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
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group

Google released its new Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental AI model late last month,

TikTok is shutting down TikTok Notes—wait, you didn’t even know it existed? Well, that explains a lot.
TikTok Notes, the platform’s short-lived attempt to take on Instagram (just as Inst

Influencing has a major pay gap, and it’s not what you might expect.
A new report from Collabstr, based on over 15,0


Tech leaders often brand themselves as “disruptors”—and few fit that label more snugly than Elon Musk. In the three months since joining Donald Trump in the White House following Trump’s election,

As the weekend deadline for TikTok to find a buyer approaches, bidders for the short-video so

At Visa’s ETA Transact event on April 3, the payments giant introduced three new products designed to simplify and secure payment acceptance. These innovations—Authorize.net 2.0, Unified Checkout,