Why Bringing Back Supersonic Is Almost Impossible | The Limit | Business Insider

0:03 the last time anybody besides a fighter pilot was able to hit mock speed was in one of these but that was 20 years ago the Concord didn't just hit mock speed it went double the speed of sound flying from New York to London in under 3 hours today you can only go visit a Concord in a handful of museums it's a relic left behind by an industry that invested in efficiency rather than speed but look online and you'll see that there's a huge appetite for supersonic travel the race to supersonic is heating up I've talked to nearly all the companies building these new planes and I asked them why is it so hard to bring back Supersonic and what's the limit to how fast a passenger plane can actually go

0:49 in order to understand the challenges that they're up against I decided to start here at the Concord so my first impression of the plane is that the head clearance walking in is extremely low I'm 6'4 and I have to really uncomfortably duck down just to get in this doorway so we're going to see what it's like inside but it's obvious that this plane's dimensions are totally different from normal commercial airlines first of all the head clearance in here thank God is a little bit better um but I'm I am about touch if I stand up straight my head is touching here so it is it is pretty narrow and low here's my hand against the window look at how small it is when this plane was flying at such a high altitude if there

1:36 was a failure of one of the windows these small windows were meant to slow that cabin depressurization so it was a safety measure and actually on some of the newer planes that we're talking about they don't even have Windows attention Concord passengers on today's menu duck laange caviar and champagne lots of champagne always wanted to hold one of these um anyway one of the things about the Concord it wasn't just about speed it was about luxury every seat on this plane was considered first class and the service was first class there was a culture created on this plane of frequent flyers a lot of the time celebrities were getting invited to the front to the cockpit and the pilots that

2:22 we talk to have some really fond memories of Meeting those people interacting with them and and almost creating friendships with them the rock stars of that area you know the Rolling Stones The Beatles they would uh use it quite a lot and they'd certainly be there and I certainly remember them and I had a menu where I was collecting my favorite rock stars um signatures I sent it back to some I won't mention the name send it back to somebody for that person to sign and they thought it was a gift for them as it was their birthday and they walked off with it which was a bit of a blow to put it mildy this is the forward most cabin before we get to the front of the plane and the cockpit and I'm comfortably standing up now finally so that might be explained by the fact

3:08 that as you can see the body of the plane gets sort of narrower towards the back so we're in the front of the plane we're towards the cockpit the view is extremely narrow if this was a car I would not feel comfortable driving this on the road because the visibility down to the ground is extremely poor hence the droop snout design so the concord's droop snoot was a feature that allowed Pilots to see the runway during takeoff and Landing but then snap back into place when it was hitting supersonic speeds over the Atlantic Ocean the beginning of the end for Concord came in 2000 after about 30 years of service tragedy struck so we're underneath the the plane now and you could see the landing here

3:54 on each side and um one of the things that's understood about when the plane actually did crash is that there was uh one of the tires hit something on the runway and it kicked up the piece of debris into the jet fuel tanks which are right here and that's what caused the fire that caused the the eventual crash Concord did start flying again not long after but its fate seemed sealed and the last flight was a few years later on the 26th of November 2003 so over 20 years later have any of these companies solved the big problems that that Concord faced while it was flying probably the most challenging obstacle these planes will have to overcome is their noise the sound of a sonic boom has remained the biggest

4:39 obstacle to supersonic flight since the very beginning so far 7,000 people have complained to the ministry of technology and to the noise of batement society only one man has seems to have come out in direct pre of the boom and that's a 74-year-old old age pensioner who claims that the boom has cured him of his deafness we got a purpose to stop the Concord what's in 1973 following a public outcry the US banned Overland flights for supersonic Jets followed by most other countries that's why the Concord was only ever allowed to fly supersonic over water planes have been getting quieter over the past 50 years too that's thanks to improvements in

5:26 aircraft design and more stringent government regulations on sound so a loudly booming supersonic jet would be even more noticeable compared to Modern subsonic travel so how does a sonic boom actually work here's what happens when anything travels faster than the speed of sound so sound is a wave of pressure for a stationary object it travels in concentric circles out from where the object is the waves of sound get pressed up against each other and that wall of high pressure that is the sound barrier breaking that barrier means an object object is traveling faster than the sound it makes it leaves behind a loud shock wave kind of like the Wake behind a boat that's going really fast and that is what you call a sonic

