Boeing Sonic Cruiser

[Archibald]

All started a bright day of March 2001.
Boeing unveiled an ultrafast airliner, able to cruise at mach 0.98, or less than 6 hours over the Atlantic.
Sadly, after 18 months the project was on the verge of cancellation in favor of the 787. But things were to changed...
Cancellation was planned for 23th December 2002, and preparation for shelving of the project started early in the month. Boeing made an ultimate atempt to save the project. It was decided to test a wind tunnel model up to mach 1.3 (instead of the previous mach 1.08 of October 2001).
It was surprisingly found that basic design of the S.C was working well up to this speed.
So Boeing took contact with Virgin, British Airways and Air France and vaunted that pushing speed above mach 1.2 allowed the plane to cross the Atlantic in 4.5 hours.
In the following days, more and more interest came from the rest of the world. In the end Boeing tooks its decision. 7E7 would replace the 767 only. The Sonic Cruiser become a 757 replacement at 225 seats.

[Archibald]

In december 2003, Boeing unveiled the name of the aircraft. It was now known as Boeing 1077 Sonic Liner.
As every Boeing airliners, the plane raised interest of US Military Forces. The name C-42 was allocated to the machine. Subvariants were as follow.

KC-42A
When F-22 orders were restricted to 183 machines only, it became obvious that such low number of aircrafts would complicate things a lot. Situation became worse in 2009 when China, now producing loads of J-11s, announced that its oldest Su-30s (from the mid-90's) would be sold to North Korea. The lone
F-22 squadron based in Japan was clearly unsufficient, but there was not enough
F-22s to permantly dispatch another squadron in South Korea.
The only way of enforcing air cover of these countries would be sending another squadron of F-22s in emergency over the Pacific. Supercruise drastically cut transit time, but range was reduced and KC-330s could not follow supercruising
F-22.
On the other hand, Sonic Cruiser speed allowed it to follow the F-22s. Of course refueling would still be made at subsonic speed...
An order for 60 KC-42A was send to Boeing. First prototype flew on 4th July 2010.

VC-42A

VC-32A and VC-37A were prised by their pilots, but less by their passengers. Coming after VC-137s, they offered much less internal room. Staffs had to be reduced, conference rooms were too small.  So a fleet of 8 VC-42A was bought. Not only vice-president and its staff used the machines, its speed also made it attractive for the President itself, cutting transit times.