‘s small capacity.

But over time, several factors eroded public demand:

• The novelty wore off after the initial hype. Business travelers chose comfort over pure speed.
• Competition emerged from long-range jets like the Boeing 747 and Airbus A340 with more spacious cabins.
• An Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, killing 113 people. This accident tarnished its perceived safety.
• By 2003, passenger loads dropped below 50%, rendering it unprofitable.

Banned from Flying Supersonic Over Land

Due to the distracting and potentially damaging sonic booms produced when flying above Mach 1, Concorde faced bans on supersonic flight over land in the U.S. and many other countries. This prevented more direct and lucrative routes like New York to Los Angeles over the continental interior.

The sonic boom restrictions forced the Concorde to fly subsonic over land, eliminating its speed advantage on many routes. This reduced its competitiveness further.

A Short Operational Tenure

The Concorde entered service with great fanfare in 1976 with British Airways and Air France as the sole operators. For the next 27 years it awed passengers and onlookers with its distinctive visage and thunderous takeoffs.

But by 2003, with losses mounting, both airlines decided to permanently ground their Concordes. The planes made their final farewell flights that October, marking the end of routine supersonic travel.

This early retirement meant the substantial investments made could never be fully recouped, sealing its ultimate economic failure.

What‘s Concorde‘s Legacy?

So was the Concorde a mere financial bust? Or did it push aviation technology forward in a meaningful way? The reality is complex.

On one hand, it demonstrated that routine supersonic flight was technologically feasible. It also showcased impressive European cooperation on a cutting-edge engineering project.

However, its high costs, small fleet, and brief tenure limited its overall impact. While it holds a special place in aviation lore, economically it was a failure.

The dream of 2-hour transatlantic flights remains alive today with various SST concepts under study. Perhaps with advances in materials, noise reduction, and propulsion, a viable successor to the Concorde will yet emerge. But its history teaches us that bold technology alone is not enough. The business case matters just as much.

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Future of Transportation

Can Supersonic Air Travel Fly Again?

The key to its revival may be a breakthrough in creating a quieter sonic boom. The challenges, though, are significant.

By Roy Furchgott

This article is part of our series on the Future of Transportation , which is exploring innovations and challenges that affect how we move about the world.

Despite the promise of two-hour flights from New York to Los Angeles, the supersonic airline industry never really got off the ground. That is largely because of physics: specifically, the sonic boom, the thunderclap noise made when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier (and continues as the aircraft flies beyond the barrier), which essentially doomed supersonic aviation as a viable business.

In 1960s-era tests, booms reportedly broke windows, cracked plaster and knocked knickknacks from shelves; in 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration forbade civilian supersonic aircraft from flying over land. Planes could go supersonic only over the ocean — most famously, the Concorde, the sleek British-French passenger plane that flew a handful of routes in less than half the average time. But potentially lucrative overland routes were off limits, restricting supersonic travel’s business prospects.

NASA and aviation entrepreneurs, however, are working to change that, with new aircraft designed to turn the boom into a “sonic thump” that is no louder than a car door that is being slammed 20 feet away. That may induce the F.A.A. to lift the ban, which could allow for two-hour coast-to-coast supersonic flights.

“The main reason NASA is working on this is to enable regulation for supersonic flight,” said Craig Nickol, NASA’s low-boom flight demonstration project manager. “The main objective is to open up new markets.”

The supersonic age dawned on Oct. 14, 1947, when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier while piloting the rocket-powered Bell X-1 over the Mojave Desert. In the following decades, the barrier was also broken by a succession of military jets, once by a passenger airliner (during a test flight of a Douglas DC-8 in 1961 ) and, ultimately, by regular commercial service from the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 and the Concorde, both long defunct.

The far more successful Concorde mostly traveled trans-Atlantic routes at about $6,000 to $7,000 per ticket for a three-and-a-half-hour flight in a cramped, noisy cabin, which was nonetheless considered glamorous. The Champagne-and-caviar flights were discontinued in 2003 after 27 years of intermittent profitability and one crash that killed 113 people. What the Concorde’s chief pilot called “the airliner of the future” was consigned to the past.

But the possibility of a supersonic renaissance was arriving even as the Concorde was on its way out. The slide rules and log tables used to design it had been pushed aside by supercomputers, which enabled engineers to test and tweak virtual aircraft designs comparatively cheaply and quickly.

That is exactly what Darpa, the research and development wing of the U.S. Defense Department, and NASA did in 2003 with the Shaped Sonic Boom Experiment, which confirmed that computer-designed modifications to a Northrop F-5E jet would hush the sonic boom in the way the software forecasted. “We flew it and measured it, and our model predicted the boom very well.,” Mr. Nickol said. “It was the first time we could prove that we could shape the sonic boom in a way we could predict.” That demonstration set the course for research to follow.

Taming the boom is complicated. Air has substance, which an aircraft slices through, much as a boat moves through water. A plane pushes air aside as it flies, creating ripples of air pressure. As an aircraft approaches the speed of sound, pressure builds up on surfaces like the nose and tail, creating waves of high pressure in front and low pressure behind. At the speed of sound, waves pile up and combine to reach the ground as an abrupt change in pressure that is heard as that thunderclap sound.

“It’s the change in the pressure that makes the sound,” Alexandra Loubeau, a NASA acoustics engineer, said. And that boom happens not just when a plane first breaks through the sound barrier; it also trails the jet continuously, like a boat’s wake.

NASA research led to the X-59 QueSST (for Quiet Supersonic Technology), a needle-beaked aircraft with lift and control surfaces spread over the 100-foot fuselage, of which 33 feet are nose.

The shock waves of a sonic boom cannot be avoided completely, but by minimizing the surfaces where pressure builds up — like the air intake and control surfaces — and spreading them over the length of a fuselage, shock waves can be reduced, shaped and aimed. “You can modify the aircraft to alter what the wave looks like when it hits the ground,” Mr. Nickol said. “What we are doing is trying to spread those waves out and make them weaker.”

NASA is not alone in trying to re-establish supersonic travel. Blake Scholl, chief executive of the Denver-based company Boom Supersonic , has declared an audacious goal of delivering passengers anywhere in the world within four hours for $100. He said Boom would begin with international transoceanic supersonic service, so that it would not have to worry about noise or wait for regulation changes, although domestic routes would mean more passengers, giving the business “a huge boost, a factor of two- or three-times in opportunity,” he said.

Mr. Scholl added that he thought that just making faster aircraft would not create a sustainable supersonic business; planes must also be cheaper and eco-friendly. The effort “has to be 100 percent carbon-neutral,” he said.

In his view, speed, economy and reduced emissions can be achieved through cleaner fuels and new engines designed expressly for supersonic flight. This approach contrasts with that of the Concorde, which used “converted military engines that were super-inefficient and rip-roaring loud,” Mr. Scholl said. (There are no realistic estimates on how or when such engines will be available.)

These engines — as well as modern materials, building methods and efficiencies introduced since the 1970s supersonic vogue — would let Boom operate for 75 percent less than the Concorde, Mr. Scholl said, although he added that his goal was to be 95 percent less expensive. Even so, he estimated initial fares at about the cost of a business-class ticket. “Still a long way from $100,” he acknowledged.

A handful of companies have proposed private supersonic business jets to whisk international bankers, chief executives and hedge fund managers around the globe in swift, exclusive opulence. But despite the stated intentions of established players such as Gulfstream and credible upstarts like Spike Aerospace , private supersonic jets have yet to streak across the skies.

The chief barrier appears to be economic. It is the norm for aircraft to take longer and cost more to build than projected, and private supersonic jets are no exception.

NASA has government backing and shares much of its research so that any aerospace company can benefit from it, although it does not work with any specific airline or manufacturer. But without government financing, it is tougher for companies like Gulfstream and Boom. There is a cautionary tale in the experience of Aerion Supersonic, a company of aviation veterans that was underwritten by the billionaire Robert Bass, in partnership with Boeing, and that claimed preorders of $11.2 billion. Unable to raise enough cash to keep the doors open, Aerion shut down in May and is now being liquidated in a Florida court.

While supersonic travel would be a boon to international trade, there are too many unknowns to predict its viability as a business, said Bijan Vasigh, who teaches economics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Are there 50 people a day who want to fly to London?” he asked. “Do we know how much people are willing to pay?”

He added: “We do our best analysis, but everything in the future could change. The best economist cannot find the answer.”

Adam Pilarski, an aviation economist and consultant, agreed that the numbers were uncertain, but still expects to see supersonic aircraft produced, although not by a major aircraft manufacturer. “It will make all of their other planes obsolete,” he said.

Instead, he looks to a maverick outfit on the order of Elon Musk’s venture with Tesla or Space-X. “When Musk started going to space, who believed him? Nobody!” Mr. Pilarski said. “The C.P.A.-type thinks, ‘How much people will pay?’ Who cares?”

Although Mr. Pilarski predicts eventual success for a supersonic airline, he is reluctant to place any bets. “Will Blake Scholl make it?” he asked. “I don’t know, he is a nice boy. But would I put my money on it, and grandchildren’s education fund on it? No.”

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Behind the supersonic rise and fall of the Concorde, 15 years after its final flight

Now NASA and Lockheed Martin are trying to bring supersonic flight back to the masses.

By Stefanie Waldek | Published Oct 24, 2018 10:37 PM EDT

Here’s how the typical storyline of technology goes: something new is invented, then it becomes old, and then we replace it with a more advanced version. But in rare instances tech is so advanced that we’re not actually prepared to replace it by the time it ages out of fashion. Case in point: the Concorde. It was a plane ahead of its time—quite literally, as a flight from Paris or London to New York was so fast it’d actually land more than two hours before it took off: something that’s only possible today if you cross the International Date Line. The supersonic jet was supposed to usher in a new age of transportation, but just 27 years after its inaugural commercial flight the futuristic aircraft retired with no successor—15 years ago today, in fact—and supersonic passenger travel ceased to exist.

The reasons were manifold, but typically distilled into two major problems: the Concorde was not economical, and the sonic boom it produced was such a nuisance to people on the ground that it could only fly over water. The first and last generation of Concorde reached old age before anyone had managed to solve those problems, so nobody unveiled a shiny new model to replace it. But there’s hope on the horizon. In 2016, NASA announced a new program to develop a quieter supersonic aircraft and awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin, meaning that the general public may soon soar faster than the speed of sound once more.

A Supersonic Rise And Fall

After the Wright Brothers made the first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, aviation developed at an incredible pace. Within two decades WWI was taking warfare to the skies and commercial airlines were ferrying customers around the world. On October 14th, 1947, aviation took another big leap forward; test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier, achieving Mach 1 in the Bell X-1 rocket-powered aircraft, a collaborative project between the U.S. Air Force and National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA. But the X-1 itself was designed primarily for research, not commercial passengers. Soon supersonic military jets were on the rise, but like the X-1, they were sprinters: they could only fly at Mach 1 for a few seconds, perhaps a few minutes at most, before they ran out of fuel. While this worked for small aircraft performing sharp maneuvers, large commercial airliners—which often travel in straight lines or gentle curves—would need to cruise at supersonic speed for a much longer period of time.

The progression did, however, inspire the commercial aviation industry to look into the creation of supersonic transports (SSTs), or civilian supersonic aircraft. While the X-1 proved we had the right tools to fly at supersonic speeds, a few major details needed ironing out, like the capability to cruise above Mach 1 for the duration of a relatively long flight, as well as the economic viability of such a project. Multiple countries, including the U.S., started research in the 1950s, but a slew of difficulties facing SSTs during development meant that just three nations would go on to build and fly such crafts: the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union.

“The only European countries that had the interest, the technology, and the financing to design and build an SST were France and Great Britain,” says John Little, assistant curator at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. “They each wanted to develop an SST, but neither country could afford to do so on its own. So, somewhat reluctantly, France and Great Britain agreed to become partners and to develop an SST jointly.”

The U.S.S.R., on the other hand, was able to develop its Tupolev Tu-144 independently, though the airliner only made 55 passenger flights before the program was canceled due to high failure rate. (There was, for instance, a high-profile crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show.) The Concorde was by far the superior aircraft, making daily flights for nearly three decades.

Flying (And Spending) High

In order to make SST possible, Concorde engineers from the U.K.’s British Aircraft Corporation, France’s Aérospatiale, and the other companies contracted to work on portions of the aircraft (like Rolls-Royce, which designed the engines) had to develop new technologies or refine old ones, from the fly-by-wire controls in the cockpit (electronic interfaces versus analog ones) to heat-resistant tires to the elegant delta wing. “In my opinion, Concorde’s most innovative technology was the ability to cruise at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound,” says Little. “After a few minutes of supersonic flight, most military airplanes would run low on fuel. By contrast, Concorde could cruise at twice the speed of sound for over three hours.”

Airlines rushed to place Concorde orders years before the plane was even built—more than 70 aircraft were ordered by 16 companies. But as the Concorde’s development progressed, so did the project’s cost. “Cost overruns were tremendous, going from £70 million to £1.3 billion,” says Aero Consulting Experts CEO Ross “Rusty” Aimer, a former pilot (that’s about $91 million to $1.7 billion in 2018 USD). Then the Concorde ran into other unexpected problems—although its faster trips meant it used less fuel on a journey than standard aircraft, environmentalists protested the high rate of fuel consumption (approximately 6,700 gallons per hour, compared to the Boeing 747’s 3,600 gallons per hour), as well as the potential damage the Concorde’s pollutants might do to the ozone layer at its high cruising altitude of 60,000 feet. And what might have been the biggest blow to the airliner was the banning of flights over land by air transportation regulators due to the sonic boom, which followed the aircraft in a 16-mile-wide trail. Thus the Concorde was limited to routes over water, and given its flying range of approximately 4,500 miles, it could barely cross the Atlantic, much less the Pacific. “The original orders from airlines around the world started to drop like a bad run on banks,” Aimer notes. “British Airways and Air France were the only airlines forced to order a small number due to political pressure and national pride.”

Ultimately, only 20 Concordes were ever built, including six prototypes: just 14, seven each for British Airways and Air France, ever entered commercial service. Despite being plagued with problems over the course of its development, the aircraft was highly regarded as one of most beautiful in the world—as well as one of the safest—and its exclusivity due to limited seats and sky-high ticket prices (in today’s dollars, a round-trip flight on the Concorde could cost upwards of $20,000, compared to the $6,000 to $10,000 you’d spend flying first-class on a subsonic Air France jet in 2018) created great demand. A massive fan base of aviation enthusiasts and high-profile passengers like celebrities and politicians grew quickly, and ticket sales soared.

