Online travel giant Ctrip bets China travellers are in a hurry with backing of US supersonic jet start-up Boom
Mainland Chinese travellers made 130 million trips last year, the most of any nation. Ctrip is betting that at least a small portion of that would pay for supersonic flights to get to their destinations in half the time
From Shanghai to Los Angeles in six hours. Or New York to London in a little over three.
Supersonic jet travel is not new. Air France and British Airways tried it back in the 1970s with the droop-nosed Concorde, but never found enough travellers to make it commercially viable.
Now Boom, a Denver-based start-up, is going to give it another try, with plans for a 55-seat jet with a long-range cruising speed of Mach 2.2 (1,451mph/2,335km/h) or more than twice the speed of sound. The difference, this time round, says the company, lies in the new carbon fibre composite fuselage and quiet, efficient turbofan engines, which promise to lower operating costs and noise levels.
Is China ready to mass-produce hypersonic vehicles?
Boom also won the backing of Ctrip.com International, the Shanghai-based online travel giant that is the second biggest in the world at what it does. Ctrip will invest an undisclosed sum in Boom and aims to bring supersonic flights to China, the world’s biggest source of outbound tourists.
“As a one-stop travel shop, we invest in the travel of tomorrow,” Ctrip said in an emailed statement. “We want our users to gain futuristic travel experiences.”
When we fly twice as fast, the world becomes twice as small
China is set to become one of the largest markets for supersonic air travel and the two companies plan to explore supersonic flights from China to the US, south Asia and Oceania.