​Supersonic Flight’s New Golden Age Getting Closer

Between 1975 and 2003, more than 2.5 million passengers traveled at twice the speed of sound on 14 Concorde airliners produced by the British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation. No paying customer has broken the sound barrier since.

“I assumed I would do it by buying a ticket, not by building an airplane,” said Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl, who founded the commercial jet developer in 2014. “For 10 years, I had a Google News alert set on ‘supersonic,’ because I assumed that somebody would do it, and I just wanted to be first to know. But there was just absolutely no progress—nothing.”

Boom aims to change that. Scholl was 22 years old when Concorde had its swan song. When he was 26, he visited the Seattle Museum of Flight, where one of the supersonic jets was on display alongside a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

If you’re not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats.

Subscribe Now

“It made no sense to me that the most amazing airplane militarily and the most amazing airplane commercially were both found in a museum, when there was nothing better in our skies,” Scholl said. “That day was really the start of my journey here.”

Two decades later, Boom is leading the push for a return to supersonic commercial flight.

In early 2025, its XB-1 “Baby Boom” demonstrator made 13 test flights over Mojave, California, where U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in a Bell X-1 nearly eight decades before. Two of those flights surpassed Mach 1—and, according to Boom, produced sonic booms that were inaudible on the ground below.

With the XB-1 now retired to Boom’s headquarters in Centennial, Colorado, the firm is setting its sights on Overture—the flagship, civil supersonic jet it aims to introduce by 2030. Both United Airlines and American Airlines have purchase agreements.

But whereas customers routinely shelled out more than $10,000 for one-way Concorde tickets, Scholl claims an equivalent trip on Overture would cost less than half that. He added that the company aims to drive costs down “until it’s for everybody.”

“This is not just New York to London for rock stars and royalty,” Scholl said. “This is going to be hundreds of routes around the planet for anybody who can fly business class.”

Dead on Arrival

Concorde suffered just one fatal incident in 27 years of commercial service. But Scholl, who was mesmerized by the technology in his youth, now considers it a “disaster” that discouraged engineers from pursuing similar projects. That includes the Boom CEO, who developed software for Amazon before taking on the supersonic challenge.

• READ MORE: Flying Concorde: A Pilot’s Perspective From the Edge of Space
• READ MORE: $800K ‘Boom Prize’ Challenges Amateurs to Build Supersonic Airplane
• READ MORE: This Company Is Taking the ‘Boom’ Out of Supersonic Flight

“You have to build a thing that’s actually useful for passengers and actually useful for airlines,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s another Concorde.”

Scholl compared Concorde’s flaws to layers of an onion. The outer layer, he said, was an “airplane that made no economic sense.” A first-class Boeing 747 cabin in the 1970s had about 50 seats. Concorde could be configured for as many as 128 and struggled to fill them at its high ticket price.

“Concorde was marvelous technology but economically was dead on arrival,” Scholl said.

Boom’s calculus is simple. Business-class seats are higher margin than economy, generating up to 80 percent of passenger revenue on certain flights, per its analysis. With a price point of $5,000 and 64 seats—the same number of Polaris business class seats as launch customer United’s Elevated 787s—Overture could tap into that demand and fly routes that weren’t economically viable for Concorde.

“Business class is people paying top dollar for a flying bed so they can sleep through a flight that is absurdly long,” said Scholl. “We’ll give you something much better, which is a seat so fast you can sleep in your own bed.”

Lessons From Concorde

The Boom CEO said the company has learned from Concorde’s pitfalls. For one, he said, Overture will be about 20 percent more aerodynamically efficient than its predecessor at supersonic speeds. It replaces Concorde’s long, slender nose with an area rule fuselage—wider in the front and skinnier in the back, “like a B-1 bomber”—that’s designed to reduce supersonic drag.

Scholl said Overture will also be about 20 percent more efficient during takeoff and landing. That’s largely due to a high aspect ratio wing with flaps and slats, which he said allows the aircraft to use “any runway a 777 could use.” Concorde used an ogival delta wing that partially blended into the nose, requiring “very, very long runways.”

Whereas Concorde was made of aluminum, Boom will use carbon-fiber composite materials to shape Overture’s complex airframe.

