By Anurag Kotoky, Kyunghee Park and Justin Bachman / Bloomberg
Supersonic jetliner travel, which ended more than a decade ago with the Concorde, got a boost as Japan Airlines Co. agreed to invest $10 million in Colorado startup Boom Technology Inc.
Japan Air also took an option to purchase as many as 20 of the aircraft Boom is developing, the two companies said Tuesday. The Asian carrier is the second company to announce an intention to purchase Boom’s supersonic jet, after billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic.
Boom is planning to build a 45-to-55 seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (1,451 miles per hour) — capable of whisking passengers between New York and London in about three hours. The Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after almost three decades in service as customers abandoned the jets amid hefty operating costs.
Japan Air will work with Boom “to refine the aircraft design and help define the passenger experience for supersonic travel,” according to the statement.
The jet, targeted to enter service in the middle of next decade, will have a range of 4,500 nautical miles, or roughly the distance between Beijing and London.
“The future needs friends,” Boom Chief Executive Officer Blake Scholl said on Twitter ahead of the announcement. “Pioneers who stick their necks out, take a stand, support the new, the half-born, while uncertainty remains and the risk of failure is still quite real.”
Boom Technology had commitments for 75 planes and customers have paid significant deposits, Scholl said at the Paris Air Show in June. Orders were spread across five airlines.
The company, which says a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo could be completed in five and-a-half hours, has already struck a deal with the Spaceship Co., the manufacturing division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, to use that company’s engineering, design, and flight-test support services.
Engine selection, which is crucial for giving customers real cost and performance data, remains an outstanding issue. Boom is using a General Electric Co. engine for its demonstration aircraft. That plane, which passed a preliminary design review in May, is scheduled to fly next year.
On the Concorde, deep-pocketed passengers could fly the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound from 1976 to 2003. After costs and noise complaints killed off that supersonic jet, GE, Lockheed Martin Corp., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and startups including Boom are studying new designs and technology that could make supersonic flight a commercial reality.
Boom in November hired Bill James, a former Airbus executive who led wing design on the A380 superjumbo, as its vice president of production operations. The company has been in talks with about 20 airlines to sell the plane.
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