Even before we could fly.
Humans locked up with a burning desire to take to the skies.
Our journey towards commercial aviation as we know it today
can be traced back over 530 years.
It began with Leonardo da Vinci's early flying machine sketches.
Although they were never made, these imagined aircraft would mark
the beginning of the incredible aviation firsts to come.
These advances have relied upon constant engineering innovation,
taking us quite literally to new heights and speeds.
But like me, the aviation industry is now facing an existential crisis
after being ravaged by a pandemic and trying to exist
in a world that's ever more climate conscious.
Can the aviation industry continue to innovate and become sustainable?
Winging it.
Now there's one part of this aviation innovation journey
that's always bugged me because instead
of moving forwards, it seems to move backwards.
I'm talking about supersonic air travel.
Why did it end? And is this beauty coming back?
Concorde made the impossible possible?
No. Not buying a property in London as a millennial,
but flying the rich and famous two and a half times the speed of sound
in ultra luxury around the world at a price.
Of course, in today's money, a seat like this would set you back
about £4000 one way.
Ouch. Excuse me. Can I have a little top up? Thanks.
After a turbulent 27 years of service,
it was announced that Concorde would be retired in October 2003.
Captain Mike Bannister was the chief pilot of the British Airways Concorde fleet.
He clocked up just under 10000 flight hours
on Concorde, almost 7000 of which were supersonic,
which is more than any other pilot in the world.
So here it is, the only Concorde simulator in the world.
What do you think?
It's glorious, Mike. Beautiful listeners.
And now I'm going to pop you in the seat so that you get to fly it.
Aim to go through Tower Bridge. What a.
Dress. Yep. We're going to lose our license,
you know? Yeah. I'll take the blame. Excellent.
Well, I have control. You have control of your craft.
Do you remember the first time that you got to have the real Concorde,
not the simulator at your fingertips? Absolutely.
We'd done the training two months in the school, two months on the simulator.
This is the first time it's with a training captain sitting where you are.
And he says, right. I'd like you to take off.
Climb straight ahead. Level off at 2500 feet. I thought, that's easy.
I'm an experienced pilot. I couldn't do that. And he's smiling.
I'm thinking, Why? Open up the engines to pull out the aeroplanes
at lightweight down the runway. My word.
The next thing I know, I'm at 4000 feet and he's sitting there with a big smile on his face.
And some of the performance we could get, we'd use full power for takeoff.
We could take off from Miami, say, and be at Mach two within 15 minutes. Wow.
I mean, a really, really fast performing area, but we called it a rocket.
What do you think was the real downfall of Concorde?
Why did you have to be retired? It's rather like that perfect storm.
Things came together fundamentally the cost the cost of operating,
the cost of maintaining the the fact that she was expensive to run
and the amount of income was no longer as strong as it had been.
Do you think the environmental impact of Concorde is?
We have got to be honest, she was a gas guzzler.
Did that impact how she was a tire?
She was a gas guzzler in the sense she used a lot of fuel.
But because she's travelling so quickly, she actually used less fuel going
to New York than the 747 of her day.
With the current environmental situation,
yes, she would probably be beyond the time.
But the next generation of aeroplanes, the ones that can bring in
new modern technologies, modern techniques,
flying supersonic is definitely on the cards again.
Do you think we need us?
The human race has never gone backwards for very long.
The human race likes advance.
People want to travel quicker. They want the experience
of flying on the edge of space where the sky got darker.
We could see the curvature of the earth and
I think all of these things are coming together to make it possible.
Again, it just demonstrates how far in advance Concorde was.
But my daughter's a pilot, a commercial pilot,
and I look forward to the day when she's flying the supersonic airliner,
just like our old, that if. We could just be a few years away
from reclaiming that dream, meet boom supersonic.
Founded in 2014 and with $270 million of investor funding behind them,
Boon plans to build and launch a net zero carbon supersonic airliner by 2029.
Their flagship aircraft overture will be capable of reaching speeds
of up to Mach 1.7, cruising at an eye watering 60000 feet
and powered by 100% sustainable aviation fuel.
Each overture airplane will cost a staggering $200 million,
but operators are already lining up to show interest,
with United Airlines kicking things off with 15 aircraft on order
and an option for a further 35.
