On my first train For more than a year, since the start of the pandemic, I’ve sat in seat 20F on United Airlines 1450, flying non-stop from Newark to Denver on a twin-engine Boeing 737-900. There is a sense of nostalgia and novelty, like seeing a familiar place with fresh eyes, restarting muscle memory that has become soft after not being used. As the familiar pattern flooded the PA system — “flight attendant, wait for full call and prepare to cross check” — my eyes were drawn to the screen on the seat in front of me.
To the sublime rhythms of WEARETHEGOOD’s hip-hop duo “Boom,” the words “SUPERSONIC IS HERE” flash across the screen, followed by a striking image of a glossy white plane, impossibly slim (“JOIN THE UNITED FLEET”), with its distinctly pointed nose and arc-shaped wings undulating backward and outward from the midsection. “CUT FLIGHT TIME IN halves,” the ad continues, with a series of eye-catching itineraries: San Francisco to Tokyo in six hours, Newark to London in three and a half hours. The next flight will, notably, be shorter than my currently scheduled domestic flight, due to the length of the Midwest “weather” route, ending in four hours 32 minutes, at 900 km/h . By the time I crossed Nebraska, in a hypersonic world, I might have crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
Supersonic is not yet – as of now – really here, and despite United’s alluring shape and advertising message, the company has signed up for 15 unbuilt (but has produced a number of) planes. massive active media attention in an otherwise disastrous year). Where is it To be, at least hypothetically, is set on a platform inside Boom Supersonic’s headquarters, a rundown building adjacent to Centennial Airport on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. Inside a spacious hangar, filled with racks of parts and workbench assemblies, seen by a banner high on the wall declaring “FUTURE IS SUPERSONIC”, is where the Demonstrator is located. supersonic XB-1, a two-thirds scale version of a larger plane, dubbed the Overture, which Boom hopes will one day take to the skies — at 1.7 times the speed of sound bar.
When I first met Blake Scholl, Boom’s co-founder and CEO, the morning after my subsonic flight to Denver, he told me I had arrived at an opportune time. “This is really a really big week,” he said as we put on our helmets and safety glasses, “because we started the plane for the first time this week. And then fuel entered the plane for the first time on Sunday. And then we were just a few weeks away from running the engine. “
At some point on the road, on a test strip in the Mojave Desert, the XB-1 will have a taxi test, and at some point later, a flight test. Loaded into the hilt with sensors, it is a virtual flying probe. Scholl predicts that “a huge amount of learning will come from this plane.”
