I agree. Of all the options, quite possibly one of the worst names you could have picked. I'm surprised the negative associations weren't obvious to them.
Agreed, terrible name. Can you imagine getting on an airplane with Boom painted on the side or waiting in the Boom terminal? I like fast airplanes, but I think they need to come up with a better name.
It could work until they have an accident, at which point the double meaning will kick in hard-core... especially since the traditional airline industry will PR flak them. (Flak pun intended.)
Boom is the company making the plane. The $5000 is an estimated ticket price based on the plane's relative cost of operation compared to modern jetliners.
The best possible brand connotations are an interesting way of putting it. When you are trying to get a company off the ground (figuratively) that is experimental in nature and will require a lot of capital investment, why hinder yourself with this 'bad' name right out of the gate? There are any number of edgy names they could have picked that people didn't associate with the last thing you want to have happen on an airplane. It is just unnecessary, and not well thought out. Even if the intent was to get attention, I wonder how many people at Boom talked to the founders and said: "Are we sure about 'Boom'?"
I didn't associate it with anything negative the first time when I saw the headline. Didn't even think about it being a bad name till I read the comment.
Not sure as many people will think it is negative as you think.
Well, what they think when they first see it, and what they think after it's made the rounds of the late shows (Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, etc) might be entirely different. This is low hanging fruit.
I still don't get that name choice. I'm guessing it's tongue-in-cheek, but in the back of my mind I still can't help wonder whether it'll turn out to be some sick prank. Then, it's like "well, it was right there on the label".
I know the chances of that are next to nil, but why even put that image in potential customer's heads?
Brands? Who cares? Are they the cheapest, fastest etc? I don't care which characters constitute their name, nor which bitmap they've chosen for their current logo.
You don't have to care about it, it was just pointed out for you a possible reason for the name. You can go on and care about the price, speed, etc now.
Prior to the (2000) accident, Concorde had been arguably the safest operational passenger airliner in the world in passenger deaths-per-kilometres travelled with zero
I have been involved with product naming over the years and have seen firsthand the incredible effort that goes into and angst generated by the process. EVERYONE has an opinion about names! It's also my considered opinion that most of the time it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, barring something really dumb or a trademark infringement.
What I find is that arguments in the comments are held to a lower standard. There's no way an original article can get away with the kind of hand-waviness we in the peanut gallery can. If someone writes an article whose primary assertion was unsupported by evidence or credible source, it's probably going to get flagged.
Do it in the comments, and the hive-mind takes over. Which, now that I think about it, could be a good thing in a sense. As article authors, we write to a larger audience, indicating what they're probably going read is researched and edited. As comment readers and writers, we put down the quill-and-ink and offer insights and opinions more directly from our own experience and intuition.
Quick, unadulterated thinking yields different results than the more grueling, task-oriented process of essay writing. And there's little reason to believe that these styles should be appraised one-dimensionally. Are some techniques not better suited to different circumstances?
Gladwell comes to mind, as well as Kahneman in support of less calculated approaches, however I am unfamiliar with the literature (beyond the layman-acclaimed NYT bestsellers). Is there a way to test the success of on-the-fly human heuristics against their slower and more deliberate procedures? Maybe one-size-does not fit all, but surely a skilled problem-solver would choose the right instrument for the gig.
Well it hasn't hurt "Bomb ba dear" :-) (that is the pronunciation I've heard for Bombardier)
So no, name is probably not an issue. Getting a passenger plane to market without any other supporting business, that is much much harder than explaining the name. Not a lot of people can raise funds for 10 years of expensive runway (no pun intended).
Yes. I actually also speak French (after a fashion) and recognize its actual pronunciation. But for folks who don't, their phonetics lead them astray. I've flown on a number of flights where the incorrect pronunciation was used by the flight crew in describing the safety features of the plane.
> Today’s Bombardier grew out of a young mechanic’s inventive genius and entrepreneurial spirit. Born in 1907, Joseph-Armand Bombardier builds his first “snow vehicle” at the ripe age of 15. His motivation? To help people travel across the snow-covered roads of rural Québec in Canada.
> In 1937, J.-Armand achieves his first major commercial success with the launch of the seven-passenger B7 snowmobile.
Even if it's named after the sonic boom the plane makes, you would think they would be trying to minimize that association as much as possible. People dont like sonic booms. Seems like an awfully tone-deaf choice.
Great idea, but even with optimistic assumptions it will require a lot of capital. Something in order of SpaceX $100 mln to get first commercial plane.
We live in a world right now where interest rates are bouncing off zero and sometimes going negative. Capital is probably the least limiting factor here, assuming there's a viable plan and clear market.
A brand new advanced composite supersonic jet flying in a year's time? Color me skeptical. There are literally millions of things that need to be designed for this, and many of them will be bleeding edge. And this is from some tiny startup?
A line like that sets off some big flashing red lights for me. Either they're incompetent and have grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to complete this, or it's a scam.
Not quite. According to [1], what they'll be flying is actually a one-third-scale prototype, which I'd imagine is a lot easier to build. And they've already been going for two years.
The real issue that I'm not seeing addressed is capital. No investors listed anywhere.
That link didn't make me feel much better. They're planning to "tweak an off the shelf engine for supersonic speed". When I hear off the shelf engines, I think turbofans, but no amount of tweaking is going to make a turbofan work at supersonic speeds. It's possible they can get some military grade afterburning turbojets from somewhere, but it's not something you can buy off of the shelf.
Their webpage has a bunch of guys standing around what looks like a Vietnam-era jet engine.
Also, if they're planning to have something flying in 20 months, they should be beyond the cardboard and plywood mockup phase of development.
The more I see about this company the more I think it's a scam.
For comparison, the Concorde took about 21 years to develop. Granted, it was a massive clusterfuck, but they also had to solve a lot of issues along the way.
> but no amount of tweaking is going to make a turbofan work at supersonic speeds
Sure they can. It's the inlet's job to slow the flow to subsonic. Turbofans have been used on supersonic military aircraft since the 1960's. Go read about intake ramps. Then learn about diverterless supersonic intakes.
You're yelling scam pretty loud for someone that clearly doesn't know basics of the topic area.
Edit: My guess is the engine they're standing in front of is a JT8 of some flavor, which have been heavily used by both military and commercial aircraft.
But those intakes don't work for free. You will encounter huge losses and drag penalties. And military jets aren't designed to fly 3500 miles supersonically the entire way. The vast majority of miltiary jets have a maximum supersonic time that can be measured in minutes.
This isn't quite so cut and dried: the ram effect can help or hurt depending on the exact context and numbers.
There are several 4th generation fighters with sustained supersonic cruise, as well as older aircraft like the B1. The basic technology has been around for decades. Nothing about the proposed supersonic small commuter jet is impossible from an engineering perspective, though aspects of it won't be _easy_, and it is entirely possible the business case doesn't work out.
I mostly replied above because of the categorical statement that supersonic flight with turbofans is impossible. The reality is that virtually all supersonic aircraft use engines with some bypass. The Concorde's engines oddly enough are one of the few zero bypass designs used in industry.
So I've actually worked on a couple of aviation projects in career as a biz dev person. A usual development technique is to build at small scale and then work your way up.
The problem is that when you get closer to 1:1 scale, new always issues come up with bigger challenges. You solve one problem at 1:5 scale, only to realize that doesn't work at 1:3 and the whole thing needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
The annals of aviation history are littered with aircraft unable to move past 1:n scale.
Lockheed Skunkworks have actually built prototype jets in under 2 years from go ahead to first flight. The A-12 (predecessor to the SR-71) went from contract to first flight in just over 2 years.
Didn't Burt Rutan make a composite aircraft from design to first flight in a year back in the 80s?
Getting the aircraft certified and into production is where most of the actual expense is.
For comparison: Tesla's first business plan stated they'd need $30m in capital to get the Roadster into production. It was closer to $300m before they started production deliveries.
Given SpaceX's well documented experience, I would not trust any cost estimates from the legacy aerospace industry. It's a deeply moribund field as a result of decades of stagnation and dependence on government/military funding.
Still I would be absolutely floored if they could do it for under $500mil, so what you say still applies-- maybe just not quite to the point of billionS with an S.
