Last week at the Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom, airplane manufacturers and partners were making plans to revive supersonic passenger planes using new designs and suitable materials, hoping regulators will approve and customers will pay for supersonic travel. This comes 15 years since the last supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde, discontinued service for financial reasons.

Executives of major airspace companies, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, promised to invest in research to reduce the sonic boom that occurs when planes exceed the speed of sound, which is a major environmental problem and is forbidden by Concorde-era rules that ban civilian aircraft from breaking the sound barrier over U.S. territory.

Prospect Boom airplane. Source: Boom

“I expect supersonic technology to be viable within the next decade, and that further advances will eventually allow flights connecting cities around the world within several hours," said Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive, in an interview at the show. "The bigger challenge is the economic case. Are there enough travelers who would pay a premium to fly faster?”

Greg Hyslop, Boeing chief technology officer, prefers planes that travel faster than the speed of sound.

“Will twice as fast be enough, or do you really have to go a lot faster on a longer route?” he asked.

Some weeks earlier, Boing announced the design of hypersonic passenger plane that could fly several times faster than the speed of sound. Experts predicted the plane would be available in two decades.

For startup Boom Technology Inc., a decade or more is too long to wait. The Colorado company plans to start flying a demonstration supersonic plane next year. For Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and CEO, the purpose of the demonstration plane is to show that it is possible to cut the time for transcontinental flights by more than half. This will allow a business person from the U.S. West Coast to fly to Asia, do some business there and return to the U.S. within the same day.

Boom already has some early orders placed by known carriers and has secured a strategic investment alliance with Japan Airlines. Mr. Scholl said his company wants to end the era of air travel that is “low on excitement, low on progress and high on frustration.”