2019 article: "Boom envisions its Overture airliner traveling at Mach 2.2." 2021 article: "a plane that could fly at Mach 1.7"
2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s". 2021 article: "It is targeting the start of passenger service in 2029."
The 2019 article also says that Boom is constructing a 1/3rd scale version of Overture that could be making test flights later in 2019. This article from October 2020 says that the 1/3rd scale vehicle was "rolled out" in 2020 and could be ready for test flights in Q3 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/26/boom-supe...
That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted.
The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1].
I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years.
With modern combat aircraft the easy part is the working airframe actually. The YF-22 first flew in 1989 and finally entered service as the F-22 in 2005. F-35 had a similarly long development time and while its technically been operational for years, its software is like a modern EA release. A lot of the good stuff missing and available as later DLC. They are still patching in drivers for weapons that legacy aircraft already support.
While its definitely good that NGAD has produced a flying prototype so quickly, it isn't proof that they have achieved the goal of faster development.
The primary hinderance has been and still is the software. The defense industry has been slow to adopt modern coding practices. Sometimes that's a good thing. But on the balance its bad. F-35's software development has all of the hallmarks of a project saddled with a great deal of technical debt combined with outdated practices and overburdened with compliance.
> With modern combat aircraft the easy part is the working airframe actually.
Is there such a thing as a “working airframe” for modern combat aircraft? Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability, I have the understanding that, for modern combat aircraft, you can’t consider the airframe to be separate from the software.
Yes, most notably the F-16, which had a really good four-channel redundant analog flight control system. But is that needed on a transport aircraft? Fighters have it for extreme maneuverability, which a transport aircraft does not need or want.
Transport category aircraft are inherently stable by their aerodynamic design, it's a certification requirement.
If you have normal wings and the right size horizontal and vertical stabiliser the basic design of an aircraft is self stabilising. Especially with the wings sloping upwards (as all airliners have) because that wing shape also contributes to stability.
Never flown one, but as far as I know that's only moving the center of gravity by moving fuel. The CG is very important to inherent stability, if it moves behind the center of pressure you lose all pitch stability. And for efficiency you want it to be as far aft as possible because that reduces drag from the tailplane.
Boom production models will use COTS avionics just like every other business jet manufacturer. They'll have to write custom flight control software but that will be much easier than on a military aircraft. No weapons, no external stores, no defensive systems, no tactical data link, no complex navigation modes, etc.
Except they'll need to write that flight control software themselves, for a plane so different from modern aircraft that there are literally no experts in software design for this class of aircraft. (Outside of anyone doing it for the military, and I can't imagine they'd be allowed to repurpose that work.) There will need to be a whole lot of new software development, along with the corresponding review process by the FAA. Simpler than a complex military fighter, but there's no COTS solution for the software and that's a huge part of this project.
Looking at the current state of open source software like ardupilot, and the fact that we've had supersonic jet fighters since the 1950s (F-100 Super Sabre) I don't think the control software is going to be a major bottleneck. If anything, not being tied to legacy control software may improve their velocity and testing. Navigation solutions should be drop in. Garmin, etc offer drop-in glass cockpit retrofit solutions for Cesnas from the 1960s.
If Boeing can't make the Max work without crashes, what makes you think a completely new supersonic aircraft can use a fork of Ardupilot with a few minor extras for supersonic flight?
Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think. There are compression and twisting forces on the fuselage and flight surfaces which have no analog in conventional airliners.
And you can't just take the flight characteristics of one shape/size of aircraft and tweak them a little for your new design.
'If X can't do it...' is a bad argument that doesn't take any consideration of real life.
Just because they are a huge company with big spending power does not make it impossible for their codebases to be a pile of hot steaming garbage that even the best engineers struggle with.
Either way, your rebuttal about Boeing doesn't address the fundamental differences between control of a traditional aircraft-- which is all that any existing software can handle-- and control of a fundamentally different type of aircraft.
> Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think.
And every supersonic aircraft also has to fly subsonic. So you really need two sets of software in a supersonic aircraft. Or more accurately three, because the transonic regime is weird enough to be its own thing.
What about the airplane given in the original example, the F-100, whose design predated the integrated circuit by something like a decade? Presumably control software improves stability, but otherwise the aircraft behaves in a predictable manner above and below Mach 1 as supersonic control software is a relatively recent addition.
Stuff in civilian aviation is designed to be certified before its flown commercially, stuff in military aviation is designed to be adapted on an evolving battlefield.
Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia.
Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.
The F35 is a primarily a sink for public cash that happens to fly. There is literally no incentive to make these projects cheap, fast, and economically streamlined.
The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
For comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of $30bn in modern money.
> The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
Tons of people are getting rich off that, and tons of people are being elected for the office. Military spending is one of the biggest government welfare programs in USA.
Sounds like a step that Tesla skipped. In the VFX world of movies, this is known as PreViz. I remember when the 3D rendering first came to CAD. One of the projects my dad was working on discovered that if they built it exactly to the plan's specifications, there would have been plumbing pipes running through other pipes. Lots of value in these kinds of looking at things digitaly before doing it physically
This is fascinating. This reminds me of a book I read about John Boyd [1] who fought the Air Force to develop theorems about aircraft performance, namely the Energy-Manueverability Theory [2]. He went on to mathematically prove why certain aircraft would fail to live up to their assigned missions and help design the F-15, F-16, and other aircraft. Albeit, the mathematics of a "perfect aircraft" lost when faced with the bureaucracy of the government.
Building a flying airframe is relatively easy now. The slow expensive work tends to be in weight reduction, software development, and systems integration. But hopefully the Air Force has learned something from the problems in the B-2, F-22, and F-35 programs.
Sure, but how many people USAF has and how many billions did it cost? Compare that to Boom. Also, USAF does not have to comply with civil aviation regulations.
Military aircraft don't have to go through the FAA certification process but the actual requirements are generally even more rigorous. So that doesn't save anything. Most of the work is typically done by the manufacturer's employees.
Like it or not, the term "defense" to mean something military-related is all over the Department of Defense, the defense budget, and defense contracting. While you are welcome to write off all these sources as ideologically contaminated, I think there must surely be better reasons to do so than their use of the term "defense". And, of course, you'll deprive yourself of news about specific technological developments.
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying.
We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
Hm. Significant delays and missed timelines aren't normal you say? Let's see (aerospace only):
• all SpaceX projects so far (USA)
• Virgin Galactic's space tourism plans (USA)
• Boeing's 787 and 777X (USA)
• HAL's Sukhoi-30-, Jaguar Darin III-, and Tejas LCA projects and production (India)
• BAE Systems Plc/TAI TF-X project (UK/Turkey)
• EADS's MRH-90, Tiger, and A400M (EU)
• Airbus A380 (EU)
• Comac’s C919 project (China)
• ...
TBH, it'd be easier to list projects that actually finished on schedule and didn't face significant delays, such as the Airbus A350XWB.
And most of the companies listed aren't even money-starved start-ups that required investor attention and media hype. It's almost as if developing, testing, and certifying cutting edge aerospace projects is kind of hard and just as easy to predict and schedule as large software projects...
Interesting comment about the XWB. The hype-driving is obviously necessary - nothing is ever more than ~5 years away, because that is the limit of VC/consumer patience.
How real of a commitment is this announcement? General Motors announced all that stuff with Nikola and then was able to pull out of it pretty quickly when it turned out Nikola had faked a demo.
Theranos isn't really the same thing though, they didn't pretend that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, they said they had already had the breakthrough and the tech was working and deployed. That's less "hype" and more just straight up "fraud".
Boom Supersonic is obviously overly optimistic in their deadlines, but they at least aren't pretending that they're meeting them when they aren't.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that Boom is Theranos, I wish them well. I merely pointed out that your reasoning of not holding people to account to deadlines that are 10 years over the initial estimate. Maybe it's time to address this at a VC level, because some things absolutely do need 10 years and the current VC culture absolutely gives rise to fraud at different levels.
They are a lot more similar that you like to admit though. Both of their hype descriptions are to support the hype culture that powers the environment they live in, namely silicon valley(even if they're not physically there).
It's just that at some point Theranos decide to resort to lying to keep the whole thing going. The scope that Theranos promised was actually physically infeasible, some subsection of it might have been possible. Boom will hopefully not do that.
But in terms of engineering, Boom also has yet to produce even a prototype of their plane. A test version is scheduled to testflight in 2021. We'll see about that, I don't think it will happen. Although 7 years for a supersonic jet from scratch would have been quite impressive.
Theranos could have chosen to build a bigger machine with a more limited amount of tests once they realized it's not possible, but they decided to tackle too many problems at once and double down on them. But what we conveniently like to ignore is that investors, politicians and media perpetuated the whole lie. It wasn't just Holmes, it was an entire culture of VC's and politicians that had a vested interest in perpetuating the lie and to some extent helped silence critics.
Besides the obvious scammy and blatant lies that Theranos leadership did(down the line). There was also the aspect of feature creep (i.e. 200 tests per tiny blood vial) and ignoring both leadership and biochemical specialists(i.e. sample size and machine size).
In the case of Boom I like to think that at least Josh Wilding seeing that he has been an Aerospace engineer for 20 years has mentioned the issues with the timeline, and was overruled probably by either his peers or VCs, but we won't really know for sure. But if the engineering cofounder is already not involved at this point, let's hope that other issues won't follow.
It was authorized by the board in 2005, first flight was planned for 2008, entry into service was planned in 2010. First flight was 2013, it entered in service in 2018 (January, but still).
I agree that it is wrong to give companies a pass on this behavior, but, with respect, this is in fact pretty normal in the aviation industry. In fact, given the ambitions of Boom, I’d argue they’re doing quite a bit better than any of us might have expected.
2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
300+ deaths seems like a very tough lesson to learn to prove the rule, though. Sorry, you comment struck me as rather macabre. This isn't a software update that caused people a temporary bit of inconvenience.
Aviation has very high visibility of fatal crashes but a low overall rate. The car fatality rate is much higher but we treat it as routine because they are lower severity events at much higher frequency.
When you want to sell, you should be overly optimistic in your presentation.
When you have sold, you can now explain the real picture and explain that actually... everything will take 3 times longer than when you were trying to sell.
How is it fraud if they actually deliver a product, but late? Wouldn't fraud be never delivering a product after taking money for it? Granted, the IF in the first sentence is still looming over them.
I hate super positve PR propaganda too, and a skeptical eye should always be applied. Fraud is still used when talking about Tesla, yet they clearly have developed products. Yes deadlines were missed. I'm willing to give Boom a bit of leeway.
Delivery time is a feature of the product you are selling.
