More than two decades after the retirement of the Concorde, American aircraft company Boom Supersonic has achieved supersonic flight with its XB-1 prototype in a test flight above the Mojave Desert.
Tuesday’s test saw the aircraft fly faster than the speed of sound, accelerating to Mach 1.122 (860 miles per hour) in three high-speed runs over the course of 35 minutes.
It marks the first time a human-piloted passenger jet has broken the sound barrier since Concorde’s retirement in 2003, which Boom Supersonic says is “paving the way for the return of commercial supersonic flight”.
XB-1 is a prototype for Boom Supersonic’s Overture aircraft, which will be about three times the size and aims to be “the world’s fastest airliner”.
The proposed jet will carry between 64 and 80 passengers at Mach 1.7 speeds. That’s twice the speed of today’s subsonic airliners and, much like the Concorde, could fly from London to New York in 3.5 hours, the company has claimed.
Boom Supersonic said it has already received 130 pre-orders for Overture from companies including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines.
The jets will be produced in Overture Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina, which completed last year and will be scaled up to produce 66 Overture aircraft per year at a cost of around £200 million each.
XB-1 successful test flight at the Mojave Air & Space Port in California marks the first time that an aircraft developed by a private aviation company – rather than a government or military – has successfully broken the sound barrier.
“A small band of talented and dedicated engineers has accomplished what previously took governments and billions of dollars,” said Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl. “Our ultimate goal is to bring the benefits of supersonic flight to everyone.”
The Concorde, jointly developed by the United Kingdom and France, was retired after only 27 years in operation due to noise complaints and high operation costs.
Boom Supersonic hopes to mitigate these issues largely through the design of the aircraft and its engine, which functions without the noisy afterburners used by the Concorde.
Instead, the American company is developing a novel turbofan engine, which it claims will have lower operating costs while complying with international aircraft noise limits.
The aircraft itself is made almost entirely from strong, lightweight carbon fibre composites and features an aerodynamic design optimised using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.
This involved exploring “thousands of designs” before settling on the most efficient, according to Boom Supersonic.
An augmented reality vision system allows pilots to land safely despite the aircraft’s long nose, eliminating “the weight and complexity of a moveable nose like Concorde’s”.
Scholl first announced Boom Supersonic’s plans to create the “fastest passenger plane ever” in 2016. At the time, he said tickets would be priced at around $5,000 (£3,504).
Last year, NASA and Lockheed Martin unveiled a separate prototype for a “quiet supersonic” jet, which they hope could be used to inform future passenger planes.
Other companies in the running to make a new and improved supersonic jet include NASA and Lockheed Martin, who have created a prototype for a ”quiet supersonic” jet, while Boeing is working on a hypersonic aircraft that move five times faster than the speed of sound.
