Boom Supersonic Works on Its Own Engine, Shows the Overture Airliner’s Flight Deck – AIN

Many have doubted whether it will ever be viable to fly in supersonic airliners again, but Boom Supersonic insists it can and will be achieved when it brings its Overture jet into commercial service in about five years from now. But will that fly from a financial and environmental point of view? At the recent Farnborough Air Show, the U.S. company was eager to demonstrate its case. If we look back to last time we had a speed up that was accessible to everyday people was really the 1960s. We went from propeller aircraft to the jet age, and what we found was the flights got faster, but more people went more places more often when flights were faster. And so just the same way we needed more jetliners than propeller aircraft, I believe we're going to need more supersonic aircraft than subsonic aircraft. So one, that means we're going to build a whole lot of these, and Boom ultimately will need to be bigger than Boeing or Airbus to fill that demand. But also it means we have to have great stewardship for what the world looks like when there are a whole lot of supersonic airliners flying. And so that comes down to a couple of things that are big responsibilities for us. First is noise impacts to communities. So these symphony engines are medium bypass turbofans, and it's a massive leap forward versus the afterburning turbojets that we had for Concorde in the 1960s. These are cleaner, quieter, dramatically more fuel efficient. And what that means is if you live near an airport and you hear that Overture service is coming, you get to be really excited because now you're able to fly supersonic, you don't have to worry about your windows rattling. So it'll be as quiet as any other airliner flying today. Boom is now pressing hard not only to complete the design of the aircraft itself, but also develop the symphony engines that would allow Overture to fly above the speed of sound, making the world feel smaller. This is a critical challenge, and none of the industry's major aircraft engine manufacturers was willing to step up to invest in a new engine. That left Boom largely going it alone with manufacturing support from Standard Aero. The company is aiming to be ready to start testing a full scale engine core by early 2026. So with Symphony, 18 months ago, this was really just an idea. We announced that, hey, we're going to take control propulsion, we're going to design the engine and the airplane together. And 18 months later, we are now into hardware testing. So we've started combustor testing that kicks off a campaign of what's going to be over 30 individual hardware rig tests, looking at everything from the fuel nozzles, to the fan, to the combustor, every single piece of this we're going to test and refine as we go. And in just 18 months from now, the full scale engine core is going to be running in a test stand. And that's a huge milestone, as the core is the hardest part of the engine. And when that's running, then we know we've really got line of sight to delivering this engine, having it certified, having it ready to go on Overture. And then also from a carbon perspective, I think the world is realizing that the only way to decarbonize long haul travel is sustainable aviation fuel. This is the most advanced synthetic fuel that can be made compatible with today's jets. And today's jets can run on about a 50-50 blend of sustainable aviation fuel and fossil fuel. And we're designing Overture and Symphony to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel, which means that we can decarbonize supersonic flight actually twice as quickly as we can decarbonize subsonic. During the air show, Boom unveiled what the flight deck will look like and how it will operate. And for some perspective on how technology has moved on since the glory years of the last supersonic airliner, who better to ask than a former Concorde pilot? A supersonic aircraft is so much more complex than an ordinary subsonic airplane. In fact, it takes a pilot six months to learn to fly a Concorde as opposed to two months to learn to fly a conventional airplane because there is so much more to it. It's not so much difficult as complex. But the beautiful thing about the Overture is the designers that bring together modern technologies and safety systems and making it even easier to operate, safer to operate, simpler to operate, so that two pilots can do what three people did on Concorde. We don't need a flight engineer. All the systems can be handled by the pilots sitting in their seats using this wonderful new display system. One of the things I was often asked was, what do you feel like going through the sound barrier? The answer is nothing, because the designers are so clever. They made it so smooth. Unless you look at the indicators inside a Concorde cabin, you wouldn't know you're flying at twice the speed of sound. That was the beauty. The designers made it such that it was a real normal experience. You're just twice as high and twice as fast. Apart from the two nudges of acceleration as you go through the sound barrier, nothing, which is a really clever thing. The real thrill is buying back