Aerion Corporation

Aerion Corporation was an American aircraft manufacturer based in Reno, Nevada, founded by Robert Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, in 2003. From 2004 until 2021 it developed a supersonic business jet intended to cut transatlantic flights by three hours, using boomless cruise technology to negate the sonic boom, and it expected to build the first supersonic aircraft without an afterburner and the first to run on biofuels. Its projects were the Aerion SBJ, the larger Aerion AS2, which GE planned to power with the Affinity engine and which Lockheed Martin and later Boeing partnered on, and a hypersonic Aerion AS3 airliner announced in 2021. It also launched a natural laminar flow subsidiary, Aerion Technologies Corporation, in 2011. On 21 May 2021 the company shut down after failing to raise the capital needed to continue, with 93 orders for the AS2 on its books.