Interestingly, the deal hinged on a commitment for overture to operate
at net zero carbon flying supersonic and protecting the planet.
It sounds too good to be true.
Well, the answer lies in these everyday waste items,
because what they have in common is their ability to create something
I mentioned earlier sustainable aviation fuel or SAF.
When you think about sustainable aviation fuel,
it's a category of fuels that pulls carbon out of the air
and uses that to produce the fuel which is then burned on the aircraft.
The technology that boom is most excited about is something called power to liquid.
This uses renewable energy to pull carbon from the air,
combine that carbon with hydrogen,
and then uses that to power our aircraft.
And you can see in that case how you really close the carbon loop.
And for every pound of carbon you emit, you've pulled another pound out.
Using renewable energy. Is so cool, isn't it?
But is it possible for the current global commercial aircraft fleet
to just switch over from traditional jet A1 fuel to soft?
Do any changes need to happen inside the aircraft?
Yeah. So SAP isn't quite chemically identical to fossil based fuels,
so currently it's limited to a 50% blend, 50% SAF 50% jet,
which is a great starting point, but it's not where we want to get to.
There's two avenues to get up to being able to use pure SAS.
One is to make the safe chemically identical to fossil derived jet fuels.
This includes adding some environmentally damaging chemicals
called aromatics to make sure that they're compatible.
Because we're designing a brand new aircraft,
we can design the fuel system and the engine
to use different materials that don't need those aromatics
and enable us to truly use 100% sustainable aviation for.
Fuels. So it's not just about the fuel.
I mean, what are the other advantages of building this aircraft?
Absolutely.
From scratch when it comes to making supersonic flight sustainable.
Because it's a brand new aircraft,
we have the opportunity to select the most sustainable materials
from the wing materials to the seats
to make sure that it is truly a sustainable product.
We're also able to think about aircraft recycling from the start,
even though we won't be recycling the first aircraft in for another 30 years.
We can build those provisions in now.
It's not just chemical pollution that creates an environmental challenge
for supersonic aviation, but noise pollution, too.
As rich people laugh at you from above.
No, but seriously, Concorde was known to startle the communities.
It flew over and even smash windows of skyscrapers
as the famous sonic boom reverberated from the aircraft down to ground level.
Now, Nasser and aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin are trying
to find ways to lessen the intensity of the boom enough
to allow supersonic flight above populated areas.
But what exactly causes the sonic boom in the first place?
So in airplanes flying through the air,
it's pushing disturbances in front of it.
As you go faster and faster, you're kind of catching up to those waves
and they can only go Mach one supersonic.
So when the airplane gets to a supersonic speed, those waves that you're pushing in front of the airplane
can no longer get out of the way, essentially.
And so what happens is it just makes a big step pressure increase.
And that's the shockwave as that propagates down
to the ground and it goes by your ears,
you get that sudden change of pressure from that shockwave,
and that sounds like a boom or an explosion.
So how are you planning to quieten the boom down?
So what we're doing with the design
of the airplane is we're trying to spread out the shock.
So there's a shock anywhere where there's a pressure disturbance on the airplane, there'll be shocks.
So we try to make it as smooth as possible to
to reduce the number of those.
But the other thing that we want to do is keep all of those little shocks,
that low pressure waves from coalescing
to be either in the front of the back of the airplane.
So we've designed the airplane so that the volume distribution increases
and then decreases as smoothly as possible.
We've designed here dynamics so that the pressure distribution is even
and all of those things go into keeping those pressure disturbances
separated as they propagate to the ground.
Takes longer for that pressure changed to cross, you know,
sound like, you know, closing a car door instead of an explosion.
So if your design is successful, could this mean that we could see
the next generation of supersonic planes flying over populated areas?
That's a big part of the project, is to fly this airplane
over several different communities and and and get community response to
to demonstrate the acceptability of flying supersonic
over these different types of communities and different geographies
to eventually allow, you know, overland supersonic flight.
We may be years away from sipping champagne as we fly faster
than a rifle bullet and high enough to see the curvature of the earth.
But we are hurtling in the right direction.
Who knew that the return of supersonic air travel could be
the unlikely savior of an aviation industry that's battling to survive in
an ever more climate conscious world? I mean, that's just brilliant.