Flying aboard a Concorde was a luxurious experience, akin to flying first class on one of today’s airliners. The notoriously cramped and noisy cabins never stopped guests from enjoying their journey: they sipped Champagne from glass flutes, dined on three-course meals served by hand rather than trolley, and indulged in after-dinner drinks. “We were trained to be efficient and elegant,” says Air France head purser Alain Verschuere, who served as a flight attendant aboard Concorde from 1999 till its retirement in 2003. “Air France was famous for this kind of class. The service was very nice, as were our uniforms and the decor aboard. We were very proud to fly on this aircraft. Even nowadays, 15 years later, passengers on my flights always say to me, ‘You were so lucky to fly on the Concorde!’”

But all good things must come to an end. Between the Concorde’s first passenger flight in 1976 and its last flight in 2003, the airliner was dealt some difficult hands—this aside from its economical and auditory woes during its development phase.

In With A Boom, Out With A Whimper

“When Concorde was conceived in late 1950s and designed in the mid-1960s, oil was cheap, jet fuel cost just pennies per gallon, and nobody foresaw that price increasing. Then came the Oil Crisis of 1973-1974, which caused the price of oil, and everything that was derived from it, including jet fuel, to soar,” says Little. “An increase of even a penny per gallon could mean the difference between operating a flight at a profit or a loss, and no airliner was more-susceptible to fluctuations jet fuel pricing than Concorde, which burned about 2,000 pounds of fuel per passenger while flying across the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Even worse, as global business travel shifted toward Asia, Concorde became less competitive. Because it could not fly supersonically over land, it could not fly to Asia eastward from Paris or London, nor could it fly westward, as it did not have the range to cross the Pacific Ocean,” Little adds. “Thus, ironically, in the long-haul market, where supersonic flight makes the most sense economically, Concorde was a non-starter.”

Market issues aside, there was also the main problem that burdens any aircraft—time. The fleet aged, and maintenance was extremely costly. By the end of the 1990s, given fuel and maintenance costs, as well as limitations to the route, the aircraft’s fate was effectively sealed. Then there was the final blow: On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde bound for New York from Paris crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing everyone on board and several people on the ground. “Just one year later, the fleet was authorized to fly again, since we developed new technology that resolved the weaknesses that contributed to the crash,” says Jacques Rocca, Director of the Heritage Department at Airbus, which maintains most of the assets of the now defunct Aérospatiale. “But because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which happened during that year, less people were requesting to fly Concorde when it returned to service.”

The Concorde’s return was brief—the plane phased out of service in 2003, with the final flight taking place on October 24, ending the limited run of one of the most legendary aircraft in aviation history. “Essentially, the Concorde was more about technological prowess than economical reality,” says Aimer.

A Second Wind

There was no SST to replace the aged Concorde, so airline passengers have been cruising at subsonic speeds ever since. But 15 years later the world is more connected than ever, and there’s incredible demand for faster aircraft. “As Asia becomes increasingly central to the world’s economy, business travelers need a way to get to Asia quickly from Europe and the Americas,” says Little. “The first aircraft-maker that develops a hypersonic airliner [one that travels at Mach 5 or higher] that can fly between New York and Beijing in, say, three hours, will sell a lot of airplanes.”

Today, a number of companies are researching ways to resolve the Concorde’s shortcomings for both commercial airliners and business jets. “From an engineering standpoint, the big challenges will be to reduce the fuel burn, reduce the emissions, and reduce or eliminate the sonic boom—all will be extremely expensive to solve,” says Little. “For reducing fuel burn and emissions, the best option is to develop engines that do not require the burning of petroleum-based fuel. That option, however, will be risky for any manufacturer to undertake, and there is no guarantee of success.”

NASA is currently working with Lockheed Martin on an experimental aircraft, the X-59 QueSST, that will reduce the supersonic boom to a quiet thump. “It’s not about the specific material used, the level of attention to screws, bolts or seams. The most important aspect of the design is its shape—the outer mold line and what’s touching the air,” explains Erica Tierney, Program Communications and Media Relations at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. “The X-59’s long pointed noise, the sharply swept wings, and shape of the canards ensure the individual pressure waves, produced at speeds faster than Mach 1, never converge to cause a traditional sonic boom.”

The plane is currently under development with a delivery date in 2021. Once Lockheed Martin hands the completed aircraft over to NASA, the agency will fly the X-59 over U.S. cities to study the effect of the sonic thump on the general population.

“NASA will recruit members of the community to participate in surveys each day during flight testing to understand how they respond to the sounds of quiet supersonic overflight,” says Peter Coen, Commercial Supersonic Technology project manager at NASA. “The data from flight tests will be given to U.S. and international regulators for their use in considering new rules that would allow commercial supersonic flight over land.”

Should the Federal Aviation Administration lift the ban on supersonic travel over U.S. land for quieter SSTs, aircraft manufacturers could use similar tech to develop new supersonic planes.

“The X-59 will be a breakthrough for the aircraft and transportation industries,” says Tierney. “It will make possible an entirely new global aerospace market, enabling passengers around the world to travel anywhere in half the time it takes today.”

But will the return of SSTs be in the broader commercial space for all types of passengers? Perhaps not—experts suggest supersonic travel might go in the direction of private planes, also known as business jets. “The business jet market is rapidly spinning up,” says Dr. James Ladesic, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Associate Dean, Industry Relations and Outreach, College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle University. “SSTs are seen as having a niche that can work here, since business jets are generally smaller in passenger count and of significant price value in the market.”

Samme Chittum, author of Last Days of the Concorde: The Crash of Flight 4590 and the End of Supersonic Passenger Travel, agrees that the future is in business jets. “All current aerodynamic research indicates that the airframe of any quieter ‘boomless’ aircraft must have a small length-to-width ratio, much like an arrow—no wide-bodies need apply,” she says. “This narrow configuration is not amenable to carrying a lot of passengers to reduce passenger mile per gallon of fuel costs. If commercial supersonic aircraft do arrive, they will most likely be as small business planes for the super wealthy, not as bus transportation for the rest of us.”

NASA, however, hopes for a different outcome. “Our vision for the future supersonic flight is one in which the speed of travel benefits of aircraft like the Concorde are available broadly to the public,” says Coen. Should the X-59 be successful in its mission to reduce the sonic boom, we might all be flying faster than the speed of sound in no time.

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The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Concorde

Once a major advancement in aircraft technology, the Concorde jet was retired in 2003.

On November 22nd, 1977, the first commercial Concorde flight took off, allowing passengers to cross the Atlantic Ocean in little more than three hours, about half the time it took other airplanes. Concorde, the British/French-produced supersonic airplane, was meant to be a testament to the romance of air travel: a commercial airline that could zip passengers across continents. When the first prototype took off in 1969, television ratings for the event were surpassed only by the moon landing that year. But while Concorde invigorated the imagination of European air enthusiasts, it proved to more of a symbol than a practical machine.

It was a technological marvel, to be sure. Families would visit De Gaulle Airport in Paris just to watch the famous downturned-nose airplane land. French farmers would set their clocks to its punctual arrival, marked by a supersonic boom. New Yorkers would look up from their cars on the Belt Parkway near Kennedy Airport and marvel at its elegant, bird-like landing approach.

So why has Concorde been retired for nearly fifteen years?  Despite its homage to the romance of air travel, the plane was always plagued by obstacles . The plane was fragile, requiring 18 hours of maintenance for every hour it spent in the air; the time spent idle created economic burdens. It never became a vehicle for average air travelers, developing a reputation as a plaything for the wealthy, who paid nearly $10,000 per ticket. And yet despite the high cost of a ticket, the plane featured a spartan interior, with limited legroom and no space for amenities such as in-flight movies.

The project was also bogged down in politics and Anglo/French rivalries. Its very name symbolized agreement between two formerly great world powers, with the  “e” added at the end to respond to French language sensitivities. The joint French/British effort was intended to thrust the Old World into the new one of space age technology. But cooperation proved difficult. International rivalry created the need for two leaders of every aspect of the project, one each to represent British and French interests.

Additionally, the project ran into opposition from the nascent environmental movement. Concorde became a symbol of noise and exhaust pollution around airports (even while its defenders noted that the plane wasn’t much different in that regard than others). Because of its environmental noise issues, the plane was limited to landings in New York, Washington, London, and Paris.

But what ultimately brought Concorde down was economics. As oil prices took off, Concorde was able to carry only a quarter of the passenger load of other planes, while using as much fuel. Concorde, noted technology writer Guillame de Syon, became more of a status symbol than a business tool. In this way, it was similar to the zeppelin, which boosted German prestige after World War I yet never was able to realize commercial success after the disastrous Hindenburg explosion.

Already on shaky legs, the plane couldn’t survive the PR nightmare of the 2000 Concorde crash in France, which killed all on board, and the dip in international travel after the 9/11 attacks. The entire enterprise was mothballed in 2003.

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Inside the race to master supersonic air travel

Nearly 20 years after the Concorde jet failed, aircraft-makers are still trying to master high-speed flights. But can they?

When British Airways flew its supersonic Concorde jet for the last time nearly 20 years ago, the era of shuttling between New York and London in under four hours while indulging in champagne, caviar and lobster seemed to be gone forever.

Now, however, plane-makers and airlines are trying to revive that dream, and pouring millions into efforts to build better, cleaner and more cost-effective jets that can fly at supersonic speeds, meaning faster than the speed of sound. They are hoping to succeed by 2029, when travelers could fly business class between New York and London in just over three hours — for $5,000 to $10,000 round-trip.

But the race comes at a crucial moment. Airline revenue was decimated by the coronavirus pandemic, putting pressure on companies to find more revenue sources as they slowly recover . As climate change accelerates, carriers are facing pressure to expand their operations while keeping carbon emissions to a minimum.

Meanwhile, technical challenges remain. Jet engine technology, noise regulations and the shortage of clean and alternative aviation fuel will make it difficult for airlines to get government approvals on aircraft and keep ticket prices low, critics said. Bold corporate claims of bringing back supersonic travel will run headlong into scientific challenges for years to come, they added.

“These manufacturers are trying to reinvent supersonic aircraft,” said Dan Rutherford, director of the aviation program at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “But they can’t reinvent the science — and the science is actually pretty damning.”

Supersonic travel has captured the imagination of aviators for decades. In 1947, U.S. Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly at supersonic speeds, inspiring commercial aviation companies to follow suit. In 1962, the British and French governments signed a pact to develop a supersonic jetliner, called the Concorde.

In 1976, the Concorde made its commercial debut with two airlines — British Airways and Air France. Over the next two decades, the plane grew into a symbol of luxury life. Champagne, caviar, lobster and lamb were on the menu . Hollywood celebrities, athletes and business moguls were photographed boarding the plane. The jet would fly at 60,000 feet, getting passengers from New York to London in just around three hours, cutting travel time nearly in half.

Despite the glamour and speed, significant problems plagued the jet. It created a sonic boom that was so loud that airlines were able to fly above the speed of sound only over water. The jet consumed huge amounts of fuel, forcing ticket prices up; a round-trip airfare between New York and London cost $12,000 in the early 1990s.

The jet’s engines also were noisy, drawing anger from residents that lived near airports with Concorde jets. And in 2000, an Air France Concorde flight from Paris to New York burst into flames, crashing into a hotel shortly after takeoff and killing 113 people, creating an image problem that was hard to recover from.

“It was more expensive to run [and] too large to be economically viable,” said Iain Boyd, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “And then they had an unfortunate accident … and I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Since the Concorde’s last passenger flight in 2003, there had been little attempt to resuscitate the service, until recently.

Over the past decade, numerous start-ups have cropped up promising a better, more cost-effective supersonic jet for commercial air travel. Earlier this week , Canadian business jet manufacturer Bombardier announced it had successfully tested a smaller private jet at supersonic speeds, called the Global 8000. Cost: $78 million per jet.

Blake Scholl, the chief executive of Boom Supersonic, a Colorado-based company founded in 2014, said his company hopes to have a supersonic jet, called the Overture, in the skies by 2029. Later this year, the company will break ground on its production facility in North Carolina.

Scholl added that his company’s supersonic jet, which could seat 65 to 88 passengers and fly at just under twice the speed of sound, will cost airlines $200 million a piece. United Airlines has a firm order for 15 planes, he said, which could increase by up to 35 more. Japan Airlines has said it could purchase up to 20 aircraft, Scholl added.

He said that the company won’t replicate the failures of the Concorde for multiple reasons. Carbon fiber technology has improved since the 1960s, allowing the Overture to be lighter and more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. Software is better, allowing his team to build a more aerodynamic plane. And his company plans on using sustainable aviation fuel — which is an alternative fuel derived from plant waste and other organic matter — allowing Boom to be more environmentally conscious.

“All of that put together means that for Overture One, airlines will be profitable,” he said.

Mike Leskinen, president of United Airlines Ventures, said his company’s bet on supersonic travel will fill customer demand for high-speed business travel. It plans to put most of the planes on routes from Newark International Airport to London by the end of the decade, with possible legs to Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

United would configure the aircraft to seat around 80 or so passengers in business-class seats similar to the ones it has on longer domestic flights from Newark to Los Angeles, he said, rather than the lie-flat beds it has on international routes. Ticket prices would be roughly the same as a current business class fare, and hover around $5,000 to $10,000 for a round-trip itinerary, he said.

“You’ve got this convergence of technology,” Leskinen said, “that will allow us to make economic and profitable something that was not economic and profitable with the old technology.”

But some scientists and aerospace engineers are skeptical, pointing out that the claims plane-makers and airlines make sound promising, but are difficult to execute.

Boyd, of the University of Colorado, said noise will be the biggest challenge. He notes that sonic booms could be less of an issue because of advances NASA has made on muffling the sound, but planes will still be able to fly at their maximum speed only over water — making supersonic travel between cities in the United States difficult.

Meeting FAA and international noise regulations also will be difficult, he said. Supersonic aircraft require narrow, aerodynamic engines, experts said, but those are harder to keep quiet enough to meet government sound limits. Public debates on aircraft noise are also fraught with political issues, Boyd added.

“The inconvenience and discomfort of extra noisy aircraft just for a relatively small number of rich people, that doesn’t sound good,” he said. (Boom spokesperson Aubrey Scanlan said she’s “confident” the Overture will meet FAA noise regulations.)

