New York to London could be a daytrip if Virgin boss Richard Branson gets his way.
The eccentric gazillionaire announced this week that his mega airline will help build a new "superjet" with the potential to courier people—well-heeled people, but we'll get to that—from JFK to Heathrow in just 3.5 hours. That is half the seven hours it currently takes to cross the pond.
The plane, called the Boom (really, you're naming a plane for the second syllable in "ka-boom"?), is being developed by pilot and former Amazon executive Blake Scholl. He says his team is on track to build and test a prototype by the end of 2017; commercial flights would soon follow.
How does Scholl—with the help of Branson—expect to beat fellow supersonic-jet-builders Boeing and Lockheed Martin to the tarmac? He says Boom's advantage is that there's no new technology involved in the design, which would otherwise mire it in a long approval process with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Branson has signed on to buy 10 of the planes if they are successfully built. According to the Guardian, Scholl says another airline intends to buy $2 billion worth of Booms.
Initially, says School, the planes will fly between London and New York, San Francisco and Tokyo and L.A. and Sydney at speeds of up to Mach 2.2 (1,451mph). There will be limited seating: 40 seats, divided into two rows.
The price tag for the London-to-New York leg is expected to be around $5000 a seat, putting it on par with most business class seats between the two destinations (though it is slightly more than some of Virgin Atlantic's Upper Class seats to London).
It may sound like a jaw-dropping wad to drop just to save 3.5 hours, but when you consider that the average cost of a flight on the Concorde was $12,000, it starts to look at least rich-people-reasonable.
And it will only get more reasonable, according to Scholl. He told the Guardian, "This is supersonic passenger air travel, no bullshit, and it's actually affordable....Ultimately I want people to be able to get anywhere in the world in five hours for $100."
A hundred bucks to London? Blimey—we'll cheers to that.