Those longing for the days of the Concorde — and it’s super fast flight times — may be in luck. An aerospace company based out of Denver, Boom Technology, unveiled its design for a 40-seat plane that can fly 1,451 mph (Mach 2.2) last week.
At that speed, a New York-to-London flight would take about 3 hours and 24 minutes — roughly the same time it now takes to go to Miami. The cost would be just $5,000 — but that price would eventually fall.
“I want to live in a world where you can get anywhere in five hours for $100,” Boom’s founder and CEO, Blake Scholl, told Bloomberg. “That will take decades, but I think we’ll get there.”
Scholl elaborates on his plan, “The idea is for a plane that goes faster than any other passenger plane built before, but for the same price as business class,”
His brainchild started in his own basement from his belief that air travel could be improved upon (you think?). He joined up with some aerospace experts and moved from Silicon Valley to Denver to John Denver’s former airplane hangar at Centennial Airport, a few miles from the Denver Broncos training facility.
Now with 11 people, six of them pilots, working in the hangar’s upstairs offices, Boom’s plan seems to be gaining some speed. Its proposed design is quieter and 30 percent more efficient than the now-defunct Concorde, which fell out of favor largely due to soaring prices. Because the proposed aircraft’s 40 seats are split into two single-seat rows, the dreaded middle seat is eliminated.
Bloomberg reports, “To cut flight time, Boom’s plane will cruise at 60,000 feet, where passengers will be able to see the curvature of the earth, while going 2.6 times faster than other passenger planes.”
Scholl says about 500 routes fit the craft’s market, including a five-hour trip from San Francisco to Tokyo and a six-hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney.
While a test flight is planned for next year, Scholl is staying mum about a time line for regular passenger travel. He does say, however, that an unnamed U.K.-based airline has signed a letter of intent to purchase $2 billion worth of planes when they’re ready.
Boom, indeed.