The 52 Year Ban on Supersonic Flight Over Land Is Gone. Here Is What Comes Next.

On 6 June 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Federal Aviation Administration to repeal the 1973 regulation that had banned civilian aircraft from breaking the sound barrier over US land. The White House published the order with a clear timeline: the FAA must scrap the 52 year old rule within 180 days and establish a new interim noise standard in its place.

The 1973 ban made no distinction between the disruptive booms of early supersonic jets and the far quieter behaviour of modern designs. NASA's X-59 demonstrator, built specifically to test new sonic boom suppression technology, produces a sound roughly equivalent to a car door closing at 75 decibels. The blanket prohibition applied equally regardless of what the aircraft actually did to the air below it.

That distinction is now the entire basis of the new framework. Supersonic flight over land is permitted provided the aircraft does not produce an audible sonic boom at ground level. Speed is no longer the measure. Noise is.

The company closest to making it real

The most advanced commercial supersonic project in the world right now is Boom Supersonic and its Overture aircraft. Boom's XB-1 demonstrator broke the sound barrier six times during testing without generating an audible boom on the ground. Its Greensboro factory in North Carolina, completed in 2024, is built to produce up to 33 aircraft per year. United Airlines, American Airlines and Japan Airlines have all signed purchase agreements.

Boom describes a mode called Boomless Cruise, operating between Mach 1.1 and 1.2 at altitude, where atmospheric temperature gradients refract sound waves upward rather than allowing them to reach the surface. At those speeds, a flight from Los Angeles to Washington DC takes around three hours and fifteen minutes. New York to London comes down to approximately three and a half hours from the current seven.

The target ticket price is around $1,700 one way for a New York to London business class seat, as RD World Online reports, compared with Concorde prices that ran upwards of $10,000 in the 1990s. Boom CEO Blake Scholl is currently seeking between $1 billion and $2 billion in additional funding to bring Overture to market. Delta CEO Ed Bastian has publicly called the aircraft "a very, very expensive asset" for the 75 or so passengers it is expected to carry.

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The new Concorde

Separately, a company called Fly-Concorde Limited has made headlines with plans to revive the Concorde name itself. Led by Dr Pano Krako Churchill, the company claims its new aircraft will be 50 percent lighter than the original, built from next generation composite materials and powered by Sustainable Aviation Fuel, with an 80 percent reduction in emissions. As Travel Trade Journal reports, the company is targeting a launch by 2026 and received a patent on sonic boom suppression technology in May 2025. The aircraft would operate at 60,000 feet.

The company behind the Concorde revival is a smaller and less established operation than Boom, and its financing model includes a cryptocurrency token called Concorde Coin. The technical ambitions are bold and the 2026 timeline is aggressive. Whether those plans translate into a flying aircraft is a separate question from whether the regulatory path now exists to fly it.

What the executive order actually does

The order does not immediately permit supersonic flight. It instructs the FAA to create the rules that will allow it. The agency has 180 days to repeal the existing prohibition and establish an interim noise certification standard. Within 18 months, it must publish a full Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to set a permanent framework under 14 CFR Part 36.

As Spike Aerospace notes, the order also directs the FAA to pursue international regulatory alignment and bilateral agreements, recognising that supersonic routes are only useful if other countries' airspace can be accessed on the same terms.

The Concorde was retired in 2003 because it was expensive to operate, limited to oceanic routes, and generated a boom that made overland flight politically impossible. Modern supersonic aircraft address all three of those problems with varying degrees of confidence. The cost question is the hardest. The noise question now has engineering answers and, as of June 2025, a regulatory framework to match.

Whether a supersonic seat becomes something ordinary people can book on an ordinary day is a question for the next decade. Whether the rule preventing it from happening has been removed is no longer in any doubt.

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The 52 Year Ban on Supersonic Flight Over Land Is Gone. Here Is What Comes Next.

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