Supersonic Flight With No Audible Sonic Boom On Ground

Boom Supersonic conducted the second supersonic flight of its one-third scale demonstrator aircraft XB-1 over California’s Mojave Desert and on the same day the company announced what it’s calling Boomless Cruise for its supersonic Overture airliner, enabling supersonic flight over land without an audible sonic boom on the ground.

The 13th flight of XB-1 was conducted on February 10, 2025, with Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg at the controls taking the aircraft through three supersonic passes during a 41-minute flight in the Bell X-1 Supersonic Corridor. The flight’s objectives were to continue assessing the aircraft’s handling characteristics at supersonic speeds, expand the Mach number to 1.14, and to capture specialized Schlieren images of the shock wave as well as sonic boom data on the ground.

To capture the Schlieren images, Geppeto had to hand-fly the aircraft at supersonic speed to a precise position at a precise time over the Desert to enable a team on the ground to photograph the aircraft as it passed in front of the sun as seen by the team. The ultra-high-speed camera gear captured the invisible shock wave generated by the aircraft changing the air density around it, and due to it being backlit by the sun, post-processing of the image data reveals the shock wave and bringing it into view — making the invisible visible.

In announcing Boomless Cruise, the company had positioned several other teams on the ground with microphones and sound pressure recording equipment at strategic locations in relation to XB-1’s flight path.

The teams confirmed again that XB-1 went supersonic three times during this flight without an audible sonic boom reaching the ground. The result from this flight confirmed the data obtained during the previous flight when XB-1 went supersonic the first time on January 28, 2025.

FMI: https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1