Say I'm looking for a bike. Person A is selling one I like and promises to deliver after two weeks. Person B is selling one I like a bit less, but promises to deliver after one week. I might now choose to buy from person B, even if I like the bike a bit less.
If I buy from person B and they deliver after three weeks, there's a problem. Why did it take three times as long? Did they ever intend to deliver after one week? Should they have known they wouldn't be able deliver after one week? They got the order based on a feature they didn't deliver. If that was intentional, that's fraud.
“Could be ready” falls pretty short of making a promise. I’m not sure what giving them a pass really entails. If they’re late to market it costs them money. Are you going to boycott using their product if it is good but late?
>> We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
You don't have to. It it not a government project.
The only pass that matters is their ivestor's. And most of the time as long as the progress is made and the outcome overweights the delay, everyone will be happy to wait.
Same with cures and vaccines. Who cares if they are delayed? It is not on purpose. Would you rather have it delayed or never?
>That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it
Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.
> press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it.
Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up.
If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others).
Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold"
And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit.
And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on.
That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility.
And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed)
In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines".
To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise.
That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?
Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
Delays happen. That is normal. I am more worried about the slip in speeds. "Traveling at Mach 2.2" becomes "could fly at Mach 1.7". That is a radical loss of performance. It is more than just 0.5. It is a switch from traveling at a speed to "could fly", a theoretical top speed for the same aircraft. I think they are facing solid engineering challenges and are having to reduce expectations.
FYI, most airliners already fly at or above 0.85 Mach. 1.7 is faster than 0.85 but operationally it will only be only an incremental decrease in total travel time.
The sweet spot for civil supersonics from an aircraft design standpoint is less than Mach 2. You can maintain good propulsion system performance without variable geometry inlets, boom strengths are lower, aeroheating loads are lower, fuel burn is lower, etc. Operating expenses will be significantly lower for such an aircraft. Maybe Boom is finally realizing the importance of all this as well.
Whether that's enough travel time reduction to make these aircraft worthwhile is definitely a valid question. The low-boom technology that NASA is pursuing is for sub-Mach 2 aircraft (I don't believe Boom is pursuing a low-boom design, but I haven't followed closely as I don't consider them a credible organization either).
Even if we say doubling instead of halving, I assume that the total portion of a transatlantic flight that it could travel at top speed would be pretty small, so the total time might still be more than half.
other than lower speeds during approach and departure around controlled airspace with speed restrictions, the overwhelming majority of a transatlantic flight will be at full speed.
of course, there are exceptions with congestion, hold patterns, excessive vectoring, etc, but this is generally true.
another thing to keep in mind is headwinds/jetstream. when going west across the atlantic; they can often be 100+mph. so the delta between boom and eg. a 787 becomes even more pronounced in this situation.
Typical height of the polar front jet stream is 30-40,000ft, that's great for a 787 that's most efficient exactly in that altitude range. But doing mach 1.7+ you want to be much higher for efficiency, so it's entirely likely that the Boom plane will miss the jet stream.
They're talking about going against the jetstream, so that doubling air velocity means more than doubling ground velocity. If the boom plane gets to miss the jet stream entirely that only improves the situation.
It makes sense to always communicate the best case, not the most likely expected case. If you allow worse-than-best-case to become the plan/expectation, you'll fill the time and often exceed it.
As an engineer, this feels strange, because you might expect to be trying to be as close to correct as possible when you give a date. But that's not the goal. The goal is to create a narrative and sense of purpose that gets you there as quickly as possible.
Finishing something 6 months behind schedule in 18 months is still better than doing it "only" 1 month behind schedule in 19 months. Of course, you also need a risk analysis of the worst case, and to understand the financials and be able to survive a reasonable range of potential delays.
Gotta say you're completely ignoring the negative toll this takes on morale. I hate unrealistic timelines, and I've been on almost every side of the table (engineer, engineering manager, product manager, program manager, even CEO for a tiny startup). Internally, only the most junior engineers tend to believe the timelines for these ambitious R&D projects. And it leads to senior engineers just getting tired of endless politicking around hype instead of actually focusing on building the thing and being honest about when it will be ready. To be a little less professional - the timelines are usually fucking bullshit.
I've quit before because of this very reason. You're allowed to disagree with me obviously, but I don't want to work with you if you honestly believe this is a good policy.
There’s also the effect where engineer A says “two years” and has a solid plan to hit that date, but engineer B says “6 months” without actually having a plan.
In my experience, engineer B usually gets to take charge of the project, and inevitably takes 3-4 years before the project ends, having failed to deliver anything that works.
Bonus points if the project is then declared a success by the pointy haired boss that bet on engineer B.
If you hand out ownership/status/power/money based on unsubstantiated project estimates, I’m not sure you can ever expect very good or happy results.
It’d be much better if all of the characters in that example sat down and decided what the most realistic best case with a solid plan looks like, and took responsibility for communicating it together, and you find a different way to decide who gets to own it.
The negative toll comes when timelines become deadlines or there’s too much pressure to hit them. Those are not good ways to manage or motivate a team.
It is essential to create teams that are aware of and talk about the most optimistic timelines, but where everyone knows the people on the front lines doing the work are in control and set the pace.
This is very achievable if the starting point is empowering people, removing roadblocks, and increasing the team’s capabilities and leverage, rather than trying to impose timelines.
> 2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s"
This one is the most egregious. It’s hard to imagine a good-faith scenario where the company actually thought they would ship a commercial airplane in a couple years when they didn’t even have their scale model working.
Even then. It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787. And that is a bog standard subsonic airliner design with the most notable feature being the composite construction.
> It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787.
This is a bit like saying SpaceX's Starship isn't possible because Boeing's SLS is costly and delayed. "If Boeing can't do it, it must be tough" is no longer the same statement it would've been in the 1960s.
Airbus, if you would like an alternative comparison, kicked off development of the A350 in 2005 and the maiden flight was in 2013, eight years later.
Boom hasn't even finished the scale prototype they've been promising for a while, much less started development on an actual full size plane. If they ever fly the plane, it will be more than a decade from now.
> This is a bit like saying SpaceX's Starship isn't possible because Boeing's SLS is costly and delayed.
SpaceX also says they'll have operational cross-earth passenger service for less than business class ticket by the end of 2028. I'd gladly take a bet against that.
We don't live in the 1960s and tolerate 1960s accident rates any more. The 787 is much more representative of a reasonable timeframe for an experienced company to design and build a new airliner than anything that happened in the 1960s when there were minimal regulations and no competition.
I agree, airliners are marvels of modern engineering. I am grateful that we can be flippant and call them bog-standard because we have (collectively) become so good at making them.
To be fair, the 787 isn't bog standard. It's built from composites, which change a lot of dynamics in the plane. Similarly, there were a lot of avionics updates from the previous generations. It looks standard, but there were a lot of improvements to the plane that required a lot of work.
Alright, let's use Airbus as an example, then. The A350 (seems to be their most recent airliner) had its maiden flight in 2013, after being in development for 8 years, since 2005.
There seems to be conflicting information. Sounds like they had orders lined up in 2005. One source says industrial launch was on 6 October 2005, another says final approval for the launch got delayed to 2006. All a bit ambiguous.
But in any case, it looks like Airbus has a similar development timeline for new planes that Boeing does. I suspect that is broadly applicable to other manufacturers as well. As a sanity check, I looked at the development of the smaller airliner from Bombardier (now Airbus A220) and it was January 2007 for industrial start, to September 2013 for maiden flight.
The market rewards bold predictions. In 2016, Elon Musk said customers would be able from LA to NYC with no human intervention by the end of 2017. He's now the richest person on Earth.
Additionally - what is the project timeline impact for any major endeavor such as this with respect to supply and labor chain interruptions due to pandemic, Suez-tipation, other economic factors...
I recall reading that major construction, mfrg project timelines were automatically setback by a large number of months due to the Evergreen thing... (JIT construction required a precise delivery of components and even a few week hiccup in that caused a downstream of ++months)
OBV Boom isnt affected by such - but the labor version locally in the US (Colorado) could still have slowed...
The other non-tangible impact of something like this is the loss of intellectual momentum that a team may have had aggressively going after a timeline when suddenly all the eng team gets to go spend more time with family...
Well, in 2019 the pandemic hadn't given a big blow to the aviation industry so that slower start could be blamed on that. Not a good time asking for investment into a high-risk expensive niche product meant for a market that's in deep crisis.
Not the speed thing though :) But the faster you go the more energy it costs for the same distance so that would make sense.
It’s probably a function of human nature to be conservative there.
It seems that the FAA is trying to optimize for the fewest unknown unknowns, and until the 737 MAX it would be hard to argue that entirely new airframes, propulsion and control systems operating in flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation would achieve that objective better than incremental changes.
The associated bureaucracy bloat can be a feature because it’s harder to sustain a ruse over time.
That said, it really does impede development of arguably safer systems.
Great to see so much innovation in aerospace. Boom has said they're going to reduce noise, but they've also said they'll only fly supersonic over water with buffers between supersonic zones and populated areas. So the 'boom', as it were, is still a concern.
I'm super interested to see how quiet their planes are at subsonic. If you ever saw the Concorde flying subsonic, it was unbelievably loud. Nothing to do with being supersonic - their engines were just obnoxiously loud. Came into Cape Town a long time ago and made the whole town rumble on final.
..Boom says: "Today’s subsonic commercial aircraft are 80% more fuel efficient than those of the 1960s, and noise footprints have shrunk up to 90% in the last 50 years. This technological progress has fueled Boom’s efforts to design a supersonic airliner that makes economic sense for airlines and their customers. "
However, the innovation that enabled this is high bypass turbofan engines. Turns out if you move more air slower, it's way quieter and more fuel efficient because physics. Boom can't take advantage of this - at least directly, because they have to go supersonic. A high bypass turbofan engine is huge, by it's very nature. At supersonic speeds this presents a lot of drag. That's why I'm super curious how they plan to be quiet and fuel efficient while also being supersonic.
Concorde was actually quieter (subsonic) than a lot of other aircraft in use when it was first released. Over time however as other commercial aircraft became quieter, Concorde wasn't developed any further, so by the end of its life it was very noticeable.
The sonic boom really isn't an issue as long as you can fly that part of the route over the sea. Concorde often took longer routes to avoid flying over land, and it was still quicker than a more direct subsonic flight. Or you just fly supersonic over countries you don't care about - flights from London to Bahrain would fly supersonic from the Adriatic Sea crossing the Middle East over land to Bahrain.
