if you are planning to travel by air
over the thanksgiving or christmas
holidays and millions of americans are
would you jump at the chance to get to
your destination in half the time
does new york to los angeles in under
three hours sound appealing
the last commercial supersonic flight
was almost 20 years ago and even then
super fast flights were only on very
limited routes
most of today's jetliners actually fly
more slowly than they did 20 or 30 years
ago in order to save fuel
but that may be about to change it's
still a long shot but private startup
companies with a big assist from nasa
may just give us all another chance to
fly faster than the speed of sound
the story will continue in a moment
when british airways flight double o2
roared into the new york sky on october
24 2003
everyone on board passengers and pilots
knew that something special was coming
to an end
as you are the last people in the world
as passengers to cruise at twice the
speed of sound the supersonic concorde a
joint effort of the british and french
governments was making its last flight
after nearly 30 years in the air
grounded by a combination of
stratospheric costs and safety concerns
after a deadly crash in 2000
even people watching that last landing
in london were emotional i just love
airplanes
and there's not going to be anything
like concord again is there
never
well you know that old maxim never say
never you know supersonic coming back
and it's going to be different this time
it's back to stay blake scholl is the
founder and ceo of boom his audacious
goal is to build a new supersonic
airliner from scratch
has a private company
ever
built a supersonic aircraft anywhere no
nowhere it's been governments and
militaries only boom is not the only
american startup company in the new
supersonic sweepstakes
spike is developing an ultra-fast
business jet and hermes aspires to make
a hypersonic plane that would fly five
times the speed of sound but boom is the
only entrant to actually build an
airplane this is it that's it
oh wow
so far blake shoal and boom have built
this single cedar test plane due to make
its first flight next year the passenger
jet meant to follow is called overture
it only exists in artists renderings but
it's real enough for one of america's
largest airlines to climb on board so is
the overture the plane that united
recently ordered that's right united
just ordered 15
overture airplanes
so more overtures than concords were
ever delivered into service is this
united deal like
a stamp of approval i think it's
incredibly validating you know when you
are united you take you take these
things really seriously seriously enough
to produce a slick promotional video
that's already playing on many united
flights
the ad may say supersonic is here but
it's not not yet
blake scholl is a software engineer who
started his career at amazon not in
aerospace but he insists he's going to
make it happen when i look
several decades out you know what i want
is to be able to be anywhere in the
world in four hours for a hundred bucks
now that's not where we start but that's
the end goal the concord charged
thousands thousands of dollars for a
one-way flight from new york to london
how is it going to be possible for you
to have a similar flight experience
for a hundred dollars you keep iterating
and so the same way you know for example
electric cars when they first came out
they were pretty expensive but we kept
working on them and the price came down
they got better and better and so we'll
do the same thing with supersonic jets
we're going to keep working on them
we're going to keep innovating this
industry needs people dreaming big
that is essential this industry was
built on that
john ostrower is editor-in-chief of the
air current a publication that tracks
every development in commercial aviation
including boom and blake shoal
he admits that
something
like he is proposing has never been done
by a private company before
but yet he's convinced
that he can do it
do you think he can
i think you cannot ignore the obstacles
that will be on the path to getting
there
and i think the amount of money that is
is required to make this happen
uh makes this a very long shot how much
money will it take
probably in the neighborhood of at least
15 or 20 billion
ostrower says that's about what it cost
boeing to develop and build and certify
a new subsonic airliner and they already
have huge manufacturing facilities boom
doesn't
blake scholl told us he can get overture
built for seven to eight billion dollars
but that's a lot more than the 300
million he's raised so far
and money's not the only hurdle boom and
united have promised their new plane
will operate on 100 sustainable aviation
fuel
but that doesn't exist yet in anything
like the quantities they'll need
oh and one other thing
they're gonna need an engine to do this
and they don't have the engine they
don't have an engine
blake shoal says an engine is on the way
from the same company that built the
supersonic engines for the concorde
and we are working with rolls-royce on a
custom jet engine that will power
overture you're working with rolls-royce
it doesn't ex this engine does not exist
yet it is a it is a lightly customized
engine and part of that is rolls royce's
work where they're kind of turning some
design knobs blake shoal doesn't dismiss
the skeptics but he points to the
example of elon musk and says not so
long ago no one thought he could build
tesla's and reusable rockets
where's this passion come from it's
because we stopped making progress on
the speed of travel you know the
airplanes we have today are no faster
