“Boom is bringing back supersonic travel by 2029, and private supersonic jets are next.”
Verdict: Boom's Overture is an airliner — 64–80 seats, for airlines such as United and American — and the company's own schedule targets certification and entry into service in 2029, a date independent analysts widely expect to slip into the 2030s. Boom's XB-1 demonstrator did go supersonic in January 2025, a real milestone. But a supersonic *business* jet is not on Boom's roadmap, and the one company that was building one, Aerion, collapsed in 2021.
Boom Supersonic, founded in 2014, flew its one-third-scale XB-1 demonstrator past Mach 1 over the Mojave Desert on 28 January 2025, the first privately developed civil aircraft to do so, and has since talked up 'Boomless Cruise' — flying supersonic over land without an audible boom by using atmospheric refraction at specific speeds. The full-size Overture is planned around a new engine, Symphony, that Boom is developing itself after Rolls-Royce withdrew.
The timeline Boom publishes: Overture roll-out and engine readiness in 2027, first flight in 2028, certification and service in 2029. Certifying a clean-sheet supersonic airliner and a clean-sheet engine on that schedule would be unprecedented; the Concorde programme took a decade with two governments behind it.
On the business-jet side, Aerion's AS2 — backed at various points by Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and GE — was the most serious attempt and folded in May 2021 without building a prototype. Spike Aerospace continues to promote a concept. Exosonic pivoted to drones. Bombardier's Global 8000, at Mach 0.94, is the practical ceiling for now.
So: supersonic flight is plausibly coming back, on an airliner, later than advertised, and the private version is still an artist's rendering.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · simpleflying.com · en.wikipedia.org
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