The Need For Speed

In 2017 Japan Airlines invested $10 million in the company with an option to buy up to 20 aircraft. Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic has also taken options of 10

Speaking at an airport conference in Hong Kong earlier this year, he reflected on the long, weary flight from Denver. “Boy, was that a long flight. It doesn’t take you long travelling on an airplane to realise we need a faster plane, and that’s exactly what we are doing.”

Which is what Boom is about. Not only does it believe it can build an airline-friendly supersonic jet – it has been named Overture – it is convinced it can do it with the right technology and economics to make it a highly profitable proposition for carriers. A few are already convinced of the potential. In 2017 Japan Airlines invested $10 million in the company with an option to buy up to 20 aircraft. Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic has also taken options of 10 and the Spaceship Company, a Virgin Galactic subsidiary, is working with Boom on the plane. Altogether, Boom says it has more than 70 orders.

General Electric, Honeywell International and Netherlands-based TenCate Advanced Composites are among suppliers for its supersonic jet and the company has raised more than $150 million in backing so far from venture capital firms.

It is not the only player.

Aerion Corporation, backed by Boeing and launched in 2014, is planning the first flight of its AS2 supersonic jet in 2023. It has also been working with Lockheed Martin, developer of supersonic fighter aircraft, since 2017.

The AS2 will be designed to carry just 12 passengers in a business style cabin and fly at a maximum speed of Mach 1.4 (1,074mph). It has already won a US$2.4 billion order for 20 from the Flexjet fractional aircraft ownership program.

Spike Aerospace is the third main contender and has already tested an unmanned, subscale version of its S-512 plane (dubbed the SX-1.2). A windowless business jet, Spike’s plane is planned to fly at Mach 1.6 (1,227mph) and carry 22 passengers.

Boom’s offering would be the only one in the same league as Concorde, flying at Mach 2.2 (1,687mph) and seating 55 passengers. Concorde flew at Mach 2.04 (1,565mph). With estimated development costs of $6 billion, the target date for launch of Overture is 2023 with entry into service in 2025.

While the Aerion and Spike supersonic planes are essentially a private jet offering to the wealthy, Boom aims to make its plane accessible to a wider range of today’s business travellers. With a list price of around $200 million, Wilding says that unlike Concorde, ticket prices will be comparable to business class fares on today’s subsonic aircraft. “What that means is if the operating economics on the airplane are comparable and competitive with a business class seat on current widebody airplane, it will allow airlines to sell tickets for travel on those same routes a little over two times faster for the same ticket price. That is going to be wildly profitable for the airlines.”

How does it plan to achieve this? Wilding says there are three technologies that will enable Overture: aerodynamics, materials and engines.

“The really neat thing about supersonic air travel is we already know how to do this. Routinely, every day, military aircraft break the sound barrier. Concorde flew 50 years ago so the technological barriers are no longer there.

“The problem with Concorde, although it was a technological achievement, was that it didn’t have the economics. We believe that the technology we have today can eliminate that problem and we actually can end up with a supersonic transport aircraft that is sustainable, offering the economics and it can be mainstream.”

He points out the three technologies already exist in current certified subsonic transport aircraft such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350. “What we are doing is taking this and applying it in a way that the pieces are put together slightly differently to optimise for supersonic travel.

“The first piece is aerodynamics. In Concorde’s day there were no computers. Concorde was completely designed by hand, by slide rule and big pads of paper and then backed up by wind tunnel testing. It is amazing they were able to take that airplane and get it into service in the way they did without technology. The problem with that was iterations took many, many months and because of that the development cycle was longer.

“Today, even though aerodynamics have not changed, the tools that we have to develop and make that efficient have changed dramatically. We use computing and modern tools like computational fluid dynamics and we can do literally thousands of iterations overnight out of our computer systems and we can get to a much more efficient design much more quickly.”

In terms of materials, Wilding says Concorde was made out of aluminum. “Aluminum is a great material. However supersonic airplanes get hot. That’s just part of the physics when you’re flying at Mach 2. The plane heat soaks at roughly 150 degrees C. That causes the airplane to grow roughly 30 centimetres in length which really contributes to fatigue on the materials and has a lot of implications on the design.