than the ones we had when my parents
were growing up
and there is
no good reason for that doesn't have to
be we can fix it
when do you expect the first paying
customers to fly on one of your planes
by the end of the decade supersonic
really only makes sense on flights of
four or five hours or more but thousands
of such routes are out of reach to boom
the reason is in the very name of his
company
that's the sound of a sonic boom created
by a plane breaking the sound barrier
listen again
the first boom was made by chuck
yeager's x1 rocket plane when it passed
through mach 1 about 660 miles per hour
back in 1947
and he does it
[Music]
what is the sonic boom what
generates it
so when an aircraft flies faster than
the speed of sound it creates
disturbances mike bonanno is a top
engineer at lockheed martin's skunk
works aircraft design studio in
california dave richardson is his boss
a lot of us understand the wake that's
generated by a ship or a boat and so
imagine that wake from speed boat or
whatever all those different waves
coming to be one large wave those
individual disturbances created up by
the airplane they combined together to
make a loud double bang the federal
aviation administration tested the
impact of that big bang back in 1964 by
flying military supersonic jets like
these over oklahoma city for six months
the outcome
broken bricks and ceilings frayed nerves
and public outrage
it was just
patently obvious that no one was going
to tolerate such a loud noise on a
day-to-day basis
the result was a ban on civilian
supersonic flights everywhere in the
world other than over open water and
that basically hit the brakes on the
development of commercial air travel in
terms of advancing speed up until
that ban
every decade air travel had gotten
faster and faster
the ban remains in place today so if
boom gets its overture in the air it
will only be able to serve long
trans-oceanic routes similar to what the
concord flew so if you want to go from
jfk in new york to paris
that's uh okay but for many of us we
want to fly places over land here living
in los angeles almost everywhere i want
to go
flying east requires overland travel and
that's one of the big problems that
we're trying to solve wonano and
richardson and their lockheed martin
team have been commissioned by nasa to
build a test plane that can fly twice as
fast as current airliners without
rattling nerves or breaking windows
your mission is to get rid of this
sonic boom
that's right the entire point of the
airplane
is to reduce sonic boom the airplane is
called the x-59 it will look like this
when it makes its first flight next year
for now it looks like this inside
lockheed martin's assembly building
you're looking at the cockpit of the
airplane
and there's no forward windscreen yeah
no this is it every part of the x-59 is
streamlined and smooth to disperse sound
waves and transform the loud sonic boom
into a much quieter thump
if you look at it it's pretty slick i
mean it looks like a dart
nils larson is the nasa test pilot whose
job it will be to prove that the x-59
can replace the sonic boom with a simple
thump
starting next year he'll pilot some of
the early test flights and then its
first sound tests
that's coming to a town near you so our
researchers are going to work with the
public and we're going to fly over
various cities and towns and
they're going to give us the feedback of
that thump was that thump too loud you
know did you even hear it at all so if
you
are able to fly over populated areas and
provide this data
then the faa will use this data perhaps
to lift this ban
uh exactly
are we likely to see planes
in the future flying supersonic that
look like this one
i certainly hope so and i think you will
so there are definite things that you
would see if you walked into a
commercial you know supersonic airplane
here you know 10 12 years from now and
you were to look at that you could see
you know some dna that goes back to the
x-59
larson took us over to nasa's x-59
flight simulator and the first thing we
noticed is that there's a tv screen in
place of the missing windshield
for you does it work as well as
yeah using your own eyes so far i think
it does about to go through mach one
there's mach one you know you can see so
we're now going supersonic yep you're
now sonic larson gave me a turn in the
cockpit not to fly supersonic but to
land the x-59 which is tricky given that
it's shaped like a pencil has no
windshield and i'm not a pilot signs
come up follow him up just a little bit
so pull back just a little bit a little
bit more and just hold it right there
just hold it right there
there you go he just landed the x-59 in
the middle of the runway better than i
did
sign him up
nils larson will start test flying the
real x-59 sometime next year and soon
after that he'll be flying it over us
and if it's quiet enough future planes
that follow its design lead could
eventually fly us lots of places twice
as fast as we can get there now when
might i be able to fly from
new york to los angeles in a supersonic
so there's a there's a long line of
things that have to happen starting with
the x-59 but i think 2035 is your answer
uh if everything marches along the way
that it's supposed to it's something
that people have been trying to solve
for for decades
have you guys solved that problem
we believe we have it's rewarding scenic
getting built but i think that real
aha moment for me is going to be when i
hear that first
shaped boom from x-59
some thump the thumbs up we won't hear
this bang
and when we hear or don't hear that
sound
is when we know we did it