6:12 boom if a plane booms too close to the ground it can actually shatter glass many people including myself before making this video thought that a plane booms one time when it breaks the sound barrier and then it's quiet as it's moving through the air that's actually not what happens as long as a plane is traveling faster than the speed of sound it's leaving that sonic boom sound behind for every th000 ft of altitude the boom carpet Left Behind the plane is about a mile wide so a plane traveling past mock speed at 60,000 ft has a 60m wide swath of land underneath it that's hearing that boom boom sound wherever it goes and for those on the

6:57 ground that boom is about 105 DB that's at least twice as loud as a normal plane flying overhead and it's equivalent to standing next to a chainsaw or a car horn so let's look at our four planes it's worth noting that I originally spoke to five key players but one of them went under while we were making this video and it just goes to show you how much of a challenge developing these planes can be each of them has completely different approaches to supersonic travel and each faces different challenges the the x59 boom and Concord all use similar Technologies flying at 60,000 ft and hitting between Mach 1.4 and Mach 2 those kind of speeds can get you from New York to London in 3 hours rather than the usual s the

7:44 houseon will use a Ramjet engine along the turbo fan to get it all the way up to Mach 5 that would get you from New York to London in just an hour and a half and the Stargazer is using a detonation rocket engine something you don't commonly outside of missiles that might just do the same trip from New York to London in under 1 hour so how are these four planes going to tackle the noise issue boom's Overture isn't looking to reduce the Sonic Boom at all at Mach 1.7 with Overture one we're starting really simple we're putting Sonic booms out over open ocean where no one's there to hear them us regulations still ban all commercial planes from going supersonic over land but researchers at MIT found that 7 88% of

8:30 demand for supersonic transport was Overland routes almost 40% of that was on us domestic flights if these regulations change boom says the Overture could achieve a boomless cruise flying it just over the speed of sound over land without an audible Sonic Boom but this phenomenon requires specific atmospheric conditions to achieve flying any faster than that without making a lot of noise requires some really Innovative design and that's where the x59 comes in the x59 isn't aiming for commercial supersonic flight like the others it's actually one of 66 xplanes developed by the US government the x is for experimental the first X plane was the Bell X1 which was the first plane to

9:16 break the sound barrier in 1947 the x13 tested vertical takeoff and Landing the X15 was the fastest piloted aircraft that never left Earth's atmosphere and it hit mock 6.7 it's taken NASA and Lockheed 6 years to build a prototype x59 first off x59 engine is on the top Not underneath the wings so by putting the engine on top we kind of Shield The Shield that shock wave from reaching the ground then there's the nose it's a little hard to miss as it's 38 ft long the idea of minimizing the sonic boom is to keep those shock waves small uh weak and Rel relatively evenly spaced so that long nose essentially starts that

10:04 process it sets up those initial shock waves to be weak and and kind of equally spaced along the first part of the airplane and lastly the light carbon fiber further helps to reduce the plane's weight otherwise the x-59 is built from parts of other planes it's got a t38 cockpit which is a favorite for test pilots and landing gear from an F-16 so did NASA actually figure out how to quiet the Boom we feel that we have I mean we have you know shown in a wind tunnel you know in an experiment and in in experiment and Analysis um that an airplane can be shaped so that instead of producing a boom it produces a thump their aim is to reduce the boom from 105 to 75 perceived

10:49 DB uh that's equivalent to either a car door closing across the street or the sound of distant Thunder as part of The Quiet supersonic mission NASA has exposed communities to a simulated Sonic thump in 2018 they conducted one of these surveys in Galveston Texas with 500 civilian volunteers nothing field Marshall the spot dve heard a faint th pum eventually the actual x59 will make about 60 flights over a variety of yet to be named communities in the US to collect more data but there's another much simpler way to reduce the sonic boom fly higher both the Stargazer and the houseon want to fly much faster and much

