"Quiet" supersonic passenger flights are one step closer to becoming a reality

For those of you who’ve dreamt of having dinner in New York and dessert in Paris (or vice versa), NASA has you covered.

The space agency is currently developing a “quiet” supersonic aircraft that can travel up to 5x faster than current passenger jets – which would allow travelers to fly from New York to London in just 90 minutes – it revealed in a press release last week.

🌬️✈️ Background: After investigating the business case for passenger air travel at speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 4 (1,535-3,045 mph) over the past few years, NASA concluded that potential passenger markets exist in about 50 currently established routes to and from the US.

And these routes all have one thing in common: like The Flying Dutchman, they travel over water. Since laws in many countries – including America – prohibit supersonic air travel over land due to the loud noise it produces (think: sonic boom), each of these 50 routes would fly across either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

But that may not be the case for much longer

NASA hopes the new “quiet” supersonic aircraft it’s developing, called X-59, will provide data to regulators that helps change those rules.

• If everything goes to plan, X-59 will produce a sonic boom with a ground volume level of ~75 decibels, about the same amount of noise as a vacuum cleaner.
• For reference: the now-retired supersonic Concorde jet – which had a top speed of 1,354 mph, enabling NYC-London trips in three hours – produced a continuous sonic boom of 110 decibels, roughly equivalent to the sound of thunder. Normal conversation comes in at roughly 60 decibels (just fyi though, the decibel scale isn’t linear).

👀 Looking ahead… NASA has issued a pair of 12-month contracts to teams led by Boeing and Northrop Grumman to explore air travel possibilities and identify the necessary technologies to make passenger air travel at speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 4 a reality.