Boom Supersonic plans to fly anywhere in world in four hours for $100
‘It’s going to take us time to get there,’ says founder and CEO
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A supersonic jet company has revealed that its long-term plan is to fly passengers anywhere in the world in four hours for just $100.
In an interview with CNN, Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl said that his company’s aims were completely different to that of the now-defunct Concorde, which was charging $12,000 for a round-trip by the 1990s.
“That's not travel, that's like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” he said.
“Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”
The aim is to achieve this in a few decades’ time.
“It's going to take us time to get there,” said Scholl, adding that he likes to think much further ahead than most people, asking, “‘Where do we want to be in a decade or two? And what's possible at that time scale?’ Then you work backwards and say, ‘How do we get there?’.”
Boom Supersonic was the first of a new stable of supersonic start-ups to put forward a real-life prototype aircraft, the XB1, which it unveiled in October 2020.
The company’s ambitious aim is to fly the XB1 at the end of 2021, to open a US factory in 2022, to build its first commercial jet, the Overture, in 2023 and to have it in the skies by 2026.
“We see ourselves as picking up where Concorde left off, and fixing the most important things which are economic and environmental sustainability,” said Scholl.
The goal is to ultimately build a “carbon-neutral” plane from the ground up, which would use alternative fuels that utilise the same amount of carbon that’s being emitted during the flight.
“What you're basically doing is sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, liquefying it into the jet fuel, then you put that in the airplane,” said Scholl.
Overture’s Mach-2.2 speed, which is twice as fast as a regular commercial jet, could fly London-New York in just three hours and 15 minutes.
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