There's also a steep difference in the tolerances you can permit. A rocket -- especially one with any hope of reusability -- is something that can't be built without getting very very close to the maximum tolerances possible within the bounds of physics. Look at the temperature differentials in a rocket engine for example... it involves nearly instantaneous transitions from deep cryptogenic temperatures to ones far beyond the melting point of any known material that can only be sustained with constant active cooling. The fact that we can achieve any level of reliability with a device this insane is really a testament to human ingenuity, but it doesn't give you much margin for error. Screw up just a tiny bit and the rocket is going to do what the laws of thermodynamics really want it to do: explode in every direction instead of just downward.
An airliner, even a supersonic one, is more forgiving. Over-engineering goes a long way toward adding nines to your reliability. We've been doing supersonic flight with reusable craft since the 1950s, and there aren't a whole lot of unknowns remaining. That means it's mostly a manufacturing and operations optimization problem.
It is easier to build a rocket, than supersonic commercial airliner. Soviets build many rockets, but practically failed on commercial airliner. Americans gave up.
Pretty amazing that materials science (lighter, carbon-fiber aircraft; hotter, more efficient/powerful turbines) has made this economic. Concorde never was.
NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.
Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference. I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.
I wonder how long until there's a Business Jet variant of this, or a Government/Military/Scientific version -- the operating costs of commercial aircraft tend to be much less than purpose-built government aircraft, so there's probably a mission/role for it.
The issue with it is that supersonic flight (due to noise) is only allowed over non-populated areas so a business jet variant is less useful unless you spend most of your time flying over the ocean (and not coast-to-coast for instance).
Yeah, it's also super inefficient/cramped/etc. compared to a G650/BBJ/etc, so it would only really make sense as a "second" business jet in a corp/personal/royal fleet, or, more likely, part of a fleet somewhere like NetJets. It's the "entire aircraft, on demand" part on a mostly finite set of routes, not the "fly anywhere you want", with this.
> The issue with it is that supersonic flight (due to noise)
Actually it's with the technology currently in use with supersonic flight that there is this large amount of noise. It's technically possible to reach supersonic without the boom and NASA is currently working on it with some contractors. I hope it pans out well; I would love to be able to fly between BWI and SFO in 2 hours.
If they could make it quiet enough to go over land, transcontinental US flights would be great; LA/NY in 2.5 hours would likely have a pretty high demand.
[edit] As someone who flies LA/DC fairly regularly I do have to mention my favorite record of the SR-71 doing that flight in under 65 minutes.
I wonder if the "no booms over land" rule will always remain in force. When I was a child, the planes from Whiteman AFB broke that rule quite often. It was interesting to hear the boom over the phone when speaking with a school friend who lived say eight miles away, and then immediately hear the whole house shaking when the plane got to my end of the circuit. It would have been annoying at night, I suppose, but during the day it was not a hardship. These military planes made no particular effort to climb to high altitude before breaking the barrier, either. While the area I'm talking about is rural, it's much more heavily populated than are e.g. the Great Plains.
So, I think that high-altitude sparse-population daytime routes could be developed that would admit supersonic flight over much of North America.
You may not have minded your entire house shaking, but most would probably quickly grow to resent such unnecessary disruption.
It's a good way to kick everyone in a large region out of their zone. If this was a constant occurrence, work may quickly cease, or become greatly diminished.
Sure, but these were 1980s-era fighter/trainer jets flying at probably 1000 ft., and it only shook the whole house when they flew pretty close. Other times one might only hear the boom when outside. I think a passenger craft of recent design of recent materials, flying at 40k ft. could do much better, even before routing to avoid populated areas. I don't think anyone, even those who live on ranches in the Dakotas, really has a right not to hear a noise during the daytime.
I used to live under the Concorde flight path near Heathrow. Twice a day there'd be this crackling rumble and all the windows would shake; and this was flying subsonic.
Concorde was really, really loud --- a lot of that was due to being a really old plane with old engines (aircraft have gotten way quieter since the 1970s), but even back then it was considered loud:
Modern aircraft are so dull! Efficient, safe, cheap, reliable even, relatively comfortable, but so boring. Even the A380 is a boring, and that's an office block with wings. How can something so incredible be so deadly dull?
...yeah, yeah, I know, being dull is an accomplishment in itself, and the duller aircraft are the better they are, and the one thing that every passenger pilot in the world wants is a thoroughly uninteresting flight. But, dammit, they're still so dull.
A380 passes overhead here every day on final, it is uncanny how it just seems to hang there on account of it being so large that relative to its speed it takes a while to move it's own length. Sure it's still going quite fast but it doesn't seem that it does and this sets of some 'it's going to fall' alarm at the back of my mind. Weirdest feeling.
I don't think people have the right to pollute noise everywhere.
And I do wish humans where mindful about the noise pollution the dump where 'nobody lives'. The noise emitted by shipping vessels is having a harming effect on sea life.
At least one real-world test was conducted about how people acclimate to sonic booms[1] with an eye towards seeing how people would take SST airliners. It didn't go very well. In general, it seems that enough people do think it a hardship to kick up a fuss that will keep SSTs from being a reality over the US for awhile.
You're right, it has been awhile since the mid-60s. If we were talking about flying F-104s and B-58s, that would be very relevant information. As I understand it, Boom are developing a new aircraft. They're probably aware of that test and indeed lots of other information about supersonic flight.
This whole "engineering vs physics" question reminds me of the misunderstandings people have of modern radio technology. Yes, in the 1920s they had to divide the spectrum into exclusive-use bands so that any particular use could transmit and receive clearly, but that was a limitation of engineering, not of physics. In the 2010s that is not a limitation we face, in general. Likewise, I expect that with modern materials and engineering software, progress can be made on the sonic boom issue.
I do generally agree with you, but I'm not really talking about engineering or physics, I'm talking about social acceptance.
If - via engineering, physics, magic or whatever - sonic booms can be minimized to the point of being indistinguishable from general background noise (or even only as intrusive as current subsonic airliners), I could be convinced that an SST project has a bright future. Until then, I don't think that they will - your first post mentioned that "the whole house shaking" didn't really seem to be hardship when it happened during the day; I'm merely commenting that there are some studies that indicate society as a whole isn't so accepting.
I used to live near an army training area. There were regular artillery exercises, and the bigger shells would literally shake the walls of the house. The smaller shells just made things fall off shelves.
I think any design that literally goes "boom" over land, even a little, isn't going to work. It's too much of an open legal target.
The design really does need to be damn near silent, or at least closer to a mild and unobjectionable "whomp", to have any hope of commercial success.
I think I've only heard one in my life. It was on surfside beach TX where I lived at the time. I was on a dock and heard a really low thunder sound. I can't say that it was "loud" like it would hurt your ears, but it really rattled everything around me (including my insides). And with that the neighbor's dogs came running over to me with their tails between their legs, and off in the distance I could here a jet really cuttin' through some wind.
The no commercial sonic booms legislation might go away if it were an American company asking for it. I have no doubt that the Concorde being foreign owned helped speed that legislation through Congress.
Of course being a little no-name company won't help matters much here, but I expect that actual production of this would involve a partnership (or probably buyout) with one of the big name companies that have a lot of congressmen on their payroll.
There has also been a lot of research into minimizing Sonic Booms since the 70s. Military jets typically don't care, but passenger jets could definitely benefit.
I've known test pilots who have flown supersonic routes over continental USA at high altitude and had zero complaints. The boom intensity depends on weather conditions. Other times they did get complaints because the boom sounded like gunshots and got reported to the police.
Cruising above 60000 ft the boom from a larger aircraft might be noticed but not be objectionably loud.
I doubt the cost would be low enough to support demand.
Transonic (approximately Mach 0.80 - 1.2) flight uses significantly more fuel than subsonic flight does. Business jets like the Gulfstream G550 burn more fuel at M0.9 than regional Boeing 717(MD-95) at M0.75 with 4 times more passengers.
The F-22 Raptor can supercruise at M1.6, with half the range compared to cruise at M0.85 similar to other fighters.
If Boom can optimize an aircraft for supersonic transport it would still be expensive to operate. For comparison, no US operator has all business class scheduled flights from LA-NY, and British Airways flies their all business class NY-London flights in an VIP A320 series jet that cruises at M0.7 which is slower than most airliners on the route.
The Boeing 747 has one of the lowest cost/passenger mile (CPM) of any aircraft, and cruises at Mach 0.85. Different aircraft have been optimized for different speeds, and while it is true that a supersonic aircraft will likely have a higher fuel cost than a comparable subsonic aircraft, the difference may not be as large as we currently think.
There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.
