The Current - Is supersonic flight making a comeback?

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

It’s been over 20 years since the last Concorde flight, and now engineers are working to bring back passenger supersonic flights. Bob van der Linden is the Curator of Air Transportation and Special Purpose Aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum and tells us what it was like on board the last Air France Concorde flight in 2003. Peter Coen, Integration Manager for NASA’s Quesst mission, talks about the agency’s work to quieten the sonic boom that planes make and what he thinks the future of supersonic flight will look like. 

Hey, I'm Matea from the show Bookends. If you want a front row seat to heated rivalry, keep listening. You heard me right. I'm talking about that heated rivalry, starring Hudson Williams and Connor's story. You probably know that the heated rivalry series was based on a book by Rachel Reed, and the next book in that series is on its way. If you want an inside look, Rachel Reed is joining me on stage for a special live event at Massey Hall on October 13th. We'll be talking all things heated rivalry in a room full of fans, so come join the party. You can find tickets and more details at cBCbooks.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Rebecca Zanbergen and you're listening to the current podcast. If you had to guess, what would you say

that sound was? Maybe a really loud gunshot? It's actually a sonic boom. That's the noise planes like the Concord made when they broke the sound barrier. The Concord was a supersonic jet that first flew in 1976 and can get you from London. to New York in just under three and a half hours. But it was loud. In 1967, the sonic boom drew complaints when the technology was tested over London. So far, 7,000 people have complained to the Ministry of Technology and to the noise abatement society. Only one man has seems to have come out in direct praise of the boom,

and that's a 74-year-old old-age pensioner who claims that the boom has cured him of his deafness. The Concord stopped flying in 2003. It was expensive to operate and there was declining demand and safety concerns after a crash in Paris in 2000 killed 113 people. But now, engineers are working to bring back passenger supersonic flight. And in a moment, I'll speak with a member of a NASA mission designing aircraft that can fly supersonic without creating that loud boom. But first, Bob van der Linden was on the last Air France Concord flight.

He's a curator with the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Bob, good morning. Good morning. You say the Concord was one of the most beautiful airplanes ever built. Just describe it to us. Well, it's a flying dart. It is gorgeous. It still is.

I mean, we own one. We just don't fly it, obviously. Very, very graceful. I mean, it's designed not to be pretty. It's designed for a purpose. And that purpose was to carry passengers at twice the speed of sound, which it did, but it did at extreme cost, expense, I should say. And over the years, I've never really found a market, and eventually they had to close it down

because the builders could no longer support it. That's funny. You say it wasn't pretty, but you did call it gorgeous. So what was the inside like? Not what you would expect. The inside is very straightforward, very narrow. The seats were no wider than coach class in conventional airliner, but you have plenty of leg room. But the interior decorations weren't elaborate or anything like that. It was just very straightforward, a nice light gray. No televisions, no media, no nothing. And remind us, where did it fly when they were operational?

What was the route most of them took? Well, they had several transatlantic routes and a couple experimental routes and other places, but the primary route was New York to London and New York to Paris, and that was it. So it's really hard to make an airliner. economic success if you only have one or two routes and are only flying a handful of airplanes. I mean, the British and the French government who paid for their Concord lost billions and billions of dollars on the airplane because nobody else other than the state airlines bought them. And so you were actually on the very last flight of this jet. How did you end up on it? It was the last flight of Air France's actually was their flagship. It's the airplane that they had opened the first service across

Atlantic to D.C. and other places. So we were very honored to get their prized airplane. But it was, in essence, a delivery flight from France to us. Because we have a satellite museum at Washington-Dulles International Airport. So we can fly large airplanes directly to Dulles and then just taxi them over and install them in our museum. And that's what we did. So you must have been pretty familiar with the Concord before you actually got on it. What was it like when you found yourself there? What was it? It must have been loud. It's a 1960s technology. So it is loud, but not on the inside. And you're where you want to be in less than four hours. That's great. You know, you don't know when you go supersonic. We only know because there's a mock meter on the wall. But you can't actually tell. You don't feel any different when you're going that fast. You do not. It's just the acceleration just keeps on going, because you're not leveling off at 35,000 feet. You're leveling off at 55,000 or 60,000 feet. So even with all the power of those four engines on it. Still took a while to get up to that altitude, but that's a very high altitude.

