About 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) over the Mojave Desert, northwest of Los Angeles, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 became the first privately funded airplane to break the sound barrier during a test flight on Tuesday.
“She was real happy supersonic,” Boom Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg said after landing, in a video posted by Boom Supersonic. “That’s the best she’s ever flown, was supersonic.”
After getting to altitude, Brandenburg opened up the test plane’s throttles, accelerating to Mach 1.1, or about 845 mph (1,360 kph) — faster than the speed at which sound travels.
In 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier when he pushed the Bell X-1 past Mach 1 during a flight over the Mojave Desert.
Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 is a stepping stone in its plan to develop a commercially viable supersonic airliner, the Overture, capable of carrying 64-80 passengers across the Atlantic in about 3 1/2 hours.
The company has 130 orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines.
Last year, it completed construction on its Overture Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina, where it plans to build 66 Overture aircraft per year.
—Dan Catchpole, Reuters
Jelentkezéshez jelentkezzen be
EGYÉB POSTS Ebben a csoportban
These days, our tech experiences are all about speed—and our expectations for instant action are actually kinda insane.
Think about it: Not so long ago, phones, computers, and e
There’s a quiet transformation underway in how we eat. It’s not being led by chefs, influencers, or climate activists. It’s being driven by a new class of pharmaceuticals that are changing the way
On TikTok, soup is getting a rebrand. It’s now water-based cooking, to you.
“Pov you started water based cooking and now your skin is clear, your stomach is thriving and you recover from
You may not have heard of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, but he’s one of a handful of people responsible for the current AI boom. As VP of Research at OpenAI, Amodei helped discover the scaling laws
2026 may still be more than seven months away, but it’s already shaping up as the year of consumer AI hardware. Or at least the year of a flurry of high-stakes attempts to put generative AI at the