The 747 efficiency drops off sharply above M0.85 cruise. I remember reading that the VC-25 (747-200 based) 100% thrust cruise speed is around M0.96 with considerable range penalty. The 747-400 has newer engines but pretty close 100% cruise speed. This is above the approved Mmo for the 747 and not authorized operationally.
Test pilots have reported that a Gulfstream G550 airframe can handle supersonic flight, and the BR710 turbofan engines can handle it. The limit is the engine intake design.
With an optimized intake, its entirely possible the fuel consumption at M2.2 would be comparable to ~M0.98
>There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.
that is one of the major issues here. Modern turbofans on large passenger planes like 787, 380, etc... are that efficient in major part because of high by-pass ratio. Which is not really an option for 2Mach+ speed.
As somebody mentioned, more comfortable 0.85Mach flight would be preferable in many situations to uncomfortable and very expensive 2Mach. If i were starting something like this i'd go straight for suborbital SFO to Singapore in under couple hours. Technology-level wise not that different, money is no issue in that segment (Branson's $200K is not that far from super-premium-business class for your priceless CEO) and there is always large money-no-issue fallback customer - military.
That's why the ticket is $5K. Even if your fuel estimates are correct, they will burn 4-5 times more fuel, but they will charge 10 times per ticket compared to economy. I just checked, and you can get $532 roundtrip NYC<->LON.
But a given airplane can carry a lot less people in a business-grade seat than in an economy seat. Also, NYC <-> LON for $500 is the price of only very few seats in a plane.
Yeah, flying West to East, more speed wouldn't be a great help. I lose 2 hours getting there, 3 hours in time zones, an hour upon arrival. So red-eyes are the way to go. But if the reverse could be improved, that'd be a big help. I could fly West in the morning, get there the same time as I left, do a days business, and take the red-eye home. All in a day.
Seriously. People here are way underestimating the costs to develop and certify a major commercial airframe, especially across the multiple regulatory regimes inherent to international flight. You're probably talking about on the order of a billion dollars even if you're playing it cheap. If you want to start re-engineering components instead of buying off the shelf, that number will go uphill rapidly.
This is not a field that's amenable to "disruption". Cutting corners means that dozens of people plummet to their deaths, not to mention the abrupt end of your airline as their families sue you into oblivion. If you try to play this like Uber and flout the regulations, the FAA and EAA will ground and impound your gear so fast your head will spin, and rightly so. Even a test aircraft is a gigantic tank full of explosive fuel hurtling through the air on a couple flimsy wings. When things go wrong people die, and the FAA does not play games.
Airlines are an incredibly low-margin business in the best case, and supersonic airliners in particular are a very niche market and have immense operating expenses (to purchase and maintain the airplane and to slake its immense thirst for fuel). The Concorde's operators could never make it profitable.
Never say never, but this just seems like fantasy. Supersonic airliners are a problem domain that has been pored over by engineers for decades, six engineers are not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and solve all the technical problems, then get it certified, then start an airline. Each of those is a problem that requires a national-scale corporation to handle.
How many people did SpaceX start with? Certainly not the thousands of workers it has today. Everything you said about requiring a "national scale corp" was said about launching rockets to orbit as well. Looking at Boom's roster they have some seriously experienced industry vets working for them or advising them. This isn't just fresh grads. They've been through FAA/EASA cert trials of new aircraft, testing and understand it a fair bit more than you do I suspect. I'd give them a bit more credit and assume they know that they're in for the long haul with this airliner.
SpaceX has also had a lot of [issues commensurate with the nature of their industry]. That's fine with a rocket, [and also fine with a new airplane, as long as the issues are proportionate with what is common in their industry].
I wouldn't put a passenger jet in the same category as rockets when it comes "things that could blow up". The safety factor of an airplane is substantially higher than a rocket. The Concorde was even one of the safest jets before it had its first hull loss in 2000 due to a metal strip on the runway that punctured its fuel tank. Boom's jet is more likely to fail due to external factors such as human error or negligence.
cost of developing the falcon 9 is estimated at about $300M (wikipedia quoting spacex). that's a surprisingly small mountain of money. a supersonic passenger jet should be probably in the same ballpark, right?
Most importantly, the Falcon-9 is not a human-rated system, or at least not yet. And everyone acknowledges there's risks to spaceflight - even a "human-rated" system is expected to fail about 1-in-270 missions (launch or re-entry). That's not acceptable for commercial aviation - your time between catastrophic failures should be measured in years or decades.
It also probably helps significantly that they could fly unmanned missions right away to make money while working out the bugs. You can't fly an uncertified aircraft for commercial purposes.
That's also the figure for just the Falcon-9 rocket. The Dragon cost another $800M. The engines were also developed in-house and may not be factored into that cost either (can't tell). So the total system is costing north of $1.1B.
The Boom model looks to be about the same size as a regional airliner, or a small narrowbody. For some recent points of comparison: the Bombardier CRJ1000 (developed 2007-2012) has a flyaway cost of $46M [1] and an estimated development cost of $300M [1]. A small narrowbody like the Bombardier Cseries costs $72-82M each and cost $5.4B to develop [3]. The Embraer E-jet E2 series (a second iteration on the E-jet airframe) is estimated to cost $1.7B [4].
It's much easier to develop iterations on a single airframe than to certify a new airframe from scratch. And those are all conventional construction, no carbon fiber or anything like that. And while you can develop components in-house - those need to be certified too. So much like any Not-Invented-Here syndrome - you really need to ask the question of whether you want to be a company who makes airplanes, or a company who makes airplane parts.
You can certainly do it some cheaper, but probably not a factor of 10. Overall I think Embraer tends to be one of the more budget-minded manufacturers.
Hell, they'll have half a billion just in the computing & control systems. Having worked to design, build, and certify the avionics systems on three major commercial aiframes, one of which is now flying (787), I am hopeful but beyond skeptical. When a company backed by the government of the world's largest economy (Comac) can't make decent progress on a subsonic airframe built with 20+ year old and well understood technologies, and when leading airframers like Boeing had a helluva tough learning curve building a composite subsonic airframer (787), I'm beyond doubtful that this startup is going to build a supersonic composite airplane before it goes bankrupt. Google '787 wing box' and '787 delamination' if you want to know the kind of pain Boeing went through when trying to build a composite airframe.
If you want to get and idea of the magnitude of the regulatory hurdles in a domain that most here will understand, google DO-178C. The mountains of documentation that you have to produce for the software will push any integrated avionics development effort well into the hundreds of millions, unless they plan on using bog standard off-the-shelf parts, and even then they'll have to deal with the flight control system, which will have to be custom by necessity. For some google food, search on 'wcet analysis', 'structural coverage analysis, 'MCDC analysis', 'requirements traceability', 'stack analysis', etc. There are huge hurdles to leap through to get certified, and that's just for the software.
I hate being a wet blanket :(.
OTOH, if they can get capital in the 5-10+ billion range, poach all the best folks from Boeing, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, GE, UTC, Gulfstream, etc. etc. etc. (which will involve setting up offices in Seattle, Phoenix, Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Savannah, the UK, France, etc. -- the aviation scene is a bit older, people have families, and are not so keen to move), then they might actually pull it off. Which would be awesome. And I'd totally be in (if they set up an office in my area, that is).
> single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.
Was the LON-NYC flight time the problem, though? I think that to go door-to-door right now you spend 50% of the time in the air and the other 50% on the ground.
With this company, you'll be spending 3.5 hours in the air and 8 hours getting to and from airports and through security.
I would think that the people that can afford this have Uber helicopter service to/from the airport and all the line skipping extras paid for already. Not sure it is really 8 hours to and from airports/security.
Right. Selling at this price point they can easily focus on expensive extras. Special terminal with super fast security, then really quick transfers in both ends. If you could do a small airport experience in both ends (1h from hotel room to liftoff) they can charge what they want.
At one point in New York, it was pretty routine for first class passengers on Pan Am to take a helicopter from JFK to the Pan Am building, which had a helipad on the roof. The service may even have been included as part of the fare. (This service was discontinued after an accident though, at least for a time, I believe there was still service to a helipad next to the East River.)
It depends on the airport that you are travelling from. London City has famously fast security, currently you can check-in upto 15 minutes before the scheduled time of departure for a flight to New York. [1]
"Pretty amazing that materials science has made this economic."
That, I think, still is an open question. Someone must think there is a decent chance it will be, but if this were a no-brainer, there would be multiple players in this market. Also, oil price fluctuations, the bane of any airline company, will hit those running these planes harder.