11:36 higher than the other Super Sonic planes it turns out like roughly about 100,000 ft uh you like a a sonic boom about about 100,000 ft is inaudible to a human ear like we we can measure it with scientific instruments but like it's inaudible to a human that's Dr Andrew douglby the CTO and co-founder of Venus Aerospace just flying higher sounds like the easy solution but when you're at those kind of altitudes a whole host of other problems quickly appear so right here on this chart at 26,000 ft is the death zone that's where the air becomes too thin to breathe it's why most climbers need oxygen to Summit Everest almost all planes Cruise higher than this but the higher the altitude the bigger the risk when something goes wrong when you're flying at 100,000 ft

12:23 if you lose cabin pressure um and you don't manage it appropriately quickly um like your blood will boil oh my God so it's you basically have to treat it like a spacecraft cabin yes um airtight yeah but uh I think the the solution that you see at the end of the day will look much more like a hybrid between a spacecraft cabin and an aircraft cabin today than just a pure aircraft cabin for high altitude military planes like the SR71 the pilots actually had to wear sort of a modified space suit because of the danger of the altitude and speed that they were flying our CEO is going to want to space suit up to get to their meeting in Tokyo a little ear I'm not so sure about that but to be in a plane like this there are so many things that could go wrong at a high altitude that you really need to protect your body from a worst case scenario and

13:10 it's not just the pressure at high altitudes there's one more problem with flying that high and that fast you'll notice on this part of the wing there's some black heat shielding and the reason for that is that certain parts of this plane would be exposed to the most amount of friction at speed the heat that could be experienced on the outside of this plane could sometimes top 250° F combined with the fact that the exterior temperature was well below zero at the High Altitude -75 that heat and cold caused a lot of stress on the outside of the plane it meant that it needed a lot of Maintenance and it meant that it was a limit to how fast this plane could go going faster than Mach 2 Mach 3 mach four Mach 5 you need to get into exotic materials aluminum like this plane is

13:57 made out of just doesn't cut it anymore it's when you get really fast that heat becomes the biggest problem aerodynamic heating increases nonlinearly with speed that means that as speed increases the temperature rise becomes more dramatic what what Hypersonic really meant is the speed at which um I'm part of my French it's a speed at which heat kicks your ass like it's where heat becomes the defining problem if you're trying to go make a missile sure maybe you want to go Hypersonic because you have other reasons to go really really fast to to avoid defense is right there might be like military reasons to go crazy blazing fast hot but I bet if I look at this from a I want to sell commercial flights how do I keep the cost down and competitive I bet I don't want to fly a

14:42 moach five so one of the centerpieces of this museum is obviously the SR71 Blackbird you can see on the uh the tail fin here there's the symbol of Skunk Works which are the people from lockeed Martin their sort of top secret division that works on stuff like this this plane broke broke speed records going over Mach 3 it's one of the fastest aircraft of all time and everything about it is built for high speed and to deal with heat the SR71 actually reached 600° at Mach 3.2 and the glass in the cockpit here was actually an inch and a/4 thick quartz material if you were to touch that even with gloves on you would burn your hand so underneath the plane the tires

15:27 again because of the Heat and the speed that it was traveling these tires actually have inside of them nitrogen not oxygen the oxygen would just blow up at the speeds that this was going and the temperature it was hitting and they also have a silver look to them because they contain aluminum again to deal with high heat that the the plane was experiencing the only way the fuselage could survive these temperatures was to make the entire thing out of titanium alloy which is 10 times more expensive than aluminum it's important to note that things that go into space and reenter hit mock speeds that are a completely different class this thing would re-enter the atmosphere somewhere between Mach 16 and mach 20 and that's why we always see on the space shuttles this black heat shielding on the front

16:14 that's actually reinforced carbon as it's re-entering the atmosphere it's exposed to heat that's on a different order of magnitude than anything that's flying you know at 100,000 or even 180,000 ft but even though these Hypersonic planes aren't going to be hitting space SP shuttle speeds finding solutions to these problems is going to take time and money the Overture has been in development for 10 years at this point and boom's test plane just broke the sound barrier in late January 2025 there we are xb1 is supersonic faster than the speed of sound the x59 is expected to take its first flight in 2025 and has already cost $632

