Incredible NASA photo captures sound barrier being broken

Specialized Schlieren photography, which shows air flow, was used by NASA to capture the sound waves as Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft broke the sound barrier on February 10. (NASA/Boom Supersonic via CNN Newsource)

Now here’s one for the mantelpiece.

A newly released image shows the sound barrier being broken on February 10 as America’s first civil supersonic jet completed its second flight at speeds exceeding Mach 1.

NASA teams on the ground used Schlieren photography to capture the shock waves around Boom Supersonic’s demonstrator aircraft XB-1 as it pushed through the air.

“This image makes the invisible visible,” said Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, in a press release.

In order to capture the Schlieren images, Boom chief test pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg positioned XB-1 at an exact time in a precise location over the Mojave Desert.

As the aircraft flew in front of the sun, NASA’s team documented the changing air speeds as speeds over Mach 1, the speed of sound (761.23 miles per hour or 1,225.1 kilometres per hour).

The images were captured during ground telescopes with special filters that detect air distortions.

‘No audible sonic boom’

NASA teams also collected data on the volume of sound made by XB-1 on the flight route.

Boom says its analysis has found that no audible sonic boom reached the ground during the flight.

Minimizing sonic boom has been a key goal for engineers involved in the race to bring about the return of commercial supersonic air travel.

The thunderous sounds created by sonic booms have meant that international governments have banned them from occurring over densely populated areas or restricted them to only being allowed over the sea.

Having no audible sonic boom, says Scholl, “paves the way for coast-to-coast flights up to 50 per cent faster.”

On January 28 this year, XB-1 made its first supersonic flight.

The aircraft is the precursor to the development of Boom’s supersonic commercial airliner, Overture.

The hotly anticipated plane already has 130 orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines.

Long-anticipated return

It’s now almost 55 years since the 002 prototype for Concorde first flew at Mach 1 on March 25, 1970, and more than 21 years since commercial supersonic travel ended with the Anglo-French airliner’s final flight in November 2003.

There have been several challengers in the supersonic space while the remaining Concordes gather dust at museums in the UK, the US and France, but so far no one has succeeded.

Boom Supersonic’s ambitions remain high. CEO Blake Scholl told CNN last year that he expects supersonic planes to replace conventional airliners in our lifetime.

“I very much believe in the return of supersonic air travel, and ultimately to bring it to every passenger on every route. And that’s not something that takes place overnight,” he said in March 2024.

Boom’s plan is that Overture will be in operation before the end of the decade, carrying 64 to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7, about twice the speed of today’s subsonic airliners.

Back when CNN Travel spoke with Scholl in May 2021, he told us his dream was for people to one day be able to “fly anywhere in the world in four hours for US$100.” In 2024, he confirmed that was still his “north star.”

The company’s plan is for Overture to one day operate on more than 600 routes worldwide.

“A faster airplane is much more human-efficient, and it’s much more capital-efficient. You can do more flights, with the same airplane and crew,” Scholl said.

“We can significantly reduce all of the cost and impact that goes into airplanes by making them faster. if we have faster airplanes, we don’t need as many.”

New technologies

The XB-1 test craft has been used to prove new technologies developed by Boom Supersonic.

Like Concorde, the XB-1 and Overture both have a long nose and a high angle of attack for takeoff and landing, which interrupts the pilots’ view of the runway.

While Concorde dealt with this by having a moveable droop nose, Boom’s augmented reality vision system enables excellent runway visibility for the pilots without that extra weight and complexity.

“The advent of digital engineering is a huge enabler for why supersonic flight’s coming back,” Scholl told CNN in 2024. “Aerodynamics, materials, propulsion: Those are the big three areas where we’ve made huge progress versus Concorde.”

Back in the 1960s, Concorde was developed in wind tunnels, which meant building costly physical models, running tests, then repeating.

“You just can’t test very many designs, when every iteration costs millions and takes months,” explains Scholl. But Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel. We can run the equivalent of hundreds of wind tunnel tests overnight in simulation for a fraction of the cost of a real wind tunnel test.”

XB-1 is made almost entirely from carbon fiber composites, selected for being both strong and lightweight.

Overture is designed to be powered by conventional jet engines and to run on up to 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

We’ve covered the so-far slow adoption of SAF before here on CNN Travel, and Scholl told CNN last year that he was well aware of its current problems.

“There’s not enough of it, and it costs too much, but it is scaling,” he said, but he reckoned that one day it’ll be used for all long-haul air travel. It’s the “future of aviation,” he declared.

Construction was completed last year on Boom’s Overture Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s been designed to scale to produce 66 Overture aircraft per year.

Article written by Maureen O’Hare, CNN