“It is surprisingly kind of anticlimactic,” Tristan ‘Geppetto’ Brandenburg says about the time he broke the sound barrier. “You don’t hear a sonic boom from the cockpit because you are leaving the ...

Supercruise sounds like marketing spin, but in aviation it describes a very specific and demanding trick: flying faster than sound for long stretches without lighting fuel‑guzzling afterburners.

Recent high-speed jet stream winds have pushed eastbound airliners to new speed records for planes not named “Concorde” while making westbound flight even agonizingly longer. Aboard one of these ...