17:01 million that sounds like a lot but building a plane is never cheap both the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner cost over $20 billion to develop and that's with huge manufacturing arms already in place the CEO of Boeing said if they were to develop a new plane today it would cost $50 billion exoic was going to be the fifth plane on our list they were also aiming for a very achievable sound Mach 1.8 plane using already existing engine technology they closed their doors completely in November 2024 I spoke with the CEO before they went under and he was a little more realistic about time frames for this technology so at least for the airliner we don't see that coming into the market until like mid to

17:47 late 2030s which I think you know UBS or some other bank had a similar uh conclusion the speed of developing these planes isn't helped by the fact that there's literally only one place you can fly supersonic planes Overland in the United States the Edwards Air Force Base we can take off and immediately climb up to 30,000 ft where we're now cleared to go Supersonic and that doesn't exist basically anywhere else in the country um and certainly probably not even around the world Edwards Air Force Base was established around two dry lake beds it's roughly 35ish square miles of naturally dry compacted surface that's hard enough to land airplanes on there are other areas especially over the water where you can be doing supersonic flight test um but that's not

18:34 exactly a place you want to be if something goes wrong during the flight test I don't want to be over the water and I certainly don't want to be far away from a landable surface but the area is not completely uninhabited we asked a few people in nearby towns what a sonic boom sounds like I've heard it described as a sound of Freedom well sometimes you get the rumbling the building will shake and other times it's just a loud like uh mad or something going off a big explosion so when people come here and enough in the area they hear the noise and the first thing they want to do is is run out the store CU they think it's an earthquake so to me it's funny and and I just look at the reaction and then let them know it's a son boom so NASA locked Martin boom hermas and other organizations building supersonic prototypes will at some point

19:20 be testing in this one strip of land in California and it's not just the test flights finding the space to test engines is even more of a challenge but that's changing and we went to Jacksonville Florida to check out why this is Cecil airport it's outside Jacksonville we're here for a press event so basically hermus is opening up a new facility here that's called heat and it's going to be for testing engines and uh they've got their quarter horse prototype plane inside the hanger here so we're going to get to check that out which is pretty cool let's go take a look at this plane wow so crazy look at this so in order to uh test the engines associated with hypersonic flight

20:06 there's only a couple places in the country that you can do it at the scale that we need at the scale of the F100 um and that primarily the kind of like go-to one is Arnold engineering development complex um and that facility is uh bottlenecked in the entire country because everyone wants to get in there um and so what we want to do is not only bring in something that will help us accelerate our road map that isn't bottlenecked where everyone is trying to get there uh but also increase the capability of the country so this is the tunnel this is the inside of the tunnel where they're going to be testing things like the quarter horse and other engines and it's hard to tell but it's super super quiet hermus an atlanta-based firm is arguably the furthest along in testing their Hypersonic prototypes they're planning to modify the pratton Whitney F100

20:53 that's the same engine that's inside an F16 so what they're doing is cocooning that engine inside of proprietary technology to take what was an engine that could go Mach 2 and giving it the capability to go Mach 4 5 and above you spend a lot of time in Washington I do and that means you're probably talking to people from the Department of Defense yes the systems you see the department investing in right now are are one-way systems right you send them they uh launch and then they don't return and so every time AKA missiles missiles uh $20 million a shot or more um and so the cost is really Challen in to scale when you have a vehicle uh that Returns the cost per effect of those munition significantly decreases it would also have the impact of unlocking a lot of private Capital Hypersonic weapons are

21:39 at the center of an arms race among the world's superpowers that's because a Hypersonic missile remains within the Earth's atmosphere unlike an ICBM which goes up in a sort of Parabola and then comes back down in theory it makes Hypersonic missiles harder to detect the US has spent over1 billion on hypers IC weapons so far about 3% of the overall R&D budget for defense and it seems to be with good reason China may have already tested a Hypersonic nuclear weapon and they've built wind tunnels that can test speeds up to Mack 30 according to articles we've read Chinese scientists have patented an engine that can go up to Mach 16 and one Chinese company called space transportation is building what they call a rocket with

