IS RIDING A PLANE IN 2024 SO DIFFERENT FROM 1964?
Back in the sixties, planes were more fashionable, with smoking sections and mod lounges. In 1970, a roundtrip flight from New York to London also cost a full $550, around $4500 today, adjusted for inflation. As such, the frequent fliers of the past were generally not mid-level consultants or digital nomads, but bona-fide global elites. That crowd has since decamped to private jets. Thanks to deregulation and modern planes being significantly more fuel-efficient, today’s trans-Atlantic flights are sometimes cheaper than they were fifty years ago, without adjusting for inflation! Yet one element of flying is the same today as in the 1960s’ “golden age of aviation”: the length of the trip. Specifically, seven hours from New York to London. Half a day gone, time change included. In eighty years, our planes haven’t gotten any faster. The one exception to that was the Concorde.
In its heyday, a typical British Airways Concorde flight would leave London at 1:00 p.m. and land in Washington at 12:10 p.m. the same day. The Concorde, the world’s first commercial supersonic jet, literally created time. But the Concorde created noise, too. And for that, we never forgave it. Supersonic transport was despised by the very people with the authority to hamstring it before it had the chance to mature. And crush it they did — not just the Concorde, but the whole dream of faster planes for all, including a plan to build supersonic jets in America.
Today, more than two decades since the last Concordes were relegated to museums, there are multiple well-funded, public and private efforts to build supersonic transport in America.
Can these new planes take flight? Will we let them?
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On November 29, 1962, the British Minister of Supply and the French Ambassador to Britain signed a treaty agreeing to jointly develop a supersonic airliner. The airliner was named the “Concorde” –– French for “agreement,” or “treaty.” In the previous half-century, the two nations had fought two world wars together, and had both recently lost or given up the final remnants of their empires. For the Europeans, the Concorde represented a new dream of connection with the world: not by conquering land, but conquering the sound barrier.
Across the Atlantic in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy responded to the treaty in London, telling a crowd at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs that the United States must develop, via private industry, a “prototype of a commercially successful supersonic transport superior to that being built in any other country of the world.” He told the cadets and officials that “we are talking about a plane in the end of the sixties that will move ahead at a speed faster than Mach 2 to all corners of the globe.” (Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, is about 1534 mph)
In 1969, the same year that the U.S. sent man to the moon, the Concorde took its maiden flight. And on October 1, 1969, the Concorde reached supersonic speed. By January 1971, Concorde had flown faster than Mach 1 over one hundred times. At the same time, opposition to supersonic flight was already building in the United States. In March of that year, the United States Congress voted to cut federal participation in the supersonic transport (SST) effort, of which Boeing was the main contractor, before a prototype had been produced.
In 1964, soon after Kennedy’s assassination, the FAA tested supersonic flights for six months in 1964 over Oklahoma City, to gauge the public’s reaction to frequent sonic booms. The local Chamber of Commerce even hosted a celebratory party when Oklahoma City was selected for the honor. One out of four jobs in Oklahoma City was in aircraft manufacturing at the time. A major Air Force base sat just miles from the city. It was as close to “plane city” as the FAA could find. Six months of sonic booms (1253 in all) and 9393 interviews later, a 1965 report described that “Serious or ‘more than a little’ annoyance with sonic booms was generally reported by a minority of the residents during the first and second interviews, but increased to a slight majority by the end of the six months program.” Still, after over 1200 sonic booms, nearly 80% of residents said they would accept eight or more booms per day — indefinitely. But that wasn’t enough. A slight majority, being slightly annoyed, was enough to whip up a national anti-supersonic fervor. In Congress, opposition to supersonics came first from Senator Wiliam Proxmire (D-WI), a man famous for his daily 4.8 mile jog to work, and his firm view on tightening the public purse strings.
From 1975 to 1989, Proxmire issued a monthly “Golden Fleece Award” to officials who, in his view, squandered public money. The Justice Department won for commissioning a study on “why prisoners want to get out of jail.” The FAA earned an award for conducting a study on the physical appearance of airline stewardesses, including “distance from knee to knee while sitting” and “length of the buttocks.” Proxmire is fondly remembered by many as an advocate for the taxpayer; others saw him as a demagogue, willing to publicly humiliate scientists conducting research that may have seemed odd to the public, but actually paid huge dividends. Former Pixar President Edwin Catmull wrote in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. that the Golden Fleece Awards introduced a “chilling effect on research” and that “failure was used as a weapon.” In one instance Proxmire paid $10,000 to a Golden Fleece awardee to settle a libel suit after he claimed that the scientist was personally enriching himself via federal support of his behavioral research.
