This is John Batchel, a conversation with Bob Zimmerman about supersonic commercial aircraft.

The company's boom.

It's testing now a jet that can fly more than the speed of sound as much as 2.2 mock, in fact,

although it didn't test that on the first day.

Bob describes why and who wants it, and the question mark is, is there a market for it?

That's to be discovered.

Supersonic.

Bob Zimmerman, more of this later.

You have to understand.

It's not a question of we need it.

It's a question of whether there's a demand for it in the market.

And both United Airlines and Japan Airlines have paid BOOM money to buy commercial super sonic

passenger jets to fly their passengers on. They've both done so. So they have part of the investment. They think there's

demand for this. And Boone's trick is they're trying to develop a supersonic jet that won't

make a lot of noise over land, which would get around these regulations that prevent flights

over land. They did their first supersonic flight using their prototype XB1 test plane,

successfully broke the sound barrier on this flight three different times,

and that was once again to test whether their system is reducing sonic boom.