22:25 wings take a look at this wild CGI video do you think that the United States is behind on Hypersonic I think it's an incredibly difficult competition um we have a different approach in general um to how you China and Russia have have taken it I mean the the the flight tests kind of speak for themselves the pace of flight testing um that China the CCP uh have been able to demonstrate over the past decade uh exceeds Ours by an order of magnitude and I think that that speaks for itself so I guess the last question is when will you feel like Hypersonic passenger planes are a real thing ask me again once we've flown in a Hypersonic aircraft that's that's step one that we got to that we got to prove out so we know it's going to take a long

23:11 time before supersonic or even Hypersonic passenger planes are going to be in the air and development is going to take a lot of investment another problem that Concord just didn't have the development of the Concord was completely subsidized by the governments of France and the United Kingdom Rolls-Royce the engine manufacturer was actually government-owned during the Concord era because it had filed for bankruptcy the airlines didn't even have to buy the planes I mean initially let's face it the airplane was basically given to British Airways I mean they didn't have to pay a cent for it that level of State investment just isn't happening today and that's definitely going to slow development I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a commercial supersonic around 2050 um and to kind of unpack that we

23:57 would need to have both low boom aircraft and very abundant very cheap safs in order for supersonic to succeed and 2050 is about the time frame that I think it could happen that's Dan Rutherford he's an environmental engineer that's been researching Aviation emissions and policy for about 15 years saf stands for sustainable aviation fuel it's still an emerging technology but it's one that's going to play a crucial role when it comes to these planes because of just how much fuel they need let's compare fuel use against standard subsonic airline travel commercial planes vary but take the two most common planes flying today the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 now this

24:43 of course varies on root weight and lots of other factors but as a fairly High estimate they both use around 3 tons of fuel per hour now compare that to the Concord which used a massive 22.6 tons per hour and for a lot fewer passengers even if you were to calculate it per distance Concord gets 13.48% ites too because SuperSonics

25:30 would fly very very high in the sky uh there's a concern that emissions from their engines will have a disproportionate impact especially on the climate and just kind of ballpark figure if a if a plane is operating at say 33,000 feet emissions from its engine stays in the atmosphere for like two or three days but if you take it and you make it Supersonic and you fly at 55,000 ft uh the what we call the residence time or the amount of time the pollution stays in the atmosphere is more like two or three years and that's very concerning both from climate change and then for ozone depletion how are these newer planes going to solve this efficiency problem well the truth is they really

26:15 aren't the main problem is the faster you go the less efficient travel becomes in fact Saudi Arabia wants to invest in SuperSonics precisely because of this they highlighted the future of supersonic flight as a key focus in their oil sustainability program here's a graph showing the drop off in efficiency at greater speeds the higher up on the graph the more efficient the plane boom is probably the closest of these projects to reality and they claim that the Overture is 30% more fuel efficient than Concord maybe moving them up here the houseon will be using a Ramjet and end up somewhere around here on the graph just beyond the SR71 the Stargazer uses a similar engine but but also adds their brand new rotating detonation rocket engine for

27:01 higher speeds Rockets are way more inefficient and if you look at the bottom of the chart that's where you're going to see the rocket propulsion not a lot of planes use rocket propulsion for that reason compared to the Concords 22 tons of fuel per hour this thing burned 20 tons of fuel per second now it's not an exact comparison obviously because the planes that we're talking about are not launching directly up to get out of uh Earth's gravity well but it just gives you an idea of how much fuel it takes to move weight uh you know up into the atmosphere I mean you could kind of see the design is different right they're like they're more compact it's just about throwing as much power through it

27:47 as you can Venus is targeting a specific impulse of 1,250 seconds which the company claims will put its hybrid rocket Ramjet engine in in line with standard Ramjet performance but that's still 80% less efficient than a 747 and rather than 400 passengers it carries only 12 engine efficiency may not be the sexiest topic but all of these planes will undoubtedly be worse for the environment than subsonic travel we have now it's not just the environmental impacts either this fuel costs a lot of money and it might just be the make or break reason that flying supersonic just isn't profitable for these companies it's a it's a it's a lovely goal everyone wants to go higher faster farther we don't like to use that phrase

