Supersonic Travel: From Tokyo to Los Angeles in Four Hours?

by Petros S. Sivitanides, Ph.D.

The possibility of supersonic travel in the 21st century should be of great interest to real estate investors, because it could have a profound effect on the global urban landscape and property values all over the globe. Air-travel industry’s vision of supersonic travel, which would considerably reduce flight times  is not new. It was more than 50 years ago (November 5, 1956) when representatives of British aircraft and engine manufacturers along with government officials and personnel from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough formed the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) to study the possibility of building a supersonic aircraft.  Six years later, on November 29, 1962 the British Minister of Aviation Julian Amery and French ambassador Jouffroy de Coursel signed a draft treaty for collaborating in the production of the first supersonic aircraft. In less than two years later, on the 1st of May in 1964, at Bristol UK, an experimental “mini” aircraft, designated "BAC 221" was tested. It wasn’t until early 1969 though when a normal-size Concorde (as the supersonic aircraft was named) made its first flight from Toulouse France, making the dream of supersonic travel a reality.
 
Concorde’s first supersonic flight took place on October 1st, 1969, but it took another five years until Concorde made its first double Atlantic crossing in one day (17th of June, 1974).  In January 1976 British Airways commenced commercial supersonic travel from London to Bahrain and in November 1977 the airline offered its first commercial supersonic flight from London to New York. With Concorde cruising at around 1,350 miles per hour, the average flight time between London Heathrow and New York JFK was three hours and 20 minutes, slightly less than half of the duration of the same trip with a Boeing 747.

Supersonic travel continued until July 25 of 2000 when Air France Concorde F-BTSC crashed in Paris just 60 seconds after take-off, due to a tyre burst, which caused a fuel leak and fire that brought the plane down, as French investigators reported. All 109 passengers were killed.  One month after the accident, on August 16th British and French civil aviation authorities officially withdrew Concorde's Certificate of Airworthiness.  After lots of modifications and tests, authorities returned the Certificate of Airworthiness to modified Concordes, which allowed Air France and British Airways to restart supersonic travel to New York in November 2001.  Faced with falling passenger revenue and increasing maintenance costs both Air France and British Airways terminated Concorde passenger services in 2003 (Air France in May and British Airways in October).  In terms of the possibilities for reactivating the Concorde fleet in the future, Airbus chief executive stated that maintenance and support costs required for operating the Concorde fleet reached levels that rendered operations unrealistic.

The Concorde experience, despite its failure, helped redefine the challenge from just building an aircraft that can fly at supersonic speeds to one that would also require lower maintenance and operating costs and would be less expensive compared to subsonic travel.

The U.S. pursuit of supersonic travel started in the 1960s, as well.  During that period the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) pushed hard for the development of an aircraft with supersonic travel capabilities and the US government undertook financing major portion of this effort.  The program though suffered from several managerial setbacks.  Eventually, Lyndon Johnson adopted the then Defense Secretary’s approach of detailed advance studies of problems before getting into an intense production program and the effort moved on.

One of the major challenges the developers of supersonic aircraft had to resolve was the noise issue, as experimental flights resulted in thousands of complaints about loud booms.  With a very vocal environmental group opposing supersonic transport development, many former supporters starting to seriously doubt its profitability, and a climate of disagreement regarding government’s role, Congress killed the project in 1971. 

In 1990, however, NASA revisited the idea of supersonic travel by initiating its High-Speed Research (HSR) program aiming at the development of a High-Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) aircraft that would be only 20% more expensive than comparable slower flights.  The HSCT aircraft envisioned by NASA was a supersonic passenger jet capable of flying 300 passengers at more than 1,500 miles per hour.  Boeing, one of the key participants in the program was predicting demand for more than 500 HSCT aircrafts over the period 2000-2015.  The technology required to bring this concept to reality, including the materials and structures from which such an aircraft would be built, was being developed by NASA Langley Center, as a part of its High-Speed Research (HSR) program.  In 1999, however, after nine years of cooperation with researchers from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and about $1 billion of expenses, NASA grounded the HSCT project due to budget cuts and lack of market demand, as www.space.com reports.

The bottom-line conclusion is that in the previous century two 40-year long efforts by the greatest superpowers in the world to make supersonic travel feasible on a commercially applicable basis failed, mainly due to economics and environmental issues.  Will the economic conditions, and technology ripe in this century in a way that will allow the development of an economically viable and environmentally acceptable aircraft?  Based on the experience and the lessons of the past century, one would argue that this is unlikely.  Even if eventually supersonic travel find its way into commercial applications it is unlikely that by the end of the century it will be the air carrier of the masses.  Within this context the impact of such a development on air travel, urban/spatial structure and property values should be quite small.