Highest flight by a commercial passenger aircraft
- Who
- SpaceShipTwo "Unity", Virgin Galactic
- What
- 86 kilometre(s)
- Where
- United States (Spaceport America)
- When
- 11 July 2021
The highest flight by a commercial passenger aircraft/spaceplane was made by the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Unity on 11 July 2021. The flight, called Unity 22, reached an altitude of 86 km (53.5 mi) and a top speed of Mach 3.
On board Unity pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci were joined by four other staff from Virgin Galactic: Beth Moses (astronaut instructor), Colin Bennett (Lead Flight Operations Engineer), Sirisha Bandla (VP of Government Affairs and Research) and Richard Branson (company co-founder).
The flight profile of a typical SpaceShipTwo mission takes it above the 50-mi (80-km) boundary that is used by NASA and the US Air Force to define "space". The FAI and several other international organizations, however, use the 100-km (62-mi) Kármán Line (named for physicist Theodore von Kármán) to define space, and by this measure SpaceShipTwo does not leave the atmosphere.