Through 1971, Proxmire’s main target was the supersonic program. Proxmire opposed public funding of supersonic research, and the whole idea of publicly-funded aerospace projects (a view shared by some entrepreneurs today). He argued that “taxpayers do not need to be saddled with another subsidy program — this time for the very few businessmen and the rich who can afford the premium SST flight prices.” Proxmire, at least, was principled; he loathed public spending for all kinds of programs. In 1971, 216 Representatives in the House voted against continued FAA support of the project. So did 51 senators. Kennedy’s dream of a publicly-supported, private-made American supersonic airliner — which was also supported by both of his successors, Johnson and Nixon — was dead.
Others hated supersonic transport altogether, publicly funded or not, and sought to ban it outright. In 1967, William Shurcliff, a physicist and researcher at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator and John Edsall, a Harvard biochemist, created the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. Shurcliff, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and Edsall, a Harvard friend of Oppenheimer’s, founded the League to “to oppose sonic boom and to halt the construction of all commercial supersonic transports, both in the United States and abroad.” Shurcliff’s 2006 obituary in the New York Times cites an interview with the Harvard Crimson in which he said that “‘We all believe in progress,’ but… ‘some things just aren’t progress.’” His 1969 book SST and the Sonic Boom Handbook provides a laundry list of problems with the supersonic plane. The booms would damage “dishes, tumblers, objets d’art, etc.” Individuals would experience a “primitive startle reaction” leading to “feelings of fear, fright, panic.” In Switzerland, “a herd of prize cattle…stampeded over a cliff when frightened by a sonic boom.” The “tranquility” of rural living would be permanently “destroyed.” Only a year after the Handbook’s publication, a Sierra Club spin-off, Friends of the Earth, sponsored a mass paperback publication of Shurcliff’s textbook of doom.
A 1969 article in The Atlantic reported that “If the SST flew from New York to Los Angeles, for instance, 10 million people in a 50-mile-wide path beneath the SST would hear the boom. Depending on atmospheric conditions, it would sound like dull thunder in the distance or a firecracker 25 feet away.” The author Stephen Shepard declared that the sonic boom “could cause fright, accidents, or even heart failure.”
In total, only twenty Concordes were built out of a promised eighty-one. Only fourteen were delivered, to Air France and British Airways. The Concordes made only 50,000 flights in total (for comparison, roughly 100,000 flights take off and land every day). Many airlines had placed orders under the assumption that overland sonic booms would be permitted, and that flights to the United States, the largest market in the world for long haul flights, would run as normal. But in 1973, the FAA banned all commercial supersonic flight over U.S. territory.
On January 21, 1976, the first commercial Concorde flight took off from London, landing 3500 miles away in Bahrain, newly-independent from the British Empire. British Airways had hoped to fly to New York, but that wasn’t allowed. The same day, another Concorde took off from Paris and landed in Rio de Janeiro by way of Senegal, eight-and-a-half hours later. Today, a flight from Paris to Rio takes well over eleven hours, even without stopping in Africa.
In March 1976, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey banned the Concorde from landing at JFK Airport; that ban was struck down in 1977 by the Supreme Court. When Concorde landings were finally approved in the U.S, Secretary of Transportation William Coleman permitted just two flights per day into JFK Airport in New York, and just one flight per day into Dulles Airport, outside of Washington. The three daily flights were not allowed to land earlier than 7:00 a.m. or depart later than 10:00 p.m..
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The timing of the Concorde’s introduction, with skyrocketing fuel prices after the 1973 oil crisis, made its economics even more tenuous, on top of the regulatory woes in the US. Supersonic planes consume seven-to-nine times more fuel per passenger than regular planes. Fuel represented fifty percent of both gross take-off weight and direct operating costs in supersonic planes. It was expensive at a time when the world was hungry for cheaper travel. Re-training a three-man flight crew of already experienced pilots and stewards to operate a Concorde took five months. Flight availability was limited artificially by bureaucrats, but it was also suppressed by the high costs of running supersonic flights (ballooned by airplane food like “foie gras mousse, smoked halibut, caviar, and sour cream barquette,” typical on a Concorde).
Passengers between Washington and London, for example, had to choose between a subsonic round trip flight for $256 or a one-way supersonic flight for three times the price (£431, then about $775). By the end of the 1990s, after two decades of growth and inflation, a one-way, three-hour flight across the Atlantic in the Concorde cost over $6000 — double the price of a first-class seat on a regular flight. By that time, many of the Concorde’s would-be passengers, the border-hopping global elite, were pivoting to private jets, as a result of the innovative fractional ownership model made possible by companies like NetJets.