The Bahrain route is interesting, as today it is 5.5 hours and Concorde was 4 hours, so not that much difference. I'd rather spend an extra hour and a half on a much more comfortable and bigger aircraft. They also tried routes to Singapore (stopping in Bahrain to refuel), the total flight time was 9 hours, compared to non-stop flights today which are 13 hours. I wonder if developments in reducing the time subsonic aircraft take to reach and descend from cruising altitude could narrow that gap even further.
It's not just a high bypass ratio that has helped. It's computational acoustics (we can predict the sound something makes based on its geometry and movement in a medium), nacelle design, materials. In supersonic flight, the most pressing issue is suppressing the sonic boom. There was a lot of work on this in the late 00's, with even Cessna rumored to be working on a quiet supersonic business jet. Various attempts - a bulging, ogival nose will increase the local density raising the local mach number leading to a weaker shock, and other thing. It was a lot of fine tuning and deep insight into transonic phenomena.
I can assure you that the planes the take off from the airport located 7 km, plain line of sight makes measurable noise, with infra basses I guess. Not unbearable but clearly a nuisance. So maybe there's progress, but it'd be better with just less planes...
Worth noting that human sound perception is logarithmic, not linear. A 90% reduction in sound is -20dB, which is significant. But in human perception terms, that’s only about a fifth of the range of the typical soundscape which ranges from the 20dB of a quiet room to the 120dB of an ambulance siren.
It depends on the the physical property you're measuring.
For power/intensity ratio, 10dB is 10x; for amplitude ratio, 20dB is 10x.
Loudness is typically measured by "sound pressure level" (dB SPL), which uses the latter (amplitude ratio).
Also, it's worth pointing out that while sound perception (like almost all the perceptions people have, Stevens's power law [1]) is logarithmic, its base isn't exactly 10 or 100. [2] claims that every 20dB (10x) in SPL, the perceived loudness is 4x.
NASA is working with Lockheed on the X-59 QueSST to tackle the noise concerns. Construction is ongoing but over half complete according to wp . first flight planned for 2022. 2025 or so is when the icao expects to establish a new sonic boom standard. If things go well it could be much less of a blunt instrument than 'no overland flights ever' like what was required for the birds in the days of Concorde and Boeing's SST competitor, the 2707 or Lockheed L-2000
Yep. Many years ago I was a junior at an engineering consultancy that specialised in noise & vibration. I spent many a happy hour out in the sun replacing melted loudspeakers that were being used to feed 'anti noise' into the exhaust ports of a pair of RB211 jet engines. The engines were ground mounted vertically to introduce pressure into the gas network should an emergency loss arise. This was rural Cheshire (UK) and some of the local properties were very old and expensive and needed protection from the vibrations these things produced. In reality they were never used but they were tested twice a year, for a total of about 2 minutes. After that the speakers (yep lots of hi-fi cones) were mush. They did their job though. And I got to travel up to Cheshire, see my then girlfriend who lived in Manchester and spend a week up on a roof in the sunshine replacing them.
> However, the innovation that enabled this is high bypass turbofan engines. Turns out if you move more air slower, it's way quieter and more fuel efficient because physics. Boom can't take advantage of this - at least directly, because they have to go supersonic. A high bypass turbofan engine is huge, by it's very nature. At supersonic speeds this presents a lot of drag. That's why I'm super curious how they plan to be quiet and fuel efficient while also being supersonic.
I’m curious if either shielding the engines, or having a scramjet (like a turbofan but without the blades) could have a similar effect.
[Increasing Mach Number] can cause the drag coefficient to rise to more than ten times its low-speed value.
I only know this because of a number of fluid-dynamics courses that are only required for Mechanical and Aeronautical engineering majors. Barely anyone else is expected to know this information. Mach numbers represent fluid-flow discontinuities. If there is fluid flow in a varying inner-diameter tube and there is a Mach number change from <1 -> >1 at any point in the tube, as long as the Mach discontinuity is there, fluid flow characteristics before and after the discontinuity are decoupled from each other, they no longer influence each other if the Mach discontinuity is present.
It actually IS a step function. A shock wave by definition is an instantaneous change in fluid properties. At the molecular level, the change in properties is observed as occurring within a mean free path length (average distance a gas molecule travels before colliding). Imaging that shows the jump: https://phys.org/news/2015-08-schlieren-images-reveal-supers...
It should be noted that these problems aren't the only important reason why Concorde failed. Pre-orders were made in 1963-1967 and almost all were cancelled in 1973 due to the oil price shock, in addition to a 500% increase in sales price.
Concorde had a bit of bad timing. It was released during the worst crisis of aviation (until 9/11), and there was already a second version planned with increased fuel efficiency, but that came never to be with all orders being cancelled. And those cancellations also meant that all economies of scale advantages were gone.
>Concorde had a bit of bad timing. It was released during the worst crisis of aviation
It doesn't feel like Boom has the timing on its side either. Feels like we're still in a massive aviation crisis and I'm not sure how long it's gonna take before things look good for the industry.
If Boom succeeds, we'll get less expensive supersonic travel (that is going to compete against something ballistic like Starship). If Boom fails, someone will buy the tech and still use the jigs, tooling, and IP for something in the aerospace domain (hopefully). Either way, Boom folks get to work on something they enjoy and is meaningful to them (hopefully), and we all get any benefit (hopefully) from their time grinding on aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, and material science problems.
Airbus used the new tech for their next generations of plane I believe. I guess the fly-by-wire has been used for the A320 soon after. ABS brakes, a more resistant steel alloy, there is this list in French for some of the innovation made for the Concorde and used elsewhere afterward.
Different times. Communications and financing are a different beast today. One can reach out to folks they'd never have interacted with in the old days (Twitter, for example). Someone with experience could put together 7 digit financing in a few days, 8 digit financing in weeks, maybe more.
This is one of the most interesting features (or bugs, depending who you ask) about the current time we live in. We can organize massive funding and technological efforts like this over morning coffee and Twitter banter.
> Feels like we're still in a massive aviation crisis
Commercial aviation tends to be a cyclical industry so there will always be a crisis somewhere on the horizon. Airlines like United are trying to broaden their offerings so that they can better maintain margins in a downturn. Some "Time is Money" expense account travelers will always have money to spend on a premium product like getting there twice as fast.
In what way is there a crisis? The major US carriers keep expanding. keep adding new routes, buying more places, etc. Air travel was at an all time high before the pandemic and is likely to rebound and hit new records in coming years.
In fairness, most business travel is not flying around the world for a 3 hour meeting. I do expect events, roadshows, series of customer meetings, etc. to come back--albeit probably gradually and perhaps not reaching prior levels.
Are they expanding... Or are they switching towards more fuel efficient planes with the expectation that it won't be long before countries start restricting flights that produce too much CO2?
Airplanes have a lifespan. Janky "third world" countries will let you fly a plane that should have been scrapped, but the big airlines in major countries scrap their old planes at the end of life to ensure flying is safe. Getting more fuel efficient planes is a side effect (and with the cost of fuel one they are excited to get)
But if we are, as I hope, on the peak of the crisis, and Boom wants to come to marked towards the end of the decade, it could be there exactly at the time the airline industry is in the next boom.
The companies working on supersonic jets are in process of lobbying hard to get FAA approval for exemptions from noise regulations. [1]
> - Concorde didn't have the range for Pacific
Not their target market, they want to be a successful niche.
> - Costs didn't work for Atlantic routes
They claim improvements in fuel efficiency and their unique selling point (apart from the speed advantage) is the use of "green" fuels (whatever that implies). Also, see previous point: they don't want to be mainstream anyway.
> - And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
Not a problem they want to solve. Niche and all.
While the economics are indeed questionable, these products cannot be compared to flagship products like Concorde. The jets are significantly smaller (50 PAX vs. 92-128 PAX), benefit from 50 years of progress in aviation technology, manufacturing, and operations and they have a very specific use case in mind.
Concorde was the result of a technological dick-waving contest between Western Europe and the US w.r.t. civil aviation technology. Its purpose was as much of a political nature as it was an attempt at testing/demonstrating the practicality of supersonic passenger jets.
It ultimately failed, but that doesn't mean contemporary attempts have to due to the differences in scope, technology and potentially regulatory environment.
I remain sceptical, but I wouldn't want to write it off as a failure from the get-go.
> The companies working on supersonic jets are in process of lobbying hard to get FAA approval for exemptions from noise regulations. [1]
Note that Boom _isn't_ focusing on noise currently, unlike the other companies (which are much more focused on bizjets), knowing this will limit the routes they can fly on even with any regulatory changes.
They're content to start with just the oceanic routes (and notably they're aiming for longer range than Concorde, and able to fly at least some trans-Pacific routes non-stop); presumably future iterations when it's known whether there will be regulatory changes (and what they'll be) could aim for lower noise and overland flight.
Even if they get an excemption, affected people will probably come with pitchforks and torches to the headquarter. These supersonic booms are really loud.
"Even if they get an excemption, affected people will probably come with pitchforks and torches to the headquarter. These supersonic booms are really loud."
Agreed.
I grew up near[1] the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and I have a very distinct childhood memory of some cadet breaking the sound barrier over our town.
I was (figuratively) knocked out of my bed. It was unbelievably loud. I thought the world was ending.
To be fair, this was probably a very low altitude flight so it was probably much worse than a "normal" sonic boom.
I grew up under fairly constant sonic booms. They always seemed pretty cool because it meant a high performance aircraft was overhead. I'm sure they annoyed some people. They excited some people. And they just became mundane to a lot of people.
Are you confusing sonic booms with regular loud aircraft? Sonic booms over land are illegal in most countries. The US military only ever does supersonic exercises far offshore.
I'm not the person you are replying to, but there is a possible explanation if the person is American. In 1964 the FAA organized an experiment to perform supersonic fly-overs of Oklahoma City over a period of 6 months. Quoting from Wikipedia "the experiment was intended to quantify the effects of transcontinental supersonic transport (SST) aircraft on a city, to measure the booms' effect on structures and public attitude, and to develop standards for boom prediction and insurance data."
- The US Airforce performed ~8 booms per day between 7am and the afternoon
- In the first 14 weeks, 147 windows in the city's two tallest buildings were broken
- An attempt to lodge an injunction against the tests was denied by a district court judge, who said that the plaintiffs could not establish that they suffered any mental or physical harm and that the tests were a vital national need
- Testing was paused for a time when activist groups sought a restraining order against the testing
- The Saturday Review published an article titled The Era of Supersonic Morality, which criticized the manner in which the FAA had targeted a city without consulting local government
- All this public pressure ended the testing early
- There were 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
> There were 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
That doesn’t seem much money. Even with inflation which makes it $110,600ish it seems very reasonable. I can imagine one difficult window install making up this much.