I was curious about fuel costs and found that the fuel cost per seat per mile for Delta and Southwest was around $.04 per mile in 2Q 2014. At that rate, even if this new aircraft uses 4x as much fuel per person it would amount to around 20% of the ticket price.
> I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.
Agreed. I spent 5 of the most uncomfortable hours of my life on an airplane from JFK to San Diego, being 6'1 and not particularly slim. Thereafter, I upgraded my seats on that flight to Economy Plus. I guess I could stand a 2 hour flight like that, but not too much more. Getting me there faster, but in a more cramped space won't make me feel better.
Concorde was almost coach level cramped. There is no way this will be as comfortable as top end subsonic lie flat business or first class. For 3h vs 6h that doesn't matter. For 7h vs 13h I assert it does.
In a number of ways, modern upper class air travel is significantly more comfortable than it was throughout most of the Concorde era. First class and then business class were a lot more like today's domestic first/business class even for long haul international flights. Of course, things like entertainment options are a lot better today as well. (Though there's no 747 upstairs first class lounge :-))
Security, etc. is worse of course--though that's largely outside of the airline's control.
One of the reasons Concord "failed" is that it could never fly supersonic over land and had to start slowing long before the destination otherwise it would overshoot (along with fuel costs causing Concord to be more expensive than business class).
Speed only matters for the cruise part of the flight. The first and last 45 mins, plus airport time are not different. The slowdown portion of a Mach 2.2 flight will be even longer.
(edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
Yes, but if the Concorde slows from Mach 2 to 0 over 45 mins then it's average may be ~mach 1. Which is faster than the average velocity of a normal 747.
Granted, if the Concorde shows up and needs to circle the airport for 20 minutes then that's the same delay.
It also shows fairly linear acceleration to Mach 2 over the first 30 minutes of flight and very rapid deceleration from Mach 2 to Mach 1. Which IMO suggests they could use a different decent profile.
> Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference.
As someone who travels to the south pacific every year (mostly in economy seating), I strongly disagree. 15h flights are no picnic, in any class. I'll stand if it would get me there in 6-7h - that is a dream.
On the other hand, when you have have a video call instantly and practically for free this looks like a very self-indulgent expense. Not exactly the eco-friendly option either.
Very skeptical this little company can go all the way with this. Look at how hard it is to get a new automobile company up and running. Tesla almost went completely bankrupt more than once.
I do think there is a need and market for faster than sound air travel. We have the technology to even minimize the sonic booms for over land travel.
Still, it would take an enormous amount of capital to get a new company up and running. I would love to see an innovated tesla-like company in the aerospace industry though. It's badly needed, IMO.
Yes, we've taken a lot of inspiration from what Elon has accomplished at SpaceX and Tesla. Supersonics are technically challenging and capitally intensive. But the world should have faster travel—and it doesn't look like the big aerospace companies are about to make it happen. (I'm a founder at Boom)
I am not saying this is easy, but what they need to do is build one airplane, and get it to fly back and forth. That is nothing like the scalability and repeated reliability that building thousands of car is asking for.
I know several people (starting by my brother) who build their own plane (granted, it was a two-seater several several times louder than a grass-mower and seemingly slower, but you get the idea). One plane feels fairly doable as far as hard- to-predict financial issues go — if you have engineers who know super-sonic, and I can’t imagine having the idea without.
Your brother's plane is likely an ultralight or light-sport category, and regardless as a kit-built is nowhere near the certification required for commercial operation. A key requirement of kit-built or experimental aircraft is that you can't ask money to fly passengers on them. He's not even allowed to ask for gas money if you take a trip together.
Commercial requirements literally start at "one aircraft that gets the wings overstressed (if not actually snapped off) during destructive testing" and the requirements continue steeply onwards from there. You can figure on having it built by FAA-certified mechanics as well.
The FAA likes having a paper trail if the wings fall off (an extremely common problem with ultralight/sport aircraft built by non-certified personnel). Not OK when you're carrying passengers for hire.
It was, originally but with some improvements since, and it got the wing-stress that you mention involuntarily and while in flight (my mom & his wife were watching — fun times). He got out without a scratch and improved the next one further.
I can completely see the expected extra cost of having to make two prototypes — and, yes, my first reaction to the article was: “please, please, let them have a billion in VC money”. But the truth is, the success ratio of projects about “we want to make a plane that goes that fast” seems far higher than success ratios of any company.
The business side sounds a lot more doable, given how many people fly those destinations and would like to do it faster.
Sounds like the prototypical "build something that doesn't scale". I have no idea how capital intensive this is (other than...a lot) but I too think building a Boom-0 and flying it NYC-London as often as possible is the best first step. Just make sure to have the first couple of flights filled with investor types ;)
You really want some innovators that spread the word. Some lawyer telling their friends how he was able to close a deal because of that flight, some top executive peddling the "home to tuck in the kids" story at the next business meeting etc.
As tangent, instead of focusing on NYC to London, a Mach 2.2 travel actually will make travel from Americas to Asia more comfortable. US to India and US to China routes benefit the most, and perhaps where people will be interested in paying top-dollar vs. Europe.
Most of that route would be over the Pacific, so it would be fine, too (although ex-West Coast US).
It might be a fuel issue on distance, but probably not. Also potentially an ETOPS range issue.
However, there are three big issues with transpac: (not impossible issues, but strong reasons why NYC-LON is ideal as MVP)
1) Greater number of destination cities on each side; for transatlantic, NYC-LON really is the main market. LAX-NRT is probably the best first pass. but LAX/SFO/SEA/LAS/Texas/NY/DC could all make solid claims on being sources of traffic, and there are >10 cities in Asia which would be destinations and fairly far apart? I'd almost certainly prefer a nonstop NYC-PEK to a domestic NYC-LAX, switch to LAX-NRT supersonic, then another subsonic NRT-PEK.
2) A lot of the good cities are inland, so no supersonic for those parts of the flights. NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG (corrected) would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there. So you're also stuck doing something suboptimal, either connecting flights or operating outside supersonic regime.
3) After a certain point, comfort is a priority over absolute speed. If it lets you accomplish a mission (meeting, etc.) in a single day, that's a new capability. if it means you get 5h of cramped sleep and then another 7h of cramped sleep on the way back, that's not really better for most missions than 8-10h of comfortable sleep in a full-sized suite for the same price. There clearly is a value in 1-4h flights from USA to China/India, but that requires more than Mach 2.2 -- maybe exoatmospheric.
Another option is probably "events"; special flights to follow F1 and stuff like that. Concorde did a lot of that toward the end.
NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there.
A lot of really sparsely populated inland. How politically influential are the Siberian fur trappers this route [0] overflies? Enough to counteract the fat overflight fees that Russia likes to charge?
You are right -- there would be a bit of extra subsonic about 150km into Canada, but it would work.
Flight time at 2.2 would still suck, but there could be a market. Probably depends on the total traffic between the city pairs, since some fraction would pay for supersonic coach-size business vs subsonic business/first.
I figured it took that far just to get to a suitable altitude. This isn't a King Air Beech 90 one can just keep cranking back while jamming the throttle. It was designed with very different goals.
Grew up in Germany during the Cold War. Sonic booms from military jets were not rare. In the low level flight training areas the population really suffered.
Mythbusters tested the sonic boom myth. An F/A-18 flew ridiculously low (200 ft AGL) before the window cracked with a supersonic flyby.
A sonic boom from a fighter jet above around 10,000 ft usually doesn't break any windows. In one case, a General flew a F-22 in supercruise just off the Florida coast at over 50,000 ft and nobody "reported" the boom until the media story ended up on the news.
For low level supersonic flight, what typically happens is the pressure wave created either overflexes the window pane, or the window frame isn't strong enough and the glass falls out.
For a larger aircraft like the Concorde flying above 40,000 ft they wont break windows. People complain about the noise.
London on New York are two of the top finance industry cities in the world. There are few other city pairs that are close enough that Mach 2.2 makes the difference between comfortably being able to pop over for a business meeting and return the same day vs. getting a really long and tiring day, and that has such a large population of people where their salaries are high enough that paying $5k to cut a few hours of a trip is cheaper than hiring more people.
On top of that, unless their planes revolutionise supersonic flights, sonic booms is a major limiting factor - they need city pairs where very little of the flight goes over land that anyone cares about, because otherwise permits becomes a major problem.
One issue with this is the "boom" (from their name). It only works across non-populated areas due to the noise as their sample routes show. It's going to severely limit the opportunity.
