| The story of America's first supersonic transport  The history of developing America's first Supersonic Transport has been long and difficult and it was only after a consortium of France and Britain decided to proceed with the Concorde, that a plan to construct an American SST developed. Two companies, Boeing and Lockheed, submitted acceptable proposals to construct aircraft prototypes. Boeing won the competition.
In the mid 1960's, The Boeing Company was deeply involved in bringing to market the world's largest civilian aircraft, the 747. Lack of available power plants, among other troubles, had literally stretched the Company to its limits.
 The problems that Boeing had with the 747, however, were nothing compared with those the Company's SST project presented. Public opposition to the idea of a supersonic plane had mounted as the project wore on. In 1967, Dr. William Shurcliff, a Harvard University scientist, organized the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. Soon, the group began to distribute arguments condemning supersonic flights over populated areas. Other scientists hypothesized that the exhaust from SSTs, expelled into the atmosphere at high altitude, would start a self-perpetuating chemical reaction that would ultimately deplete a radiation-absorbing layer of ozone in the stratosphere and bring on an increase in skin cancer.
Few of these claims were anything more than poorly documented conjecture, but they were enough to incite the public against the SST. As resistance grew, Congress began to express doubts about the plane. President Richard Nixon, shortly after he was elected in 1968, appointed a 12-member committee to report on the project. Believing like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson before him that the plane was essential to American prestige, Nixon hoped that the committee's report would be a favorable one. Instead, it blasted the SST not only on environmental grounds but on economic ones as well. Three billion dollars would be spent before the first SST came off the assembly line, and at best the government would not recover its investment until 300 aircraft had been sold. When the committee's report became public, it all but sealed the fate of the SST, but not before additional millions of dollars had been sunk into the project. The plane was finally killed on May 20, 1971
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