I also grew up with constant sonic booms. There is no way to mistake a loud aircraft for them. This is like mistaking a loud engine with a gun shot.
I grew up in Germany, and whatever the laws said (probably sonic booms were illegal), they didn't apply for the allied troups (mostly British and American in my region). So jet fighters going supersonic pretty close to the ground were a rather common thing, you might hear one once a week or so.
(Technically, Germany became only with the 2+4 treaty in 1990 a fully souvereign nation, formally ending the occupied state after WW2)
The U.S. military does supersonic flights over land, too. For example, see page 39 of the R-2508 Complex Users Handbook[1], the section titled "Supersonic Operations". The R-2508 complex[2] is an airspace around the area of Edwards Air Force Base in California.)
Yeah in France we have them too, I live not too far from Mirage/Rafale air bases, and they fly over sometimes. I remember it was more common around the 2000s, nowadays I hear it less than once a year.
I think it happened over Paris last year and people freaked out, calling for a bomb and everything.It was for an interception mission.
I grew up in a remote part of northern California, and I can assure you that every so often a military jet would would fly right over our house at super sonic speeds(and very low altitude, barely above the tree tops).
It was mind numbingly loud and obnoxious-the entire house would shake and rattle and you couldn't hear anything but the rumbling.
I sincerely doubt the jet in question was flying at supersonic speeds right above tree tops. Couple of reasons, at low altitude most military jets can only handle mach 1.2 or so at the cost of massive fuel consumption. Any sort of long distance flight at low altitude, supersonic speeds would waste massive amounts of fuel. Additionally all aircraft are significantly less maneuverable at supersonic speeds which is a bad combination with being close to the ground. Lastly and probably most importantly sonic booms are really really loud. As in they can at least in theory kill people if in close contact(not aware of this actually happening at any point, but there was a cold war project to use a low flying supersonic aircraft as an anti-tank weapon). Point is if they actually where supersonic I would be surprised if you didn't have some form of hearing damage. Also shaking and rattling is not consistent with a sonic boom, just normal jet noise.
They are not looking for the ability to cause sonic booms, they are looking allow supersonic planes that don’t produce the concussive booms.
> In the airline industry’s current tube-and-wings model, shock waves largely roll off and then meld into a sonic boom. The aerodynamic X-plane, however, is designed to scatter multiple shock waves and minimize their cumulative effect, producing only a rumble or soft thump. [1]
> Acoustic engineers have developed a system for measuring sonic booms, called perceived levels of decibels, or PLdB. A decibel (dB) is a measure of pressure; PLdB is what people actually hear. When the Concorde airliner went supersonic, its window-rattling booms scored a PLdB rating of 102, equivalent, for a split second, to the high whine of a fighter engine just feet away. Those are the booms that inspired the original FAA ban. The X-59 has been designed to achieve a PLdB of 75, similar to what might be heard when standing next to a heavily trafficked road. (The numeric drop is larger than it might seem; the decibel scale is logarithmic.) In more conventional units, the Concorde’s supersonic sound waves carried a powerful maximum atmospheric overpressure of two pounds per square foot. By contrast, the X-59’s would exert 0.3 pounds per square foot on the eardrum. [2]
> They claim improvements in fuel efficiency and their unique selling point (apart from the speed advantage) is the use of "green" fuels (whatever that implies). Also, see previous point: they don't want to be mainstream anyway.
That seems a logistical issue to me. Airport fueling services have Jet A/A1. So airlines buying Boom will have to arrange contracts to supply these "green" fuels at service destinations?
They've been using Prometheus Fuels (a YC-backed company with further investment from US DOE and BMW i Ventures) thus far, starting with a 2019 deal. It will probably be up to United as to how they fuel the aircraft once in service, but they are basically touting that it is using a carbon-neutral fuel source all through R&D and Prometheus is using Boom to show that it can produce A1 (or possibly JP-8 with additives) in some new ways starting with ethanol and renewable energy sources.
Tesla has at least partly solved some of those, no?
- Charging network: don’t they have their own network? I’m sure it’s not widespread enough to meet everyone’s needs, but it’s not nothing and helped get the ball rolling.
- Battery tech: has been gradually improving, range is now in the hundreds of miles which is enough for many uses.
- Too expensive / everybody wants an SUV: starting with luxury and sports models and gradually following up with mass-market models addresses both of these.
So I think the analogous questions for Boom are good and valid questions. Tesla had decent answers and Boom should too.
I still think the questions are perfectly reasonable. But maybe it just needs to be phrased as “how do they plan to address these?” rather than “which ones have they solved?”
That then turned out to become increasingly false over time. Buying the early stage product is a risky bet, you hope it will take off like that, but it might not. They do need a plan to address them, and to be trustworthy.
Those were issues of infrastructure which weren't built out, but could be built out.
Are you planning on refueling the boom mid-air at supersonic speeds?
Tesla also took an approach that analysts who clearly weren't "car guys" weren't expecting: mainly creating something with massive HP and TQ. Previous electric cars had yawn-inducing performance. Someone buying a 5-series probably at least partially bought it for the performance, when they got behind the wheel of a model S it was like getting behind the wheel of a modified M5.
Boom isn't bringing anything new to the table to solve the issues people have listed. Tesla had a plan to solve those issues from the get-go.
Boom is bringing to the table that the technology has advenced in the last 50 years and even the Concorde might have succeeded, if a second iteration had made it to the market. Also, partially the Concorde failed because Boeing opposed it. They were working on their own supersonic plane but were a few years behind. Unfortunately, they were so successful in blocking the Concorde, that their own project failed as the market had become convinced that supersonic flight doesn't work out.
It should be obvious that the market will eventually support supersonic flights. The question is just when. OP is probably asking these questions to determine if the time is now, or in the future.
Why? What customers is this meant to serve in the commercial airline market? The Concorde overwhelmingly catered to high end business travelers, which made sense at the time. Every hour you were in the air was an hour you couldn’t be doing business. Time is money so if you need to get across the Atlantic, making the trip as short as possible was worth the price. Now we have airplanes with WIFI, we have laptops, we have smart phones. Now you can remain comfortable, productive, and connected on your flight. Secondarily was the rich persons market.
You also gave up a lot of comfort to ride the Concorde. That would be even more true today with excellent business-class options on most airlines and many world-class first-class products like the Etihad A380 “Apartments”. Are high end business flyers or rich tourists really going to trade that to save 4 hours between New York and London in high enough numbers to sustain a regular route?
There is also the exclusivity factor, but that is already highly served by private jets. Then finally, just the experience. But is that enough to fill the seats every day?
Supersonic flight is a really cool idea but the reality involves a lot of tradeoffs. When it comes down to people actually buying tickets and looking at the customer base, I just don’t see it as some slam dunk product.
There's clearly a market for it. It's just that the market is probably a very different size if a one way trans-Atlantic ticket is $5K vs. if it's $20K.
No it didn’t. It sold a lotus Elise, because it was the cheapest way to deliver a car, and the MVP to showcase electric. It did not at all sell hype to consumers waiting for perfection
The early Teslas were overpriced for value delivered. They had shorter range, build problems etc..
People wanted to buy them because they were 'buying a dream' - and helping to move the ball forward.
There was a huge amount of 'good faith' in the process by early customers and supporters. Even to this day.
Tesla is an aspirational brand and people are paying an aspirational premium.
Boom will definitely be that as well. Execs will humble brag about their Boom flights, everyone will talk about - it's super exciting, super cool.
The issue I'm pointing to is scale ... will those smaller tranche of buyers be able to support all of the operational overhead of the airline and the ongoing R&D of the company ... is the question.
Honestly even if all we get out of this is an affordable low-carbon jet engine I'd call it a win. At the end of the day, Tesla is battery company that makes cars. Maybe Boom should try to be a jet engine company that makes planes.
edit: I say this as someone having little to no real knowledge of the aerospace industry :)
Elon Musk now claims that the final production Tesla Roadster used very few Lotus Elise parts. Even though the vehicles looked similar they ended up changing almost everything, and in retrospect using the Elise platform didn't save them anything.
Starting with the Elise provided a massive benefit: the ability to iterate. Big Design Up Front would have massively failed -- there were way too many unknown unknowns.
In the end the product was nothing like the Elise. But intermediate products were like the Elise, and could be driven and test manufactured and could inform revisions. A half complete scratch design could not have been.
Questionable. Going to a company that had experience with car body designs and getting an in-house designer would likely have been a better plan for them.
Many of their problem was due to the assumption that the electric car motor & batters from AC Propulsion were working as advertised and ready for mass production. That assumption was wrong. So the iteration was because changes in the propulsion system resulted in changes to the car, and changes in the car led to changes in the propulsion system.
It was barely an Elise by the time they shipped. So many changes were needed, that they said they'd have been far better off starting fresh, which is what they did with the S.
I don't think that would've been better. It gave them a good start for a POC/MVP.
It's the same as some people who say "next startup, I'll go straight to insert scalable architecture". That doesn't work. You need your flexibility to experiment and find what really works in the beginning.
Boom's premise is that they can reduce the sonic booms to acceptable levels while making incremental progress on fuel and maintenance costs.
Airlines are likely expecting that business trips flying coach are going to radically diminish. Offering a super-premium fast flight for the remaining business travelers who must travel but have a reduced tolerance for it is a smart move.
But isn’t Boom selling a vision for affordable supersonic flights?
What you’re suggesting about “super-premium” flights doesn’t map to what’s being publicly said about Boom or the fundamental principles of commercial flying.
As a matter of fact, the Concorde ultimately failed for those very same niche-economy reasons.
What’s your source for saying that business trips flying coach will diminish?
> What’s your source for saying that business tripes flying coach will diminish?
That's an unsourced opinion based on personal experience. Zoom has become a much more common method of connecting with remote teams. I don't see a compelling reason to travel for non-critical business functions, and if the travel is that business critical then I can probably get my company to pay the expense of a premium ticket.
There are probably 2 travel occasions per year where the business travel is more of a "fun" activity such as conferences etc. I'll still fly coach for those.
In my experience zoom meetings work a lot better if you meet the people in person once in a while. Human nature is someone you know in person is more trusted than an image on a screen.
Or suddenly you realize you can be effective working over Zoom instead of in person as long as you have those couple meetings a year, so you have new business or employee relationships that only existed locally in NY or London before. That’s an X000% increase in demand.
JFK-LHR-JFK business class is about $9k assuming you're travelling fairly flexibly without a Saturday night away, at least pre-covid.
Even a month away I can't see a direct flight for less than $8k return leaving JFK evening of Jul 11th and returning July 16th.
