NASA works to restore Supersonic passenger flight

Concorde conducted its final commercial flight on 24 October 2003, flying from New York to London at Mach 2.0, twice the speed of sound in about 3.5-hours.

Twenty-years on, no commercial airliner has exceeded or neared, for that matter supersonic speed. 

Due to the effort of NASA's Quesst mission, an ostensibly clever acronym connoting Quiet SuperSonic Technology, has set out to return supersonic flight to the purview of the world's commercial airlines. The programme is predicated, in part, on Lockheed-Martin's X-59 Quesst, an experimental supersonic aircraft being developed at the storied defence contractor's famed Skunk Works. NASA intends to fly the X-59 over US communities for purpose of identifying a set of sound-limits by which quiet supersonic flight will ultimately be defined.

NASA Quesst mission integration manager Peter Coen said the space agency plans to collect data supportive of a larger international effort to develop an enroute noise standard sufficiently quiet to not disturb persons on the ground. Utilising data gleaned by virtue of the X-59, new decibel-based regulations governing supersonic flight over continental land regions will be developed and codified, thereby facilitating the emergence of new faster-than-sound commercial passenger and cargo markets.