RT Blake Scholl 🛫: BREAKING: FAA officially announced the rulemaking to legalize supersonic flight, including the Boomless Cruise ("Mach cutoff") a...
The FAA has officially announced rulemaking to legalize supersonic flight, including the "Boomless Cruise" (Mach cutoff) approach demonstrated on the XB-1 aircraft.
Background
- Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a Denver-based aerospace company building a new generation of supersonic passenger jets (the Overture airliner and the XB-1 demonstrator aircraft).
- "Mach cutoff" (or "Boomless Cruise") is a flight technique where an aircraft flies slower than the speed of sound over land but accelerates to supersonic speeds over water or unpopulated areas, avoiding the sonic boom that disturbed communities and led to the FAA banning overland supersonic flight in 1973.
- Until now, the FAA's ban made commercial supersonic flight over land effectively impossible outside of military operations. This rulemaking — a formal regulatory process to change those rules — would allow civilian supersonic flight again if aircraft can meet new noise standards.
- This matters because it removes the biggest regulatory obstacle to companies like Boom bringing back supersonic air travel, which hasn't existed since the Concorde was retired in 2003 (the Concorde could only fly supersonic over oceans for noise reasons).