And Rutherford, of the International Council on Clean Transportation, said fuel costs will make it tough for supersonic air travel to become a viable business. Supersonic aircraft will burn seven to nine times more fuel compared to normal “subsonic” aircraft, he said.

Rutherford added that companies like United and Boom are aware of that, and pledging to use sustainable aviation fuel. But the supply of sustainable fuel is limited and the cost is high — two to five times costlier than fossil jet fuel.

“That is honestly a dealbreaker, I would guess,” he said.

Why The Original Concorde Supersonic Jet Failed

Humanity's obsession with supersonic flight reached unfathomable heights when U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947. Onboard a Bell X-1 affectionately called Glamorous Glennis (named after Yeager's wife), Capt. Yeager dropped away from a B-29 at 25,000 feet and rocketed past 42,000 feet at Mach 1.06 (700 mph), earning him the distinction of being "The Fastest Man Alive."

By 1954, Arnold Hall, director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), asked aeronautical engineer Morien Morgan to form a committee and study the feasibility of supersonic transport (SST) . And in 1962, the United Kingdom and France signed a treaty to share the risks and costs of developing a supersonic commercial airplane. The Concorde was born in 1969 through a partnership with British Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, Aerospatiale, and SNECMA (Société Nationale d'Étude et de Construction de Moteurs d'Aviation), and commercial travel would never be the same again.

The Concorde performed its maiden voyage made on March 2, 1969. It achieved a maximum cruising speed of Mach 2 or 1,534 mph (2,469 kph), faster than the Earth spinning on its axis (roughly 1,000 mph). It made its first transatlantic flight from London's Heathrow and Orly airport outside Paris to Bahrain and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, in 1976, where both Concordes cruised at Mach 1.7 (1,350 mph).

Breaking the Sound Barrier

The Concorde is an engineering marvel, and it's also one of the prettiest aircraft to ever fly in the skies. It had a long and slender body to reduce drag and a revolutionary pair of " slender-delta wings ," a design that broke the doors open to achieving commercial supersonic flight. The Concorde's innovative droop nose system makes it look like a preying eagle swooping down its prey during landing.

It had four Olympus 593 Mrk610 turbojet engines (with afterburners) developed jointly by Rolls-Royce and SNECMA. Each engine pumped out a maximum of 38,050 pounds of thrust at takeoff, and the Concorde had a takeoff speed of 220 knots (250 mph) and a cruising speed of Mach 2.04 (1,350 mph). The Concorde flew so fast and high (up to 60,000 feet) that it succumbed to intense heat during supersonic flight, hot enough to physically stretch the aircraft from six to ten inches while in the air. And at 60,000 feet, Concorde passengers could see the curvature of the Earth while cruising at twice the sound barrier.

With its propensity for speed, the Concorde could carry up to 108 passengers from London to New York in 3.5 hours , a flight that usually took an average of eight hours in a commercial subsonic plane. In 1996, the Concorde set the record for the fastest flight by a commercial airline, zooming from New York to London in 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds, a record that stands to this day.

Why did the Concorde fail?

The Concorde's failure had nothing to do with its appetite for speed, but rather economic downturns and environmental concerns took a deep route south and never looked back. For starters, the Concorde was expensive to operate, and it consumed 22,629 liters of fuel per hour at full chat. In addition, the roundtrip ticket prices could cost $12,000 to $14,000, not something the average Joe could afford. Remember that a Boeing 747-400 could carry 400 passengers while only gulping an average of 14,400 liters of fuel per hour. By 1979, the assembly lines at Bristol, England, and Toulouse, France, were shut down as only nine Concordes were purchased by British Airways (five) and Air France (four), with five additional Concordes still searching for a home.

The Concorde was also noisy, and the sonic boom it produced when breaching the sound barrier was distressing to residential areas below it. In 1964, the U.S. Air Force and the Federal Aviation Agency (now called the Federal Aviation Administration) conducted the Oklahoma City sonic boom tests to "measure civilian responses to sonic booms." The FAA received 655 complaints from angry residents who dealt with severe nervousness, broken chinaware, cracked windows, and fallen mirrors within the first week of testing. The findings limited the Concorde's ability to fly over civilian-based routes and strictly limited supersonic flight above the oceans, which meant that a Concorde flight from New York to Los Angeles would never materialize.

The means to an end

The Concorde had its fair share of mishaps. An Air France Concorde crashed after taking off in Paris on July 25, 2000, the first crash in its history. Flight 4590 departed from DeGaulle airport for New York when one of the engines caught fire, causing it to plummet uncontrollably near a hotel in Gonnesse, France, killing all 109 passengers and four people on the ground.

The FAA grounded the Concorde until November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, cruel acts of terrorism that severely affected the airline industry. The Concorde made its last commercial passenger flight on October 24, 2003, from JFK airport in New York to London's Heathrow. It carried 100 passengers (mostly celebrities) who reportedly paid up to $60,000 for roundtrip tickets.

We may never see or witness another Concorde, but humanity's passion for supersonic flight could experience a resurgence. American company Boom Supersonic claims its Overture SST would cost 75% less than an equivalent Concorde, making supersonic travel more affordable. Furthermore, the Overture promises net-zero carbon emissions with its modified turbofan engines that run on sustainable aviation fuel.

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Why did supersonic passenger flight end when Concorde retired in 2003? Could we still see a new generation of supersonic aircraft?

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Is supersonic travel a concept that’s had its day, or will we see a new generation following on from Concorde and its Russian counterpart?

To explore this question, Ian Sample is joined in the studio by Jonathan Glancey, author of Concorde - The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner.

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The Eternal Disappointment of the Return of Supersonic Travel

Air travel is about to get a hell of a lot faster — at least that’s what the headlines say. “American Airlines to buy supersonic jets amid clamor for ultra-fast travel,” declared the Washington Post on Wednesday morning. “World’s fastest airliner ‘Overture’ to usher in new era of supersonic travel,” the New York Post proclaimed. They were pegged to American Airlines’ announcement that it had placed orders for 20 supersonic Overture jets from a start-up called Boom. The planes will carry up to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7. Better yet, they’ll burn a special fuel that will make them carbon neutral .

It’s all very exciting, if it happens. But there are many reasons to believe it won’t — not least that, for years, similar claims have continuously come up empty. “It’s just PR,” says aviation analyst Brian Foley. Supersonic air transportation is, he says, “still a long way off,” adding, “It’s fun to dream.”

To hear Boom tell it, the project is moving along at a blistering pace, and later this year the company says it will break ground on a factory in North Carolina. “We’ll begin production in 2024, with the first Overtures coming off the line in 2025,” Boom president Kathy Savitt says. Flight testing and certification will follow in short order. “We estimate that the very first passengers will be able to fly an Overture by the end of 2029,” she says.

Boom has made similarly ambitious claims before. Back in 2016 , the company said it would be making three-hour transatlantic flights by 2023. In the meantime, it hasn’t even flown a scale model. “It’s always a decade in the future,” says Foley.

The reality is that developing any new airframe is a vastly expensive and lengthy process, so much so that even the aviation heavyweights approach it with trepidation. The A350 took Airbus a decade and $15 billion to take from the drawing board to the runway. Add in the technical challenges of supersonic flight and you’re climbing an even higher mountain. Industry analyst Richard Aboulafia has speculated that a project like Boom could cost $20 billion to develop.

Aircraft designer and longtime industry observer Peter Garrison says those hurdles put him in the skeptics camp, “just from the knowledge of how hard it is to bring a project like this to fruition. As with all such ambitious projects, dates of critical milestones keep getting pushed back and the costs keep climbing.”

A big part of the challenge is developing an engine. Flying supersonic is technically challenging and requires an especially tough and durable power plant. Because no other supersonic commercial planes exist, there is no off-the-shelf engine Boom could simply hang under the wing. “It will be a modified engine specifically for us,” Savitt acknowledges.

Rolls-Royce, which has been in talks with Boom, told the aerospace publication the Air Current earlier this year that it wouldn’t pocket the development expense. “If Boeing or Airbus comes out with a new product, the engine and avionics providers will pay a lion’s share of the development in anticipation of income further down the line,” Foley says. “But this is more of a niche program.”

Even if Boom could build and certify the Overture, its customers would still need to be able to operate the jet profitably. Given the high fuel and maintenance costs of such a jet, seats would necessarily be a high-ticket item. A Concorde seat sold for about $20,000 in today’s dollars. Even if Savitt is correct in estimating that the Overture will be able to operate profitably at 75 percent of that fare or less, that’s still a lot of money for a minimum fare given that the plane will be allowed to fly supersonic only over oceans, since the sonic boom would annoy anyone on the ground.

Finally, there’s the claim that the Overture will be carbon neutral. Boom says the plane will run on “sustainable aviation fuel,” or SAF, a catchall term that includes biofuel and synthetic hydrocarbons captured from the atmosphere. But the simple fact is that once a manufacturer sells a plane to an airline, it has no say over what kind of fuel it burns. SAF, says Foley, “is not plentiful, it’s not available everywhere, and it’s extremely expensive. Given that the airlines are all cost conscious, that’ll be a real decision tree for them.”

The daunting challenges of building a supersonic transport have already doomed another start-up that was trying to do the same thing. Last year, Aerion Supersonic, a venture backed by Boeing , closed its doors after running out of money. Another, Spike Aerospace, has put its efforts on hold.

For his part, Garrison says his disappointment in the past failures of these projects is tempered by the knowledge that, even if they did ultimately work out, they would in no way have benefited people like him. “It’s just to make some rich people happier,” he says.

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This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail?

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We had supersonic transport — until almost 15 years ago, when it stopped.

You might remember the  Concorde , the supersonic plane that came to symbolize technological optimism and extreme luxury. Though it always had critics and a high ticket price, it delivered on the promise of supersonic transport, giving riders trans-Atlantic flights in under four hours.

And then in 2003, the Concorde landed for good. What went wrong?

The video above examines the tangled mess that doomed the Concorde. The reason for Concorde’s demise isn’t simple. It happened due to a range of factors, from high price to manufacturing concerns to environmental worries. In concert, all of these negatives turned a technological breakthrough into a business nonstarter.

But even if the Concorde failed, it looked beautiful doing so. The video shows the masterful engineering that made the Concorde work, from its breakthrough wing to its whimsical — yet highly functional — "droop snoot."

Smithsonian curator  Bob Van der Linden , who also rode on the plane, told me the journey was both extraordinary and surprisingly ordinary, because the engineers strove to make Concorde as comfortable as any passenger flight.

And that’s the enticing paradox of this late, great plane: It could be both an engineering masterpiece and a business failure at the same time. That may be what makes it so alluring, as well. We know planes like the Concorde can change flight; we just have to figure out how to make it sustainable.

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Why we haven't had supersonic commercial jets since the Concorde

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Setting: January 21, 1976. Two supersonic planes take off, one from London, the other from Paris. Speed: 1,350 miles per hour, twice the speed of sound.

[plane roaring]

Vik Kachoria: The Concorde was an incredible aircraft. Super gorgeous. Well ahead of its time.

Narrator: It took more than 30 years to develop, led by aeronautical engineer Sir James Hamilton, who famously designed the Concorde's delta wings, adding to the overall distinctive appearance of its tilted nose and long, ultrathin body. But initial public awe quickly dissolved.

When one of Air France's Concordes crashed shortly after takeoff in July 2000, it added one more thing to criticize to an already growing pool. Critics said the Concorde was too expensive, too elitist, and much too noisy.

Blake Scholl: It wasn't that the technology didn't work. It was that the economics didn't work. It was simply too expensive for enough people to afford to fly.

Narrator: That's because fuel was pricey, and almost 22 hours of maintenance was required for every hour in the air. That maintenance also needed a specialized crew, in part because of the cooling mechanisms that managed the planes' high-speed temperatures. And then there was the boom... [booming] a thunder-like noise from breaking the sound barrier that could be heard on the ground. The noise caused many countries to ban the Concorde's overland routes altogether, meaning less money to be made.

By the fall of 2003, Air France and British Airways had retired their Concorde fleets. 17 years later, we still don't have another Concorde. So, what's the super holdup on supersonic planes?

Well, companies are still solving the challenges the Concorde faced: speed, fuel efficiency, and noise from the sonic boom. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus are all at various stages of development to bring the supersonic passenger aircraft back, and the Federal Aviation Administration stated in 2008 that, "Interest in supersonic aircraft technology has not disappeared."

Today, companies are choosing one of two paths to go beyond the speed of sound: private planes or commercial airliners. Spike Aerospace is on the first path: private supersonic jets. Its design has reduced the sonic boom to the sound of a car door slamming.

Kachoria: You do that by changing the aerodynamics of the plane, the shape of the plane, the shape of the nose.

Narrator: Its aircraft has a long, pointy nose to help bounce the shockwave towards space instead of the ground, and its sleek, windowless fuselage will help lower the cabin noise. Finally, Spike substantially updated Concorde's famous delta wing to a cranked delta wing to control the pressure waves.

Kachoria: It's what's called a clean-sheet design. We're not basing it on a preexisting model; we're basing it on knowledge about aircraft. It has to have a wing and engines, but otherwise the cabin can be done completely differently. How we shape the nose is different.

Narrator: To deal with the Concorde's temperature issues, Spike built its aircraft with composite materials, lighter than aluminum and capable of tolerating higher temperatures. And instead of creating a new engine from scratch, Spike is simply modifying an existing engine, shaving 10 to 15 years of development and potentially billions of dollars. The catch: Spike plans on flying at a slower speed of 1,100 miles per hour, still faster than the speed of sound but slow enough to manage the temperature, sonic boom, and engine efficiency while cutting passengers' flight time by 50%.

Spike hopes to eventually work its way up to larger commercial passenger planes, a path that Boom Supersonic is also on. The Denver company has been building smaller prototypes to test designs for a larger supersonic passenger jet. And since the company is initially focusing on overseas travel, the sonic boom isn't as big of an issue; speed and efficiency are.

Scholl: We started from that same basic delta-wing approach the Concorde had, but we've applied a lot of innovations. Through a combination of shaping the wing and optimizing the propulsion, we have a design for Overture that will be no louder than aircraft flying today.

Narrator: The seamless, angle-less design is key. Not only is the fuselage made of carbon-fiber composites that can tolerate higher temperatures; it also tapers by the wings.

Scholl: There's a principle called area ruling, which basically says you want to keep the distribution of cross-sectional area continuous and smooth from tip to tail with the aircraft, and so, where the wings stick out, the fuselage actually gets a little bit skinner, and then it can be fatter after the wings. And so it's hard to find a straight line anywhere on the aircraft. It's like a smooth, flowing, continuous shape.

