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Board my first For more than a year, since the beginning of the pandemic, I took the 20F seat of United Airlines 1450 and took a twin-engine Boeing 737-900 to fly directly from Newark to Denver. There is a covalent feeling of nostalgia and novelty, like seeing a familiar place with fresh eyes, restarting the muscle memory that has become soft due to discarding. As the familiar crackle sounded on the PA system—”Stewardess, wait for all calls and prepare for cross-checking”—my eyes were drawn to the monitor on the back of the seat in front of me.
In the noisy beat of the hip-hop duo WEARETHEGOOD’s “Boom”, the words “SUPERSONIC IS HERE” flashed on the screen, followed by the eye-catching image of a dazzling white plane (“JOINING THE UNITED FLEET”) . A clearly pointed nose and curved delta wings undulate backwards and outwards from the middle. “Cut the flight time in half,” the ad continued, including a series of compelling itineraries: from San Francisco to Tokyo in six hours, and from Newark to London in three and a half hours. It is worth noting that the next trip will be shorter than the domestic flight I am currently booking. Due to the “weather” in the Midwest, the flight path is elongated, and I finally flew at 900 km/h for 4 hours and 32 minutes. When I flew over within In Brasca, in a supersonic world, I could have crossed the Atlantic.
The supersonic speed has not actually been-so far-despite the attractive geometry and information of the United Airlines advertisement, United Airlines has contracted to purchase 15 unbuilt aircraft (but in an otherwise disastrous year ).Where YesAt least it can be speculated that it is supported on a platform in the headquarters of Boom Supersonic, a low-rise building adjacent to the Centennial Airport on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. In a huge hangar, full of parts racks and groups of tables, there is a banner on the wall that says “The future is supersonic”, and on it is the XB-1 supersonic demo machine, which is more A two-thirds scale version of the large plane, called Overture, Boom hopes to fly into the sky at 1.7 times the speed of sound one day.
When I first met Blake Scholl, the co-founder and CEO of Boom, it was the morning after my subsonic flight to Denver, and he told me that I was coming at the right time. “This is actually a very important week,” he said when we put on our helmets and glasses, “because we powered the plane for the first time this week. Then the fuel boarded the plane for the first time on Sunday. Then we were away Only a few weeks to run the engine.”
At some point on the road, on a test strip in the Mojave Desert, the XB-1 will undergo a taxi test and then a flight test at some point later. It is equipped with sensors and is a virtual flight detector. Scholl predicts that “a lot of learning will come from this level.”
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