Supersonic Is Coming Back. Will the Airlines Buy It?

Ask a harried air traveler about the basics of modern flight, and you’ll probably elicit surprise when they discover commercial airplanes fly only as fast as they did in the 1950s. Given the range of aerospace advances in the past half-century, plus the technological leaps in almost every other area of human endeavor, it seems reasonable to ask: Why can’t we fly faster?

That’s the question driving a startup called Boom Technology, which says it’s time to bring supersonic jet travel into the mainstream—in a modern way. The company is pursuing speed with an audacious idea: a 45-seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (1,451 miles per hour), faster than the defunct Concorde and certainly faster than the standard 550 mph, with fares no more expensive than a current business-class round trip, which ranges between $5,000 and $10,000.