It could possibly be the most advanced passenger plane on the planet but researchers have turned to the dawn of aviation in the hope of bringing supersonic flights back for travellers.

Researchers tested 700 wing configurations to come up with a biplane design – used by most aircraft in the early years of flying – to reduce the sonic boom that restricted earlier flights of the Concorde and contributed to its demise.

“The sonic boom is really the shock waves created by the supersonic airplanes, propagated to the ground,” Qiqi Wang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said.

“It’s like hearing gunfire. It’s so annoying that supersonic jets were not allowed to fly over land.”

For almost 30 years from the 1970s the Concorde ferried passengers from New York to Paris in just three-and-a-half hours. But high fuel costs, ticket prices, noise pollution from the sonic boom and a well-publicised crash in 2000 led to the airline’s eventual grounding in 2003.
Mr Wang said placing one wing above the other cancelled out the shock waves produced from either wing alone.

The researchers also smoothed out the inner surface of each wing to create a wider channel for air to flow through, essentially shaping the wings like a flattened triangle.

It also has half the level of drag the Concorde did, which means it needs less fuel to fly so ticket prices would not be as expensive.

UK company Hypermach is planning to bring its SonicStar Jet – a new version of the Concorde – to the skies. It would be able to travel from Paris to New York in two hours.

Meanwhile Mr Wang said a group in Japan has made progress in designing a Busemann-like biplane with moving parts: The wings would essentially change shape in mid-flight to attain supersonic speeds.

The team’s next step is to design a three-dimensional model to account for other factors affecting flight.