And so faster than the speed of sound, how fast is that? Do you know what speeds you actually reached on the plane that day? The aircraft were doing Mach 2, which is twice the speed of sound, which depending on altitude and temperature, is about 1,320 miles an hour. It's faster than the earth rotates. And you can't tell. What struck you the most is that when you were on that flight and when you got off? What do you reflect on when you think about?

that time. Well, of course, it was quite exciting because it was the last flight. The airplane was full of VIPs. I just remember once we got up to speed and altitude, when they started serving lunch, lunch is an understatement. One of the best meals I've ever had. But a proper French meal takes two and a half hours. And two and a half hours later, they took the tray away and looked out the window and we're here. That was pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm assuming you were on it for free because it was a delivery back to the museum. But how much? much did it cost at that time to get on that flight? Well, that's 2003, and a one-way ticket was about $6,000, which is considerably higher today, but even that's high. So it was very expensive.

So its market was not very large. They knew that when they built it. They just hoped they would be able to, the market would be big enough to keep it going so they could build a bigger version of a Concord, which would seek 200, 250 people, but never got that far because economically, it just didn't work. So the business model didn't work then, but there are efforts now underway to bring supersonic flight back. Do you think there could be a business case to make this work somehow? I am not a businessman, so I don't know. It's possible that there's a business case, but it hasn't changed radically. It all depends. You know, the population gets larger. More and more, more very wealthy people may be out there who are willing to fly supersonically and pay for it. If it does get off the ground, would you get on board? I mean, physically on the plane, would you want to get it tried out again? Sure, as long as I don't have to pay for it.

Okay. Bob Vanderlinden, I appreciate your time on this. Thank you. Pleasure is mine. Thank you. Bob van der Linden was on the last Air France Concord flight back in 2003. He's a curator with the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Hey, I'm Matea from the show Bookends. If you want a front row seat to heated rivalry, keep listening. You heard me right. I'm talking about that heated rivalry, starring Hudson Williams and Connor's story.

You probably know that the heated rivalry series was based on a book by Rachel Reed, and the next book in that series is on its way. If you want an inside look, Rachel Reed is joining me on stage for a special live event at Massey Hall on October 13th. We'll be talking all things heeded rivalry in a room full of fans, so come join the party. You can find tickets and more details at cBCbooks.ca. The engineers at NASA's Quest Mission are working on bringing in a new era of supersonic passenger flights. Their goal is to make the sonic boom quieter, turning into what they call a sonic thump instead. Peter Cohen is the Mission Integration Manager for Quest.

He's been working on NASA's supersonic programs for the last 30 years. He's joining me from the agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia. Peter, good morning. Good morning. I do want to talk about your work specifically in a moment, but first just explain how the sonic boom that we've been talking about. We heard a little bit about it, but how does that come to? to be. What is that? I always say that a sonic boom happens because the air doesn't know the plane is

coming. All airplanes, when they fly, they create a pressure disturbance that kind of pushes the air out of the way, but the airplane is going faster than sound. So since pressure travels at the speed of sound, there's no way for that disturbance to get out in front of the airplane. So the pressure changes instantaneously. And we call that instantaneous pressure change of shock wave. So if you look at an airplane, Anytime the air is flowing over component of the airplane, it produces a shockwave. So it's one at the nose, there's one around the windshield, the wing, the engines, the tail, etc. And so you've generated the system of shockwaves, and it's now travels towards the ground. And as it's traveling towards the ground, those waves start to pile up on each other.

And very soon you're left with just two. And those two waves are strong and stable, and they travel to the ground. and you hear it on the ground, that bang, bang of a sonic boom. People say that a sonic boom happens when an airplane breaks the sound barrier. That's not really true. The sonic boom starts when you reach speeds faster than sound.

But you're generating a sonic boom all the time while you're flying. So everybody under the flight path hears that noise. Okay. So tell me about what you're working on. NASA's Quest mission. this is about bringing supersonic passenger flight back? Is that, I mean, is that really the goal here? Tell us about it.

That is our goal. So NASA aeronautics, you know, we work to make air travel better. But one of the things that, you know, what obviously make flying better is that the trips were shorter. That's why NASA's interested in improving the technology for supersonic flight. So, you know, aircraft like the Concord, there were a lot of barriers that prevented it from being a cost-efficient means of travel. fuel efficiency is one, landing and takeoff noise, emissions from the engines. But one of the biggest barriers was the sonic boom. Because it prevented the airplane from being used the way an airliner would use an airplane.

If we can make it so that the sonic boom noise is quiet enough that it's not disturbing, then there's the potential for manufacturers to begin to really seriously look at building supersonic transports in the future. And how close are you to all of that? I know you're working on an experimental jet called the X-59. Have you solved the sonic boom problem? We think so. And the X-59 is indeed, it's an experimental airplane. It's not a prototype for an airline or anything like that.

