🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Concorde's retirement in 2003 brought the curtain down on an age of supersonic passenger flights. Now, two decades later, Boom Supersonic is trying to revive that era. It's not just about the speed, the technology or the glamour, says its CEO—something even more important is at stake.
"Imagine a future in which our children have friends from other continents that they actually spend time with and what that does for the world," Blake Scholl told Newsweek. "It's very hard to go to war with somebody you've met."
That prospect is edging closer. Tests have taken place for the Boom Overture, a spiritual successor to Concorde that could fly between London and New York City in just three-and-a-half hours, with plans to revive the Atlantic journey and open other routes across the world.
With those high-profile tests using a dedicated demonstrator jet, Boom is rekindling excitement about commercial supersonic flight. But beneath the optimism lies a complex web of engineering puzzles and the daunting task of building an entirely new engine, while also navigating an environmentally conscious culture that has become increasingly critical of excessive air travel.
The Legacy of Supersonic Travel
The first steps toward commercial supersonic travel began in the 1960s, an era defined by bold technological feats and acute international rivalry.
The Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 debuted just ahead of the Anglo-French Concorde, a symbol of European collaboration, but it was the latter that truly captured the public imagination.
First flown in 1969, Concorde's inaugural commercial flight in 1976 transformed aviation by shrinking transatlantic travel to around three hours, giving wealthy passengers a glamorous, if expensive, way to hop between Europe and the United States. Despite its fame, Concorde was constantly struggling through financial turbulence. The aircraft was limited to flights over water, due to the disruption a sonic boom generates, and the oil crisis of the 1970s meant that airlines became less inclined to invest in projects with high fuel consumption, with many firms preferring lower-risk subsonic jets, which had also undergone major improvements.
Then in 2000, Flight 4590 suffered a tire puncture that caused the wheel to explode, rupturing the fuel tank and causing an engine fire after takeoff from Paris. The plane crashed into a hotel in France, killing all 109 onboard plus four people on the ground. It was a severe blow to a brand that the public was already losing interest in, and the program was retired in 2003.
Fast forward 22 years and Boom is confident that it can make supersonic flight sustainable and accessible.
"I think the world will be far better off if everybody can fly faster," Scholl told Newsweek. "This is what makes the world a smaller place. Faster flight determines where we can vacation, it determines where we do business. It even determines who we can fall in love with. I think it is hard to underappreciate how important that is."
Scholl founded Boom in 2014, inspired by seeing Concorde in a museum. Before that, he worked for technology firms, starting as a software engineer at Amazon in 2001. Development on the Overture began in 2016, with demonstration model XB-1 revealed in 2020. A third the size of the final design, testing of the XB-1, most recently in January, made the aircraft the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier—Mach 1, or about 767 mph. Overture will have a cruise speed of Mach 1.7.
Scholl said testing proved that the technology was capable of breaking the sound barrier without producing an audible shock wave, which was the issue that confined the Concorde to transatlantic flights only. "The airplane performed beautifully, it actually flew better supersonic than subsonic," Scholl said. "And we did it with no audible sonic boom, which means you don't actually have to solve the sonic boom issue by flying over the water."
This means that Boom's vision for a far wider range of destinations is a lot more possible. Potential routes include San Francisco to Tokyo, which could be made in six hours, and Newark, New Jersey, to Frankfurt, which would be a four-hour flight. For comparison, the same journey by conventional plane takes almost eight hours.
For its creators, the technology is a step forward and a revival of aviation history, with many lessons being taken from Concorde's successes and failures. "In the U.K. today and in France, there's such a deep love of Concorde and what it stood for and this deep sadness that it's gone," Scholl said. "We had supersonic flight and we lost it, and we went backwards. Humanity backslid and that's not supposed to happen. Concorde showed that supersonic flight was technically possible with 1960s technology. It was [in] 1969 that we landed on the moon and we flew Concorde for the first time."
He added: "If you stopped somebody in the street and asked, 'What do you think space exploration and flight will be like in the future?' I don't think anybody would have said that both of those things will be gone."
Money Matters
In its final days, Concorde was struggling to generate enough money to justify the extremely high development and maintenance costs, despite exorbitant ticket prices.
Boom estimates its starting prices will be around $5,000 for a round trip between New York and Europe, compared with Concorde's peak prices of around $12,000, once adjusted for inflation. A subsonic round trip costs around $600 in economy to over $2,000 for business class. "Overture will be very, very profitable for airlines, at more like $5,000. I recognize that's not yet for every family, but it is tens of millions of people who already pay those prices in business class today, so that's our starting point," Scholl said.
"We all have to understand...the way technology works. It needs to start in a relatively higher price point and then as scale happens and innovation happens, the cost comes down," he added.
Perhaps the most significant technical hurdle for Boom is developing its own power plant, the Symphony engine. Boom explored partnerships with established engine manufacturers but eventually went in-house, believing a custom solution would more precisely meet Overture's thrust, efficiency and noise requirements. Symphony is designed for supercruise, meaning it can fly faster than the speed of sound without afterburners. Concorde's engines needed afterburners for takeoff and acceleration, making them far noisier and less efficient.
Supercruise still has its own challenges. It burns far more fuel than standard subsonic engines, especially in the longer climb to higher altitudes and at speeds that generate greater air resistance. This multiplies greenhouse gas emissions. "Reaching such high speeds requires a huge amount of fuel, which means a dangerous level of emissions," Hannah Lawrence, a spokesperson for Stay Grounded, an organization calling for reduced air traffic, told Newsweek.
"Supersonic planes such as Overture fly higher than commercial planes, leading to atmospheric effects that could further heat the planet. While it's positive that flying so high likely won't cause contrails, this is far outweighed by all the disastrous climate impacts such intensive flying will have.
"With climate breakdown visible all around us, we need to urgently reduce flights and Overture goes in exactly the wrong direction by letting a reckless industry chase profit over planet." To overcome these issues, Boom says Symphony can run on any blend of fuel, including 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, which speeds up decarbonization. However, Lawrence, said, "SAF is, itself, a false solution. These fuels still emit pollution and they aren't available or sustainable at the scale needed to power the amount of flights that take off every day.
"According to Boom's own estimates, Overture will burn two to three times as much fuel per passenger as on a regular, subsonic plane's first-class cabin."
What Happens Next?
Boom plans to roll out Overture models in two years and have planes passenger-ready in four years, meaning flights could take place by the end of the decade. It has commitments from multiple carriers to buy the jet, including United Airlines, American Airlines and Japan Airlines. Boom says it has 130 orders and preorders for the Overture and there is demand for 1,000, compared with 20 examples of Concorde.
However, the push for supersonic passenger travel has suffered high-profile casualties, including Aerion Supersonic folding in 2021, despite significant backing, and Exosonic in 2024.
Exosonic CEO Norris Tie told Business Insider after his firm collapsed: "Boom has said it would cost up to $8 billion to build its supersonic plane, and that's a low number. The company has only publicly funded less than $1 billion. It's a long road, and I don't know how it's going to get done."
