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After the fatal Concorde crash, could supersonic flight return?
The closest I've ever been to being on a supersonic flight was looking at the Concorde on static display at the Intrepid Museum in New York. But, for an entire generation of travelers and aviators, flying at twice the speed of sound was a daily reality, at least for the wealthy.
July marks 25 years since an Air France Concorde suffered a catastrophic incident just after departing Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, and a few years later, the entire commercial supersonic flight program ended.
As private entrepreneurs and the Trump administration renew a push for supersonic flights, I had a chance to speak to a student filmmaker who brought the history of the Concorde to light for a new generation of aviation professionals.
Jillian Preite produced a short film about the Concorde for a class at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and shared why the plane is so inspiring, even to those who never got to see it fly.
'I honestly didn't know much about it before starting this project,' she said. 'It had such an impact way back in the 1960s that's still being put into place now.'
What made the Concorde special?
"What they did was absolutely mind-blowing,' John Tye, a former British Airways Concorde pilot, said in the documentary. 'They didn't have mobile phones or computers, we'd only just got color television when Concorde first flew, so this was one of the greatest technical achievements of mankind.'
The Concorde, developed in the 1960s under a partnership between British and French manufacturers, was the first (and so far, only) commercial supersonic aircraft. It entered service in 1976 with British Airways and Air France.
The commercial supersonic aircraft made the trip from New York to London or Paris in about three and a half hours, less than half the time it takes a traditional jet, but passengers paid a premium for the speed. Tickets on the Concorde were virtually unattainable for the average traveler, and its passengers were often business executives on an expense account or celebrities.
'This is insane that we're able to get a commercial plane to go this far in that amount of time,' Preite, who studied communication and broadcast meteorology and graduated from Embry-Riddle in May, told me. She now works as a meteorologist in Tallahassee.
Passengers also enjoyed high-end cabin service, though the short flight time meant there wasn't a tremendous amount of luxuriating to be done over lunch.
The Concorde crash
Throughout its service history, Concorde suffered only one catastrophic hull loss. On July 25, 2000, an Air France plane that had been chartered by a tour group struck a piece of debris on the runway at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It damaged the tire, a fragment of which ruptured the fuel tank and ultimately, the plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone onboard.
'The Concorde is so associated with business travel and the fact that the crash was not a business trip, it was a charter carrying mostly German citizens that were flying to the United States to get on a cruise ship, so there were families that were part of the crash, that was one of the things (that people often forget),' Steve Master associate professor of communication at Embry-Riddle and advisor on Preite's project, told me.
In the weeks after the crash, both Air France and British Airways grounded their Concorde fleets, with the planes only returning to service in November 2001.
The Concorde's end of service
Although the Concorde did fly again for about two years after the crash, the program never fully recovered, and Concorde operations at both airlines ended in the fall of 2003.
'They just weren't making any profit from it, so I think the crash was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was already tumbling, and the crash was an excuse, 'it's now dangerous, let's get rid of it,'' Preite said. 'It was a very controversial plane, and the crash really put it in for it.'
Concorde used a tremendous amount of fuel to reach and maintain supersonic speeds, and there were significant concerns about its environmental impact. In addition, the sonic boom it generated when breaking the sound barrier limited the routes it could fly, and its takeoff configuration required full power, leading to significant noise on the ground around airports during its operations.
What's next for supersonic flight?
Since 2003, there haven't been any commercial supersonic flights, but that doesn't mean no one is trying to return to the speedy glory days.
Boom is probably the most well-known company working toward the goal of restoring supersonic passenger aviation, and it already has speculative orders from carriers including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines. Still, the American company has major hurdles to overcome before its aircraft enter service, including getting its custom-built engines approved and significant slate of flight testing after that.
There is not yet any realistic entry into service date for the next generation of supersonic aircraft, and engineers still have to prove that efforts to mitigate the sonic boom will work at scale, among other things.
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Still, it is likely that there will, eventually, be supersonic passenger jets again. It's all but unheard of for an advanced technology to just be shelved after decades of successful service.
President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at reducing regulatory hurdles to supersonic flight testing in an effort to jumpstart the next phase of research.
Neverthless, the economics remain a question, even if the aircraft are technically capable.
'It's definitely going to happen, it's just the fact of: is it going to be successful in making profit, or go downhill like the Concorde did?' Preite said.
