United orders ‘New Concorde’ with Supersonic plane

A US airline has unveiled plans to bring back supersonic transatlantic flights by the end of the decade.

Dubbed by many as the ‘New Concorde’, United Airlines has conditionally agreed to buy jets capable of flying at speeds of Mach 1.7 – twice as fast as modern airliners.

It could see flight times slashed in half – with a journey from London to Newark in New Jersey taking three and a half hours.

Currently, a flight between those two locations would take almost seven hours.

The record for the fastest flight by a commercial airline between New York and London is two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds – set by Concorde in 1996.

Concorde was retired from service in October 2003 after British Airways and Air France blamed a downturn in demand and increasing maintenance costs.

The 88-seat plane will be the first supersonic airliner to have zero carbon emissions by running on “pure sustainable aviation fuel”, United said.

A prototype is set to make its first journey through the skies this year or in early 2022.