Boom or bust? Does supersonic flight have a role in the 21st century

A few years ago, Boeing took a serious look at the sonic cruiser, which can fly 150 miles an hour faster than current jets. Steven Cutts wonders if we’re about to see the return of a new ‘Concorde’

BA Concorde arrives at Boston, Massachusetts, in 2003 – a farewell visit before the fleet was taken out of service (Getty)

Modern aircraft are boring. None of them have increased their speed since the 1960s and – if anything – they are slowing down. After a 100 years of gradual increase in the speed of travel, the travel business plateaued out at around 500 miles per hour. It was not always so. For a brief moment in the 1970s, it looked as if the Anglo-French Concorde might be the future. With a speed of mach 2.04, Concorde could cross the Atlantic in three-and-a-half hours and became an airborne symbol of British and French engineering pre-eminence. But the last of the Concordes were retired in 2003 and, to date, no country or manufacturer has been able to match their speed.

By its very nature, aerospace research is high risk and high cost. In addition, it would be a mistake to pretend that other nations haven’t wasted huge sums on money or research projects that failed to provide them with a viable product. Having said that the British story is particulary sobering one, with successive disappointments of the Comet, TSR2 and then finally the Concorde. Ironically it was the modestly priced BAe 146 that won the coveted title of the best selling British airliner of all time. Every so often, you may turn on the news and notice a bunch of people protesting in London, asking for a higher standard of living, better funding for the NHS or a more generous pension. There are many things that determine our standard of living but waving a banner in central London isn’t one of them. Had each of our major aircraft projects been better managed, most if not all of our people would have a precipitously higher standard of living than they have now.

Cabin crew from several airlines in front of a scale model of the aircraft (Getty)