The flights are pretty much empty at the moment, but they would be at any price. Doesn't mean that VS/DL will sell for $7k (undercutting BA/AA's $8k), it's effectively a cartel.
First of all, don't be surprised if a goal of “the cost of a business class ticket” translates into something like 50% or 100% more.
Also the Concorde was not that much of a premium over first class on, say, a 747. I'm remembering +30% or +50%. Of course, that first class ticket was very expensive if you inflate it to today's money.
Affordable is relative. International business class from NYC to London is probably going to run you $3-4K RT for a business class seat which is absolutely routine for senior business people. Assuming you consider that affordable--which it certainly is compared to a private plane--a 50% premium over that would still seem to be in the affordable category. Doesn't mean it's cheap of course.
The Concorde was a premium over sub-sonic first class but it wasn't anything like double.
Counterpoint: fast, accessible in flight Wifi is a reality now. It means that flights aren’t anywhere near the kind of “dead” time they used to be.
I’m sure some CEOs will pay whatever it costs to boost their own egos but IMO that would push them towards private jets, not a supersonic flight with United. I find the actual arguments for faster flights less persuasive than they were in the 70s.
There are far more CEOs earning ~$500k/year than there are making private jet money. I've worked for a half dozen pretty successful SMEs and all of the C-Suite flew business class and I suspect they'd all take the option to cut a few hours off their trip if it was within 50% of the price of a standard business class ticket.
For that matter, you can get into fairly large public enterprises where the CEO is making well into the millions and they are not routinely flying private for a variety of reasons--but will routinely take premium commercial.
Private is expensive. For fun I looked into it a few years ago. I never did figure out how much a share buy in was (6 figures at least), but once you have a buy in each flight is still $7000 for a domestic flight (up to 6 people same price) My entire family can fly just over 1000, though that is coach not first class. Even if you fly first class private planes are a large step up in price.
Premium air travel is also much more comfortable than it was in the 70s. First class was more akin to domestic business class today than modern lie flat seating much less the real premium roomettes on some airlines.
The connectivity probably does make a difference for some. Personally, I appreciate the disconnect time.
Being on a plane isn't technically dead time, but no matter what, it's still much more comfortable being on the ground.
And taking 6 hours total out of your flying time means you have 6 more hours to enjoy your destination. Unless I was a celebrity that would get hounded by the public, I'd rather do TSA Pre-check + first class supersonic than a private jet.
The caveat for me is that I wouldn't trust a startup that is behind its timelines to create a safe aircraft without further information.
Supersonic means you can do London-New York for a afternoon meeting in a day trip. Leave Wednesday 8AM(UK) flight, arrive 6AM(11) in New York for an 8AM(13) breakfast meeting, finish up about 1pm(18) and you're on the 3pm(20) flight and back home for midnight(UK).
According to Boom, they are aiming for fares to be the same price or cheaper than today's business class travel.
Plus I imagine many of the ultrarich that you are talking about would prefer to fly private even if it is slower than flying commercial. Flying private also cuts into the time saving benefit of supersonic flight. You save time pre-flight as you can basically drive up to the plane, get in, and be immediately ready for takeoff rather than needing to arrive an hour or two early. And private flights operate on your personal schedule which is obviously much more convenient than organizing your schedule around someone else's timing.
Private flights also go where you need to. Not a big deal if you are headquartered in a hub and have business at a different hub, but as you have business in distance places a private plane ends up a lot faster because you don't have to wait in hub airports. I know my company keeps a flight crew in Frankfort Germany so that the CEO on trips from US to India they can land, refuel and change pilots and be off in 15 minutes. (I'm not clear if the crew lives there, or just flys commercial the day before) Though if supersonic airplanes were affordable I believe the CEO makes the US-Asia trip often enough to buy one.
I think this is key. There are now a lot more rich people who would pay for the speed, and just as importantly a chance to avoid the hoi polloi, than 4 decades ago.
The Concorde actually had a pretty profitable final couple months when they cut prices down from ultra premium because it massively increased their utilization. Boom also seems to have plans for Pacific routes according to their website, so I assume they're planning their range accordingly.
Good point, higher utilization is one of Southwest's key competitive advantages since they're able to squeeze 1 extra trip for their aircraft than competitors.
Significantly cutting travel time should also enable higher utilization. E.g. cutting LA-Sydney route in half (15hrs to 7hrs) theoretically enables fitting in a roundtrip in the timespan of a one-way.
By utilization I actually meant the percentage of filled seats but yes that's also an advantage of supersonic planes. You need roughly half as many planes to service the same timetable (assuming turn around is roughly as fast and doesn't get drawn out by technical/maintenance requirements).
The Concorde basically used afterburners. It used fuel at incredible rates. Boom is using more modern engine technology that can achieve the high cruise speeds using less fuel. This also increases effective range.
So it solves 2,3, and 4. Can do Pacific. Cheaper to operate. Can be used on all overseas routes.
Concorde engines were actually some of the most efficient ones while cruising above Mach 1.7 (because afterburners were only used to take off and to go transonic until M1.7).
So it was efficient but only when flying fast.
Wiki says:
The overall thermal efficiency of the engine in supersonic cruising flight (supercruise) was about 43%, which at the time was the highest figure recorded for any normal thermodynamic machine.
Not at all, the magic was in the intake which slowed down the air so the turbojet engine could use it. And that's why it was so efficient when flying at VMAX.
Wiki again:
Forces from the internal airflow on the intake structure are rearwards (drag) on the initial converging section, where the supersonic deceleration takes place, and forwards on the diverging duct where subsonic deceleration takes place up to the engine entry. The sum of the 2 forces at cruise gave the 63% thrust contribution from the intake part of the propulsion system.
Wow. This is cool. Looks like cutting-edge technology for 1972. (Apollo 11 landing was in 1969) The engines had digital control system connected to digital sensors in the front of the plane.
It was cutting edge and in a way the Franco-British Apollo program in terms of engineering. I mean not only in terms of speed, but engines, material, fly by wire, anti skid (aka abs), carbon brakes, CoG adjustment to reduce drag, even the now common Airbus flight stick was tested on Concorde...
I remember reading a book by an engineer from the Concorde program (he's from the UK) who got invited by the Americans working on the B-1 bomber (which was initially supposed to be a M2.2 thing).
They wanted to exchange about air intakes problems such as efficiency, surges, and all. The author was not impressed at all by what had been developed and tested on the B-1. And he thought what they had on Concorde was so much more advanced (he might have been totally biased of course).
Because as people say, Concorde was not tested, it was developed (hence the many prototypes, pre-production and first production models) because a lot of the technology had to be created and if it didn't, it had to be modified to be usable on a civilian aircraft.
A classic example is pulling the throttle all the way back while at full speed: on most fighter jets of the era, you'd completely trash the turbine if you did that. So they had to create a plane which did the right thing for pilots who weren't trained like fighter pilots...
It was also a case of doing all the wrong thing in terms of management. Like assembling two of the same things on each side of the Channel to please respective governments...
Note that the Concorde B (which never happened due to the eventual low sales of Concorde A) would've had no afterburners, and been quieter for climb-out and significantly lower fuel burn; it certainly was getting within reach during the time period of its development.
Despite these problems, Concorde managed to fly for a long time... on the routes that they managed to fly.
The reasons that they stopped flying were different. It cost a lot, and was a lot more cramped than first class or private... the competition. Meanwhile, the time you spend in airports diluted the time you save by flying faster. If these could fly from LCA to a similarly small US port, speed makes a lot more sense.
That said, this will probably fail. Most air travel stuff fails. I'm hoping it won't. Progress is fun.
I don't think the size of the airport made much difference: at LHR and JFK BA had a special lounge and other arrangements. You had to arrive 30 minutes before if taking luggage, otherwise just early enough to get through fast-track security.
LHR T5, arrive 40 minutes before takeoff - especially if you're going from a high numbered A gate for a small plane (which you could arrange for a premium service) security takes about 2 minutes, gate closes at t-20 for normal planes.
Not sure why you'd use it from Cyprus (LCA is Larnaca). If it could operate on a short runway though, London City to JFK or LaGuardia ala the BA airbus would be interesting, although the stop for Shannon has never appealed.
Part of that was also political. It's petty and I wish it weren't true, but a domestic-made plane making noise will be better accepted than a foreign-made plane making noise.
Whilst this is true historically, the regulations exist and I don't see rewriting them to tolerate sonic booms as a vote winner, not even for those committed to arguing against the trend towards stricter restrictions on greenhouse gases etc. A lot more people will live near the flightpaths than use them
Do you have any sources to back that up? U.S. Congress funded development of the SST (Supersonic Transport) back in the 60'ies but stopped funding in 1971 due to concerns and displeasure of exactly the sonic booms (and ozone layer issues). So five years before the Concorde entered service a domestic plane was not seen as being worth.
Heppenheimer's The Space Shuttle Decision has a chapter where this is discussed in detail.
Boom's aircraft don't make as loud a sonic boom as Concorde. Both NASA and Boom will conduct tests of this design in the mid 2020s to measure the sound at ground level in various conditions.
- much lower noise than Concorde (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). Ironically, they reduce the "boom".
- Pacific crossings. 4,900 miles range ( https://onemileatatime.com/boom-supersonic/ ) Tokyo - Seattle is about the furthest within that, at 4,777 miles. California to Hawaii is easily in range, USA to Australia is far out of range, but Brisbane to Hawaii is in range.
- Article talks about 15 planes not one.
Have they solved those yet? They're not flying yet, so no. But that's what they're aiming at.
> Tokyo - Seattle is about the furthest within that
There's about the shortest viable route I can imagine. I could see refueling stops being a thing, though. SFO-SIN is a pretty long flight, so an hour to refuel in Tokyo wouldn't be so bad.
> - And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
On both of those, the passengers are kings. If enough people decide they want to pay a lot to cross the ocean quickly, those things will not be a problem.
If the plane goes supersonic at 10 miles of altitude, will it still make much sound on the surface? It's not just distance, it's the pressure of the air at the altitude, too.
Haven't engines improved a lot since 1967?
No idea about cost, but currently oil is cheap and abundant, compared to 1970s, and the U.S. has a large domestic supply.
Regarding identical planes, I suppose first Boom's supersonic planes are going to be mostly identical. But even standard airliners get small changes with every dozen planes built.
But even if you get a higher dose per unit of time, you spend less time in the air so your overall dose is lower. Your link mentions that.
I guess the main exception would be for personnel that did a lot of flights. That could be reduced by requiring longer ground breaks than with subsonic aircraft.
