“Buy what you need to—just don’t buy a house or a boat.”

Those words from a British Airways agent at JFK came back to me as I read a Wall Street Journal article last week about a company called Boom Supersonic.

It was March 25, 1992. Paul and I were sitting in the Concorde lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport. On the wall-mounted TV, I was “watching” the Cricket World Cup Final between England and Pakistan, being played in Melbourne. The display wasn’t live footage, just a green dot matrix scoreboard on a black background—good old Teletext.

The world was still reeling from the post-Gulf War recession, and British Airways had a promotion: pay full fare for business class on a transatlantic flight and you could upgrade one way to the Concorde. Paul and I had to attend the NPRA (now AFPM) conference in Texas, and he signed off on the expense.

For my younger readers: the Concorde was a big deal. Developed by a British-French partnership, it was a supersonic jet (top speed 2,179 km/h) operated only by British Airways and Air France. It was an icon of luxury and innovation—a narrow-body, tailless aircraft with an all-business class cabin that could take you from London to New York for lunch and have you home for a late dinner. Though in service from 1976 to 2003, it never achieved commercial scale.

A fatal crash in July 2000—the only one—marked the beginning of the end for this magnificent aircraft.

Back in that lounge in 1992, Paul and I were watching the slow score updates because our Concorde had been grounded due to technical issues. Eventually, another Concorde was brought into service. Later, we joked we were among the rare few who had flown on two Concordes in one day.

Our luggage, of course, didn’t make it to New York. That’s when the BA agent at JFK told us to buy whatever we needed for the next 24 hours—just not a house or a boat. Classic British humor.

But I digress. Back to Boom Supersonic.

In the post-Concorde era, commercial air travel slowed down, partly due to increasingly congested airspace. Boom Supersonic, founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, aims to change that.

read the article with interest. Considering that the first passenger supersonic jet took off in 1976, it’s hard to believe that technology is the main barrier today. So why didn’t Boeing or Airbus pursue supersonic commercial jets? Boeing did try—but concluded it didn’t make economic sense within the traditional model of packing travelers from all price points onto a single aircraft.

Boom has faced its own hurdles. While it was once valued at nearly $1 billion, that number had dropped to around $500 million by the end of last year. The company still hasn’t built a full-scale jet. Yet momentum may be shifting—especially with President Trump (an investor) having signed an executive order to repeal a five-decade ban on supersonic flight over land in the U.S.

Time will tell if Boom can succeed where Concorde ultimately couldn’t—and whether supersonic passenger travel is truly poised for a comeback.

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Endnotes:

1. You can read the entire WSJ article (paywall) on Boom supersonic here.

2. If we remember, our high school science class taught us that the speed of sound is 343m/sec or 1,267km/hr or 767 mph.

3. More info on the Concorde is available on Wikipedia.