I would guess this mostly designed for ocean crossing flights. Their example is NYC to London, as soon as you take off from NYC you're over the ocean. By the time you accelerate to mach 1.12 and are at the appropriate altitude, you'd be far enough away from the city for the boom to not matter.
Exactly, that's what I said. There are may across ocean routes but this means it limits its market and the routes it can run. It also makes less sense to have it as a single private jet.
That's correct. We're starting with overwater supersonic because there's no regulatory barrier to launching service. You can make a much quieter sonic boom than Concorde, and eventually supersonic overland will be allowed.
It's great for you to leave SF in the morning, go to Sydney to watch the opera and be back in SF by midnight. But is the environmental impact of you doing that worth it for everyone else?
The drop in the price of oil has discouraged airlines from investing in more efficient engines for their fleet, I assume there are similar economics at play here.
That’s simply not true! Airplanes are developed over decades and then stays in service over decades, current low fuel prices won’t change decisions that are being made years into the future.
All current in development airplanes (and I’m talking non-GA non military here), focus on increased efficiency and fuel consumption.
Absolutely worth it. We live in the future. If you can fly half way around the world to watch an opera and be home by midnight, do it.
Riding your bicycle to work isn't going to save the planet, neither is reconsidering a flight.
Environmental concerns should be that of multi-national corporations and governments. The 1% flying around the world isn't killing the planet. It's industrial output from cattle and energy production for electricity (coal, nat gas, oil) and fossil fuels burned for industrial use.
I'm tired of the misplaced moral imperatives. Change needs to happen on a global, industrial scale, not in your decision to eat a locally-grown kale salad.
Snarkiness aside, I think you're mistaken. You can't say 'industrial use' or 'industrial output' and absolve yourself of responsibility. The electronics that you wrote this comment on were all built with yucky industrial machines, running on yucky industrial oil which had to pulled out of the ground by yucky, messy drilling machines. And the kicker is that people did all of that because they knew that you would buy the resulting device.
If no one bought them, they wouldn't make them! The industrial output is all there for your benefit. If we all decided that protecting the planet was more important and invested in making slower, more efficient travel more comfortable, then it would make a big difference.
EDIT: Also the kale salad thing - since you bring up industrial output from cattle farming being a major pollutant then surely you have just made an argument for eating kale salad instead of a tasty burger?
Fully agree with you on the kale salad thing. It's delicious, don't get me wrong, and eating more kale and less burgers will contribute to a reduction in cattle rearing, reduction in methane gas / deforestation.
My main point is it needs to be a national conversation, one the government is involved in.
Riding a bicycle to work arguably does a lot more to save the planet than flying on a more fuel efficient airplane, if for no other reason than the indirect benefits of taking a car off the road.
Definitely worth mentioning in the article, but not a big concern. Even if this plane actually comes to market and is successful according to their wildest hopes, it'll only be a very tiny fraction of the aviation market. This is due to many factors: small cabin, limited capacity, limited routes (only over water)...
> it'll only be a very tiny fraction of the aviation market.
So is everyone driving in the morning: a tiny fraction of the transport pollution. Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction.
To add to staceymakano's point: in the transport industry, I feel very uncomfortable when a a new alternative doesn't perform better on the environmental side.
Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction.
Not even remotely true in this case. Aviation accounts for about 2% of carbon emissions, by my cursory Google search. Boom aircraft will, in the absolute best of outcomes, never account for more than a very small fraction of that number. And a small fraction of 2% is still, no matter how one tries to spin it, a very small fraction.
In any event, power (P) required to increase velocity (V) is a cubic relationship (P=FV, where F is the drag force, which has as one of its components V^2), so doubling speed requires 8 times the power. There are ways to mitigate that increase -- fly higher to reduce air density, reduce drag by using specialized airfoils and reducing excrescence, take advantage of increasing engine efficiencies, etc. -- but I think it's safe to say that a supersonic aircraft will always require gobs more fuel than its subsonic cousins. By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.
Full disclosure: I once worked as an aerospace engineer.
> By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.
Correct. My nerd side tells me supersonic planes are the coolest thing on earth, my hippie side is telling me we'll live better without it.
And I still disagree about the fact that a tiny fraction can be ignored.
The main reason why climate change is a thing is because we consistently and repeatedly failed to acknowledge our impact on the environment and justified it by comparing it to other people's impact (and I include myself in that statement).
So are they building their own plane, and launching a new airline? Will they also sell the plane to other airlines? Or is this trying to be vertically integrated, like Apple / Tesla?
Also, I echo the other sentiments here about the name, really don't want to fly on an airline named "Boom". Nor "Explode", "Kapow", or "Blast". And god forbid if one of their planes crashes during test flights, the PR nightmare that would result.
Correct-- the real problem with air travel isn't the flight time but the terrible and inefficient process on the ground with security, customs, baggage claim. I'd much prefer a longer flight in a slower, less aerodynamic plane that was safer and roomier.
Roomier classes in planes (as well as private air terminals for private planes) are all things that pretty much exist today; you just need to be willing and able to pay a huge premium for them. (Both because the costs are higher and they're priced for a less-sensitive clientele.)
Be interesting to see how they manage to increase range and payload substantially where Concorde wasn't able to.
Interesting from a tech point if they manage to build and certify a brand new supersonic airplane based on new materials. From a customer's stand point though, hardly anything new.
Presumably they're just testing the ergonomics of their seat/cockpit layout, or something along those lines. Unless you're worried that they're actually going to try to build an airplane out of cardboard, I don't see what the problem is.
This is what a scrappy airplane startup looks like in the early days. The wooden mockups validate sizing and ergonomics before you lay down expensive carbon fiber.
Carbon fiber is incredibly strong when engineered properly:
"During the test, the wings on the 787 were flexed upward “approximately 25 feet” which equates to 150 percent of the most extreme forces the airplane is ever expected to encounter during normal operation. The test is used to demonstrate a safety margin for the design and is part of the certification process to show the airplane can withstand extreme forces."
Cardboard mock-ups are extraordinarily helpful in making real the space that will define the product (as opposed to CAD drawings). They are regularly used in rapid prototyping.
The fact that they aren't waiting before having a final metal frame before testing for instrumentation fit is a plus in my book.
What does not inspire confidence in me is that they are toying around with what appears to be a small General Electric CJ610 turbojet engine, developed in the 60s from the earlier J85. Doesn't seem like the best propulsive plant for a supersonic airliner!
A CJ610 engine doesn't have complicated electronics to integrate, and would allow aerodynamic test data from a subscale model. For comparison, the two J85 engines in a F-5E could push it to over M1.4 at altitude.
> That's good news for ozone layer. Luckily this seems to be only a few guys, a wish, and a rendering.
Sorry, what connection does this have with the ozone layer?
The most sense I can make of your comment is that you're concerned about CO2 emissions from supersonic flight and don't understand the difference between global warming and ozone depletion.
The problem is not CO2, but reactive chemicals such as nitrogen oxides released near the ozone layer, which is a particular concern with supersonic transport because of the high cruise altitude. See:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/270/5233/70
I thought it was common knowledge. We learned about ozone layer hazards (and SST was among the most destructive ones) in elementary school (7th or 8th grade, Europe) when we learned about ozone layer.
Super smart - make good margins on a use case for the wealthy to subsidize R&D and development of scale economics, hopefully eventually get that price down so we can all use it. Hope it works!
(Writing this just to pre-empt the inevitable $5,000 THIS IS ONLY RICH PEOPLE comments :) )
The major difference here is the Concorde was real and actually flew. A few guys with a cardboard mockup of a cockpit can toss out any number for what it will cost for a ticket.
I'm reminded of the first half of "Web Design: The First Hundred Years"[0]. Commercial planes have not gotten faster and have in fact gotten slower.
I personally agree with the sentiment of the blog post, that a 5 hour flight across the atlantic is fast enough but it's still neat to see startups getting in to this space.
I don't agree. Faster travel is always better - whatever the mode of transportation. Once you hit a certain speed and price point, it will radically change the lifestyle of people. For example, the hyperloop with 30 min travel time between SF and LA would mean that people could literally live in one city and work in another city.
There are many reasons why Boeing and Airbus have not entered the supersonic market, the most important being that there is simply very limited appetite for supersonic travel other than for novelty purposes. It's much more economical to build big, subsonic airliners but increase the comfort and level of service.
