Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 12th of January, the start on this podcast of Super Sonic Week.

That's because it was 50 years ago this month that the first passenger concord flew.

21st of January, 1976, both British Airways and Air France dispatched their supersonic jets. There was a terrible crash, as you may

recall, in July 2000, which meant that Air France stopped flying.

Their Concords, British Airways made modifications, but even then, by October 2003,

so 23 years ago, Concord stopped flying.

Are we ever going to fly Supersonic again?

Well, according to my guest, Blake Scholl, we are.

Our ultimate goal, he says, is to bring the benefits of supersonic flight to everyone.

He is the founder and chief executive, Supersonic, the Denver-based

company that's at the forefront of the race to find a successor to Concord. But surely over the past

couple of decades the world has come to an agreement that, actually,

we're quite okay with subsonic flight.

Oh, it's absolutely insane.

I mean, so from the Wright Brothers 1903, forward to Concord's first flight in 1969, we were

just literally accelerating, and then we did this bizarre thing, which was put it in reverse and we went backwards.

And to my knowledge that has really only happened in aerospace, 1969, Concord, Flying Supersonic, within months of that, the first moon landing.

Now the year 2025.

Now imagine if it was 1969 and you stopped any man or woman on the street and they said,

what do you think it's going to be like in space or with travel in 2025? I don't think you could have found anybody crazy enough to say, well, you won't be able to go to the moon and you won't be able to fly supersonic. And yet that's the world we live in. We went backwards. Well, and at one stage, I believe,

1972,

...