We're trying to learn about the technology that we've developed that will turn the boom into a thump. The primary thing that we're going to do with the X-59 is gather information about how people respond to a thump at different levels. And what's the difference between a thump and a boom? I describe it as this. If you're in the middle of a thunderstorm and you get one of those things where the lightning and the thunder happen almost instantaneously and you get that really loud crack from the storm,

that's a sonic boom. Later on, you know, the sun is back out and the clouds are off in the distance and you hear that kind of last rumble of thunder before the storm dissipates. That's a sonic thump. And I understand the shape of this sort of prototype contributes to getting to a thump versus a boom. Is that right? Just describe what it looks like. Yeah, the shape is critical. So it's longer and slenderer than an aircraft like the Concord.

It has a very unique shape because you're trying to shape the airplane so that those shockwaves are relatively the same strength and relatively evenly spaced along the airplane. So it's kind of got unique curvature in the wings. It's relatively flat on the bottom. One unique feature is the engine is mounted on top of the airplane instead of below the airplane because the engine inlet has a strong shockwave that you want to eliminate if possible. You don't want that shock to contribute to the overall sound system. Another interesting feature of the X-59, which might show up in future supersonic transport. is it doesn't have a window in the front for the pilot to see out of.

Making that window creates a shockwave, which again adds to the sound. So we've eliminated the window and installed something we call our external vision system, which is basically a camera that gives the outside view to a pilot. So the pilot, instead of looking at a window, is looking at a screen, that gives them their external view. I suppose you wouldn't want that system to fail. That would be a little bit alarming. I mean, sometimes these things fail.

Well, yes. That's why, particularly in the X-59, we have backups to our backups to our backups. What about the other challenges you talk to? Because even if you create a sonic thump and not a boom, you still have the fuel efficiency that you have the problem with it being so much, so much money that no one can afford to take it unless you're super wealthy. I mean, are you considering those problems as well? Yes. Our main focus is the sonic boom right now. But our portfolio of work in supersonic does include addressing. all of these other technologies. And if you look at, you know, compared to Concord, you know, there's many technologies in subsonic airplanes right now that would make, you know, the next generation of supersonic airplanes all that much better. For instance, composite materials they use for construction of airframes now are much lighter. The engines are much more efficient. There's noise reduction technology that makes the airplanes quieter when they take off and land. So all of

that applies, but there's definitely unique aspects of it that need to be considered for supersonic. So some of the things that we're working on in specific right now are takeoff and landing noise because that's kind of after sonic boom, that's really the next biggest challenge.

So there are technologies. We're working on that kind of the engine can kind of reconfigure itself when you slow down and it becomes much more like a subsonic engine, so it's quieter at takeoff and landing. What's interesting is the U.S. Federal Aviation Association is looking at reworking the rules around flying supersonic jets over land.

In fact, I think Donald Trump at some point signed an executive order, allowing for some of these changes to come into effect if we get there. But they're currently not allowed to fly over land. So how likely do you think it is that we'll see these rules change? The whole goal of the Quest mission is to create information that can inform new rules about supersonic flight. We need to understand, you know, the ban on supersonic flight wasn't done just to prevent supersonic flight. It was the only way the FAA knew at the time to protect people from sonic boom noise. But the FAA said, if technology is developed and information comes forward that shows what sound level is acceptable, they would revisit the rule. That's really what's happening right now. So our data from the Quest mission will give the FAA the information they need.

need to say, all right, instead of a speed limit, we're going to have a sound limit. So as long as an airplane is quieter than some level, it would be okay for that airplane to fly supersonic overland. Based on the work you've been doing, and I know you've been studying this for years and years, can we get to the point where it is viable? Yes, we didn't start out to build the X-59, the demonstrator. We started out to solve the sonic boom problem. And when we thought we had a solution that would work, we did some airliner designs that incorporated that technology. So we've done a lot of that work. So we kind of know what level of sound you have to get down to where people either find

it not objectionable or don't hear it. But those are laboratory studies. So we really need to get information from people in their own homes, in communities. And so how many years away do you think we are in seeing supersonic travel, maybe at a cost that is affordable. I suppose that's the big question. That's the big question. So, you know, it's hard to say.

You know, the way the market works is a lot of times, you know, the first product is a high-end product that kind of blazes a trail. And then the next generation is accessible to more people. And that's kind of the way NASA envisions it. We want to bring supersonic travel back so that we can gain experience with it. In the meantime, continue to develop the technologies

that make the airplanes more capable, but also more affordable. Okay. Peter Cohen, I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you for this. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you. Peter Cohen is the integration manager for NASA's Quest mission and has been working on NASA's supersonic programs for the last 30 years. He joined me from the agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.