Boeing Sonic Cruiser

The Sonic Cruiser was born from one of numerous outline research and development projects that began in the 1990s at Boeing with the goal to look at potential designs for a possible new near-sonic or supersonic airliner. The Sonic Cruiser was publicly unveiled on March 29, 2001. Boeing had recently withdrawn its proposed 747X derivative from competition with the Airbus A380 when not enough airline interest was forthcoming, various tail, engine location, and inlet and outlet configurations, smaller supersonic and subsonic business jets, and what Boeing called a "modular" system, where the cruise speed could be changed from supersonic to near-sonic by an interchangeable nose; the "Sonic Cruiser" was a near-sonic variant. The origin has been traced back to 1995, with the formation of an internal Airplane Creation Process Strategy team, which had designed a plane code-named Project Glacier that strongly resembled the initial Sonic Cruiser drawings by fall 2000. Popular Science named the Sonic Cruiser to its list of the Best of What's New in 2001.