![]() ![]() His aim is that airlines will be able to set fares at a price point similar to business class – unlike Concorde, which by the ’90s was charging around $12,000 for a round trip, or $20,000 in today’s money. ![]() “We see ourselves as picking up where Concorde left off, and fixing the most important things which are economic and environmental sustainability,” says Scholl.Īccessibility is key. Supersonic airliner could fly LA to Tokyo in under three hoursīoom Supersonic’s current timeline is to fly the 1:3 scale XB1 prototype aircraft “around the end of the year,” break ground on a new US factory in 2022 (location TBD), and then start building the first Overture plane in 2023. “It changes where we can vacation, changes where we can do business, changes you can fall in love with or you can be close to.” We believe it’s deeply important to break the time barrier, more so than the sound barrier.”ĭesigned to seat between 65 and 88 people, Overture will focus on over 500 primarily transoceanic routes that will benefit from the aircraft’s Mach-2.2 speeds – more than twice as fast as today’s subsonic commercial jets.Ī journey from New York to London would take just three hours and 15 minutes while Los Angeles to Sydney would be cut down to eight and a half hours.īreaking the time barrier could be life-changing, says Scholl. “That barrier of time is what keeps us apart. There hasn’t been any major speed-up in travel times since the Jet Age of the ’50s and ‘60s and his team hopes to change that. “Either we fail or we change the world,” says Scholl over a video call from Denver, Colorado. Last October frontrunner Boom Supersonic was the first to roll out an actual honest-to-goodness IRL demonstrator aircraft, the XB1.ĬNN Travel caught up with its founder and CEO Blake Scholl to talk about Overture, the Mach 2.2 commercial airliner he wants to get in the air by 2026, and the company’s ambitious long-term plans. ![]() The British-French airliner Concorde, one of only two supersonic jets to have operated commercially, flew from 1969 to 2003 and was ludicrously expensive and an environmental disaster.īut now a fresh bunch of start-ups are working on supersonic and hypersonic projects. Reviving the supersonic dream that died with Concorde’s retirement nearly two decades ago seems, at first, like an outrageous fantasy. The aviation industry is in crisis, there’s a global push to cut carbon emissions, and many of us haven’t stepped on a plane or hugged far-flung loved ones in more than a year. ![]()
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