THE FUTURE OF FLYING / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Here, the results of hundreds of images taken at JFK (previous page) and Heathrow (above). For the JFK shot, Kelley positioned himself for eight hours on runway 31R; for Heathrow, he stood on 09L for three hours. Then he spent days doing painstaking photoshop work. His photos take you back to that first childhood trip to a departures lounge, nose pressed to the glass, gazing at those metal behemoths somehow lifting into the air, like magic. —Austin Merrill Michael Kelley

By Scott McCartney



OF ALL THE JOYS of a bygone era of luxury air travel, Concorde was in a class by itself: supersonic flights that shrank the globe and made the hands of clocks tick backward. Now we’re closer than ever to a return to supersonic flights on commercial airlines, at prices far more affordable than Concorde ever was. 

By the end of this year, a bluntly named aircraft manufacturing startup, Boom Technology, says it will fly a one-third size model of its supersonic airliner. The plane is called Baby Boom and it will test design and performance. The full-scale Boom airplane is scheduled to start three years of testing and certification in 2020. Many hurdles lay ahead, but the jet could be flying passengers in late 2023. Virgin Atlantic has ordered the first 10 of the $200 million jets. Other airlines have signed on, Boom Technology says, and a total of 76 orders are on the books so far. 

Boom Technology Aerodynamics Engineer Marshall Gusman prepares the XB-1 model for a wind tunnel test. Photo: Boom Technology 



Boom Technology says its Mach 2.2 plane will be able to get from New York to London in three hours, 15 minutes with round-trip tickets priced at about $5,000. Day-trips across oceans for business meetings would be possible. San Francisco to Tokyo would be five and a half hours instead of 11 hours today.

The plane will be roughly the length of a 737, only skinnier, and carry up to 55 passengers. Most rows will have a single seat on each side of the aisle with under-seat storage for carry-on bags. Seating will be about the same size as domestic first class today—38-inches for each row. While lie-flat business-class beds may be an option, there’s no need for them when you’re in the air as long as it currently takes to get from New York to Dallas.

The Denver-based company, founded in 2014, is backed by Silicon Valley investors and future airline customers, including Japan Airlines, which has preordered 20 aircraft. Boom Technology says it will use mostly off-the-shelf airplane technology—conventional turbofan engines, three on each plane, and no afterburners, for example. The key enabler, says founder and CEOBlake Scholl,is building airframes out of carbon-fiber composite materials instead of aluminum, as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 have done. Composites are lighter, stronger and don’t expand when heated the way aluminum does. “There’s no fundamentally new technology on the plane,” says Scholl.

Traveling faster than the speed of sound creates a window-rattling boom. Today sonic booms are banned over the continental U.S., meaning the company could fly supersonic only over oceans. An effort is under way to reverse restrictions in Congress, but many lawmakers are reluctant to lift the ban without testing.
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Its supersonic airliner will travel between New York and London in just over three hours. Photo: Boom Technology 


Scholl says the aircraft’s shape and size means its sonic booms won’t be as loud as Concorde’s. At a cruise altitude of 60,000 feet, or about twice as high as conventional airliners, the booms won’t rattle windows and will be about as noisy as motorcycles or weed-wackers. Even if the U.S. boom ban isn’t modified, the jet will still be financially feasible with over-ocean flights only, he says.

Supersonic travel has become a hot topic again in aviation. NASA and Lockheed Martinare working on a new breed of supersonic aircraft that will greatly minimize sonic booms. Those planes likely won’t get to commercial use until years after Boom Technology starts. Several makers are also developing supersonic private business jets.

High maintenance costs, a fiery crash in 2000, and other factors killed Concorde. Boom Technology thinks it can break the supersonic barrier again for airlines with per-seat costs 75 percent lower than Concorde’s were, in today’s dollars. If it works, it’ll turn back the clocks once again.