I remember sitting in a British Airways Concorde jet at New York’s JFK airport in the early 1980s and thinking that supersonic jet travel was the wave of the future in an ever-faster-moving world.
I envisioned commercial aircraft getting speedier and speedier, almost becoming rocket ships to shuttle business and leisure travelers from one continent to another as quickly as a New York-Washington flight today. I expected more airlines besides British Airways and Air France to bring supersonic jets into their fleets and the prices of tickets to drop, so all passengers — not just the wealthy — could afford supersonic travel.
Like the Concorde I was sitting on during a non-flight press tour decades ago, those expectations never got off the ground. British Airways and Air France stopped flying their Concordes in 2003, because of high operating costs, weak sales of expensive tickets and heavy government noise restrictions. No supersonic commercial aircraft has flown since.
Flights to other continents today on subsonic jets take about as long as they did decades ago, and, with seat widths tighter and less legroom, it can truly be an ordeal today to fly long distances in a coach seat.
So, with open arms, I welcome today’s announcement by Denver-based Boom Technology and Japan Air Lines that they have established “a strategic partnership to bring commercial supersonic travel to passengers.” Japan Air Lines, Boom says, has invested $10 million in Boom and “is collaborating with the company to refine the aircraft design and help define the passenger experience for supersonic travel.”
Boom plans to develop a supersonic aircraft that flies at Mach 2.2 and will cut current airline flight times in half. The Concorde flew at Mach 2.0, and today’s commercial jets fly at Mach 0.85.
Boom says its jets will fly from New York to London in three hours and 15 minutes, enabling business people to leave early in the morning, make afternoon and evening meetings in England, and return home in time to tuck their kids into bed.
It sounds wonderful, but can Boom and other companies working to reinstitute supersonic travel solve the problems that British Airways and Air France couldn’t overcome when they stopped flying their Concordes?
Boom says its supersonic aircraft’s fuel efficiency and light composite materials will make it much more cost-efficient than the Concorde, and, when it breaks the sound barrier, the sonic boom will be at least 30 times quieter than the one produced by the Concorde.
A one-way New York-London ticket will cost about $2,500, Boom says. That’s much cheaper than a Concorde ticket decades ago.
Such plans always sound so good during the development stage. But I am not about to go to Vegas and place my money on the success of the next supersonic aircraft.
Can operating costs truly be minimized to make supersonic travel profitable for airlines and affordable for passengers? Will a new supersonic jet truly be able to fly while generating less noise and meet government noise regulations?
And might there be some relatively unforeseen consequences — akin to the wonders of cell phones and their downside of deaths on the road? Supersonic jets would fly at higher altitudes than today’s commercial jets, so, in a thinner atmosphere, passengers would be exposed to a higher dose of UV radiation. Yet, flight times would be shorter than current jets which also expose passengers to such radiation.
And I will leave it up to the scientific experts to determine whether higher-altitude supersonic travel might have a more detrimental effect on global warming than today’s lower-altitude flights. NASA scientists concluded in 2004 that exhaust from airplanes could have accounted for increased average surface temperatures in the USA from 1975 through 2004, and other studies have pointed to the possible harmful climatic effects of contrails created by jet exhaust.
So many questions await so many answers as commercial aviation minds try to reinvent and jump-start sensible and profitable supersonic airline flights.