Narrator: An updated engine is also in the works in order to improve propulsion and make the aircraft more fuel efficient. And Boom is aiming to make history next year by test-flying its supersonic jet XB-1, hopefully paving the way for overseas flights before tackling routes over land. But as of right now, no company working on supersonic aircraft has conducted a test flight. In the meantime, companies are testing via traditional wind-tunnel tests and modern computer flight simulators. Drawings are then rendered to design each and every part of the aircraft, measuring everything from noise, wind, and speed to temperature. And then companies can make adjustments for future tests.

Kachoria: Supersonic jets will be here by the mid-2020s. I expect that the general public will be able to fly in a supersonic jet by the mid-2030s. This is really gonna grow dramatically, and it's just the beginning of supersonic flight. Only time will tell what our future of flight will look like and how fast we'll get there.

Alex Appolonia: Thanks, Michelle, for being the voice behind this. Something interesting I learned from these interviews was how Concorde's engineers designed and built the aircraft. They didn't have computers, so they drafted hundreds of thousands of drawings for each part of the aircraft. Now, of course, we have computers, CFD systems, and even wind-tunnel testing, which makes it easier to get the results from these tests and make improvements on their design. Pretty crazy, right? Well, let us know what you want to learn more about in the comments below, and subscribe so you don't miss it

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in July 2020.

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Why The Concorde Was Discontinued and Why It Won't Be Coming Back

Concorde Blog

Thousands of Museum of Flight visitors step inside Concorde each year to admire its posh interior and imagine what it's like to fly at supersonic speeds. Concorde certainly made a splash when it was first released in 1976, but there are some very good reasons why this supersonic jetliner, with cruising speeds of over Mach 2 and cruising altitude of 60,000 feet, isn't flying today. 

The Need For Concorde

During the Cold war, Britain and France wanted air travel that went faster than the speed of sound, which meant that the two countries had to create a plane faster than any other commercial airliner flying at that time. The British developers were overwhelmed with the cost of producing such an aircraft, so they reached out to other countries to work with, and ended up working with France.

The Construction of Concorde

Concorde was jointly developed and manufactured between France and The British Aircraft Corporation under an Anglo-French treaty. Twenty aircraft were built, including six prototypes and developmental aircraft. Air France and British Airways were the only airlines to purchase and fly the Concorde. The aircraft was used mainly by wealthy passengers who could afford to pay a high price in exchange for the aircraft's speed and luxury service. Concorde was mainly built out of aluminum and a high temperature alloy comparable to that created for aero-motor pistons to withstand high external temperatures and thermal expansion from traveling at supersonic speeds.

The droop snoot was a feature unique to the Concorde. It was implemented because the Concorde’s delta wings forced the aircraft to require an extremely steep angle of attack while landing and lifting off. Additionally, the long nose further hindered runway visibility. The droop snoot is designed to lower the nose of the Concorde to improve visibility during takeoff and landing. The droop snoot ended up requiring 2 windshields, one fastened on the movable nose and the other secured onto the cockpit.

Going Supersonic

The aircraft gets blisteringly hot when it goes supersonic, which caused Concorde to expand 6-10 inches at its cruising speed of Mach 2 due to thermal expansion. A regular flyer of the Concorde described what it was like to fly in it: “For a girl used to flying steerage, the experience was unbelievable. Once through the doors of the sleek, tiny, cigar tube into the body of Concorde, I knew I had entered into the rarified air of gods and kings. But dang, things were small and cramped."

Concorde's Accomplishments

Besides the Concorde being the fastest supersonic commercial airplane in aviation history, it also accomplished other significant advancements. One of them being its air intake control units, or AICUs in short. This was the first time a digital processor was used to give an airplane full control of an essential system.

The brakes on Concorde were developed to withstand high temperatures. Developed by a multi-national company called Dunlop, the brakes were the first carbon-based ones to ever be used on an airliner. The wheels had multiple rotors, and each were cooled down by individual electric fans.

Concorde was also the first aircraft to open service from Rio de Janeiro to Washington, D.C. and New York City. With its incredible speed and increased routes, Concorde had flown for a total of 17,824 hours.

So if the Concorde had so many achievements, why was it discontinued? 

Issues Faced By Concorde

One of the issues that negatively affected the success of Concorde was the cost of fuel. On a regular flight, Concorde consumes 6,771 gallons of fuel. The cost of fuel quickly exceeded the profit made from the flight and rendered Concorde unprofitable to operate. Though the cost of the aircraft and fuel proved to be problematic, there were also other underlying issues that contributed to its downfall.

Another issue emerged from the restrictions of supersonic travel. Concorde was restricted to only go supersonic over the ocean because it sent a shockwave into the air strong enough to shatter glass if it went over densely populated areas. Cities issued numerous noise complaints whenever Concorde flew overhead, causing huge headaches for the airlines and manufacturers.

But one incident eclipses all these issues. Concorde was involved in a serious accident on July 25, 2000. On Air France Flight 4590, some debris blew a tire and punctured one of the fuel tanks. The fire and engine failure caused Concorde to crash into a nearby hotel, killing 113 people in total.

At The Museum of Flight

The Museum of Flight Aviation Pavilion houses a model of a prototype Concorde G-BOAG. This Concorde prototype was built in November 1980, but after it was completed, no customers would purchase the model. It was eventually bought by British Airways through a transfer contract. They kept it for 6 months while G-BOAG was being restored at Filton Airfield in Bristol, England.

Concorde holds the record for the fastest transatlantic airliner flight from New York to London, the fastest airliner circumnavigations going both east and west. When the Concorde G-BOAG made its last flight to The Museum of Flight in Seattle in November 2003, it set the fastest New York to Seattle record, going supersonic over the Canadian wilderness with special permission.

Visit the Museum today to experience Concorde for yourself!

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Why Did Supersonic Airliners Fail?

(Note: Unless otherwise noted, quotes regarding American SST projects are from “High-Speed Dreams” by Erik Conway, and quotes regarding the Concorde are from “Concorde: New Shape in the Sky” by Kenneth Owen).

Progress in aviation has traditionally been associated with speed. Following the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903, aircraft speeds steadily increased each decade, and increasing aircraft speeds was one of the primary goals of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s predecessor).

Even the sound barrier – the large increase in drag encountered by aircraft as they approach the speed of a sound wave in air – proved to be no match for the desire for increasing aircraft speeds. After the sound barrier was broken in 1947, a series of military jets capable of supersonic flight were developed and flown in the 1950s. It seemed obvious that civilian supersonic aircraft would follow shortly behind. Just as jet engines had displaced piston engines in commercial aircraft, so too would supersonic aircraft replace subsonic ones. It was the nature of aviation technology.

But this didn’t happen, though not for lack of trying. Since the late 1950s, there have been numerous plans to build a supersonic airliner. Most of them never got past the planning stages, and only two – the Soviet Tu-144 and the Concorde – were ultimately built and entered commercial service. Neither the Tu-144 or the Concorde were a commercial success, and today there are no supersonic aircraft in commercial service. Modern airliners fly at roughly the same speed as Boeing’s first jet airliner, the 707.

Despite billions of dollars in government investment, supersonic airliners remained noisier and less economical to operate than their subsonic competitors. Even while they were in service, they were a niche offering, effectively dependent on government subsidy to survive. Supersonic transport (SST) projects have thus far the unfortunate distinction of being some of the largest commercial failures in aviation history, though a new crop of aviation startups is hoping to change this.

Early supersonic aircraft

The sound barrier was first broken by a piloted aircraft in level flight in 1947 by Chuck Yeager in the rocket-powered Bell X-1 . 1 By the early 1950s, the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union had all developed jet fighters capable of supersonic flight (the F-100, the P.1 Lightning, and the Mig-19 respectively). 2 But even before Yeager’s historic flight, people began to seriously consider the possibility of a supersonic commercial airliner – an article in Life magazine showed a design for a potential commercial SST sketched up by NACA researchers. But it was the development of the supersonic B-58 Hustler in 1956, followed by plans for the more advanced B-70 supersonic bomber , that truly kicked off SST development. The B-58 was the first bomber capable of Mach 2 flight. And while previous jet aircraft were capable of supersonic speed only for short bursts, the B-58 and B-70 would be capable of “supercruise” – flying almost their entire missions at supersonic speeds. The rapid development of supersonic capability in the 1950s made engineers optimistic that a potential SST could be in service as early as the 1960s.

In November 1956, just a few days before the first flight of the B-58, Britain’s Supersonic Transport Advisory Committee (STAC) met for the first time to study the feasibility of supersonic transport. Around the same time, Boeing began its own in-house SST study, and NACA formed an SST research group at the urging of a White House aviation advisor. The Soviets, too, were considering their own SST project around this time.

Ultimately the US, Britain (in partnership with France), and the Soviet Union would all pursue SST projects in the 1960s and 70s. These projects would be conceived with very different goals, and proceed along very different paths, but none would crack the fundamental economic challenges of supersonic travel, and commercial air travel would continue to be dominated by subsonic aircraft.

The British-French SST, Concorde

After forming in 1956, the British STAC met consistently over the next 3 years, putting forward its recommendations in a 1959 report. It concluded that an SST was feasible, and recommended development of two supersonic aircraft: a larger, Mach 1.8 aircraft for transatlantic routes, and a smaller, shorter-range Mach 1.2 aircraft for intercontinental travel. Mach 2 was chosen as the maximum speed to minimize technical difficulties: at that speed, existing aluminum alloys could be used for the aircraft structure. A Mach 3 aircraft was deemed technically possible but risky, since novel aircraft materials such as titanium would be required. It was estimated that the market might support anywhere from 150 to 500 aircraft, and that while initial costs would be higher than subsonic travel, advancing aerospace technology would steadily whittle away this difference. Development costs were estimated to be $210-270 million dollars for the larger aircraft (~$2-3 billion in 2024 dollars).

The committee recommended that SST development work should begin “without delay.” Waiting meant giving other countries the opportunity to pull ahead with their own SST programs, and possibly capture the market for supersonic aircraft, at great cost to Britain’s aircraft industry should SSTs become the new standard. At the time, Britain’s aircraft industry was struggling after a series of major failures. The Bristol Brabazon airliner had failed to attract any orders due to its high seat-mile costs, the enormous Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat was developed just as the flying boat era was ending, and the de Havilland Comet (the world’s first jet airliner) had been withdrawn from service after three crashes, ceding the jet airliner market to Boeing and Douglas in the process. To some, an SST represented the only chance for Britain to maintain an aircraft industry. Without it, the country would inevitably fall behind “first class powers” like the US. Upon receiving the report, the British Ministry of Transport opted to proceed with SST feasibility studies.

The fundamental challenge of supersonic travel is that air behaves very differently above and below the sound barrier, and different kinds of aircraft work best in each domain. At supersonic speeds, an aircraft works best if it's thin and needle-like, with narrow, swept back wings. But this sort of design has trouble providing sufficient lift at subsonic speeds. Similarly, different kinds of engines work better in each domain: at subsonic travel, a high-bypass turbofan works best, while at supersonic travel a turbojet is superior.

This makes designing an SST difficult, because it will inevitably spend significant amounts of time in both domains: cruising at supersonic speeds, but taking off, approaching, and landing at subsonic speeds (not to mention when abiding by restrictions on sonic booms over land). Designing an efficient supersonic aircraft is like designing a car that can double as a boat: it's possible, but it's hard to make such a vehicle as cheap as a conventional car.

As British researchers struggled with these tradeoffs, the most promising approach appeared to be the “slender delta”: a narrow triangular wing that was found to have good performance at supersonic speeds. Lift at lower speeds was an issue, but at low speeds and high angles of attack (when the aircraft “leans back”) the airflow over the wings could, with proper wing design, be made to separate, generating vortices over the wings which provided additional lift. 3 Traditionally, flow separation in aircraft was avoided at all costs, but by taking advantage of it, a slender delta aircraft could have acceptable supersonic performance while still having sufficient lift at low speeds. Low-speed performance of a slender delta was tested on the HP 115 aircraft, and ultimately resulted in the Bristol 223 concept .

Wanting to defray the costs of development, Britain began to pursue a partner country to develop an SST with. Though it courted the US heavily, the US wasn’t interested in a collaboration. It had no interest in sharing what it believed to be its superior aerospace technology, and wanted to pursue its own SST project, which at a proposed speed of closer to Mach 3 was incompatible with British designs.

France proved more amenable. The French were working on a SST of their own, a successor to their Caravelle jet airliner dubbed the Super Caravelle, a slender delta Mach 2 aircraft that was similar in many ways to the proposed Bristol 223. In addition to sharing development costs, a partnership between Britain and France would help both countries. France would get access to British engine technology and the powerful Olympus engines that would make transatlantic supersonic flight possible; Britain would (it was hoped) be allowed to join the European Common Market, the predecessor to the EU. 4 In 1962, the agreement was signed to combine their projects and develop two supersonic aircraft: the larger transatlantic aircraft and the smaller, shorter range Mach 1.2 craft (though this second aircraft would eventually be canceled). The agreement, critically, had no exit provisions, and had the status of international treaty: if either country withdrew, they could be sued in the International Court in the Hague, and be forced to pay hundreds of millions in restitution.

But despite joining forces, the two nations were pursuing the SST project for different reasons. Britain wanted to maintain its faltering aircraft industry, and wanted a grand symbol of Britain’s engineering and technological competence that would enhance national prestige, keeping Britain relevant in a world that was becoming dominated by the US and the Soviet Union. France, on the other hand, hoped to become more independent from America by fostering technological development: an SST project would require expanding French capabilities in materials, machining, electronics, and a host of other high-tech industries. 5 France also saw the project as a chance to enhance national prestige. Neither country necessarily expected an SST to ultimately be commercially profitable, though economic concerns would loom larger and larger in Britain as development costs spiraled upward and the chance of recouping its investment dwindled. Only the binding nature of the agreement kept Britain from withdrawing from the project.

Building the Concorde was a monumental feat of aerospace engineering, on par in some ways with the Apollo program. 6 Though military aircraft achieving supersonic flight had become common by the early 1960s, there was a world of difference between a military jet and a commercial airliner. Existing military jets flew at supersonic speeds for relatively short periods of time – as of 1963 no aircraft in the world had spent more than an hour at Mach 2 – but an airliner would have to maintain them for hours at a time, while keeping its passengers in relative comfort. And in many ways a commercial aircraft needed to be much more robust than a military jet: military jets had an expected lifetime of around 6,000 flight hours, while a commercial jet needed to be in service for at 30,000 flight hours to be practical. And even for military jets, breaking the sound barrier was far from routine, and catastrophic failure was common. One test pilot noted that while the US Air Force had purchased 128 B-58 Hustlers, by 1963 it was down to just 95 due to the high number of accidents.

