Boom Supersonic, a Colorado-based company designing a supersonic aircraft known as the Overture, has expanded its partnership with StandardAero to include production of the plane’s engine core at its site in San Antonio.
“Our plan is to get to hardware quickly, and let’s learn and iterate,” Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl told Aviation Week Network in a story last week describing the partnership. “Eighteen months ago, the [engine, dubbed] Symphony was a sketch on a napkin. Now the conceptual design is complete, and we’ve said, ‘Great, let’s go.'”
Interest in supersonic jet travel, once symbolized by the glamour of the Concorde jet, which could make the trip from New York to London in four hours, largely ceased after 2000, when an Air France Concorde burst into flames and crashed, killing 113 people.
Supersonic flight was plagued by other challenges, including a sonic boom so loud the U.S. government in 1973 banned civilian supersonic flights over land, as well as the massive amounts of jet fuel necessary to reach those speeds.
In the past several years, however, private companies as well as NASA are spending millions on the development of technologically advanced and more cost-effective jets that can fly faster than the speed of sound.
“Passengers and airlines are hungry for supersonic flight,” said Scholl in the company’s July 23 announcement of the expanded partnership with StandardAero, an all new flight deck for the Overture and current hardware testing. The first full-scale engine core is expected to be operational in just 18 months, according to the release.
Scholl has said his company hopes to have the Overture in the skies by 2029. In March, Boom Supersonic announced the successful flight of XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet, at the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California. The company says its XB-1 program is the foundation for the design and development of Overture.
Scholl told Flight Global that it plans for the XB-1 to break the sound barrier by year’s end.
StandardAero, a global provider of support services for commercial and military aircraft, will dedicate 100,000 square feet of one of its San Antonio facilities to the assembly and test of the Symphony engine.
The company has worked with Boom Supersonic for several years, “initially to introduce the ideas of maintainability and a sustainable supersonic aircraft engine,” Russ Ford, chairman and CEO, told Aviation Week Network. In Boom Supersonic’s announcement, he stated, “Our collaboration is a testament to StandardAero’s world-class engineering capabilities and dedication to delivering solutions that power the future of air travel.”
The expanded agreement means StandardAero should be able to assemble 330 engines a year, Scholl said in the company’s statement.
To build that many engines, “we decided it was best to select a partner with deep experience manufacturing both commercial as well as military supersonic engines,” Scholl told FlightGlobal. Boom Supersonic plans to have a full-scale Symphony engine core running on a test stand by the end of 2025.
StandardAero, which is owned by global investment firm Carlyle and has been estimated to be a $10 billion business, has had a presence at Port San Antonio for more than 25 years. The company employs about 800 people, who work in roughly 800,000 square feet of specialized industrial facilities doing maintenance, overhaul and testing as well as research and development.
That makes it an integral part of San Antonio’s storied aerospace industry. Considered the birthplace of military aviation, the industry had an estimated economic impact of $3.4 billion in the region in 2018, per a study commissioned by the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
Much of that activity happens at Port San Antonio, which in addition to StandardAero, is home to Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Knight Aerospace, Chromalloy and Xyrec as well as the 16th Air Forces Cyber Command.
At the Port, the 113-year-old StandardAero maintains and services two commercial aircraft LEAP engines, as well as several Rolls-Royce engine lines. StandardAero’s government and military sector headquarters and its engineering services unit also reside at the Port.
As it continues to grow, StandardAero is expected to hire several hundred people in the next few years. Last year, the company developed a technician training program with the capacity to graduate more than 200 technicians per year, said Dan Gonzales, vice president of business development.
“We will leverage the training program to support the continued growth in our military and commercial engines lines,” he said.
StandardAero is one of the larger companies that will benefit from the City of San Antonio’s Ready to Work’s on-the-job training pilot program, which will reimburse employers up to $150,000, capped at $10,000 per employee.
