On top of my first One year after the plane crash, I landed in the 20F seat of United Airlines 1450, from Newark to Denver on a twin-engine Boeing 737-900. There are emotional and unusual sensations, such as seeing familiar places with new eyes, resuming muscle memory that has been so soft due to inactivity. As the well-known patter rides on the PA – “pilots, they stand up to all the calls and get ready to look” – my eyes are drawn to the project that is in the seat behind me.
The powerful hit of two of WEARETHEGOOD’s “Boom” hip-hop hits, the phrase “SUPERSONIC IS HERE” appears on the screen, followed by a striking image of an unmistakably shiny, impossible shimmer (“JOIN THE UNITED FLEET”). a nose that looks pointed with coastal wings that curve back and forth from the inside. “MAKE TIME TO TRAIN IN HALF,” the trade continues, with an impressive series of trips: San Francisco to Tokyo in six hours, Newark to London in three and a half hours. This last trip, I must know, may be shorter than the flight I have planned here, which, due to the long-haul flight due to the “weather” in the Midwest, can be four hours and 32 minutes, at a speed of 900 kph. . When I was in Nebraska, a land of magicians I would have crossed the Atlantic.
Supersonic has not arrived – so far – in fact – despite the attraction of geometry and United’s advertising messages, which signed off to buy 15 aircraft that have not been built yet (but have sparked a lot of radio interest in perhaps a dangerous year). There and. Inside the museum, filled with sections and desk groups, unmarked by a sign on the wall announcing “THE FUTURE IS SUPERSONIC,” breathing the XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator, a two-thirds of the largest aircraft, called Overture, which Boom hopes will one day go up in the sky — at 1.7 times the speed of noise.
When I first met Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom, the morning after I flew to Denver, he told me I had arrived at the right time. “This is a very big week,” he says, wearing hats and sunglasses, “because we first grounded the plane for the first time this week. Then the fuel goes off for the first time on Sunday. Then we have a few weeks left to run the engine.”
At some point on the road, at the test line in the Mojave Desert, the XB-1 will have a taxi test, and, sometime later, a flight test. Filled with sensors, and flying research. Scholl predicts that “more training will come from this aircraft.”
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