Supersonic Plane To Fly From San Francisco To Washington DC In 2.5 Hours

A plane debuted at the Dubai Airshow this week claimed to be able to transport passengers more than two and a half times faster than a regular aircraft. The Boom Supersonic will be able to take 55 passengers from Washington D.C. to San Francisco to London in only two and a half hours, founder Blake Scholl said during a Monday press conference.

Utilizing Mach 2.2 speed, the Boom Supersonic would be able to fly from London to Dubai in four hours and from Paris to New York in just three and a half hours. The jet also boasts prices 75 percent lower than that of Concorde, which flew at Mach 2.0 in its heyday.

“Leave New York at 6 a.m., make afternoon and dinner meetings in London and be home to tuck your hits into bed,” the company said on its website.

The Boom Supersonic was set to undergo pilot testing next year, while regular flights were set to begin sometime after 2020. And while the jet will be much faster than a typical aircraft, it will be just as loud and tickets will cost the same, Scholl said.

“They’re not going to notice the difference because it’s no louder than the airplanes that are flying today,” Scholl told Khaleej Times. “At the airport, your approach to land and take off speeds are a little bit faster than subsonic, which actually reduces the noise footprint because the airplane flies over you faster than it would have otherwise.”

Supersonic travel, however, is banned by federal law in the United States. Scholl said he aimed to change that as the laws, implemented by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1973, are currently up for renegotiation, according to CNBC.

“Both the House and Senate versions of the FAA re-authorization bill have very positive language on supersonics,” Scholl said. “The Senate bill, in particular, would repeal the speed limit.”

Scholl said the planes aimed to enter the market by 2023 and would ideally produce 100 jets per year. Seventy-six of the jets were already pre-ordered, CNBC reported.