By Dr Keith Mc Loughlin, Department of History, School of Humanities
Almost twenty-two years after Concorde completed its final commercial flight to Bristol in 2003, a US-made prototype jet, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, has successfully broken the sound barrier. As a historian of industry, politics and technology in Britain and the wider world, Dr Keith Mc Loughlin considers the significance of the achievement, the challenges facing supersonic transport and the historical lessons to be learnt if it is to succeed.
Last month, a new chapter in the history of transport might have begun. Over the Mojave Desert in California, a small test plane, the XB-1, broke the sound barrier. The company who created the aircraft – Boom Supersonic – seeks to revolutionise civil aviation by halving flight times. If they succeed, you could well see a Boom Supersonic jet on the airport tarmac as you board your considerably slower subsonic jet. But if it fails, billions of dollars would have been wasted and a harsh reality of commercial aviation would have been confirmed – that when it comes down to it, the cheaper the better.
If Boom Supersonic is to be successful, something very significant needs to happen, something largely beyond its control: the business culture of online meetings will need to revert to an older corporate ethos of in-person interactions. Boom Supersonic has made a bold claim to make supersonic flight affordable to the masses. Its in-production passenger jet, the Overture, will seat 80 paying passengers at most, with each set to command prices considerably higher than equivalent subsonic fares offered by its competition. Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that supersonic transport is worth a roll of the dice. Some prominent airlines have advanced orders, including American Airlines. Despite the significant savings offered by online interactions during the pandemic, industry heavyweights have turned away from remote working and reinstated office culture. Many thought that the pandemic had revolutionised the workplace; but such conclusions have been exposed as misplaced, with ‘business as usual’ preferred over sterile, impersonal online meetings. In the current, strained economic environment, meeting in person has assumed a currency of its own.
For all its apparent futurism, Boom Supersonic is, of course, not the first venture into commercial supersonic flight and has much to learn from history if it is to succeed. In the heady era of early 1960s techno-politics, President John F. Kennedy pledged not only to put mankind on the Moon but also to begin funding a supersonic passenger aircraft that could fly at speeds beyond Mach 3 – that is 2,301 mph. But the project did not venture far beyond a wooden mock-up as the giant Boeing SST was cut off at the knees by a sceptical Congress. The Soviet Union also had a go at supersonic flight for the masses; while its Tupolev got off the ground, it fatally crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973 and was retired as a commercial and technological failure.
President John F. Kennedy announces plans for a new supersonic civilian aviation programme at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduations in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 5 June 1963.
If there is an obvious historical precedent, it is Concorde, the supersonic aircraft designed, built and operated by the United Kingdom and France. Conceived in the early 1960s to rival the big Cold War powers, Concorde was a political machine from its inception, a machine to give the Europeans a world lead in an emerging technology. The engineering project was second in scale only to the American space programme. Employing thousands of workers in Britain and France – not least in Bristol where it was partly assembled – Concorde hurtled its fare-paying passengers at over twice the speed of sound. It remains a feat of outstanding technological cooperation barely a generation after the invention of the jet engine in the 1940s. It is a design icon and, in Bristol, among other places, a heritage site.
In their designs and marketing to the higher end of the corporate market, Boom Supersonic have heeded the historical legacy of Concorde. But we should not make too many historical comparisons; as Mark Twain said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. For all the physical similarities, Boom Supersonic is avowedly targeting an elite social group; it is an aircraft built for capitalists, for capitalists. By contrast to Concorde, Boom has availed of automation and AI which means its ‘super factory’ in North Carolina can function with the minimum of human involvement. This is a far cry from the analogue age of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Concorde was designed with pencils and slide rules and built with rivets and welding irons by thousands of workers. In its early incarnation, advocates of Concorde boasted with an optimism very much in the spirit of techno-boosterism of the ‘white heat’ of the scientific revolution. They spoke of ‘hundreds’ of Concordes, and by the early 1970s there were scores of tentative purchases from airlines around the world.
But the seismic oil crisis of 1973 – and the economic shock thereafter – put paid to Concorde as the governments in London and Paris had to absorb not only all the research and development costs, but the operating cost as well. For all its glamour, Concorde struggled to return a profit until it was retired in 2003, at which point it was evidently clear that slower, but cheaper, mass-produced subsonic flight, such as the Boeing 747, had thoroughly ‘democratised’ air transport.
If Boom Supersonic succeeds, it will have done so by focusing on an elite clientele; if it is to lose, it will be at the cost of elite investors. Even though the American government is taking more interest in the company by applying its technology to military aircraft, it remains largely in the domain of the private sector. In this respect, it is again much different to state-supported Concorde, who constantly contended with the claim that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is always difficult to predict the future, not least when it comes to technology. While many thought that supersonic flight was consigned to history when Concorde had its last flight to Bristol in November 2003, Boom Supersonic has shown that commercial flight faster than the speed of sound is still a commercial possibility. But it will be so only for the select few, and only if corporate culture returns to a pre-pandemic setting of ‘in person’ interactions. In this sense, Boom Supersonic looks ahead to the future, but with the weight of historical experience bearing down.
Dr Keith Mc Loughlin is a Lecturer in the Department of History. He is interested in the history of technology and currently researching the history of Concorde and its impact on Bristol. To find out more about Keith’s research and how to get involved, please contact keith.mcloughlin@bristol.ac.uk.