My dad flew it once because he got "bumped up" from First class on the flight he normally took. His reaction was more or less "meh." First on the 747 was more comfortable and arriving a few hours earlier meant he had to grab dinner in London when he arrived rather than having a nice meal in First on the plane.
After a certain point, airplane technology is no longer going to be the limiting factor, and we'll have to finally eliminate the TSA to get under 5 hours of total travel time.
It describes their values as something like 'fly long distance in the morning, do a bunch of meetings there, and be back before the end of the day'. Does it make sense to travel 20,000km on one day to make a bunch of meetings, spending 15,000$?
I feel that better tele-presence just makes more sense.
The telepresence rooms we have at our corp. are 100's of thousands for a room. And you have to have another room on the other end. If it will be a consistent meeting then it makes sense to set them up but for one off meetings at different locations then the cost is not justified.
I do see a stereoscopic (3D) 360 VR future someday but we have a ways to go to get the 'presence' of that down to realism still.
In the financial world, where the physical presence of a trusted deal quarterback (who may fill that role for multiple deals at once) makes all the difference, the answer is a resounding yes. I love telepresence as much as anyone, but the reality is that nothing replaces a good firm handshake at the right moment, and nothing will unless we start living the majority of our waking hours in VR.
I wonder if the original demand for Concorde between NYC-LDN was due to the clear link as major financial centers.
As video and audio conferencing proliferated the demand for in person meetings amongst customers in finance would have gone down. That would have hit Concorde pretty hard.
Business which needs to be conducted in person could be between factory and design hubs. Silicon Valley to China's manufacturing centers for example.
Not just the money, the environmental impact of this gives me pause. Don't get me wrong, the tech is cool. But it's just enabling a behaviour that doesn't have a positive effect on the planet.
You have just described a huge fraction of my adult life. Take my word for it, being there in person is still the only way to close critical business deals.
This. That's why silicon valley. That's why working remotely doesn't work very well for most people. Non verbal communication is very important for trust.
I wonder how Virtual and augmented reality will change that. Just being able to Skype or use Whatsup with my clients during the day, ad-hock, has hugely changed the way I build business relationships.
Telepresence will definitely be a greater and greater percentage of the market. The overall meeting-market is also expanding. I think the subset of the market which ends up as in person meetings will continue to expand for a long time.
Does $15,000 matter, to people earning $50,000 a day?
Does $15,000 matter, as a business expense on a billion-dollar deal?
I agree tele-presence makes sense, but when $15,000 means as much as the price of a Starbucks coffee means to you and I, the price is so irrelevant, it's like us meeting for coffee, saying to each other "I'll get the bill", and then thinking it's more effort than it's worth to even bother expensing it.
How can they discuss cost and dates when it sounds like they don't even have firm plans on the engine? The promise of Boom is very compelling and good luck to them, but it's just a dream right now.
If it was as easy as the founder makes it sound, Boeing would already be doing it.
I agree, this is an insanely hard problem to solve. There are dozens of companies with tons of capital and massive R&D budgets that haven't already done this, presumably because they either think it's too hard, the regulatory hurdles are too high, or the market is not ready. Why can this startup do what they can't?
...because they really want to do it? If there's one thing I've learnt, looking at what the big companies are doing/didn't do is a really bad metric for things like this.
If this was a company started by Elon, perception of this company would have been totally different.
This seems nice, but there's no way 6 guys in a hanger in Denver are going to build a viable supersonic passenger aircraft that meets FAA standards for mass passenger travel, is fuel efficient enough that tickets aren't $20K and somehow also turns a profit.
I know "never say never", but this is about as confident a statement I or anyone with 3 minutes of reading on the airline industry can make. Margins are razor thin as it is.
A much better option (IMO) would be to research a Citation/Learjet sized supersonic aircraft. If you think of the market, the rich would be much more comfortable leaving from a smaller/private terminal in their private jet, zipping to London in 4 hours, and then zipping back on their own time, than they would going through the main terminal and all that nonsense just to save 3 hours in the air. Hell, being in the air in first class is the best part of the entire trip!
These guys (No connection whatsoever) http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/ have been trying to do the latter for 13 years. Thirteen. They just got their first order.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadOr is the 5k just a price point for selling the plane? Now I'm confused what these guys do...
Not sure as many people will think it is negative as you think.
I know the chances of that are next to nil, but why even put that image in potential customer's heads?
Maybe.. SonicBee or something cuter?
Agreed that Boom is not a name I would immediately associate with sonic boom instead of ka-boom.
Unlike Concorde, flying Boom is affordable—the same price as business class.
Ok, so the Concorde had some critical engineering faults, making it cheaper definitely sounds more secure.
After the single accident, the Concorde's death per passenger km record doesn't look so hot.
Nobody cares anymore.
Do it in the comments, and the hive-mind takes over. Which, now that I think about it, could be a good thing in a sense. As article authors, we write to a larger audience, indicating what they're probably going read is researched and edited. As comment readers and writers, we put down the quill-and-ink and offer insights and opinions more directly from our own experience and intuition.
Quick, unadulterated thinking yields different results than the more grueling, task-oriented process of essay writing. And there's little reason to believe that these styles should be appraised one-dimensionally. Are some techniques not better suited to different circumstances?
Gladwell comes to mind, as well as Kahneman in support of less calculated approaches, however I am unfamiliar with the literature (beyond the layman-acclaimed NYT bestsellers). Is there a way to test the success of on-the-fly human heuristics against their slower and more deliberate procedures? Maybe one-size-does not fit all, but surely a skilled problem-solver would choose the right instrument for the gig.
So no, name is probably not an issue. Getting a passenger plane to market without any other supporting business, that is much much harder than explaining the name. Not a lot of people can raise funds for 10 years of expensive runway (no pun intended).
http://www.bombardier.com/en/about-us/history.html
> Today’s Bombardier grew out of a young mechanic’s inventive genius and entrepreneurial spirit. Born in 1907, Joseph-Armand Bombardier builds his first “snow vehicle” at the ripe age of 15. His motivation? To help people travel across the snow-covered roads of rural Québec in Canada.
> In 1937, J.-Armand achieves his first major commercial success with the launch of the seven-passenger B7 snowmobile.
That's actually a perfectly reasonable explanation of how they ended up with such a name, but it's still unfortunate.
Will fly late next year? Where have I heard that one before...
A line like that sets off some big flashing red lights for me. Either they're incompetent and have grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to complete this, or it's a scam.
The real issue that I'm not seeing addressed is capital. No investors listed anywhere.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-21/this-aeros...
EDIT: Forgot to actually include the link.
Their webpage has a bunch of guys standing around what looks like a Vietnam-era jet engine.
Also, if they're planning to have something flying in 20 months, they should be beyond the cardboard and plywood mockup phase of development.
The more I see about this company the more I think it's a scam.
For comparison, the Concorde took about 21 years to develop. Granted, it was a massive clusterfuck, but they also had to solve a lot of issues along the way.
Sure they can. It's the inlet's job to slow the flow to subsonic. Turbofans have been used on supersonic military aircraft since the 1960's. Go read about intake ramps. Then learn about diverterless supersonic intakes.
You're yelling scam pretty loud for someone that clearly doesn't know basics of the topic area.
Edit: My guess is the engine they're standing in front of is a JT8 of some flavor, which have been heavily used by both military and commercial aircraft.
There are several 4th generation fighters with sustained supersonic cruise, as well as older aircraft like the B1. The basic technology has been around for decades. Nothing about the proposed supersonic small commuter jet is impossible from an engineering perspective, though aspects of it won't be _easy_, and it is entirely possible the business case doesn't work out.
I mostly replied above because of the categorical statement that supersonic flight with turbofans is impossible. The reality is that virtually all supersonic aircraft use engines with some bypass. The Concorde's engines oddly enough are one of the few zero bypass designs used in industry.
The problem is that when you get closer to 1:1 scale, new always issues come up with bigger challenges. You solve one problem at 1:5 scale, only to realize that doesn't work at 1:3 and the whole thing needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
The annals of aviation history are littered with aircraft unable to move past 1:n scale.
Didn't Burt Rutan make a composite aircraft from design to first flight in a year back in the 80s?
Getting the aircraft certified and into production is where most of the actual expense is.
Still I would be absolutely floored if they could do it for under $500mil, so what you say still applies-- maybe just not quite to the point of billionS with an S.