The aircraft will be powered by four of Boom’s proprietary Symphony turbofans, each with about 40,000 pounds of thrust. Scholl said that will allow it to reach Mach 1.7, its intended cruise speed over water, without relying on afterburners. Concorde’s four Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 turbojet engines each produced about 38,000 pounds of thrust—and deafening noise—with afterburners ignited.

Though Concorde cruised at about Mach 2, Scholl said Overture is fast enough to cut a three-day round trip between Los Angeles and Tokyo to just 24 hours. Boom aims to raise speeds and lower costs on future models.

“There’s this sort of mythology that you need an afterburner to break the sound barrier, which is not true,” Scholl said. “You just have to have enough thrust.”

‘Boomless’

Scholl said Boom aims to fly “tens of millions of passengers everywhere on hundreds of routes”—and not just internationally. That’s because Overture will be capable of what he dubbed “boomless cruise.”

The FAA since 1973 has barred commercial supersonic flight over land due to noise concerns. However, Boom’s XB-1 test flights showed it’s possible to break the sound barrier without an audible boom. A few months later, the White House ordered the FAA to repeal its 52-year ban, which would open up transcontinental U.S. routes.

The XB-1 exploited a phenomenon called Mach cutoff. The aircraft created sonic booms, but it used software to calculate a precise speed and altitude such that the sound “makes a gigantic U-turn in the sky and never touches the ground.” Scholl said Overture could muzzle booms while moving as fast as Mach 1.3, the model’s planned overland cruise speed.

The Boom CEO contrasted that method with NASA’s X-59, which instead uses a long, thin nose to break up sound waves. “That airplane is really long, and it’s part of why it’s hard to build,” he said.

Scholl said the people working on the X-59 are “well intentioned” but described the program as a “boondoggle.” He said the experimental model would be impractical as a commercial airliner because it only reduces sonic booms while flying straight.

NASA reportedly expects to spend more than $630 million on the X-59, which first flew in October and has yet to break the sound barrier. Scholl said it took a team of 50 people, about $200 million, and far less time for Boom to build and fly the XB-1.

The Boom CEO said NASA’s planned X-59 community noise survey—the capstone of the project—could even be “counterproductive.” He worries that the space agency will study how much the sounds annoy participants rather than determining how long it would take them to acclimatize.

That could prompt regulators and politicians to call for an “overly stringent noise regulation that doesn’t actually meet anybody’s interests,” he said.

Supersonic Comeback?

With the surging business-class demand, wider acceptance of carbon-fiber composite materials, and shifting regulations, Scholl said aviation is entering a “new Golden Age.”

This year, the FAA will oversee expanded testing of electric and autonomous air taxis in 26 states, with real airports, air traffic controllers, and—potentially—revenue. Last year, it published early air taxi regulations and expanded its MOSAIC rule to permit electric powerplants for light sport aircraft.

At the same time, manufacturers such as JetZero and Heart Aerospace are developing innovative commercial airframes and propulsion systems. But there’s a distinct lack of innovation in the supersonic realm.

Aerion, which had been designing a 50-seat Mach 4 airliner, ran out of cash in 2021. Exosonic, which proposed a 70-seat Mach 1.8 model, suffered a similar fate in 2024. Spike Aerospace, another competitor, relaunched its S-512 supersonic business jet program in 2025 after a multiyear pause. It’s targeting first flight in 2027 but has shared little progress publicly.

Beyond Boom, Hermeus is perhaps the most advanced in the industry. The manufacturer in March completed its second flight with supersonic test aircraft in nine months as it develops Darkhorse, a reusable, hypersonic, uncrewed aircraft. But it’s focused primarily on defense and national security missions rather than commercial transport.

Boom in February began installing a test stand for Symphony and Superpower—a natural gas turbine that’s designed to power AI data centers—at the Colorado Air and Space Port (KCFO). It plans to gauge compressor, combustor, and turbine performance during full engine core testing later this year.

After that, Boom intends to begin flying Overture prototypes in North Carolina. By then, Scholl hopes to see more supersonic aircraft in the skies.

“I want there to be a future where we have to teach our kids that we didn’t just always fly supersonic,” he said.

---

This column first appeared in the June Ultimate Issue 971 of the FLYING print edition.