Supersonic Flight’s New Golden Age Getting Closer

Between 1975 and 2003, more than 2.5 million passengers traveled at twice the speed of sound on 14 Concorde airliners produced by the British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation. No paying customer has broken the sound barrier since.

“I assumed I would do it by buying a ticket, not by building an airplane,” said Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl, who founded the commercial jet developer in 2014. “For 10 years, I had a Google News alert set on ‘supersonic,’ because I assumed that somebody would do it, and I just wanted to be first to know. But there was just absolutely no progress—nothing.”