The death knell of the Concorde rang out on July 25, 2000, when Air France Flight 4590 crashed in a Parisian suburb, Gonesse, two minutes after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport. All 109 people on the flight — a hundred passengers and nine crew — were killed. The public blamed the Concorde, although a French investigation determined that debris on the runway, not an intrinsic fault of the plane, caused it to crash. Three and a half years later, the Concorde flew its last commercial flight, landing in Bristol to cheering crowds. But both the anxiety created by the Paris crash, and the general fear of flying post-9/11, sent the Concorde into its current state: museum artifact.
In total, the British and French governments spent $2.8 billion developing the Concorde, about a tenth of what the United States spent on the Apollo Program in the same timeframe. British Airways made a modest profit operating the Concorde over 28 years.
The Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 was, briefly, Concorde’s main competitor. It reached supersonic speeds several months before the Concorde. But after just six months of service and a deadly crash near Moscow in 1978, the planes never flew passengers again. Years later, after the breakup of the USSR, the Tu-144 was reborn as the Tu-144LL — with an American flag on its tail. As a result of its own lack of supersonic passenger planes, the United States struck an agreement with Russia in 1993 for NASA to use Tu-144’s for research. Those Soviet planes are, to date, the only supersonic passenger jets to bear the American stars and stripes.
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The first time humans broke the sound barrier was on October 14, 1947, during the famed U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Chuck Yeager’s ninth flight of the Bell X-1 research aircraft. That aircraft was released from the belly of a B-29 bomber. That first sonic boom was lost to the expanse of the Mojave Desert. News about the flight only broke two months later as a headline in the Los Angeles Times. On March 22nd, 2024, 76 and a half years later, a trainer aircraft called “XB-1” took off from a runway in the same Mojave Desert. Unlike that first supersonic flight, which was a federal project, the XB-1 is made by a Colorado-based startup called Boom Supersonic. Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and CEO, told me that the name XB-1 was a “nod of the hat” to the X-1.
Boom Supersonic is “inspired by what used to be a very high rate of progress in aviation.” In the first half-century of flight, Scholl observes, we progressed from the Wright Flyer to the Apollo missions. “In the mid 20th century, the average service life of an airliner was six years. And it’s not because they got rusty and fell apart. It’s because we made new ones. Today, airlines buy airliners and they plan to keep them for decades because they’re not getting better.” So he started a company to build a supersonic plane.
“I want to get back to that world where airplanes don’t last as long because we make better ones,” he told me. But Scholl sees mistakes in what he calls the “national prestige development model” of the Concorde, SST, and Tupolev projects. Scholl’s view mirrors, in a way, the arguments that Proxmire was making in real time. “While the first airliner—the first jetliner—came from founder-led companies,” he says, “the supersonic airplanes in the sixties and seventies came from government projects.” If a plane lives by government support, it can also die by it. In his view, the government-backed projects “disconnect[ed] technical development from any kind of sustainable market.” Boom, on the other hand, is a venture-financed company, with over $700 million raised to date.
“Capitalism matters. You have to do things with economic motivation,” Scholl says. United Airlines, American Airlines, and Japan Airlines have already placed orders for 130 of Boom’s planned jetliner, the Overture. (The XB-1 is a trainer aircraft intended to validate Boom’s systems). At the same time, NASA is now working with Lockheed Martin to build the X-59 Quesst, a “low-boom” supersonic model which could prove that quieter sonic booms are possible, booms that could skirt the existing regulations. Third: Hermeus, based in Atlanta, unveiled its Quarterhouse MK1 aircraft in March, with plans for a test flight later this year—also in the historic Mojave Desert, at Edwards Air Force base. Hermeus plans for hypersonic flight: five times faster than the speed of sound.
Up next, Boom needs to test its XB-1 at supersonic speeds. And then there is the even more daunting task of building an airliner, not just a test aircraft. They have their work cut out for them. Supersonic planes remain expensive to operate. Traditional jets have become incredibly efficient and quiet. And yet… the world is richer, and (hopefully) more open-minded today than it was in the mid-1970s. The dream of speed endures. For Scholl, a future world where supersonic planes fly regularly, “the way we live, who we spend time with, who we fall in love with, where we do business, where we vacation, it’s all different…”
He recalled a recent United flight. The WiFi stopped working, and he called a flight attendant over to ask about the problem. The flight attendant didn’t know anything about the outage. But she wanted to tell Scholl all about United’s new airplanes. He goes on: “She starts raving to me about how United’s going to have supersonic jets. And I’m sitting there like, ‘I know a little bit about that.’”
