The next supersonic airplane could be built in metro Denver. And Richard Branson is banking on it.
Boom Technology Inc., a startup which departed Silicon Valley for Arapahoe County, has set up shop in a Centennial Airport hangar to develop a 40-seat aircraft that can travel to London from New York in 3.4 hours.
Branson's Virgin Galactic has committed to provide development services for Boom and signed an option to buy 10 planes. Boom also said it has inked a similar deal for 15 planes with an unnamed European carrier.
With $5 billion of options on the books, Boom's 11-person team of seasoned aerospace and software engineers wants to succeed where the luxury Concorde did not.
"We're building a supersonic airplane that's actually affordable to fly," Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl said in an interview Monday.
Boom unveiled its design last week . If all goes as planned, the sleek little plane would use proven technology — carbon fiber composites, propulsion systems and airframe materials — to hit speeds of Mach 2.2, or 1,451 miles per hour, but burn fuel far more efficiently than the Concorde, which was mothballed in 2003.
At that pace, passengers could travel from New York to London in 3.4 hours, cutting flight time by more than half, Boom says.
Boom wants to accomplish that for the round-trip price of $5,000.
The 100-seat Concorde was heftier in size and ticket price. Maintenance costs exceeded the expenses of other commercial aircraft, and round-trip tickets ran about $20,000.
"The fuel economy was awful," Scholl said, "and that drove prices up right there."
The Concorde had a fatal crash in 2000, but it was doomed by economics, said Seth Kaplan, managing partner of Airline Weekly.
Even with technological advancements and a cheaper ticket price promised by Boom's plan for supersonic commercial flight, Kaplan wonders if it's worth the effort.
"If we could be assured that fuel was going to stay cheap or be relatively cheap for the long-term, then, all things being equal, that would make faster travel be more attractive again," he said.
Kaplan noted aircraft manufacturer Boeing has developed a technology that allows planes to fly faster without burning additional fuel.
"The airlines basically told Boeing, 'If you can fly faster, how about instead you fly the same speed but burn less fuel?' " he said. "Boeing, to its credit, listened, and that became the Dreamliner."
Richard Aboulafia, a vice president of analysis at aerospace and defense analysis firm Teal Group, said the current market conditions do not warrant a supersonic commercial plane.
The cost-savings may not be dramatic enough to offset the current structure, which includes a fully connected "office in the sky," he said.
"Supersonic business jets I still regard as inevitable," he said. "Commercial transports? Boy, it could go either way."
Manufacturers, which must balance return-on-investment in new ventures while maintaining profitability for existing aircraft, typically make incremental technological changes, Airline Weekly's Kaplan said.
The bigger manufacturers, however, do seem to move quickly if a viable competitor emerges, said Kaplan.
For example, Boeing and Airbus tried to quash competition from Canada's Bombardier, which developed a series of narrow-body, mid-range aircraft, he said.
"If (Boom) actually starts to gain traction, then one threat to a startup is that Boeing and Airbus — if they believe it's viable — could quickly decide to pursue something of their own," he said.
It may help that The Spaceship Company, Virgin Galactic's manufacturing organization, has Boom's back.
"Richard Branson has long expressed interest in developing high-speed flight and building high-speed flight R&D," Virgin Group officials wrote in response to questions Monday. "We can confirm that The Spaceship Company will provide engineering, design and manufacturing services, flight tests and operations and that we have an option on the first 10 airframes. It is still early days and just the start of what you'll hear about our shared ambitions and efforts."
Boeing has no supersonic civil aircraft product under development, spokesman Tom Kite said in an e-mail to The Denver Post on Monday.
"But we maintain a continuing interest in technologies that could one day lead to an environmentally acceptable and economically viable supersonic airliner," he said.
Others, including Airbus, which filed a patent application, and NASA, which contracted with Lockheed Martin, also appear to be taking steps in supersonic development.
Boom's first milestone is completing a prototype that is one-third scale of the 150-foot plane. The company expects that work to be done by the end of 2017 and "start setting speed records," said Scholl, who is a licensed pilot.
The company has not released dates for the development of the full production plane, which would be priced at $200 million.
Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace @denverpost.com or @aliciawallace
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