The amount of radiation you receive during a regular flight is quite small, and more than you would receive on a supersonic flight: https://youtu.be/TRL7o2kPqw0?t=307
Right, that's something I was wondering when Boom was announced a few years back [1]. Will radiation be even worse for the crew if the plane body is made of carbon-fiber vs thicker metal like the Concorde was?
Common misconception. The Concorde was absolutely quite profitable throughout, and massively so after they adjusted the prices down at the very end when it was already being shut down due to safety reasons.
The Concorde was the safest plane ever. It flew for 27 years with just 1 accident. And that accident wasn't Concorde's fault. Another plane dropped metal on the runway, and Concorde ran over the metal and got damaged right before takeoff.
There are individual passenger aircraft that flew more hours and cycles than the entire Concorde production run without incident. The accident where running over a piece of metal on a runway during takeoff resulted in a raging inferno and ultimately the deaths of everyone on board wasn't the first time Concorde's unusually-prone-to-failure tyres had punctured a fuel tank when they exploded, or something likely to happen if a different aircraft ran over the same piece of metal. Separately, it also had two spontaneous in-flight structural failures of the rudder. All this in a production run of 14 aircraft that spent most of their life on the ground.
Considering it was a complete novelty designed in the 1970s it did OK, but I don't think there are many airframes its safety record compares favourably with.
They create a PR boost for United. They can tell the business travelers that "Super Diamond Elite" business travelers will get first access to these flights (Dates TBD). Making those people more likely to go with United over Delta.
How many transcontinental flights fly USA domestic routes? If this can cut my flying time from Seattle to Beijing, I would be a happy camper, hopefully they can go boom over BC, Alaska, and the Russia Fareast.
When iPod came out there were numerous successful portable music players already on the market. The iPod skeptics were not skeptical that there was a market for a portable music player--they were skeptical that the iPod's particular combination of features and limitations would do well.
With supersonic passenger service no one has demonstrated that there is actually a viable market for it. The two prior attempts were both heavily subsidized by government (Russia for the Tu-144, France and the UK for the Concorde).
It is quite different to ask "why do you think this product will do well against a bunch of established, viable competitors?" and to ask "why do you think this product can succeed in a market that everyone who has tried before has failed in?".
IIRC Concorde development was highly subsidized by the government but it became a sustainable business for British Airways as long as there were wealthy business travelers willing to pay a huge premium to get between the financial centers of NYC and London in 3 hours. After 9/11 a lot of that business went away and Concorde wasn't viable anymore.
Boom is taking the government's role, not BA's. I once did a back of the envelope calculation which suggested the government could have lost less money paying for a NY- Europe business class ticket on a regular aircraft for every person ever to fly Concorde. It was as spectacularly bad commercially as it was impressive technologically.
It was a sustainable business for BA because they got several aircraft at giveaway prices (the minister who sold them conceded it may have been the worst deal ever negotiated by a government!) which they could charge extortionate rates to fly on, but they still weren't flying more than one of them at a time very often.
You could add:
- Concorde didn't work flying east because with the time zone thing, you might be flying real fast, you still arrive super late. Meaning you could as well pay less and fly the red eye...
I fly SF->NYC redeye regularly. The practical side of takeoff and landing is that I get 4 hours of sleep max. I also start to sleep around 2AM NYC time. If I could reduce flight time to 2.5 hours, I would rather land in NYC at 2AM and get to bed there so I can start my day much better rested.
But do you fly in first class? Because for cheaper than Concorde, that's what you could get (and that's what Concorde was competing against) and usually in first, they don't wake you up for breakfast or whatever before you land...
And the other issue in your case is flying supersonic over land but I hear you.
First class is all very well, but you don't escape the unfamiliar bed; the noise of the engines and other passengers; the weird air pressure; the fact you're in your travel clothes; the strangely corporate environment; or the jostling and noise of landing and takeoff.
Of course, some people are less sensitive to these things than others - and jobs with a lot of travel probably select for people who find the experience of flying tolerable.
it might be an FAA requirement to be upright, but iirc some other international airlines (eg. virgin atlantic, air new zealand) allow you to keep your biz class seat in seating position during takeoff and landing.
At some point, I decided I'm too old for redeyes unless I really have no choice. Yes, it means getting up early to get in at a reasonable time but at least I sleep in a real bed.
I've flown London to Washington DC for meetings and then immediately returned to the airport to fly back, and I'd have loved to have had the ability to fly supersonic for trips like that.
So while "just" flying East might be less attractive, very brief return flights will be attractive even if one of the legs doesn't seem very beneficial.
There are plenty of scenarios cutting hours off will improve. Whether there are enough of them to make Boom profitable is another matter.
Can’t you do coast-to-coast? I thought the requirement is no sonic boom over land, but you can fly out over the ocean and then turn around at Mach N. Eg SF<>NYC would be an obvious route that is worth adding some miles at the start, if you can go 3-4x quicker.
A sonic boom is a continuous noise, not just at the transition. You perceive it as a single noise at the ground, but so does every other person along the entire flight path.
Boom's aircraft uses a modern design that reduces the loudness of the sonic boom.
Thanks for the correction, I did have that incorrect. TIL.
Interesting follow-up -- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom, the angle of the shockwave cone decreases (i.e. gets narrower) as the plane's velocity goes up. I'm wondering at what Mach number would the cone be tight enough that it doesn't intersect land?
I hope everyone is given flight suits as just the image of a plane full of people making a 180 degree turn at 600mph to accelerate to 740mph is somewhat comical. I know not entirely what you are suggesting but its immediately the thought that came to mind.
While you are canabalizing some of your own 1st class passengers, the first airline to get a supersonic route going will also take first class passengers from other airlines.
You mean the third airline? This has already been tried before, and the financials didn't work out the first time. Maybe everything has changed, but who really knows.
And frankly, I'm hoping for failure. Some of these new super-sonic companies are trying to get approval for continental routes, saying that the boom is only as loud a car door. Like a car door slamming shut for 3000 miles is no big deal. The super-wealthy have enough toys to inconvenience the rest of us and destroy the climate; they can keep hanging out in first class, or on their private, subsonic jets.
When I read the headline I was quite confused at first, a big why why why? Then it came to me, it's a business bet on wealth concentration. Conventional first will always be far more comfortable, private far more convenient, but supersonic easily outdoes them both in bragging rights. And think of the networking opportunities when (if?) passengers are almost as packed as in coach despite paying a huge entry fee!
And the environmental aspect won't feel too bad actually: if you are traveling first you produce x times as much CO2 for your trip as others (how many more could they take aboard if that are was as densely packed as regular?), only because you are, well, too soft to sit out a few hours. But if the CO2 happens because supersonic, you get something very real in return. Time! Who could blame you?
Do they? The FAQ suggests that they are not aiming to do supersonic flight over land:
> Won’t the sonic boom be loud?
> Overture flights will focus on 500+ primarily transoceanic routes that benefit from supersonic speeds—such as New York to London or San Francisco to Tokyo. Overture won't generate a sonic boom over land cruising at subsonic speeds.
So what are the other 497+ possible routes (new York Paris also works) ? I read somewhere that after a Concorde test flight to Singapore, India complaint strongly and stopped the airway.
Given the fuel needed per passenger per mile, I don't think it 's reasonable to call supersonic planes sustainable, even if they use biofuels or synthetic fuels. As long as not all aviation fuel is net zero carbon emission, we shouldn't build/use planes that are unnecessarily inefficient. Also, biofuels and synthetic fuels have their own environmental impact (land use).
Supersonic planes are incredibly cool, but I can't help the feeling that it's an unnecessary and harmful luxury at this point. Although, that goes for a lot of other things used by the ultra-wealthy. Maybe ban yachts first?
Companies will build planes for whatever the market demands. We need regulatory agencies to impose carbon taxes on fuel usage so that inefficient planes are prices accordingly.
Aviation uses incredible amounts of fuel, and commercial planes are in the air more often than they are on the ground. My guess is that the embodied energy to operating energy ratio is lower for planes than for any other vehicle.
The beauty of a market-based solution is that you don't need to worry about details like that. If you price the externalities appropriately, the market will automatically optimize for the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly solution; grounding planes in situations where that makes sense and leaving them running where it doesn't.
And yes, a carbon tax would indeed result in "a greater cost of air travel". That's sort of the whole point.
Boom is designing the plane around e-fuels, essentially ethanol, which will be created from direct air capture of CO2, water, and renewable electricity, making the fuels carbon neutral. But you can't drop-in replace A-1 with ethanol, potentially the entire platform needs to change.
Depending on the type of renewable energy used in the production of the fuels, there might be some land use issues, but this is about as close as possible to the least impactful transportation option ever designed. Speed is always going to decrease fuel economy, but we're not going to tackle climate change by taking things away from people. Tech improvements like these are exactly what we need to move forward.
What are the expected numbers for the Boom plane? The Concorde was a little over 1/3 as efficient per passenger-mile compared to a contemporary 747. I seem to recall that the planned successor to the Concorde was considerably more fuel efficient.
I imagine it would still be more thirsty than a typical subsonic airliner, but I am curious to know how it actually pencils out.
So far we've made zero progress actually cutting emissions. So why not plan for a world where everyone just keeps emitting? That's what every other company and industry is doing...
Companies and industries won't have to pay to build a wall around Miami to protect it from water... or the repair to New York when everything gets flooded. That's why a government needs to step in, companies have no incentives to step in (why would they?).
Government, at least in democratic societies, follows from the will of the people. So it does matter what people believe. If nobody believes that carbon emissions are a problem or that we should actually do something about the problem, then it’s odd to expect that government would somehow step in and work against the believe of people.
The way the people in the thread react to the attempt to resurge a technology associated with huge emissions is worrying in this context. I guess a bit of handwaving around sustainability is enough to make people ignore the issue, while the aviation industry in real life has made close to zero progress in replacing fossil fuels.
United, as part of their announcement on Twitter, suggested that a weekend trip from sf to Tokyo would be possible with this. Even if the emissions per km weren’t higher (which is a stretch at best), it’s still trying to encourage people to burn through a huge chunk of their personal lifetime carbon budget in a single weekend for fun.
You're right. But what you're saying has been a fact for decades. And so far government hasn't stepped in. So do you want to live in a cave and hope the government finally steps in, or invest in a (carbon intensive) Miami wall project and make massive profit?
Net co2e globally. I believe it's flattened out since covid hit at least, the issue being we need it to fall massively and we can't rely on having a pandemic every year...
Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago?
Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts.
In fact, more humans now then ever and we have more resources then we ever had.
> Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago?
lt
Yes. In fact some of the smartest economists and intellectual at the time were panicking about things like 'peak-coal'. Sound familiar? Go actually read Jevons. Others were panicked about over-population, go read Malthus and the Population trap.
There was a massive popular movement in the US predicting imminent over-population and resource exhaustion in the 60s. Read things like The Population Bomb.
And it always end up with the same fallacy and terrible dangerous zero sum ideas. Jevons was so afraid of 'peak coal' he suggested the government should roll back technological progress so the coal would be available for longer.
Paul R. Ehrlich and his ilk suggested that the US should not lend of food aid to India and said it was preferable for them to starve now in small numbers rather then millions later.
Not to mention the horrible, discussing suggestion they had about other forcible population control measures and not just for India, but they also want such policies in the US (This is literal professor from Standford, suggesting forced sterilization as a solution).
Of course 'peak oil' that nobody cares about now, was a huge thing in the early 1990-2000s. In the 2010 people thought rare-earth were gone run out. And yet not a single non-renewable resource has actually ever seriously run out. Ironically renewable resources like whales are far easier to exhaust then non renewable resources.
> Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts. People obsessed with this id
This is again wrong. This is the exact zero sum fallacy that has lead to all the fallicy explained above and actually even worse the the much, much worse outcome of WW1 and WW2. Read some of the text of some of the German High Command before WW1 and all the suggestion they made. Read Hitler nonsense about 'Lebensraum'. Its all the same idea.
The idea that because if the total resource base is fixed, if there are Slaves who are consuming them, it means less for the Germans. There is simple logical conclusions that can be drawn for that, and they did.
The opposite is actually true. More humans, consistently has lead to more resources being available. Not just in the absolute but also on a per-human bases. The total amount of farm land needed has actually decreased in the US. There are far more forests in Europe now then there were in 1200.
You can today get 1kg of almost any material cheaper then in 1900 and you can get it in higher quality and of course you can also get tons of materials that simply didn't exist in 1900. Aluminum started out worth more then gold and now is not much more expensive then dirt.
Our total energy reserves now are larger then they have ever been. The discovery of uranium/thorium alone provides 10000x more energy then all forest that existed the world in 1500. The discovery of photovoltaic alone means we can take gigantic amounts of energy from a huge fusion reactor in the sky.
More humans consistently has meant the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. Read 'The Ultimate Resource' by Simons that was a direct response to the 'Population Bomb' people.
The difference between a bunch of dirt, a bunch of stone or a bunch of dirty sand is technology. Technology, human knowledge and productivity, is what turns utterly worthless stuff into resources. The Nevada desert for example has been without resources, and now it might turn out that it is the single biggest lithium resource in the US. What is and is not a resource depends on human knowledge and technology.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The bronze age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. The iron age didn't end because we ran out of iron. The oil age isn't ending because we are running out of oil.
Urbanization actually means we can have far, far more people using less space then ever before and people even do it voluntary. There are huge parts of the US that are basically uninhabited and actually are consistently less inhabited over time.
We are not even anywhere remotely close to potential maximum efficiency of farm land. Our methods have been improving year over year for 200+ years. And farming now still doesn't look that different compered to 200 years ago. We are not close to max productivity. In terms of productivity per labor hour farming has improved even more then when we simply looking at land productivity.
Using actual simple fact, a marginal increasing in human population has actually increase to resource availability/consumption by any one human.
Some of the smartest people and intellectuals in history who have not understood this effect and it has to be relearned and proven wrong over and over. Doesn't matter if its Malthus in 1700s or Elon Musk in 1990s. There are good and bad things that come out of this, some of these people look at this situation and simply do something about it themselves, Norman Borlaug or Musk. More often however it lead to people who wanted to limit population, take resources by force or prevent technological progress.
You make some interesting points, but I don't think you can get around the logic that more people on the planet has a significant contribution to global warming (with all other things kept constant).
If we if ignore population size/growth as a factor, we will ignore possible solutions related to that variable.
Reducing the world's population doesn't have to some dystopian horror show, with forced sterilization and mass cullings.
Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
Yes the world would be free of climate change if there were again only 100 million people. However that isn't a solution I would advocate.
> Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
Exactly. And we do that by more technology development into superior technologies that don't suffer the inefficiencies of carbon sources. And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.
Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
I also believe that the effects are not gone be as bad as some people predict, as was the case with most of the 'this is gone kill us all predictions'. Slow adjustment over decades is gone mitigate most of the issues.
> And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.
I thought you were arguing against forcibly shrinking the population (which I don't think anyone was advocating btw), but are you actually arguing to grow the population as a way to improve things environmentally?
Having more people in the world does not lead to "more people are working on these issues". Well, maybe it could, but it would be one of the least efficient (and most indirect) ways to make it happen.
> Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
Problem: We've got a problem with too many humans being ineffecient.
Answer: increase the population to get more ubanization, which brings some efficiencies.
I'll just ignore the decrease in quality of life for everyone, and just say that this doesn't seem like an elegant solution.
The number one contributor to increasing carbon emissions is population growth, but the same people who pretend to be outraged about carbon emissions are also the same people who were adamant that we needed a full lockdown for COVID so that not a single unnecessary person would die. You can't have it both ways. You can't say carbon emissions are destroying the earth and then do everything in your power to undermine earth's natural defenses against overpopulation.
Although it’s not mentioned, I hope people are watching Stuff Made Here. If not, definitely check that channel out. Cool projects, epic engineering, usually tied together with code.
This is not what the world needs, these planes will be extremely polluting and inefficient and carry very few people. I doubt if the US properly taxed carbon that these planes would even be considered. This is the worst idea the aviation industry has come up with in quite some time, I thought we learned better than to replicate the bad antique ideas from the past.
This seems like something that could only come out of tone deaf and climate denying America. The rest of the industry is trying to improve their climate targets and innovate, this is going straight in the opposite direction. I would sign a petition to ban these planes in a heartbeat.
We shape the future through investments, an investment in one thing takes potential away from another. Over a hundred years of fossil fuel investments have starved investments into for example batteries and the electrical grid, not to mention the whole thing was subsidized by the hidden cost of climate change. We as societies have failed hard to provide subsidizes and funding for these technologies, and a carbon tax at least at last reflects the real cost of fossil fuels, and creates innovation that is going to at least be useful in the future.
What are the commercials terms for deals like this?
I'd image United pays some portion upfront in exchange for a discount and being amung the first to have the plane. Boom gets some cash flow without dilution and validation from an airline.
If United is paying a portion upfront, is there risk factored in if Boom can't deliver?
I don't know any specifics, but I'd guess that united's up-front payment is near $0, and the main benefit for boom is not the immediate cash flow but the ability to take united's order to a bank and use it to secure a loan.
They won't even be able to take it to a bank, but it'll enhance their credibility with VCs. United get a bit of PR, and if Boom does work out they're at the front of the queue and have probably influenced the design a bit by the time it comes to deciding whether to actually pay.
Agreed. These types of agreements, this early, tend to be Letters of Intent that aren’t legally binding OR a contract stating that “if Boom produces planes to agreed upon spec by 2029, United will purchase 15...” plus a bunch of out clauses.
Yes the terms are usually like that. The upfront payment is probably fairly small and not material to United. If Boom fails to deliver then United will become one more unsecured creditor in the bankruptcy case.
The planned routes are EWR-LHR, EWR-FRA, and SFO-NRT.
United had pulled out of JFK in 2015, but just recently came back, because it turned out JFK's "prestige" factor impacted their business. EWR is a major United hub, but the idea of EWR being blessed with the "prestige" of supersonic flight is a bit funny.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if it gets moved to JFK as United rebuilds their operation there. A lot can happen in 8 years.
JFK is also a preferable location for staging supersonic flight because you don’t need to pass over/near a massive population center on a route to northern Europe
I think in the case of Concorde JFK was preferred because the engines used loud afterburners during takeoff, climb and acceleration to supersonic speeds. For noise abatement they would takeoff on burners, immediately turn south to stay over Jamaica bay, turn the burners off as they crossed over the rockaways (populated barrier island south of JFK,) and then go back on burners over the ocean to finish climbing/accelerating.
A plane like Boom that doesn't use afterburners could take off from any airport as long as they stay subsonic over populated areas.
Do you think that supersonic flights go supersonic within seconds of takeoff? By the time they get to cruising altitude, planes that takeoff from JFK and EWR will be well outside of NYC. The problem is that the great circle route from either JFK or EWR to Europe basically follows the Northeast Corridor to Boston.
For the market this venture is targeting, JFK and perhaps even (after the construction is finally done) LGA would be preferable. Both in the city, both have Centurion lounges, etc. But LGA is a shorter field without a substantive international ops infrastructure. With the end-of-decade timeline, I suspect this will end up launching from JFK.
Apart from the perimeter limit, LGA's runways are also only ~7000ft.
I don't know what Boom's expected runway requirements are, but if they're anything like the Concorde's (>11000ft), there's no way they'll actually be able to take off from LGA.
Edit: At least one source says that Boom's plane requires no less than 10000ft[1].
The LGA perimeter rule already has holes. Denver is allowed, and the rule doesn't apply on Saturdays. With the much more airline-friendly layout post-construction, it would not be surprising if the rule is changed.
Do airplanes usually spontaneously explode? I'd agree "Crash" would be a aweful name, but "Boom Supersonic" makes a lot of sense since most people know what kind of sound gets made once you reach supersonic speeds, while I don't remember any exploding planes really, but my memory has been off before.
Well most aeroplanes don't spontaneously explode, but the Boom's immediate progenitor Concorde is famous for having done exactly that in Paris upon takeoff. And that was the end of that.
Sonic booms are a continuous wavefront, not caused only once upon crossing the "supersonic speed barrier", but radiating outward continuously from the aircraft (or rather a compression point in front of the aircraft) as it travels. Everyone under the flight path of a supersonic craft gets to hear the boom as it passes over them, even though it is "already" supersonic.
it's a perfectly fine name for attracting media attention and VC dollars. in a few years they'll sell their IP to boeing or airbus and the name will go away.
one of the most inspiring startups to come out of YC.
i used to despair at YC just churning out more and more b2b software bc that is understandably the problem they know well (i think a YC partner famously said "you can get to series B just selling to YC alums").
But to actually do this in the world of atoms and get market validation... bravo. lets hope they keep a pristine safety record, of course.
It's just a matter of cost for customer: how much a ticket for supersonic flight is going to cost? If the price is comparable with a "normal" business class, I will fly with that one: you have lot of more space to relax and 3/4 hours more are not an issue when you can sleep comfortably.
How do they plan to deal with the sonic boom problem that relegated the Concorde to ocean-crossing routes? Or will this also be relegated to ocean-crossing routes?