And while most new commercial aircraft had the benefit of operating in a well-understood aerodynamic domain, the Concorde was venturing into uncharted territory. The vortex lift required for low-speed operation was novel, and until the full-sized Concorde actually flew, engineers weren’t sure whether it would work in practice. A new engine inlet system had to be invented, which used a carefully controlled series of ramps to reduce the speed of incoming air by 1,000 mph in just 14 feet, while simultaneously keeping a smooth, constant flow of air.

The Concorde also required a break from the historic method of aircraft design, where different aircraft functions (lift, propulsion, cargo, control) were performed by distinct components (wings, engines, fuselage and control surfaces). On the Concorde, meeting performance requirements required a much tighter integration between different parts of the aircraft, and a “new set of aerodynamic design principles." On typical airliners, for instance, small control surfaces called “trim tabs” compensate for differences between an aircraft's center of gravity and its center of lift. But at supersonic speeds, such control surfaces would produce an unacceptable amount of drag. Instead, the Concorde used a series of pumps to move fuel between different tanks to adjust the location of its center of gravity (the fuel was also designed to act as a heat sink, keeping the aircraft cool at supersonic speeds). Similarly, Concorde’s wing was cambered and twisted in such a way to keep the aircraft trim at cruising speed, eliminating the need for action from drag-inducing control surfaces.

These sorts of efforts were necessary because the Concorde had to hit a very narrow target to be viable as a commercial aircraft. Traveling at supersonic speed consumes about 5-7 times as much fuel as subsonic travel, and Concorde could only allocate around 6% of its total weight for passengers and cargo, compared to 20% on a Boeing 747 and 24% on modern jetliners. The tiniest decrease in aerodynamic efficiency would substantially reduce payload capacity. Concorde, in fact, was only just barely possible: had its range been even 2% less, it wouldn’t have been able to fly across the Atlantic.

All this development work and technological boundary-pushing came at enormous cost. And costs were amplified by the enormous amount of testing required. The primitive state of computers and aerodynamic theory in the 1960s meant that nearly every aspect of the aircraft required extensive verification using wind-tunnels and full-scale testing. The complex camber and twist of the wing, for instance, was found to be incorrect on the prototype aircraft, requiring the wing to be redesigned for the production aircraft. When the prototype had been completed, it underwent over 5,000 hours of flight testing, more than 3 times as much as the Boeing 747. Fatigue issues, the failure of a structural member well below its capacity due to repeated loading, were a constant threat on aircraft. Fatigue damage caused the Comet crashes in the early 1950s, and its risk was especially high on the Concorde due to high temperatures encountered at supersonic speeds. To verify there would be no serious fatigue damage, enormous test rigs were built in Britain and France to pressurize full-sized fuselages while repeatedly heating and cooling them.

And costs weren’t helped by the bi-national structure of the project, which added another layer of complexity. The chairman of the project alternated between Britain and France, two years at a time, and the work was split 50/50 as much as possible. Production lines were duplicated, at great expense, to have one in Britain and one in France. This 50/50 split, and the negotiation and horse-trading involved in trying to maintain it, was a continual problem on the project, resulting in delays, false starts and changes before reason (in most cases) prevailed”. Decision making was “incredibly torturous” – not-invented-here syndrome was a constant battle, and the need to come to absolute agreement on every aspect of the design slowed down the project considerably. Because responsibility for each portion of the project was divided between Britain and France, effectively no single person was in charge. 7 And the tightly integrated nature of the design also made dividing work between subcontractors challenging. The intakes, engines, and nozzles, for instance, were a tightly coupled system, but each was the responsibility of separate companies, making it difficult to address problems when they occurred during testing. Some of the project leadership would later state that it was a miracle the project actually succeeded.

Poor conception of the project didn’t help the cost issue. The initial idea of two separate aircraft was eventually abandoned in 1964, but not before the second, smaller one absorbed significant design effort. And since the original plan was for each country to develop one aircraft (Britain the longer-range one and France the shorter range one), combining efforts meant reconceiving and redesigning the single remaining model until both countries agreed. As the project continued, Concorde’s weight grew (as happens to all aircraft during development), which required several additional redesigns and the adoption of different, more expensive construction methods and materials to reduce aircraft weight and achieve a reasonable payload capacity. This had the unfortunate effect of driving up the production costs and harming the already-marginal seat-mile costs of the aircraft.

As costs crept up, and it became clear that the Concorde would never recover its development costs or possibly even operate profitably, the British began to regret participating in the project. Between 1962 and 1973, spending on the project increased by roughly a factor of five over initial estimates of 150-170 million pounds. But the treaty had no exit provisions, and the French, pursuing the project entirely for prestige and national development reasons, had no interest in canceling. Ultimately “French single-mindedness” carried the project through to completion, and Concorde first flew in March of 1969, just a few months before the launch of Apollo 11.

The American SST, Boeing 2707

Though interest was stirring in the US for an SST program in the late 50s, the American project took longer to get off the ground. Even the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which sparked an urgent need to redress the perceived loss of American technological superiority, wasn’t sufficient to kickstart an SST program. Following Sputnik, the Air Force put out a proposal for a SST project, but it was canceled when Eisenhower, in an attempt to reduce duplication of effort in the armed forces, removed the budget authority of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, putting it under the Secretary of Defense. Also canceled in this reorganization was North American’s XB-70 high-speed bomber program, which would have provided the technological basis needed for a commercial supersonic aircraft.

And while many felt developing an SST was an important national priority (pointing to rumors of a Soviet SST program), others were skeptical. The head of Lockheed’s famous Skunkworks, Kelly Johnson, thought little of the proposed SST, and the team at Douglas Aircraft warned the Air Force that developing an SST would require “virtually unlimited resources," and that there was no guarantee that it would be profitable to operate. And the aviation industry was not exactly clamoring for another expensive aircraft project. Aircraft manufacturers had nearly bankrupted themselves in developing commercial jetliners, and airlines were in dire financial straits paying for aircraft five times the cost of propellor planes they replaced. 8

NASA research and other events related to supersonic flight also raised questions about the viability of an SST. While aerodynamic research in the 1950s resulted in better, more efficient aircraft configurations, expected payload capacities for an SST were very low, 7% or less of vehicle weight, with 50% of the weight devoted to fuel. An early sketch of a proposed SST at Douglas Aircraft showed a fuselage entirely filled with fuel, within which were passengers wearing diving suits, with a “no smoking sign” over their heads (Douglas would ultimately decline to participate in the American SST project). And while aviation technology in the US was typically first adopted in military aircraft, only later making its way into commercial service, the paucity of experience with extended supersonic flight meant that wouldn’t be possible with an SST. Rather than having the luxury of adopting vetted and robust technology, a commercial SST project would have to blaze a trail through unexplored territory, with all the risks and costs such development work entails.

American researchers were also much more concerned about sonic booms than the Concorde team was. The US military had been dealing with complaints from sonic booms since the mid-1950s, and early research suggested it was not something people would learn to accept. Sonic boom tests over the city of St. Louis in the early 1962 generated a significant number of complaints, with the local newspaper demanding the booming cease. 90% of residents interviewed felt the booms interfered with them in some way, and 35% found them annoying. When a B-58 set a speed record by traveling between New York and Los Angeles in 2 hours and 57 seconds (averaging just over Mach 1.5), it smashed windows and jammed police switchboards, ultimately resulting in over 10,000 complaints.

Ultimately, it was a new president, and the development of the Concorde, that spurred action on an American SST. In 1963 Pan Am placed a reservation for 6 Concordes, which was expected to spur other airlines to follow suit. This gave ammunition to pro-SST groups, who warned about lost national prestige and loss of the commercial aircraft market to foreign builders. John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, also supported an SST, in part out of a desire to outdo Charles de Gaulle. Kennedy announced the American SST program on June 5th 1963, the day after Pan Am announced its orders for the Concorde. But though the US had committed to an SST project, concerns about profitability hadn’t been pushed aside nearly as much as they had on the other side of the Atlantic. Americans saw “little prestige in commercial failure," and economic considerations would dog the project throughout its lifetime.

The American SST program, led by the FAA, called for a 4,000 mile range, a 30,000 pound payload, and a speed of Mach 2.2 or greater — faster than Concorde and with a greater load capacity. But none of the initial submissions by Boeing, Lockheed, and North American Aviation met these requirements. Only Boeing came close: to overcome the fundamental challenge of needing different aircraft performance at subsonic and supersonic speeds, Boeing had proposed a complex “swing-wing” aircraft, with wings that would extend out at slow speeds for greater lift and then pull back into a delta-shape for supersonic travel.

And between the start of the program in 1963 and receiving the proposals in January of 1964, the base of support for an SST project had shifted. Kennedy had been assassinated, and while his successor Johnson supported the program, an advisory committee led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had been inserted between the FAA and the president. McNamara opposed the SST project: he felt that such a project was only justifiable if it would ultimately be profitable, and that it was clear that it never would be . McNamara was also cautious because of his knowledge of the A-12 project (better known by its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird), a secret high-altitude supersonic aircraft being developed by Lockheed for the CIA. The A-12 project was struggling; not only did it take “almost an act of God to get it off the ground”, but keeping it operational at high speeds proved to be enormously difficult, with CIA director John McCone reporting that “every notch we put it up above Mach 2 and every few thousand feet in altitude we run into a whole series of totally unforeseen problems.” The A-12 had been a year late for its first scheduled flight, and had constant struggles with its inlet control system (an enormously complex aerodynamic problem that would likewise consume a large amount of the time and resources on the Concorde project). It took a year and 66 flights for the A-12 to go from Mach 2 to Mach 3, and the first time it cruised at Mach 3.1, the aircraft’s wiring disintegrated and nearly all of the hydraulic fluid leaked out because of the extreme heat. As one of the only aircraft in the world capable of supersonic cruising, the struggles of the A-12 made McNamara skeptical that an SST could be developed on anything like a predictable schedule and reasonable budget.

Ultimately, McNamara’s strategy became one of delay, pushing back deadlines and putting off building prototypes in the hopes that aircraft technology would catch up in the interim and defuse the technical risk of the project. 9 McNamara delayed selecting a winning proposal until the end of 1966 (though it was narrowed down to two airframe builders and two engine manufacturers), instead instructing participants to continue to refine their designs. But McNamara couldn’t delay forever, and at the end of 1966 Boeing’s swing-wing 2707 was selected over Lockheed’s L-2000 Concorde lookalike. Plans were made to proceed with prototype construction.

But Boeing’s proposal had been somewhat incomplete when it was selected, and as development continued, significant reworking was required. Weight crept up due to the addition of canards , structural stiffening and hydraulics, reducing its range to the point where it was unable to cross the Atlantic. Space for fuel required shifting the location of the wing’s swinging mechanisms, reducing its climb performance, which in turn required larger engines or larger wings, further exacerbating the weight problem. Ultimately, the design refused to “close”: the solution to a particular problem simply generated more problems in what seemed to be an unresolvable spiral.

Boeing ultimately went back to the drawing board, spending millions more engineering hours coming up with alternate designs. It ultimately selected a more conventional, lower-risk design without swing wings, the Boeing 2707-300, in October 1968, designed with a cruising speed of Mach 3 and a capacity of 250-300 passengers.

But while Boeing struggled to come up with a viable aircraft design, opposition to the SST project was building. Until the mid-1960s, criticism of the project had mostly been confined to the realm of government agencies and specialized technical organizations (airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and so on) concerned about the project’s economic and technical viability. But in the second half of the decade, opposition spilled into the public sphere, and the SST became a major political issue.

Initial public opposition stemmed from concern about the sonic boom. Sonic boom tests in Oklahoma City in 1964 yielded similar results to the earlier St. Louis tests, with 27% of the population stating that they could not accept repeated sonic booms. In 1967, physicist William Shurcliff founded the Citizen’s League Against the Sonic Boom, which by the end of the year had over 2,000 members. A book authored by Shurcliff, The SST and the Sonic Boom , sold over 150,000 copies after it debuted in 1970. Shurcliff, in turn, was able to convince major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society that sonic booms represented a threat to natural wilderness, and enlist their support in opposing an SST. When David Brower, the Sierra Club’s executive director, resigned from the Club in 1969 and founded Friends of the Earth, one of its first major campaigns was to force the cancellation of the SST. In 1970, the Citizen’s League, Friends of the Earth, and 12 other organizations banded together to form the “Coalition Against the SST” (which later grew to encompass 31 organizations), which worked to turn public opinion against the SST project and force its cancellation.

As public opposition mounted, it was becoming clear within the SST project that the noise of the sonic boom would never be acceptable. Already there was significant opposition to jet engine noise, resulting in the creation of much more stringent jet engine noise requirements in 1968 (though supersonic aircraft were exempt from this regulation). By the late 1960s there was discussion by the FAA and President Nixon of banning the sonic boom, and civilian supersonic travel over land would ultimately be banned by the FAA in 1973. For the foreseeable future, SSTs would only go supersonic over water. 

But this didn’t dissuade opponents to the project, who still considered the project an environmental and economic disaster. Even aside from the sonic boom, the engines of an SST would have great difficulty meeting the latest FAA noise requirements, and new research suggested that a fleet of SSTs might be a threat to the ozone layer. The shaky economics of the program led many to question why the government was spending money on a project that could be better spent elsewhere. It did not escape notice that Boeing, convinced of the commercial possibilities of the 747, had entirely footed the bill for its development, but had opposed contributing even 25% of the funds for the SST project. Statements from 16 prestigious economists, including Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and W.J Baumol, all expressed their reservations about the SST.

For many environmentalists, however, the importance of opposing the SST was symbolic. The SST represented “worship of technology for its own sake”, a project chosen by government technocrats that would absorb billions of government dollars and cause enormous environmental harm catering to needs of the ultra-wealthy that could afford to use it. Many environmentalists, such as David Brower, wanted to abandon the pursuit of progress for progress’ sake that had led to widespread environmental devastation, and redirect technological development towards goals that were beneficial to humankind and the natural world. For them, stopping the SST was a crucial victory in this larger war.

