Is supersonic flight making a comeback?

Grainger knows if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Grainger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.

[music] This is a CBC podcast.

Hi, I'm Rebecca Zandbergen, and you're listening to The Current podcast. [plane whooshing] If you had to guess, what would you say that sound was? Maybe a really loud gunshot? It's actually a sonic boom. That's the noise planes like the Concorde made when they broke the sound barrier. The Concorde was a supersonic jet that first flew in 1976, and can get you from London to New York in just under three and a half hours. But it was loud. In 1967, the sonic boom drew complaints when the technology was tested over London.

So far, 7,000 people have complained to the Ministry of Technology and to the Noise Abatement Society. Only one man has seems to have come out in direct praise of the boom, and that's a 74-year-old old-age pensioner, who claims that the boom has cured him of his deafness.

The Concorde stopped flying in 2003. It was expensive to operate, and there was declining demand and safety concerns after a crash in Paris in 2000 killed 113 people. But now engineers are working to bring back passenger supersonic flight, and in a moment, I'll speak with a member of a NASA mission designing aircraft that can fly supersonic without creating that loud boom. But first, Bob van der Linden was on the last Air France Concorde flight. He's a curator with the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Bob, good morning.

Good morning.

You say the Concorde was one of the most beautiful airplanes ever built. Just describe it to us.

Well, it, it's, it's a flying dart. It is gorgeous. Still is. I mean, we, we own one. We just don't fly it, obviously. It, very, very graceful. I mean, it's designed not to be pretty. It's designed for a purpose, and that w- that purpose was to carry passengers at twice the speed of sound, which it did, but it did it at extreme cost, expense, I should say. And o- over the years, uh, never really found a market, and eventually they had to close it down, 'cause the, the builders could no longer support it.

It's funny you say it wasn't pretty, but you did call it gorgeous. So what, what was the inside like?

[laughs] Not what you would expect. The inside is very straightforward, very narrow. The seats were no wider than coach class in, in conventional airliner, but you have plenty of leg room. But, you know, the, um, interior decorations weren't elaborate or anything like that. It was just very straightforward, a nice light gray. No televisions, no media, no nothing.

And, and remind us, where did it fly when, when they were operational? What was the route it, most of them took?

Well, they had, uh, several transatlantic routes and a couple experimental routes in other places, but the primary route was, uh, New York to London