Supersonic intercontinental flight only decade away: airline CEO

The CEO of one of Australia's biggest airlines has flagged the possibility of commercial supersonic jets becoming a reality within 10 years.

"It is entirely reasonable to believe that in the next 10 years we will see supersonic jets safely and sustainably flying commercial passengers," John Borghetti, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Virgin Australia, said at the Safeskies conference in Canberra on Tuesday night.

He made special mention of Boom, a company based in the U.S. city of Denver which is aiming to develop an aircraft that can travel at speeds of up to 2,335 km per hour (km/h), almost 200 km/h faster than Concorde's top speed.

Boom expects that its XB-1 supersonic demonstrator prototype will fly for the first time in 2018 with passenger flights operating from the early 2020s.

Borghetti said there has been "a lot" of focus recently on how far a plane can fly without needing to re-fuel.

"However, I believe in order to achieve the next step-change in aviation, we need to shift the paradigm," he said.

"We should not be asking 'How far?' but rather 'How fast?'"

Borghetti's comments came days after Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, used his keynote address at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, South Australia, to talk about the opportunity about using rockets designed for space travel for intercontinental flights.

Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of U.S aircraft giant Boeing, has also suggested in 2017 that hyper-sonic flight could only be a decade away.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)