time, arriving before you leave, crossing the Atlantic so quickly, traveling at Mach 1.7, you're going twice as fast as a conventional airplane. It opens up so many more new routes and new potentials. What's the relationship between the pilot and the airplane? Should pilots be able to have full control over the airplane, or does the automation take control? What we wanted to do is leverage really 40 years of progress in technology and build an all-new flight deck that is the best and therefore safest and simplest way to fly an airplane. In this flight deck, what you'll notice is there are a very small number of physical controls. Instead, we've got four large touchscreens. Every single feature on the airplane is accessible on the touchscreen. You want to go pull a circuit breaker? Great. Tap, tap, tap, as an example. If we think of a new feature, something that would make the airplane better, we can ship an over-the-air software update to the flight deck, and it'll get upgraded just the same way your smartphone or computer would be after it's shipped. One of the most important things is actually how the pilots fly the airplane. Like an Airbus, we have side stick controls, but unlike an Airbus, these are force feedback controls. If one stick moves, the other stick moves. The autopilot, of course, this has an advanced autopilot, is like a third pilot in the cockpit. When the autopilot's making control inputs, the sticks move too. The pilots always know what each other are doing, and they know what the automation is doing. While we have advanced envelope protection, again, like you'd find on any modern airliner, there's also the ability for the pilots to override that and fly the airplane exactly the way they want to. The Concorde cockpit flight deck was really quite complex. It comes from the 50s and the 60s of analog instruments. The modern 2020 design for the flight deck is so much better. Everything's within easy reach. It's ergonomically designed, and yet it's still an airplane. Although it looks differently and it feels differently, as soon as I got in the seat, it's an airplane. I'm not used to side stick controllers, but I absolutely love the BAE system side stick controller. It's a delight to fly. And the fact I can feel what my colleague's doing when they're flying it, because the two are synchronized, means I've got a total awareness all the time of what's happening. One of the key things of designing an aircraft is to design it for normal line pilots. So any normal line pilot, when they've had the correct training, will be able to fly the Overture like they can fly any other type of airplane. Yes, there'll be a training course, but there always is. But that's the beauty of it. We don't design airplanes to be flown by experts and geniuses. We design them to be flown by line pilots, day in and day out, perfectly safely. Beyond the flight deck displays and BAE system side stick controls, Boom is working with Universal Avionics on new ways to ensure that after racing across oceans far faster than current airliners, Overture's pilots will be able to land safely in all circumstances. Concorde was famous for that droop nose. And the reason it had a droop nose was for aerodynamic reasons, a supersonic airplane needs to have a long, skinny, pointy nose. And then for takeoff and landing, the airplane comes in at a pretty high nose high angle of attack. And what that means is you can't see the runway to land. And born in an analog era, the solution was to move the nose out of the way. So it was done for runway visibility for takeoff and landing. And Overture, born in a digital age, has a much, much better way to do that with tools we didn't have in the 1960s. And so first is Autoland. And we actually expect that the majority of Overture landings will be flown on Autoland. But also the pilots can hand fly a landing. And to do that, there are two different ways to fly and approach. You're not going to be able to have a great view out the front. Instead, we've got two versions of augmented reality that are redundant. One is a headworn display that we're partnering with Universal Avionics on. And it gives you, akin to an F-35, a virtual view outside the airplane. You can just look around and see what's out there. And it's fed by multiple redundant cameras and sensors. So it's a super high availability view just looking right through the airplane and seeing the runway environment ahead of you, enabling you to have a beautiful landing every time. Additionally, the pilot's primary flight displays have a redundant augmented reality view. Again, that's fusing camera data with synthetic terrain data and giving the flight crews the ability to look right through the screen, see the runway environment ahead of them, and then have a beautiful landing every time. Boom aims to roll out its first full-scale prototype of the new supersonic jet in 2027 before flying it in 2028 and then having it certified and delivered to airlines by the end of 2029. Well at AIN, we can't get enough stories and news about cutting-edge technology developments like a new supersonic airliner. And if you want more of that too, keep coming back to AINonline.com. Thank you for watching.