Virgin working on a jet that will fly New York to London in 3.5 hours
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is teaming up with aerospace start-up Boom to help build a new fleet of supersonic commercial jets that can travel at more than twice the speed of sound.
The start-up claims its vehicles will be able to travel from New York to London in just 3.5 hours, with tickets costing an “affordable” price of $5,000 per seat — “the same price as business class.”
Virgin will initially help Boom with research and development, a spokesperson for the Virgin Group told The Verge. Branson’s spacecraft manufacturing company, The Spaceship Company, will provide “engineering, design and manufacturing services, flight tests, and operations” to Boom, the spokesperson said. Virgin will also have the option to buy the first 10 planes if production goes well.
“Richard has long expressed interest in developing high-speed flight and building high speed flight R&D through Virgin Galactic and our manufacturing organisation, The Spaceship Company,” the spokesperson said.
Boom’s planes will have 40 seats total, divided into two aisles with one seat per row. They’ll be able to fly at Mach 2.2 (1,451 miles per hour), more than twice as fast as modern commercial airplanes. And the vehicles will zoom at a lofty altitude of 60,000 feet, around 20,000 feet higher than the average commercial airline’s cruising height. Boom hopes to test out its first plane by the end of next year.
If Boom can pull off its vision, its vehicles could be the first commercial supersonic jets to enter service after the Concorde was retired in 2003. The Concorde boasted 100 seats, but a single round-trip ticket ran upward of $10,000. Boom founder Blake Scholl says that his planes will be a more realistic option for customers. Scholl even suggested that customers could commute daily cross-country or across the Atlantic. “Imagine departing from New York at 6 AM, and landing at Heathrow by 2:30 PM London time,” Scholl told The Guardian. “You’ll be able to make afternoon meetings, you can stay until 9:30 PM, have a full productive day, and back in New York at 8 PM.”
As groundbreaking as this all sounds, Boom still has a long way to go.
