NYC to London in 3.4 hours? Richard Branson backs supersonic startup
A Denver, Colo. startup, Boom Technology, wants to build a supersonic airplane for business travelers that, for a roundtrip price of $5,000, could get them from New York to London in 3.4 hours. This is half the time it takes to fly the route now.
Boom says its 40-seat supersonic planes will fly 2.6 times faster than any other current airliner (and faster than the speed of sound), at 1,451 miles per hour. At their cruising , about twice that of current planes, Boom passengers will be able to see the curvature of the earth, reports Bloomberg.
鈥淚magine departing from New York at 6 a.m., and landing at Heathrow by 2:30 p.m. London time,鈥� Boom founder Blake Scholl, a 35-year-old who worked at Amazon and then sold a shopping app to Groupon, told The Guardian. 鈥淵ou鈥檒l be able to make afternoon meetings, you can stay until 9:30 p.m., have a full productive day, and and back in New York at 8 p.m. [local time] so you can ,鈥� he said.
Though it鈥檚 a far-off scene, it has promise, given that Boom says that a London-based airline is interested in buying $2 billion worth of its jets, and that Richard Branson鈥檚 spaceflight company Virgin Galactic is backing it. Mr. Branson鈥檚 rocket-building company, which wants to commercialize civilian space travel, will help Boom with the engineering, design, manufacturing, and flight tests. It also will have , The Denver Post reported.
Branson, who has pledged () millions of dollars towards the development of a low-carbon fuel and has invested millions in other low-carbon technologies to offset his carbon-intensive businesses, such as Virgin Airlines, hopefully will also help the startup develop a supersonic plane that has minimal impact on the environment. As of now, the planes burn through massive amounts of fuel and emit gases and particles with a yet unknown impact on the ozone.
鈥淓nvironmental questions about the impact of contributed to the US government鈥檚 1971 decision to cut funding for the development of a supersonic civil transport,鈥� a 2014 news release from the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. 鈥淭he use of advanced engine designs with improved emissions characteristics is expected to mitigate the environmental impact, but the potential for adverse climate and ozone impacts remains an area of concern,鈥� said the lab.
In June, MIT received $1.2 million grant from NASA of supersonic aircraft to 鈥渉elp overcome the remaining barriers to commercial supersonic flight,鈥� said the agency in the funding announcement.
, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are also developing new supersonic planes.
