By Mark Samuelson | Denver Gazette
President Trump signed an executive order Friday that could clear the skies for Boom Supersonic’s Overture, the sleek craft being designed and tested at Centennial Airport that could become the world’s first faster-than-sound jetliner since the Concorde’s final flight in 2003.
The White House described the order as one that ended “decades of stifling regulations” that had grounded U.S. efforts to reestablish supersonic airline flights.
These, the order said, would be replaced by new noise standards that might allow supersonics to be certified for overland flights, following a regimen of research and tests.
The Anglo-French Concorde entered commercial service in 1976, but its operations were practically entirely transoceanic routes like London or Paris to New York, rather than over land, where its sonic boom would register all along its supersonic path.
Aviation experts vary on whether that restriction directly led carriers to end Concorde’s service 22 years ago, but most see the limit as having greatly increased ticket prices and reduced its marketability.
But executives at Boom envision their Mach-1.7 jet as able to fly New York to Los Angeles in around four hours—two hours faster than contemporary Boeing and Airbus passenger jets fly now.
That would be enabled by what Boom calls “boomless cruise”— an effect that refracts the shockwave of the soaring craft off the atmosphere, reducing the sonic impacts on the ground below. Boom said it demonstrated the effect six times during test flights last January, carried out by a needle-nosed “Baby Boom” demonstrator jet over California’s Mojave desert.