An airliner, even a supersonic one, is more forgiving. Over-engineering goes a long way toward adding nines to your reliability. We've been doing supersonic flight with reusable craft since the 1950s, and there aren't a whole lot of unknowns remaining. That means it's mostly a manufacturing and operations optimization problem.
Looks interesting though
NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.
Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference. I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.
I wonder how long until there's a Business Jet variant of this, or a Government/Military/Scientific version -- the operating costs of commercial aircraft tend to be much less than purpose-built government aircraft, so there's probably a mission/role for it.
Actually it's with the technology currently in use with supersonic flight that there is this large amount of noise. It's technically possible to reach supersonic without the boom and NASA is currently working on it with some contractors. I hope it pans out well; I would love to be able to fly between BWI and SFO in 2 hours.
http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-building-a-jet-that-brea...
[edit] As someone who flies LA/DC fairly regularly I do have to mention my favorite record of the SR-71 doing that flight in under 65 minutes.
So, I think that high-altitude sparse-population daytime routes could be developed that would admit supersonic flight over much of North America.
It's a good way to kick everyone in a large region out of their zone. If this was a constant occurrence, work may quickly cease, or become greatly diminished.
Boom's Kenrick Waithe worked on that same project when he was at Gulfstream and when he was at NASA.
Concorde was really, really loud --- a lot of that was due to being a really old plane with old engines (aircraft have gotten way quieter since the 1970s), but even back then it was considered loud:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3581192.stm
It was exempt from the usual noise regulations and on takeoff it'd set of car alarms in the airport carparks.
I still miss it, despite the noise. I'd hear the noise and look up, and there'd be this beautiful delta-wing shape slipping through the clouds...
...yeah, yeah, I know, being dull is an accomplishment in itself, and the duller aircraft are the better they are, and the one thing that every passenger pilot in the world wants is a thoroughly uninteresting flight. But, dammit, they're still so dull.
I miss Concorde.
And I do wish humans where mindful about the noise pollution the dump where 'nobody lives'. The noise emitted by shipping vessels is having a harming effect on sea life.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
This whole "engineering vs physics" question reminds me of the misunderstandings people have of modern radio technology. Yes, in the 1920s they had to divide the spectrum into exclusive-use bands so that any particular use could transmit and receive clearly, but that was a limitation of engineering, not of physics. In the 2010s that is not a limitation we face, in general. Likewise, I expect that with modern materials and engineering software, progress can be made on the sonic boom issue.
If - via engineering, physics, magic or whatever - sonic booms can be minimized to the point of being indistinguishable from general background noise (or even only as intrusive as current subsonic airliners), I could be convinced that an SST project has a bright future. Until then, I don't think that they will - your first post mentioned that "the whole house shaking" didn't really seem to be hardship when it happened during the day; I'm merely commenting that there are some studies that indicate society as a whole isn't so accepting.
I think any design that literally goes "boom" over land, even a little, isn't going to work. It's too much of an open legal target.
The design really does need to be damn near silent, or at least closer to a mild and unobjectionable "whomp", to have any hope of commercial success.
Of course being a little no-name company won't help matters much here, but I expect that actual production of this would involve a partnership (or probably buyout) with one of the big name companies that have a lot of congressmen on their payroll.
There has also been a lot of research into minimizing Sonic Booms since the 70s. Military jets typically don't care, but passenger jets could definitely benefit.
Cruising above 60000 ft the boom from a larger aircraft might be noticed but not be objectionably loud.
Transonic (approximately Mach 0.80 - 1.2) flight uses significantly more fuel than subsonic flight does. Business jets like the Gulfstream G550 burn more fuel at M0.9 than regional Boeing 717(MD-95) at M0.75 with 4 times more passengers.
The F-22 Raptor can supercruise at M1.6, with half the range compared to cruise at M0.85 similar to other fighters.
If Boom can optimize an aircraft for supersonic transport it would still be expensive to operate. For comparison, no US operator has all business class scheduled flights from LA-NY, and British Airways flies their all business class NY-London flights in an VIP A320 series jet that cruises at M0.7 which is slower than most airliners on the route.
There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.
Test pilots have reported that a Gulfstream G550 airframe can handle supersonic flight, and the BR710 turbofan engines can handle it. The limit is the engine intake design.
With an optimized intake, its entirely possible the fuel consumption at M2.2 would be comparable to ~M0.98
that is one of the major issues here. Modern turbofans on large passenger planes like 787, 380, etc... are that efficient in major part because of high by-pass ratio. Which is not really an option for 2Mach+ speed.
As somebody mentioned, more comfortable 0.85Mach flight would be preferable in many situations to uncomfortable and very expensive 2Mach. If i were starting something like this i'd go straight for suborbital SFO to Singapore in under couple hours. Technology-level wise not that different, money is no issue in that segment (Branson's $200K is not that far from super-premium-business class for your priceless CEO) and there is always large money-no-issue fallback customer - military.
That remains to be seen. They don't even have an engine yet, so this is still firmly in the "we'll see" category.
This is not a field that's amenable to "disruption". Cutting corners means that dozens of people plummet to their deaths, not to mention the abrupt end of your airline as their families sue you into oblivion. If you try to play this like Uber and flout the regulations, the FAA and EAA will ground and impound your gear so fast your head will spin, and rightly so. Even a test aircraft is a gigantic tank full of explosive fuel hurtling through the air on a couple flimsy wings. When things go wrong people die, and the FAA does not play games.
Airlines are an incredibly low-margin business in the best case, and supersonic airliners in particular are a very niche market and have immense operating expenses (to purchase and maintain the airplane and to slake its immense thirst for fuel). The Concorde's operators could never make it profitable.
Never say never, but this just seems like fantasy. Supersonic airliners are a problem domain that has been pored over by engineers for decades, six engineers are not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and solve all the technical problems, then get it certified, then start an airline. Each of those is a problem that requires a national-scale corporation to handle.
It also probably helps significantly that they could fly unmanned missions right away to make money while working out the bugs. You can't fly an uncertified aircraft for commercial purposes.
That's also the figure for just the Falcon-9 rocket. The Dragon cost another $800M. The engines were also developed in-house and may not be factored into that cost either (can't tell). So the total system is costing north of $1.1B.
The Boom model looks to be about the same size as a regional airliner, or a small narrowbody. For some recent points of comparison: the Bombardier CRJ1000 (developed 2007-2012) has a flyaway cost of $46M [1] and an estimated development cost of $300M [1]. A small narrowbody like the Bombardier Cseries costs $72-82M each and cost $5.4B to develop [3]. The Embraer E-jet E2 series (a second iteration on the E-jet airframe) is estimated to cost $1.7B [4].
It's much easier to develop iterations on a single airframe than to certify a new airframe from scratch. And those are all conventional construction, no carbon fiber or anything like that. And while you can develop components in-house - those need to be certified too. So much like any Not-Invented-Here syndrome - you really need to ask the question of whether you want to be a company who makes airplanes, or a company who makes airplane parts.
You can certainly do it some cheaper, but probably not a factor of 10. Overall I think Embraer tends to be one of the more budget-minded manufacturers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CRJ700_series
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/crj1000-takes-on-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CSeries
[4] http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/embraer-e-jet-e...
If you want to get and idea of the magnitude of the regulatory hurdles in a domain that most here will understand, google DO-178C. The mountains of documentation that you have to produce for the software will push any integrated avionics development effort well into the hundreds of millions, unless they plan on using bog standard off-the-shelf parts, and even then they'll have to deal with the flight control system, which will have to be custom by necessity. For some google food, search on 'wcet analysis', 'structural coverage analysis, 'MCDC analysis', 'requirements traceability', 'stack analysis', etc. There are huge hurdles to leap through to get certified, and that's just for the software.
I hate being a wet blanket :(.
OTOH, if they can get capital in the 5-10+ billion range, poach all the best folks from Boeing, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, GE, UTC, Gulfstream, etc. etc. etc. (which will involve setting up offices in Seattle, Phoenix, Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Savannah, the UK, France, etc. -- the aviation scene is a bit older, people have families, and are not so keen to move), then they might actually pull it off. Which would be awesome. And I'd totally be in (if they set up an office in my area, that is).
Was the LON-NYC flight time the problem, though? I think that to go door-to-door right now you spend 50% of the time in the air and the other 50% on the ground.
With this company, you'll be spending 3.5 hours in the air and 8 hours getting to and from airports and through security.
[1] http://www.londoncityairport.com/travelandbooking/page/check...
