Last week, Boom Supersonic (Denver, CO) and Japan Airlines (JAL) announced a strategic partnership to bring commercial supersonic travel to passengers. The supersonic aircraft are expected to go into service during the mid-2020s.
For the past few years, Boom has been developing a new-generation supersonic aircraft, which flies at Mach 2.2 and cuts flight times in half. During the 2017 Paris Air Show, Boom unveiled the completed design of the XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator, the subscale prototype of a composite-intensive, supersonic passenger airliner. The demonstrator is a one-third scale version of what the company intends to be the final version of the aircraft.
When it flies next year, the XB-1 will be the world’s fastest civil aircraft and will demonstrate key technologies necessary for mainstream supersonic travel. The demonstrator will fly with General Electric engines, Honeywell avionics, TenCate carbon fiber prepreg, and 3-D printed components from Stratasys. As Boom explained on its website, carbon fiber composites have a number of advantages over aluminum. Read More…