Anti-SST opposition succeeded in making the project a major public issue, and generated a storm of negative media coverage (which was countered to some degree by a retrenchment of pro-SST groups). The first Earth Day in 1970 marked an enormous outpouring of anti-SST activism, with teach-ins, public speeches, and demonstrations against the project, driving opposition to it to new heights. But unbeknownst to the environmental lobby, by the time the SST became a major public issue it was effectively already dead. In late 1969, the DOT told Boeing that it would be required to meet a new, more stringent noise standard, 12 decibels lower than previous requirements. Achieving this would require a new, heavier engine and wing, increasing the aircraft's weight and further driving down its already marginal economics. The SST was now expected to weigh 100,000 more pounds than the 747, carry 2/3rds the passengers, while costing twice as much to buy and much more to operate. The economics of it had deteriorated so severely that Boeing told the DOT it no longer planned to bring the aircraft into production, and that any subsequent changes would need to be entirely funded by the government.

Ultimately, the American SST project was canceled in 1971, after the House and Senate, under significant public pressure, voted to cancel additional funding for the project. And though over $800 million ($6 billion in 2024 dollars) was spent on the project, no aircraft was ever produced, save for a large wooden mockup of the Boeing 2707, which is currently in storage at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

The Soviet SST, Tupolev Tu-144

Like Britain and the US, the Soviet Union had been considering the possibilities of supersonic airliners since shortly after the sound barrier had been broken. In some ways, the Soviet Union was the perfect country for incubating an SST project. Its centrally-planned economy meant that aircraft designers were, at least initially, free from concerns about seat-mile costs, fuel consumption rates, or other measures of economic efficiency. The major impetus for an SST, along with ideas of national prestige which propped up every other SST project, was time savings in crossing the enormous distances of the Soviet Union (which stretched almost 7,000 miles from east to west. Soviet leadership fervently believed in the power of advancing technology, and had already made impressive gains in aerospace technology: not only in the space program, but also in things like the Tu-104 jetliner (for a time the only operating jetliner in the world after the Comet was withdrawn from service) and the Tu-114 (the largest, fastest, and longest-range propeller passenger plane in the world when it was introduced). The Soviet Union was all too aware that the West was developing SSTs, and did not intend to be left behind. The Soviet SST program, which would result in the Tupolev Tu-144 , officially kicked off in July of 1963, a month after Kennedy announced the American SST program.

The Soviet’s relatively limited experience with supersonic aircraft meant that the Soviet SST would end up borrowing many ideas from Western aircraft, such as the narrow delta wing. The Tu-144 would end up bearing a striking resemblance to the Concorde, with both aircraft having a slender delta wing, no tails, and a drooping nose, resulting in the Tu-144 being nicknamed “Konkordski." The Soviets did in fact spend significant time and effort trying to illicitly obtain information on the Concorde project, going so far as to bribe French airport maintenance crews to supply them with Concorde tire debris, and (allegedly) walking around with special sticky-soled shoes at Concorde assembly locations in the hopes of picking up fragments of exotic alloys.

But though it ended up closely resembling the Concorde, the Tu-144 differed from it in many ways, mostly for the worse. 10 Both aircraft, for instance, used afterburners, which inject fuel into the engine’s exhaust stream, increasing power at the expense of greatly increased fuel consumption. But while the Concorde only used afterburners on takeoff, the Tu-144 required afterburners to be used continuously, giving it a dismal range of just 1600 miles compared to the Concorde’s range of over 4,000 miles (later engine improvements extended the Tu-144’s range to closer to 3,300 miles, still substantially less than Concorde). The Tu-144 lacked the Concorde’s twisted and cambered “self-trimming” wing, and also its advanced system of engine inlets. The Tu-144 didn’t use fuel as a heat sink, instead opting for enormous air conditioners that created a deafening roar in the passenger cabin (so loud that passengers had to communicate by passing notes), though it did use fuel pumping to move the aircraft's center of gravity as Concorde did. In contrast to the luxury accommodations of the Concorde, the Tu-144 never managed to move its passengers in anything resembling comfort, subjecting them to noise and vibration more similar to military aircraft.

But for all its lack of aerodynamic refinements, the Tu-144 was developed impressively quickly, especially given that the Soviets needed to solve many of the same aerodynamic and fabrication difficulties that Concorde did. From kicking off in 1963, the Tu-144 made its first flight in December 1968, several months ahead of Concorde. The Soviets had once again come in first in a race to deploy advanced aerospace technology.

The Concorde and the Tu-144 in Service

In the face of environmental opposition, and with the chance of ever producing a profitable aircraft receding, the Americans bowed out of the SST race in 1971. The subsequent experience of the Tu-144 and the Concorde would confirm both the dismal economics and the serious environmental issues, particularly noise, of supersonic transport.

By the end of the 1960s, it was becoming clear that supersonic flight over land would largely be untenable, greatly reducing the proposed market for the Concorde. Nevertheless, British Aircraft Corporation still projected a market of up to 200-250 Concordes, and at one point options to purchase totaled more than 100 aircraft . But by the time the Concorde entered commercial service in 1976, its prospects were considerably dimmer. The Oil Crisis had driven up the cost of jet fuel, and the Boeing 747 had driven down the cost of transatlantic flight. Its speed notwithstanding, the Concorde was twice as expensive to buy and twice as expensive to operate as a 747, for an aircraft with around 1/4th the passenger capacity. Ultimately nearly every airline canceled its orders, and the Concordes were only adopted by the captive state airlines of Britain and France (British Airways and Air France, respectively), “sold” at a steep discount to their production cost. Rather than hundreds of aircraft, a mere 14 Concordes entered service.

Not only was this far below the number of sales needed to recoup development costs, but neither airline was able to operate their Concordes profitably. In their first five years of operation, Concorde operations lost money at both airlines nearly every single year. Even ignoring depreciation costs (ie: the allocated cost of purchasing the aircraft) wasn’t enough to put Concorde operations in the black. Fleetwide, Concordes were operating an average of just 2.6 hours per day for British Airways, far less than the 7.5 hours per day expected. Only one route – London to New York – was profitable, with every other route losing money. In 1979, the British and French governments gave up trying to sell Concordes (though not before spending half a billion dollars on an enormous marketing campaign), and shut down the assembly lines and destroyed the tooling for making them.

On top of its poor economics, Concorde was never able to fully resolve its noise issues, either the sonic boom or engine noise at subsonic speeds. Concorde service to the US was delayed by widespread protests over the sonic boom, and in some cases (such as at New York City airports) the aircraft was initially banned from landing. 11 In subsonic operations its engines remained especially noisy compared to contemporary turbofans, despite the Concorde team spending millions on noise abatement research (it was eventually found that noise suppressors would have such a negative impact on fuel consumption and range that even if one were developed, it wouldn’t be possible to use it.

Ultimately Concorde would continue operating until 2003. British Airways eventually found a way to operate it profitably by cutting all routes except the New York-London route (along with the occasional charter flight), increasing the ticket price, and cutting what had become extraneous overhead costs. Additional fatigue testing, for instance, was found to be unnecessary, since the Concordes were flying so infrequently that they had already been tested past their likely service lives. But this “profitability” was something of an accounting trick, as it required ignoring both the upfront development costs and the actual purchase costs of the aircraft. And even then, Concorde still required twice as much maintenance, and flew at much lower load factors, than other commercial aircraft.

The beginning of the end of Concorde service was marked by an Air France crash in 2000 , which took every Concorde out of service while the causes were investigated. Once the causes were understood and the remaining Concordes retrofitted to prevent similar accidents in the future, they returned to service – on September 11th, 2001. Following the terrorist attacks, air travel declined significantly, as did Concorde’s profits. The French, who had never had as much success operating Concorde profitably as British Airways, wanted to end their Concorde service, and British Airways, faced with the near doubling of maintenance and spare parts costs such a withdrawal would cause, had no choice but to end their Concorde service as well. The final flight of Concorde was in November of 2003.

The Tu-144 had even less success commercially. After a 1973 airshow crash , the Tu-144 faced increasing bureaucratic opposition internally, with many wondering whether the resources being invested in the project could be better spent elsewhere. The Tu-144 had a short range, an uncomfortable cabin, and consumed such enormous amounts of fuel that even the Soviets couldn’t ignore it. Russia’s state-owned airline Aeroflot quietly canceled its (already greatly reduced) Tu-144 service in 1983, with the director of Aeroflot's operations later stating that it had become too expensive to run.

Subsequent SST projects

But the dream of an SST didn’t stop with the Concorde or the Tu-144. Proposals for a new generation of SSTs continued to be floated (though none turned into an actual aircraft). In Europe, there were plans to upgrade future Concordes to a more advanced “B” model that were never brought to fruition, and in the 1990s a study group was formed to investigate a potential “Concorde 2” (ultimately abandoned in favor of a “very large transport” project which became the Airbus A380). In the US, NASA formed an “Advanced Supersonic Transport” (AST) program almost as soon as the SST project was canceled, to try and build the technological foundation for a future SST. This work continued through the 1970s, later transforming into the Supersonic Cruise Aircraft Research (SCAR) program, but was ultimately canceled in 1981. The poor economic performance of Concorde, and the lack of aircraft manufacturer support whittled away political support for funding the technological development needed for another SST program.

A more robust US SST program began in 1986, after Reagan announced the idea of a “new Orient Express," a Mach 25 hypersonic aircraft that could fly from New York to Tokyo in just two hours, which was followed by announcements of hypersonic programs in Britain, Germany, and Japan. But it soon became clear that a Mach 25 aircraft made little sense: even a Mach 8 aircraft would spend most of its time accelerating or decelerating (in the words of one engineer, “the world turned out to be too small for a Mach 25 airliner – or even a Mach 6 one”). The program thus evolved into a more modest “High Speed Civil Transport” program to develop an SST with a speed below Mach 5. Early studies showed that an economic SST with a speed between Mach 2 and Mach 3.2 could be viable as early as 2000. Subsequent research showed that the still-concerning ozone problem could be addressed, and that an engine could be built to meet then-current Stage 3 noise standards required by the FAA. Sonic booms would remain an issue (research suggested that efforts to reduce the noise from a sonic boom would make an aircraft uneconomical), but it was believed that there was a large enough market purely for over-water SST routes.

Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, GE and Pratt & Whitney were engaged to develop the technology for a 300-passenger, 5,000 mile range, Mach 2.4 SST that would be economically competitive with year 2000 subsonic aircraft. It was not, technically, an aircraft development program, but rather a technology research program to build the foundation for a subsequent aircraft. Efforts included high-temperature carbon-fiber composites, fuel-tank sealants, and more advanced supersonic engines.

As the program proceeded, much successful research was generated. However, as timelines stretched out, the issue of noise once again became a limiting factor. While it appeared possible to built an SST that would meet the Stage 3 noise requirements in place when the project began, noise requirements were steadily getting more stringent, and meeting the requirements that were likely to be in place when the aircraft was likely to first be in service couldn’t be accommodated by the program’s technologies. Similarly, the proposed aircraft struggled to remain competitive with the seat-mile costs of existing aircraft. The High-Speed Research program was ultimately cancelled in 1999, though many of the technologies it developed (such as new turbine blade materials) have since been used successfully in other areas.

The Future of an SST

Today, commercial airliners are still traveling below the speed of sound, but there’s a whole new crop of companies trying to find feasible ways around the sound barrier. This includes companies like Boom (developing a “conventional” supersonic transport), Hermeus (developing hypersonic Mach 5 aircraft), Venus Aerospace (developing a “rotating detonation rocket engine” that will carry passengers at up to Mach 9), and Astro Mechanica (building an electric-adaptive Jet Engine).

It’s not yet clear whether this crop of aerospace companies will succeed. On the one hand, the aerospace landscape has changed significantly since the first SSTs were developed in the 1960s. Supersonic aircraft performance is much better understood, and advances in computational fluid dynamics and optimization techniques mean much more design can be done on the computer without requiring expensive wind-tunnel testing. Engine performance has steadily increased, and materials like high-temperature carbon fiber have become available. And the steady increase in air traffic since the Concorde debuted also means there’s potentially many more customers, and many more viable routes for supersonic travel than there have historically been (though as late as 2003, the Concorde had trouble even filling its New York-London route to capacity). It's far easier to build a supersonic aircraft today than it was in the 1960s, and there are potentially many more customers for one.

But some things haven’t changed. It’s still incredibly risky to develop a new commercial aircraft, as billions of dollars need to be recouped from a relatively small number of sales. This is difficult even for a “conventional” aircraft, much less one traveling at supersonic speeds, which likely has a much smaller number of aircraft to recover development costs on (there’s a reason that Boom was unable to get any of the Big 3 jet engine suppliers to build them an engine). Supersonic travel still burns far more fuel than subsonic travel does, and a sonic boom drastically limits the routes it can travel (though there’s some promising research from NASA on reducing sonic booms). 

And the nature of supersonic flight, where significant amount of time is spent on both subsonic and supersonic domains, means trying to find a way to build an aircraft that is “two aircraft in one," or simply accepting a performance penalty with an airframe/engine that is not optimized for a particular domain. Astro Mechanica is pursuing the former strategy, with its electric-adaptive engine that can theoretically be made very efficient at drastically different aircraft speeds. Boom is pursuing the latter strategy, using a more traditional turbofan that will be quiet and efficient at low speeds, at the cost of reduced supersonic performance. Supersonic aircraft are still noisier than conventional commercial aircraft, and people still hate aircraft noise, causing the noise requirements for them to continue to get stricter. And supersonic aircraft still have a very narrow performance target they must try and hit to be economical, much less pay back their development costs.

Ultimately the SST projects are a story about the limits of the “push” strategy of technological development. With new technologies, it's often hoped that with enough upfront investment, technical issues can be resolved, and they can be pushed far enough down the learning curve to the point where they become economically competitive and widely adopted. This is, indeed, often possible: both Solar PV and wind turbines absorbed a large amount of government dollars in the form of R&D investments, Feed-In Tariffs, and Renewable Portfolio Standards, which pushed it far enough down the learning curve that they have become one of the cheapest sources of electricity, and they’re still getting cheaper.

But such a strategy requires some cooperation with the universe. To succeed, a technology needs to contain the potential for sufficient improvement based on the form it takes, the phenomena it leverages, and how it compares to competing technologies. Some barriers are too big to be pushed through by sheer force of will. The US, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union spent billions of dollars and millions of man-hours in an unsuccessful attempt to continue the trend of increasing commercial air travel speeds. The fundamental physical constraints of supersonic flight have made it inherently noisier and more expensive than subsonic travel, which combined have doomed most commercial efforts, regardless of how many dollars were thrown at the problem. We saw a similar phenomenon with titanium, which despite its abundance, its useful physical properties, and expectations that it might displace steel or aluminum, remains comparatively niche. Despite huge government investments, it remains a comparatively niche material because of fundamental physical constraints that make smelting and processing it expensive.