What's the market for this? The Concorde was extremely expensive to operate and extremely expensive to fly on. Are they predicting lots of wealthy people looking for fast international travel between North America and East Asia?
> “The world’s first purchase agreement for net-zero carbon supersonic aircraft marks a significant step toward our mission to create a more accessible world,” Scholl said in a statement.
> Part of what made buying supersonic jets appealing to United is Boom’s plan to power the planes with engines that will run on sustainable aviation fuel.
How does a net-zero carbon aircraft work? What is "sustainable" in this context? Carbon credits?
Not sure about other countries but under current US laws it wouldn't be able to fly supersonically over land. Boom has been trying to get the laws to be a limit on noise heard on the ground rather than speed but that's going to take a long time to change if ever.
If the boom plane or similar is a success and airlines started lobbying for change then maybe something could happen.
Maybe good to remember that 18 airlines had once placed orders for Concorde, with only the 2 national carriers flying it in service eventually.
And that The Boeing 2707 was ordered by 27 airlines before the program being canceled…
How will ongoing supersonic flight over the ocean impact the whales and other marine life?
Presumably the Casual Transcontinental Supersonic travel market implies leaving a long tunnel of sonic boom shockwave sound across the entire ocean for each and every supersonic flight.
If there's a supersonic boom in the forest but no human to hear it, might it be an issue for anything else in the forest?
Hopefully, the negative effects of extreme sound pollution on humans and animals will be considered in the trade-offs to save a few hours of flying time for the wealthy.
I might be missing something with your comment, but there are obviously animals that live in and around oceans.
So "just" flying at super sonic speeds over oceans seems like it could be a disaster for marine life. The disruption to whales from noise pollution comes to mind
Noise pollution in oceans is a serious concern, yes.
But not transferring from the air to the ocean, the phase transition attenuates sound a great deal.
It's things like propeller noise and sonar which are causing problems. A sonic boom over the ocean is not going to ruin any whale's day, short of perhaps alarming them when they come up for air.
If a seat would be the same as first class today then I'd fly this. A 3 hour flight means I can take off at 7AM local and land in London at 3PM local and be where I'd like to be by 5:00PM local in time for a few drinks and a dinner. This would make jet-lag much easier to deal with.
If this works out, we can probably envision a future for travel where there are different price points for different travel times.
Traveling to the other side of the world?
Cheapest ticket is your traditional 18-22+ hr flight.
Next is your 9+ hr flight.
Most expensive is the 1hr trip via a rocket ship.
Arguably we are already there - direct flights for $X, one-stops via Dubai on Emirates for $X * 0.75, two-stops via Manila and a city in China on China Southern for $X * 0.50.
Wendover Productions has a great video on the latest generation of supersonic airplanes and their comparative advantage over prior attempts like the concorde.
Spacex is getting so good at making rockets, perhaps one day people will just take a ballistic trajectory across the atlantic, and arrive in 20 minutes! It's hard to imagine anyone being in such a hurry. I wonder if the spacex crew has thought about this at all.
Ten minutes at multiple G and an hour in free-fall sounds... fun, kinda? But it also sounds like the kind of thing most people wouldn't tolerate very well.
Especially the sort of older folks who could afford it.
Yes at this rate, Boom is competing more with SpaceX than traditional airplane makers. 2029? I read that as 2031-2033. By then, the ballistic approach may be commercially feasible.
I think it's worth noting that united received $5 billion dollars in federal aid last year. I wonder if they'll pay any of it back or if the surplus this year is going into purchases like this?
Might be an obvious question, but is there an engineering reason behind why they have the Avro Arrow / Concorde delta wing? Is that just a thing that makes physics sense for supersonic flight?
I think it's physics, yes. If you want to keep the leading edge of the wing behind the supersonic shock cone you need to have a highly swept design and a Concorde style delta wing is a good choice for lots of aerodynamic and engineering reasons.
I've always been surprised that no major airline has vertically integrated into owning their own plane manufacturer (e.g. United to acquire Boom as a company).
Isn't that because airline is a low margin business ? You'd need a ton of cash to own your plane manufacturer.
You may have hard time to sell planes to concurrent companies so you cannot scale like Boeing or Airbus.
You would be tied to this manufacturer for life and if you start to manufacture defective planes, you are on the highway to bankrupt and selling your plane manufacturer wouldn't even save you because nobody wants a defective airplane manufacturer.
Sounds like a lot of risks.
But those are just my thoughts, i'm far from being an expert.
I visited Boom at the Denver suburban airport facility in 2017 as part of a MIT alumni club tour. They had a 1/3 size mockup then- no passenger seats. I wasn't sure if that was the one they were going to use for flight testing or just for show.
A point was most of the design was done done and verified by computer. The Concorde and many of the early military supersonics were designed by sliderule and wind tunnel models, just like Apollo spacecraft.
Wow, that’s a pretty big boost in credibility if the terms of the deal are firm. As far as I know XB-1 is still preparing for its first test flight. So my assumption is that this deal is a commitment to buy if (and that’s a big IF), Overture actually comes into existence with adequate specs. Hopefully there’s some immediate money in the deal as well.
https://youtu.be/kraWrYS6CsE
The planes don’t exist and probably never will exist. Boom is Silicon Valley randos trying to play SpaceX, praying that their material science investments will somehow garner government investment. Supersonic travel solves no actual problem. Airlines could invest 1/10th the cost of this program to make air travel better so that customers would demand the planes go slower.
How is it that a technologically sophisticated aircraft company, that probably burns through cash or needs enough of it, produces advances in technology that have the potential to be useful downstream in other areas, advances human knowledge and experience in a multitude of areas, gets only 141 million, while a creative way to sell people ads (FB, IG, SC....) gets billions of dollars.
Valuation is based on risk and net present value of projected profits.
Advertising revenue is well proven and arrives quick, while as you mentioned this endeavor has high costs, high risks, and is not likely to be profitable for a long time, decreasing present value.
All of these purchase agreements you need to look at the conditions. Like, what are the exact terms of this purchase agreement? What dates need to be met, what price conditions need to be met, and how cheaply can those be reneged on. A huge amount of time new companies negotiate purchase agreements that have a lot of favorable terms in order to generate PR.
What I wonder is about the engines. It seems they are not building them. And they seem to make optimistic claims about them.
Say what you want about SpaceX but they developed their own engines and brought real innovation to the table. I'm a lot more skeptical about a company that seems to just wants to buy some engine.
I suspect that the "net" qualifier is doing a lot of important work in that statement. Maybe they are planting a gazillion trees, do carbon capture or regrow coral reefs. Could mean anything really. Plant enough trees and you'll theoretically have "net zero emissions" from lighting a lake of crude on fire.
Amazing how the only piece of tangible information in that post was how Boom promises to adhere to standards and regulation when it comes to noise levels.
The joke isn't funny. Just like the rest of SNL. Boom will be fine.
Seriously. Did any of you think "explosion" before "sonic boom" when hearing of this company for the first time? If so, would that actually influence your perception of the safety of their planes?
It's not SNL's influence, it's the fact that the brand has filtered into mainstream entertainment as the butt of a joke. Think of it as a signal of a larger problem.
I honestly hope VR and other telepresense stuff eats this market's lunch. It seems like an awful lot of resources to throw at the problem of people needing to read each other's social cues in person.
Am I the only one to suspect that this "order" is mostly a show deal? United Airlines will do anything to seem progressive, and Boom needs some credibility in order to raise more funding.
The world’s first purchase agreement for net-zero carbon supersonic aircraft marks a significant step toward our mission to create a more accessible world.
Wonder if the big plane MFGs will be interested in buying them out or believe they have the talent to bring to market if the market proves large enough.
There are several viable candidates. The reason this is hard are more related to a lack of infrastructure than fundamental technical issues. Producing vast amounts of fuel and putting the infrastructure in place to get it to airports around the world is a non trivial effort.
Here's a list of things that could work:
- Hydrogen has been used as rocket fuel and e.g. Airbus is working on adapting jet engines to burn it. Green hydrogen generated from wind/solar would be zero carbon and sustainable. It probably would not be that cheap though. It might also be interesting in combination with fuel cells. Airbus is working on that as well. Late 2030s are apparently what they are shooting for for this.
- Methane, also used as a rocket fuel (e.g. SpaceX). There have been multiple attempts to use liquid gas as aviation fuel and if you use e.g. bio gas or synthesize it, it could be sustainable. I don't think there are a lot of companies working on this for aviation but it has definitely worked in the past as a fuel. Of course fossil supplies of methane are plentiful but not very sustainable. Synthesizing it would be similarly expensive as other synthetic fuels.
- Ethanol (what boom is apparently proposing to use) is also suitable as a fuel. Corn based ethanol is of course controversial (i.e. only sustainable if you don't look at the production process with too much scrutiny) but there may also be ways to synthesize it in different ways as well. Currently mixing a portion of ethanol in fuels is a popular way for oil companies to green wash their business. Therefore, there's good reason to be wary of companies promoting its use.
- Kerosene could feasibly be synthesized long term (just like a lot of other carbohydrates). Technology for that exists but there are a lot of scaling issues to solve. E.g. Shell is working on that. This would obviously be great for powering legacy planes for the foreseeable future. Planes produced today could fly well into the 2050s or beyond. So there is an obvious economic incentive to make that work.
IMHO hydrogen is the most obvious path as there is a growing momentum to use it in many other applications and some serious effort to product it in sustainable ways. E.g. Airbus bringing planes to production in the late 2030s could inspire a lot of airports to start investing in related infrastructure. Relative to kerosene, it would be lot less polluting. Co2 is not the only issue associated with burning kerosene. Synthetic Kerosene might be a good second option. Everything else could work but seems less obvious right now.
But it's not bland. You instantly remember it, makes you more likely to talk about the company if only to remark on the name, and I'd imagine it leads to more press coverage as well.
It's a given that this is the entire point of the name: "Boom Supersonic" is just a cool-sounding (depending on your taste) play on "supersonic boom." It's not like the inconvenience of supersonic booms was some secret negative connotation that whoever named Boom Supersonic didn't know about.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/supersonic-passenger...
Some side-by-side comparisons:
2019 article: "Boom envisions its Overture airliner traveling at Mach 2.2." 2021 article: "a plane that could fly at Mach 1.7"
2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s". 2021 article: "It is targeting the start of passenger service in 2029."
The 2019 article also says that Boom is constructing a 1/3rd scale version of Overture that could be making test flights later in 2019. This article from October 2020 says that the 1/3rd scale vehicle was "rolled out" in 2020 and could be ready for test flights in Q3 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/26/boom-supe...