“Our carbon-fibre composites are mostly impervious to thermal growth in that same way and they are much more durable from a fatigue standpoint. Additionally, with carbon-fibre components we can basically make this airplane any shape that we want so the aerodynamicists when they are doing their optimisation of the airplane are not constrained by what kind of parts we can make the airplane out of.”

The final enabling technology is engines, he says.

“Concorde famously was the only jet transport ever to fly with afterburners. They obviously make a lot of noise and burn a lot of fuel. The Concorde was designed with engine technology from the late 1950s and over the last 50 or 60 years engine technology has drastically improved.

“Our airplane is not going to have afterburners. It’s going to have turbofan engines not a lot different from what is currently flying on state-of-the-art subsonic airliners, just with a little bit different design points to the airplane. All of those technologies really come together to allow us to do economical and sustainable supersonic flight. We believe now is the time for a supersonic renaissance and that is why we founded Boom.”

While the final design of Overture is expected to be locked in before the end of this year, a one-third scale version of the plane, the XB-1 – nicknamed Baby Boom – is currently in production. It is essentially an aerodynamic and propulsion model of the plane which will be rolled out later this year and make its first flight in 2020. It will fly at Mach 2.2. “What this is really about is helping to build the team,” explained Wilding. “There is no team out there today capable of building a Mach 2.2 supersonic airliner so we decided let’s build this team and let’s figure out how to do this in-house with a much smaller and much more rapid cycle, learn some lessons before we go off and tackle this bigger airplane.”

While Concorde was a revolutionary plane that, in the end, only ever had one profitable route, from London to New York, Boom has put together potential route maps, again with most over water because of the sonic boom.

Right now, Boom is not focusing on a low boom model, something it plans to tackle later. “We believe we can get to somewhere around 500 city pairs with at least once daily service. That’s a combination of over the Atlantic, over the Pacific and Asian routes.”

Some examples are New York to London, currently a seven-hour flight, which would be cut to a little over three hours, San Francisco to Tokyo which would come down from eleven hours to 5.5 hours, and Hong Kong-Sydney from nine-10 hours to less than five hours. Because the aircraft, similar to Concorde, would be flying at 60,000ft, it would also gain efficiency by avoiding congested air routes at lower altitudes. Speaking at the conference in Hong Kong, Wilding also made the point the aircraft is being designed to fit into today’s airport infrastructure. “I was in Tokyo recently hosted by Japan Airlines and we spent three days on the ground observing airport operations and maintenance facilities to really get a good first hand understanding of how airplanes are being used today, and what we as designers have to do to ensure nothing has to change there.”

While there does appear to be a renewed interest in the prospects for supersonic flight, hurdles remain. The first of those is the sonic boom. A great deal of work is being done on finding ways to eliminate or reduce the impact.

Aerion has said its AS2 has the ability to fly up to Mach 1.2, technically known as Mach cut-off speed and what the company calls Boomless Cruise. This is still around 50 per cent faster than today’s jets.

Boom says it expects its supersonic boom will be “at least 30 times quieter than Concorde’s.

Spike says it has patent-pending “Quiet Supersonic Flight Technology” that will stop a sonic boom reaching the ground. There will also be regulatory barriers. Today, it is illegal to fly at supersonic speeds above US soil, although it is understood the FAA is looking at rewriting supersonic flight rules.

New York to London, currently a seven-hour flight, would be cut to a little over three hours

All the contenders are convinced there will be a market for this new breed of supersonic transports.

Blake Scholl, the other co-founder and chief executive of Boom, has projected that about 65 million passengers a year will be flying business class on transoceanic routes by the mid-2020s, which would mean a market for 1,000 to 2,000 Overture jets over the decade from Overture’s anticipated launch date of 2023. If new supersonic aircraft designs that can dampen sonic booms convince regulators in the US and other countries to end restrictions on overland flights, he believes the market could be two to three times larger.

On its part, Aerion expects there to be 300 AS2 planes in flight during the first 10 years of its service.

One thing is clear. Whatever the size of each of these new supersonic jets, they will still be well and truly ensconced in the upper atmosphere of business class travellers. Economy passengers will have to wait many more years before they get access to ultra high-speed flying.