Technology may ultimately resolve these issues, by overcoming previous physical limits, or driving down input costs to the point of irrelevancy. Cheap enough fuel would make the high fuel burn of supersonic aircraft irrelevant. A clever design that sufficiently reduces a sonic boom could open up enough new routes to drastically increase the number of aircraft expected to sell. But these types of breakthroughs aren’t guaranteed, even if enormous sums are spent on them.

SSTs are also a story about the importance of the context that surrounds a technology: a changing landscape can drastically alter how attractive a technology appears, even if nothing about the technology itself changes. When the first SST projects were being conceived, there was nothing resembling the modern environmental movement, no aircraft noise restrictions were in place, and air travel was still comparatively expensive. By the time they entered service, all this had changed: environmental concerns had drastically shifted what sorts of technology were acceptable, people had become fiercely opposed to noisy aircraft, and competing methods of air travel offered far superior economics. A similar evolution took place with the HSCT program in the 1990s. Supersonic airliners could go faster than 1,000 miles per hour, but they still had trouble hitting the moving target of a changing world.

If you’re interested in reading more about supersonic aircraft, an SST reading list is available here for paid subscribers .

Prior to this, aircraft had broken the sound barrier only in dives, and unpiloted craft like the V-2 had broken it as well.

The prototype P.1 Lightning was capable of supercruise , but not the production models.

The high-angle of attack at low speeds limited pilot visibility. This was solved by having a nose that would drop down during takeoff and landing, giving the Concorde its distinctive “droop snoot.”

This didn’t work, and French president Charles de Gaulle would deny Britain membership to the Common Market a few months later.

This same impulse of technological independence would lead France to build its nuclear reactor fleet.

Neil Armstrong would later state that “from a technical perspective...the Concorde was as big a challenge as putting a man on the moon.”

This torturous decision making, however, has been credited with the Concorde’s excellent design: because the British were constantly shooting down French ideas and vice versa, only the most bulletproof design ideas could pass muster.

As late as 1963 it was believed that no aircraft manufacturer had made a profit off commercial jets.

The FAA administrator Najeeb Halaby, on the other hand, believed that only by constructing an actual aircraft and learning about its characteristics during flight could progress on the project be made.

The differences weren’t all in favor of Concorde. The Tu-144’s turbofan engines, for instance, meant it was quieter than the Concorde, which used turbojets.

This ban was eventually overturned by a Supreme Court ruling in 1977.

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Why the Concorde Failed: A Supersonic Saga

The Concorde was a technological marvel. This supersonic passenger jet could fly at over twice the speed of sound. It made the journey from New York to London in just three and a half hours! Pretty amazing, right?

However, despite its amazing capabilities, the Concorde ultimately failed as a commercial project.

After just 27 years of service, it made its final flight in 2003. So what went wrong with this engineering masterpiece?

Why did the “future of air travel” never take off? Let’s explore the reasons behind the Concorde’s demise.

The Development Saga

The idea of a supersonic passenger jet dates back to the 1950s. In 1962, the British and French governments signed a treaty to jointly develop and produce the Concorde.

– Total development cost: $1.3 billion (over $12 billion in today’s money)

– First prototype flight: March 1969

– First commercial flight: January 1976

– Top speed: Mach 2.04 (1,354 mph or 2,180 km/h)

– Maximum range: 3,900 miles (6,275 km)

However, the road to the Concorde’s first commercial flight was long and bumpy. Multiple issues like material and engine problems, noise regulations, and funding constraints constantly delayed the project.

The first Concorde prototype crashed in 1973, killing the test crew and further setting back the schedule. Finally, after over a decade of delays and budget overruns, the Concorde entered commercial service in 1976 – 6 years behind schedule.

Operational Challenges

Even after its launch, the Concorde faced numerous operational hurdles that limited its commercial success.

The Sonic Boom Problem

When the Concorde flew at supersonic speeds over land, it created loud sonic booms that troubled people on the ground. This led to a ban on supersonic overland flights.

The Concorde could only fly at supersonic speed over oceans, greatly limiting the routes it could serve profitably. Most transatlantic flights had to slow down to subsonic speeds while overland, negating much of the time-saving benefits.

Fuel Inefficiency

The Concorde guzzled a lot of fuel, especially when taking off and accelerating to supersonic speeds. Its four Olympus 593 engines had a very high fuel consumption rate compared to subsonic jets.

Aviation fuel prices skyrocketed in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. This greatly increased the Concorde’s operating costs and made supersonic travel uneconomical for most passengers.

Airport Limitations

The Concorde could only operate from airports with long runways, special safety areas, and upgraded facilities to handle its noise, wake vortices, and high temperatures.

Very few airports globally met these stringent requirements. Additionally, the sonic boom issue prevented the Concorde from flying supersonically on many overland routes. All of these factors severely limited the routes it could service.

Economic Factors

While the Concorde was a remarkable engineering feat, it failed to make economic sense as an aviation project. Several factors contributed to its lack of commercial viability.

High Operating Costs

The high development costs, fuel inefficiency, and expensive airport modifications significantly drove up the Concorde’s operating expenses.

Furthermore, it required costly regular maintenance and special training for ground crew and pilots. Ultimately, airlines could never recoup these exorbitant costs through ticket sales alone.

Limited Seating Capacity

The Concorde had a relatively small seating capacity of just 92 to 128 passengers to accommodate its slender aerodynamic shape.

With such few seats to sell per flight, it was extremely challenging for airlines to profit, especially given the high operating costs.

Competition from Subsonic Jets

As aviation technology progressed, new subsonic wide-body jets like the Boeing 747 offered a cheaper and more comfortable flying experience for long-haul routes.

Gradually, the minor time savings became less of an incentive for the premium prices that the Concorde demanded.

Safety Concerns

In 2000, a tragic accident dealt a severe blow to the Concorde’s reputation. An Air France Concorde crashed shortly after takeoff from Paris, killing all 109 people on board and 4 on the ground.

The crash was caused by a small piece of metal that had fallen onto the runway and punctured one of the tires. This led to a chain of events causing a rupture in the fuel tank and an uncontrollable fire.

While the Concorde eventually resumed service in 2001 after safety upgrades, the accident severely dented public confidence in the jet.

Environmental Impact

The Concorde was extremely noisy, with its sonic booms and engine roar irritating communities around airports.

It also had a larger carbon footprint per passenger compared to modern subsonic jets, due to its higher fuel consumption and smaller seating capacity.

As environmental concerns grew, the Concorde’s sonic booms and emissions became harder to justify.

Lack of Market Demand

Ultimately, the greatest factor behind the Concorde’s failure was its inability to stimulate enough demand from passengers.

The time savings were just not valuable enough for most travelers to pay the premium fare, which was often double or more than regular first-class tickets.

Most airlines agreed that while the wealthy might fly the Concorde occasionally for the novelty, there was little long-term demand for supersonic air travel at such high prices. The Concorde was simply too niche.

The Concorde failed due to a combination of factors:

• Massive development costs and overruns
• Operational limitations like sonic booms and specialized airport needs
• High fuel consumption and operating expenses
• Small seating capacity making profitability difficult
• Public concerns over noise levels and emissions
• Insufficient demand for supersonic travel at such premium pricing

While a technological marvel, the Concorde proved to be an uneconomical commercial endeavor due to its high costs, limited routes, safety issues, and lack of mass-market demand.

Q: Could better planning have made the Concorde successful?

A: Better planning and more realistic projections could potentially have mitigated some issues, but the core challenges were inherent to the Concorde’s supersonic design. Factors like sonic booms, high fuel burn, and limited seating would have persisted.

Q: Will we see new supersonic passenger jets in the future?

A: Several companies are working on new supersonic jet designs addressing some drawbacks like quieter sonic booms. However, making them truly economically viable at scale remains a huge challenge.

Q: Why didn’t more airlines operate the Concorde?

A: Only Air France and British Airways operated the Concorde due to its exclusivity and the immense costs involved. Most airlines found supersonic transport too risky and unprofitable to invest in.

Q: Could anything have extended the Concorde’s service life?

A: Perhaps if airlines and manufacturers had continued investing heavily in upgrades and expensive solutions to the noise, emissions, and sonic boom issues, its service could have been extended. However, the costs likely outweighed the benefits.

Priyanka transitioned from being a trendsetting fashionista to an influential business blogger. With an innate passion for style and an astute entrepreneurial mindset, Priyanka carved her own path in the digital landscape, captivating audiences with her unique blend of fashion-forward insights and astute business acumen. Through her posts, she shares her expertise on emerging trends, fashion industry analysis, and valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

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Simple Flying

Russia's concorde: why the tu-144 failed.

There were high hopes with the Tupolev Tu-144. It was the first commercial supersonic airliner to hit the skies when it took off on December 31st, 1968, and it was the first to go supersonic when it broke the sound barrier on June 5th, 1969. Despite these breakthroughs, the plane ultimately failed in service. Where did it go wrong?

Tough competition

Notably, the two aforementioned achievements were before the Concorde followed suit. Yet, the Tu-144’s life was cut far shorter than the Anglo-French aircraft.

Concorde was in service for 27 years. However, the Tu-144 only flew for a few years after being introduced with Aeroflot on December 26th, 1975.

The Tupolev Design Bureau was behind the Tu-144 program. The group was the force that helped get the Soviet Union’s aviation sector going and was behind other ambitious types such as the Tu-104 . This plane was the second jetliner to be introduced for commercial operations.

Challenges in practice

In an era when the Soviet Union was racing against the West in the Cold War, the country was eager to get the plane ready for passenger service. Those behind the project managed to beat rivals to the post when it came to flight tests. However, transitioning to commercial operations proved to be a real challenge.

For instance, the Tu-144 had to deploy its afterburners constantly to maintain flight. Whereas the Concorde only had to do this at specific times. This factor caused the plane to consume fuel heavily and shorten its range.

Several important technical features weren't up to scratch with what was available across the globe at the time. The engine control and aerodynamics fell short of the Concorde, which beat the Tu-144 by a range of 400 NM (740 km).

These technical factors caused a domino effect on the overall passenger experience. The plane’s four loud Kuznetsov turbofan engines combined with the essential air conditioning to cause significant noise disturbances to those that could afford a ticket. This air conditioning was crucial as it prevented overheating amid the high friction during flight, but the noise forced passengers to pass notes to each other to communicate.

Critical events

Even though there were practical limitations, infamous incidents undoubtedly contributed to the plane’s downfall before it really got going. The 1973 Paris Air Show crash was the most publicized accident. Here, the Tu-144 was on display the same day as the Concorde. However, as the plane was in the air above 200,000 spectators, it broke into pieces as it could not withstand the stress and crashed in a nearby village. Six crew members onboard and eight French civilians died as a result.

This incident set the mood for what was to follow. Even though Aeroflot took on the plane in 1975, it initially only deployed it for mail operations. The carrier waited until 1977 to enter the aircraft into passenger service, nearly a decade after the Tu-144 performed its first flight.

Importantly, during the Tu-144s early service, it had over 226 failures. 80 of the failures were during the flight, and 80 were so critical that the trip had to be delayed or canceled.

Just a year after the aircraft was called upon for passenger duty, a unit that was set for delivery crashed near Yegoryevsk. Aeroflot had enough and grounded the type after just 55 passenger trips. In total, 16 units were produced of the Tu-144 between 1967 and 1983.

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Another chance?

The Tu-144, nonetheless, managed to extend its life with research projects. Interestingly, NASA worked with the plane's manufacturers to develop a new variant in the form of the Tu-144LL . This aircraft became the Supersonic Flying Laboratory, marking a new age of diplomacy between the United States and Russia following the end of the Cold War.

When I visited the Tu-144 in Moscow Oblast last month, the general consensus was that the locals were proud of the initial achievements to send such an aircraft up in the air. The first wave of supersonic travel failed to live up to the hype across all markets. However, with the scene set to return in the coming decades, the aviation industry has the opportunity to right many wrongs.

Russia is one nation that is working intently on a new supersonic jet . With it being five decades since the Tu-144 first took flight, the country will be keen to introduce the many new technologies that have emerged over the years to offer a more well-rounded solution for a new generation.

What are your thoughts about the Tupolev Tu-144? What do you feel about the prospects of another wave of supersonic travel? Let us know what you think in the comment section.

What Happened At Aerion?

The supersonic jet company appeared to have a lot of momentum, but elusive funding unraveled its expansive ambitions..

Aerion Corporation shocked the aviation world when on the evening of May 21 the company confirmed it had ceased operations .  

Aerion had appeared to be on the precipice of realizing its 18-year dream of building what many anticipated would be the first purpose-built supersonic business jet, the AS2 . The company had decided on a final design that had been proved out in wind tunnel tests, and dozens of patents had been secured.

Aerion had sought to de-risk development with well-established suppliers. Many of the industry’s giants had signed on to the program, including  Boeing , GE Aviation, Spirit AeroSystems, Honeywell, and Collins Aerospace.

The company had held a groundbreaking ceremony in December for a $300 million, two-million-square-foot headquarters complex at Florida’s Orlando Melbourne International Airport that was to have housed facilities for research, design, production, and interior completions of the AS2 supersonic and future aircraft.

As the progress was being made, the AS2 had generated enthusiasm regarding the possibilities for the market, with established operators such as Flexjet and NetJets publicly coming on board. In fact, Aerion claimed its order backlog had ballooned to $11.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the company had already teased its next product, a near-hypersonic AS3 airliner that was to incorporate technologies developed through a joint research product with NASA.

And importantly, Aerion had helped convince regulators and lawmakers that the time was ripe to consider a fresh approach to certifying and accepting new-generation, more environmentally friendly supersonic aircraft.

Dramatically Ramped-up Spending

But while Aerion appeared to be moving forward with much momentum, it was also on the precipice of a dramatically ramped-up spend rate as it transitioned from being a design firm to an aircraft developer. At that critical juncture, the company's investors decided that was too much for them to bear without significant outside support.

Aerion knew from the beginning that its venture would be expensive, figuring it would take upwards of $5 billion to bring its  supersonic business jet  to market. Fort Worth financier Robert Bass—the key investor who backed the project, enabling it to launch in 2003—had set early on a limit on what he would spend, according to officials close to the company.

