China has entered the race to usher in a new golden age of supersonic air travel with plans to build an airliner that will rival the Concorde, according to local media. 

As per reporting by the South China Morning Post, China’s Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) has revealed blueprints for the C949 – a 1.6-Mach jet that could fly further and more quickly than the Concorde – in a recent academic paper. 

The paper said the project looked to achieve a 50 per cent range boost over the Concorde and is designed to make the plane fly as quietly as the noise level of a hairdryer. 

It will do this with a curved plane body that will weaken shockwaves to delay violent booms that could come from the aircraft, the SCMP report continued. 

Reducing the noise levels is a way for the plane to try and bypass regulatory barriers that ban supersonic flights, SCMP continued. 

Euronews Next is trying to independently verify these claims by reaching out to the academic journal that published the findings as well as COMAC but has not received any replies at the time of publication. 

Other supersonic crafts in the works

The Concorde, an Anglo-French supersonic airliner that first took to the skies on a test flight in 1969, made just under 50,000 flights for carrier British Airways during its 26-year career. 

The craft, with a maximum cruising speed of Mach 2.04 (around 2,180  km/h), boasted a flight time from London to New York of less than 3.5 hours instead of the regular 8 hours for a subsonic flight. 

There hasn’t been a non-military supersonic aircraft in service since Concorde’s retirement in 2003 but there are other supersonic projects now in the works, like the X-59, a joint venture between the US Space Agency, NASA, and US-based manufacturer Lockheed Martin. 

Revealed last year, the aircraft flies at 55,000 feet (over 16,700 m) and produces sound equivalent to a car door closing, according to the jet’s designers. 

The X-59 is designed to travel at speeds of Mach 1.4 (around 1,730 km/h), slower than Concorde and the proposed Chinese C949.

In March, NASA announced that the X-59 successfully passed an engine speed hold, or cruise control test, a last step before a first flight that should happen later this year.

“We needed to verify that speed hold worked not just within the engine itself but as part of the entire aircraft system,” Paul Dees, NASA’s X-59 deputy propulsion lead at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, said in a statement.

“This test confirmed that all components – software, mechanical linkages, and control laws – work together as intended”.

Private company Boom Supersonic wants to launch its supersonic jet, the Overture, before the end of the decade. 

In test craft XB-1’s first test flight inJanuary, the aircraft flew up to 1,207 km/h to an altitude of over 35,000 feet (10,600 m) and was able to land without a sonic boom, the company said.

There has already been commercial interest in the Overture, with Boom having already signed deals with United Airlines, American Airlines, and Japan Airlines to deliver the aircraft once it meets the required safety standards. 

The European Commission funded several projects to study noise reduction and the environmental impacts of supersonic flights, like the 2022 RUMBLE project, the 2020 SENECA project, and the ongoing MORE AND LESS project.