Pins matching tag:Supersonic

On 29 November 1962 the British and French governments signed a treaty in London to build a supersonic airliner together, sharing work, cost and sales equally. The agreement, with no escape clause, started the programme that became Concorde.

On 31 December 1966 the federal government chose Boeing's swing-wing design over Lockheed's L-2000 to build the American supersonic airliner, later designated the Boeing 2707.

The Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 prototype CCCP-68001 flew for 37 minutes from Zhukovsky on 31 December 1968, two months before Concorde, to become the first supersonic airliner to fly.

The Anglo-French supersonic airliner, built by Sud Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation under a 1962 treaty, flew for the first time from Toulouse. Four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojets drove an ogival delta wing carrying 92 to 128 passengers.

Concorde 002, G-BSST, took off from Filton near Bristol on 9 April 1969 with Brian Trubshaw at the controls and landed at RAF Fairford, five weeks after French prototype 001 first flew.

The Tu-144 prototype went supersonic for the first time on 5 June 1969, four months before Concorde, and reached Mach 2.02 on 26 May 1970.

Concorde prototype 001, flown by chief test pilot Andre Turcat, passed Mach 1 on 1 October 1969, the western supersonic airliner programme's first flight beyond the speed of sound.

British Airways and Air France began scheduled Concorde flights on 21 January 1976, London-Bahrain and Paris-Rio de Janeiro via Dakar, the world's first supersonic airline service.

Aeroflot began passenger flights with the Tu-144 on 1 November 1977 on the 3,100 km Moscow to Alma-Ata route; the service lasted until 1 June 1978, 55 passenger flights in all.

Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde bound for New York, crashed into a hotel at Gonesse minutes after takeoff from Paris on 25 July 2000, killing all 109 aboard and four on the ground, the type's only fatal accident.

Air France and British Airways resumed Concorde passenger flights to New York on 7 November 2001, fifteen months after Flight 4590, with Kevlar fuel-tank liners, reinforced undercarriage and new tyres.

British Airways flight BA002 from New York landed at Heathrow at 4:05 p.m. on 24 October 2003, ending 27 years of supersonic passenger service; two more Concordes landed alongside.

Boom Supersonic's one-third-scale XB-1 demonstrator for the Overture airliner flew for the first time on 22 March 2024 from Mojave Air & Space Port, reaching 7,120 feet and 238 knots.

Boom's XB-1 reached Mach 1.122 at 35,290 feet over the Mojave Desert on 28 January 2025, the first supersonic flight by an independently developed jet and, in Boom's words, the first human-piloted civil supersonic flight since Concorde's retirement.