Aerion knew it would have to line up other partners. It was able to attract the likes of Airbus, Lockheed Martin, and ultimately Boeing. Airbus was not the right fit, however, because while interested in the technology, sources say, it was not as interested in building a business jet. The relationship proved fruitful while it lasted but ultimately was not going to get the AS2 to the finish line. Similarly, Lockheed Martin had different priorities.

After two wrong fits, Boeing appeared to be the right match. But the timing proved wrong. Aerion announced its partnership with Boeing in February 2019, just a month before the second of two Boeing 737 Max airliner crashes set off a global grounding of the manufacturer’s cornerstone new program. That grounding lasted more than a year, until December 2020.

In the interim, the pandemic set in, causing airlines to cancel numerous aircraft orders; in 2020 Boeing logged one of its worst years, posting a nearly $12 billion loss. Slogging through a double-whammy, Boeing in late 2020 shuttered its NeXt innovation division, which had focused on emerging technologies.

Even so, Boeing had ostensibly continued its involvement in the Aerion program. It had reportedly already invested several hundred million dollars for a 40 percent stake in the company and was appointed to two of the five positions on the Aerion board. However, its ability to continue at that level of investment was in question.

A Search for Investors

Meanwhile, the search for outside investment continued. Aerion was reportedly in talks earlier this year  to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Altitude Acquisition Corp. But as the SPAC market seemed white-hot this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission has given notice that it is stepping up oversight in this arena.

Aerion was said to have been “agonizingly close” to arranging for outside capital that would have provided the necessary push into production, said another source close to the company. However, during a pandemic that had already taken a heavy toll on one of Aerion’s key partners, Boeing, and on major suppliers such as GE Aviation, that outside capital proved elusive.

“Investors are fickle,” said one observer, noting that the eVTOL sector has been attracting heavy investments, particularly from the risk-takers in Silicon Valley, while a company such as Aerion has failed to secure the same.

Joshua Ng, a director with Singapore-based Alton Aviation Consultancy, said that the investment proposition for eVTOL aircraft is significantly different from that for supersonic aircraft. “With eVTOLs there is the aim to democratize air travel, but that is not the case for supersonic business jets, which will only ever be used by the super-wealthy,” he told BJT . “So, the overall addressable market for supersonic aircraft is much smaller. The question is whether existing business aircraft owners will trade up to supersonic. I’m not sure about that, especially given the range limitations.”

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A ruling by the agency does not lift the ban on flying faster than the speed of sound over land, but it does represent a significant step.

That evening, Aerion issued a statement: “In the current financial environment, it has proven hugely challenging to close on the scheduled and necessary large new capital requirements to finalize the transition of the AS2 into production. Given these conditions, the Aerion Corporation is now taking the appropriate steps in consideration of this ongoing financial environment.”

Fallout from the Shutdown

The fallout was swift. Its anchor supplier, GE Aviation, discontinued development work on the twin-shaft, medium-bypass Affinity engine that was to have powered the Mach 1.4 AS2. GE Aviation also confirmed to BJT it was redeploying its Affinity team to other programs.

Other suppliers were forced to quickly move on past the AS2. Spirit AeroSystems, which had been selected to design and supply the aircraft’s forward fuselage, also was notified of Aerion’s decision to cease operations on May 21, a spokeswoman for the Wichita, Kansas–based supplier told BJT . Employees working on the AS2 program were moved to other roles within the company to support its defense work and growing commercial aircraft production rates, she said. “Spirit is committed to working with other companies in the future on new and innovative technologies in the aviation sector,” she added.

Boeing expressed similar sentiments: “While we are disappointed Aerion could not secure additional funding to continue their work, we remain committed to working with innovative and creative partners who, like Aerion, continue to push limits on groundbreaking technology.”

Meanwhile, at least in the immediate aftermath, Aerion remains a going entity. The word “bankruptcy” has not been mentioned but to all those involved, it is clear that the company is taking steps to shutter.

High-level employees gave notice of their availability for other opportunities, and Aerion chairman, president, and CEO Tom Vice was believed to have been reaching across his network to make sure his staff was taken care of to the extent possible.

The fate of the company's intellectual property and some four dozen patents remains unclear.

A Longtime Dream

Aerion began as a dream of keeping civil supersonic travel alive at a time when the Concorde had retired and with it most hopes for that form of flight. Dr. Richard Tracy, the noted aerodynamicists who worked for companies such as Lockheed and Douglas, formed Asset Group in 1991 to pursue his research in supersonic natural laminar flow. He teamed with Bass in the founding of Aerion in the early 2000s to use that research to form a foundation for a new supersonic aircraft.

Tracy remained with Aerion and Bass throughout its time.

Aerion slowly worked to flesh out the concept and developed a company with seasoned industry executives that brought credibility and interest to the possibilities of supersonic.

These included, over the years, former Learjet president Brian Barents, who retired from Aerion in 2018 as executive chairman, and former Gulfstream president Bryan Moss, who joined the Aerion board in 2018. As Barents retired, Vice, a former Northrop Grumman executive, took the helm of Aerion and brought with him an expansive view of a transportation network.

Under Vice’s stewardship, Aerion moved away from that original natural laminar flow design to a more traditional supersonic design that would be easier to industrialize and bring to market in a timelier fashion.

And a little over a year ago, he laid out a concept in which the AS2 would be just the beginning. Aerion would become a company that facilitated door-to-door travel through partnerships and use of novel air transportation modes such as the emerging eVTOL platforms.

Partnerships and Testing

In addition to building a supplier base, Aerion had begun to form partnerships to go down that road, including with eSTOL developer Electra, as it had launched its “Aerion Connect ecosystem.”

Aerion also had matured its more conventional approach with wind tunnel tests late last year and appeared to be ahead of a growing pack of would-be supersonic developers, some of which were close on its heels.

Critical to moving ahead with the technology were environmental approvals. Fully cognizant that the environmental community would never permit the return of a noisy Concorde, Aerion took a more practical approach, designing an aircraft that could be efficient at high subsonic speeds over land and supersonic over the ocean. This could serve as a starting point as it worked to convince regulators of a concept of accepting a sonic boom that still occurred but didn’t reach the ground with the same impact as the Concorde. Aerion was targeting just over supersonic in the Mach 1.2 range for that “boomless cruise” mode, while top speed could be Mach 1.4.

With a growing field of supersonic developers, Congress and the international regulatory community have begun to discuss such alternative concepts, and Lockheed Martin is planning noise trials with a demonstrator over land to test a softer thud or supersonic aircraft that do not produce the same noise or emissions profile. When Aerion began, this conversation was a nonstarter at the regulatory level. It was told to demonstrate that there was sufficient interest before regulators would consider evaluating noise requirements.

Beyond tackling the conundrum surrounding noise regulations, Aerion also recognized that clean emissions were critical in gaining acceptance of a supersonic aircraft and promised its model would fly on 100 percent sustainable fuel—a promise that all of the supersonic developers have made.

As this continued, analysts clearly saw a market for supersonic, but not for all the players.

“The market is clearly there,” said Rolland Vincent, president of Rolland Vincent Associates and JetNet IQ creator/director. “Pricing has been established. The technology does not require any leaps of faith. Capital is cheap and [I thought] generally available.”

JetNet had forecast a 10-year market for 300 supersonic business jets, which incidentally was the forecast production rate Aerion projected for its AS2.

While it is unclear how much of Aerion’s backlog was backed with significant deposits, companies such as Flexjet appeared eager to move into that sector. Flexjet was to have been a launch customer, jumping onto the program as early as 2015 with an announced order for 20. More recently NetJets placed options for 20.

“Flexjet ordered its AS2’s from Aerion Supersonic in 2015 and the company has been a supporter of the program since then," said Kenn Ricci, principal at Flexjet parent Directional Aviation. "We were particularly impressed with the recent design changes and innovations generated by Tom Vice and his current team. While we are disappointed to hear from the company that they are ceasing operations, we understand the vast investment required by such programs to bring them to fruition and the inherent risks involved.”

Interest in Supersonic Remains

Flexjet remains interested in that market segment. Gulfstream , which has long been exploring supersonic possibilities but has never felt the timing was right, has maintained that speed is among the top attributes that its customer base seeks.

But the next company in line to reach the supersonic market, Boom, initially has set its sights on an airliner. Unlike Aerion, though, Boom has built a demonstrator that it will first fly later this year or early next.

However, analysts such as Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis for Teal Group, have questioned the viability of commercial supersonics because of the costs. He noted that business jets and commercial airliners operate with very different economic models and said he believes there is more hope on the business jet side than for a commercial variant. “The prospects for supersonics exist with business. They do not exist with commercial,” he said.

Like Vincent, Aboulafia believes “there was indeed a reasonable level of market demand” and feels Aerion provided realistic guidance at a $120 million price rather than a lower price that would be dependent on unlikely production numbers. He also recognizes the seasoned aerospace professionals Aerion brought on board.

But he conceded, “I don’t see a Plan D,” for Aerion after Boeing, and unfortunately, “The closer you get to the finish line, the bigger you are, the harder the collapse.” He also wondered whether the more recent suggestion of the AS3 was a “plea for help.”

Despite the market, he questioned whether the financial world may have made its statement on supersonics. “Aerion may be a category killer,” he said, adding that supersonic business jets “were the only appealing form of civil supersonics, and Aerion was always ahead of the pack. What are the chances that anyone will eagerly acquire Spike, Boom, or any of the others?”

Vincent agreed, questioning whether others could have success in that space. Others have questioned whether an established player, such as Gulfstream, would step into that spot.

Meanwhile, as Aerion announced its end of operations, it touted its successes. “The Aerion Corporation has assembled a world-class team of employees and partners, and we are very proud of our collective efforts to realize a shared vision of revolutionizing global mobility with sustainable supersonic flight. Since our company’s formation, our team has created disruptive new innovations plus leading-edge technologies and intellectual property.“

The company further said its aircraft met “all market, technical, regulatory, and sustainability requirements” and that the market for a new supersonic segment was validated by its order base.

Charles Alcock, Jerry Siebenmark, and Chad Trautvetter contributed to this article.

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Analysis: What The Boom XB-1's Supersonic Flight Authorization Means For Aviation

• Boom Supersonic's XB-1 prototype aircraft has been authorized to fly faster than sound, paving the way for supersonic commercial flights.
• The company aims for Boom Overture to run on sustainable fuel, offering quicker travel times and potentially lower ticket prices.
• The Boom Overture is set to be the first supersonic aircraft to enter service with US airlines.

Boom Supersonic's XB-1 prototype aircraft has been granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1). As part of this Special Flight Authorization, the manufacturer has been authorized to conduct up to 20 test flights with the XB-1. As a technology demonstrator aircraft, the XB-1 will pave the way for the arrival of Boom Supersonic's debut supersonic commercial aircraft, the Boom Overture .

Boom Supersonic has already overcome many barriers to getting its plans off the ground since the concept was developed in 2014, including investments that will be relevant to the aviation industry as a whole and will assist with the development of new aircraft in the future, supersonic or not. In an interview with CNN , the CEO of Boom Supersonic, Blake Scholl, outlined some of the challenges faced by the manufacturer's design team, saying as follows:

I very much believe in the return of supersonic air travel, and ultimately to bring it to every passenger on every route. And thats not something that takes place overnight. The hard part of building a supersonic jet is making something thats so sleek, and so slippery, take off and land safely.

Among the other hurdles already overcome is an expensive testing process. Unlike the costly physical wind tunnels that were used in the 1960s to test Concorde throughout its development stages, Boom Supersonic has been able to make use of digital wind tunnels, making the testing process significantly quicker and cheaper.

With the aviation industry striving to achieve carbon net zero by 2050, critics have asked what place a supersonic aircraft may have in this, but Scholl has assured that the Boom Overture will run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). This will, in turn, support the wider move to SAF-powered flights across the entire industry.

When it comes to the cost of supersonic travel, Boom Supersonic acknowledges that the hefty price tag for tickets on previous supersonic aircraft like Concorde was prohibitive to the vast majority. Scholl hopes that prices on the Boom Overture will initially be on par with business class tickets on conventional aircraft, while the longer-term goal is to bring them down to a level accessible to the masses.

Progress towards supersonic flight

XB-1 supersonic flights are on track for later this year. The aircraft completed its first flight in March 2024 at the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California. During the test flight, the aircraft met all of its objectives, including safely reaching an altitude of 7,120 ft (2,170 m) and speeds of up to 238 knots (273 mph). Boom Supersonic took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to celebrate the occasion:

The XB-1 is still some way off reaching the speed of Mach 1 (760 mph), but Scholl went on to say that a further 10-15 test flights will be conducted over the coming months, with the aircraft gradually working its way up to Mach 1.

Boom Overture set to carry its first passengers by the end of the decade

The manufacturer has stated that it is planning for the Boom Overture to carry its first passengers before the end of the decade, and currently, Boom Supersonic has taken 130 orders for its Overture aircraft from multiple airlines around the world, including major carriers such as United Airlines, American Airlines, and Japan Airlines. Scholl went on to say that 2024 is going to be "one of the biggest years yet for supersonic flight."

Meanwhile, construction of the Overture Superfactory at Piedmont Triad International Airport (GSO) in Greensboro, North Carolina, continues to progress. The facility is due to open later this year and will provide the space and tools necessary to build large supersonic aircraft such as the Boom Overture.

The Boom Overture could revolutionize the aviation industry

In the history of aviation, there have only been two supersonic commercial aircraft - the Tupolev Tu-144 and Concorde. These aircraft stopped flying in June 1999 and October 2003, respectively. Despite both aircraft facing their own problems, they act as a reminder that supersonic air travel is a very real possibility, and the progress being made by Boom Supersonic with its XB-1 test aircraft takes the aviation world one step closer to supersonic commercial travel, more than two decades after Concorde's retirement.

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With the Boom Supersonic set to fly at twice the speed of today's aircraft, it could revolutionize the aviation industry, with airlines able to operate flights such as:

• London to New York in four hours
• Los Angeles to Sydney in six hours
• Miami to Sao Paulo in four hours.

Not only does this open a world of possibilities for travelers, quicker flying times also enable greater aircraft utilization throughout the day, improving the economic strength of air travel, which may in turn have a positive impact on ticket prices for passengers.

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What do you make of Boom Supersonic's XB-1 test aircraft and the manufacturer's eventual plans for a passenger supersonic aircraft - the Boom Overture? How do you think the next few months will play out for the XB-1 as it conducts further test flights? Share your thoughts by commenting below.