Boom Supersonic is a unicorn in the United States.  A unicorn is defined as a company that has a value, while not yet listed on a Stock Exchange, of $1 billion or more.  They are busy designing an aeroplane seating 65 people that will fly at twice the speed of current aeroplanes and be in operation as soon as 2024.  Their investors include Japan Airlines and Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic.

I think news like this is always exciting, but it is particularly exciting for a country like South Africa which has so much to offer to tourists and where one of the biggest problems is how far away from the rest of the world we are.  I don’t think the average person thinks about how much effort it takes to visit South Africa compared for example for somebody living in New York to fly over to London or to Paris.  There is no doubt, as planes get faster in the years ahead, that South Africa will be one of the big winners in terms of tourism, offering as we do, not only our Game Reserves and resorts like Sun City, but the wine farms of the Cape and Cape Town itself.  These planes are carrying a smaller number of passengers cutting the time to travel to SA by more than half, will certainly help with encouraging more high-end tourists to SA.  At the moment, for example somebody flying from Atlanta in America would have to fly for 17 hours before landing in Johannesburg and then there is another 2 hour flight to Cape Town – not to mention the flight getting to Atlanta in the first place.  Cutting that in half would make a dramatic difference.  Some countries like the UK are obviously closer to us and that is probably why we see a lot more tourists from the UK and France.