28:34 too much but you know but at some point there they limits and in the case of airplanes the limit for Speed is Mach One a little bit below it practically speaking to be commercially viable beyond that no here's a graph of jet fuel prices over the last 50 years this flat period of low prices was concord's Era since then fuel prices have shot up so while trip on the Concord in 1999 costs about $154 per passenger in fuel that flight today would cost over $700 and for Boom the numbers are looking much worse they've made a commitment to sustainable jet fuel today's airplanes are actually only 50/50 compatible with sustainable aviation fuel and Overture we're designing to run on up to 100%

29:20 sustainable fuel sustainable jet fuel is a type of jet fuel made from either renewable sources like plants or algae or repurposed waste that's intended to have a lower carbon footprint but the thing to know is that safs remain very expensive and very rare So typically uh saf costs between two and five times as much as fossil jet fuel and it's only uh it only accounts for two t of 1% of fuel use today so it's very much a nation technology so if boom achieves their 25% more efficient than Concord claims and saf cost the $8 per gallon that it cost recently that means the fuel alone own for each passenger on a flight from London to New York would be around $1,500 if saf hits the highs of $10 that

30:06 it did multiple times last year that would be almost $22,000 in fuel costs for every single passenger those are really rough estimates and maybe boom will manage to squeeze a little more efficiency out of their planes but it gives you an idea of just how expensive these fuel costs could be we reached out to Boom about this and they told us they're aiming for a five ,000 roundtrip ticket if that's true $3 to $4,000 of that would be fuel alone they told us we've designed Overture to be profitable for Airlines at fairs similar to First and business class that includes fuel costs which we expect to go down over time as the supply of saff increases along with demand and there's one other big problem

30:51 with this plan saf often isn't actually as sustainable as it sounds well there's a lot of diversity hiding under that term sustainable Aviation fuels a saff can be produced in a sustainable way with a good feed stock and reduce emissions by 80% or more compared to Fossil jet fuel but it also can be produced in a way that actually makes it more polluted than fossil jet fuel so to take an example if you take palm oil that's derived from um like a deforested area and turn that into a saf then that's actually going to have higher life cycle emissions than fossil jet field just because of all the carbon You released when you cut down the forest the US government is aiming for 3 billion gallons of saff Supply in 2030 which is um you know H hundredfold or

31:37 more increase from today so those would be saps produced from corn or soy that offer modest if any greenhouse gas benefits it's going to be a tough task to balance out fuel costs environmental damage and heat problems all while making a comfortable and affordable ride for passengers now that we've seen all the suic prototypes who's actually going to fly on these things all the CEOs we talked to said similar things I think it's uh typically the the business traveler folks that You' see um flying in uh business class or first class today when we talk to people who are the most frequent International Travelers in in business class and first class 97% of them say they want supersonic flights

32:22 you land in Japan at 2:00 p.m. your time but it's more like 7:00 a.m. their time and you you know take an Uber or you ride a taxi to the factory you're able to have a meeting with whoever you're meeting with for like 3 hours you you can then board a flight and get back home in in time for dinner and in a world of super fast internet and remote calls do we really need to be flying these CEOs across the planet at Hypersonic speeds and finally for the nearly 10% of CEOs who are super commuters traveling 100 miles or more to work one study found that they consistently underperform their localized counterparts causing their firms to lose value and their tenure to be shorter it's even worse if they own a boat or live near a golf course it turns out the only person who would actually

33:08 fly Supersonic and be home in time for dinner was the pilot of the Concord and I would drive my wife early in the morning to the station our local station she get on the train commute into the City and I would go to Kennedy get in my Concord fly to London go swiftly through customs and immigration and come out the other side and get on as a passenger on the evening Concord out of Heath row and i' get back into uh Kennedy get in my car drive up to Kona and pick my wife up at the station she having been to work all day and me too I suppose but even for the ultra wealthy are they going to pick speed over Comfort when you can already fly in

33:55 luxury on a private jet is the hours saved going to be enough to entice people back to supersonic could there be a faster supersonic future maybe but it's not happening anytime soon and there's a lot of reasons that people should think about and be concerned about what the implications of that future might be