That, I think, still is an open question. Someone must think there is a decent chance it will be, but if this were a no-brainer, there would be multiple players in this market. Also, oil price fluctuations, the bane of any airline company, will hit those running these planes harder.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/southwest-fuel-hedging-overvie...
Agreed. I spent 5 of the most uncomfortable hours of my life on an airplane from JFK to San Diego, being 6'1 and not particularly slim. Thereafter, I upgraded my seats on that flight to Economy Plus. I guess I could stand a 2 hour flight like that, but not too much more. Getting me there faster, but in a more cramped space won't make me feel better.
Security, etc. is worse of course--though that's largely outside of the airline's control.
One of the reasons Concord "failed" is that it could never fly supersonic over land and had to start slowing long before the destination otherwise it would overshoot (along with fuel costs causing Concord to be more expensive than business class).
(edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
http://www.blodtandsmidigt.com/concordeprofiles.html
Granted, if the Concorde shows up and needs to circle the airport for 20 minutes then that's the same delay.
As someone who travels to the south pacific every year (mostly in economy seating), I strongly disagree. 15h flights are no picnic, in any class. I'll stand if it would get me there in 6-7h - that is a dream.
Seriously, I could start listing the things you can accomplish with one and not the other and I would never run out of steam.
I do think there is a need and market for faster than sound air travel. We have the technology to even minimize the sonic booms for over land travel.
Still, it would take an enormous amount of capital to get a new company up and running. I would love to see an innovated tesla-like company in the aerospace industry though. It's badly needed, IMO.
I hope in 10 years or so we say: yeah 10 years back we laughed at Boom but now they are booming business.
I know several people (starting by my brother) who build their own plane (granted, it was a two-seater several several times louder than a grass-mower and seemingly slower, but you get the idea). One plane feels fairly doable as far as hard- to-predict financial issues go — if you have engineers who know super-sonic, and I can’t imagine having the idea without.
Commercial requirements literally start at "one aircraft that gets the wings overstressed (if not actually snapped off) during destructive testing" and the requirements continue steeply onwards from there. You can figure on having it built by FAA-certified mechanics as well.
The FAA likes having a paper trail if the wings fall off (an extremely common problem with ultralight/sport aircraft built by non-certified personnel). Not OK when you're carrying passengers for hire.
I can completely see the expected extra cost of having to make two prototypes — and, yes, my first reaction to the article was: “please, please, let them have a billion in VC money”. But the truth is, the success ratio of projects about “we want to make a plane that goes that fast” seems far higher than success ratios of any company.
The business side sounds a lot more doable, given how many people fly those destinations and would like to do it faster.
I suspect they intend to become a bigger company.
Could be wrong tho
It might be a fuel issue on distance, but probably not. Also potentially an ETOPS range issue.
However, there are three big issues with transpac: (not impossible issues, but strong reasons why NYC-LON is ideal as MVP)
1) Greater number of destination cities on each side; for transatlantic, NYC-LON really is the main market. LAX-NRT is probably the best first pass. but LAX/SFO/SEA/LAS/Texas/NY/DC could all make solid claims on being sources of traffic, and there are >10 cities in Asia which would be destinations and fairly far apart? I'd almost certainly prefer a nonstop NYC-PEK to a domestic NYC-LAX, switch to LAX-NRT supersonic, then another subsonic NRT-PEK.
2) A lot of the good cities are inland, so no supersonic for those parts of the flights. NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG (corrected) would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there. So you're also stuck doing something suboptimal, either connecting flights or operating outside supersonic regime.
3) After a certain point, comfort is a priority over absolute speed. If it lets you accomplish a mission (meeting, etc.) in a single day, that's a new capability. if it means you get 5h of cramped sleep and then another 7h of cramped sleep on the way back, that's not really better for most missions than 8-10h of comfortable sleep in a full-sized suite for the same price. There clearly is a value in 1-4h flights from USA to China/India, but that requires more than Mach 2.2 -- maybe exoatmospheric.
Another option is probably "events"; special flights to follow F1 and stuff like that. Concorde did a lot of that toward the end.
A lot of really sparsely populated inland. How politically influential are the Siberian fur trappers this route [0] overflies? Enough to counteract the fat overflight fees that Russia likes to charge?
[0] http://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper/rout...
Flight time at 2.2 would still suck, but there could be a market. Probably depends on the total traffic between the city pairs, since some fraction would pay for supersonic coach-size business vs subsonic business/first.
A sonic boom from a fighter jet above around 10,000 ft usually doesn't break any windows. In one case, a General flew a F-22 in supercruise just off the Florida coast at over 50,000 ft and nobody "reported" the boom until the media story ended up on the news.
For low level supersonic flight, what typically happens is the pressure wave created either overflexes the window pane, or the window frame isn't strong enough and the glass falls out.
For a larger aircraft like the Concorde flying above 40,000 ft they wont break windows. People complain about the noise.
On top of that, unless their planes revolutionise supersonic flights, sonic booms is a major limiting factor - they need city pairs where very little of the flight goes over land that anyone cares about, because otherwise permits becomes a major problem.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/21/global-wa...
It's great for you to leave SF in the morning, go to Sydney to watch the opera and be back in SF by midnight. But is the environmental impact of you doing that worth it for everyone else?
The drop in the price of oil has discouraged airlines from investing in more efficient engines for their fleet, I assume there are similar economics at play here.
All current in development airplanes (and I’m talking non-GA non military here), focus on increased efficiency and fuel consumption.
Riding your bicycle to work isn't going to save the planet, neither is reconsidering a flight.
Environmental concerns should be that of multi-national corporations and governments. The 1% flying around the world isn't killing the planet. It's industrial output from cattle and energy production for electricity (coal, nat gas, oil) and fossil fuels burned for industrial use.
I'm tired of the misplaced moral imperatives. Change needs to happen on a global, industrial scale, not in your decision to eat a locally-grown kale salad.
Wake up people.
Snarkiness aside, I think you're mistaken. You can't say 'industrial use' or 'industrial output' and absolve yourself of responsibility. The electronics that you wrote this comment on were all built with yucky industrial machines, running on yucky industrial oil which had to pulled out of the ground by yucky, messy drilling machines. And the kicker is that people did all of that because they knew that you would buy the resulting device.
If no one bought them, they wouldn't make them! The industrial output is all there for your benefit. If we all decided that protecting the planet was more important and invested in making slower, more efficient travel more comfortable, then it would make a big difference.
EDIT: Also the kale salad thing - since you bring up industrial output from cattle farming being a major pollutant then surely you have just made an argument for eating kale salad instead of a tasty burger?
My main point is it needs to be a national conversation, one the government is involved in.
So is everyone driving in the morning: a tiny fraction of the transport pollution. Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction.
To add to staceymakano's point: in the transport industry, I feel very uncomfortable when a a new alternative doesn't perform better on the environmental side.
Not even remotely true in this case. Aviation accounts for about 2% of carbon emissions, by my cursory Google search. Boom aircraft will, in the absolute best of outcomes, never account for more than a very small fraction of that number. And a small fraction of 2% is still, no matter how one tries to spin it, a very small fraction.
In any event, power (P) required to increase velocity (V) is a cubic relationship (P=FV, where F is the drag force, which has as one of its components V^2), so doubling speed requires 8 times the power. There are ways to mitigate that increase -- fly higher to reduce air density, reduce drag by using specialized airfoils and reducing excrescence, take advantage of increasing engine efficiencies, etc. -- but I think it's safe to say that a supersonic aircraft will always require gobs more fuel than its subsonic cousins. By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.
Full disclosure: I once worked as an aerospace engineer.
Correct. My nerd side tells me supersonic planes are the coolest thing on earth, my hippie side is telling me we'll live better without it.
And I still disagree about the fact that a tiny fraction can be ignored.
The main reason why climate change is a thing is because we consistently and repeatedly failed to acknowledge our impact on the environment and justified it by comparing it to other people's impact (and I include myself in that statement).
Also, I echo the other sentiments here about the name, really don't want to fly on an airline named "Boom". Nor "Explode", "Kapow", or "Blast". And god forbid if one of their planes crashes during test flights, the PR nightmare that would result.
Interesting from a tech point if they manage to build and certify a brand new supersonic airplane based on new materials. From a customer's stand point though, hardly anything new.
I dunno. They do say "carbon fiber" a lot... and that is a description of cardboard....
"During the test, the wings on the 787 were flexed upward “approximately 25 feet” which equates to 150 percent of the most extreme forces the airplane is ever expected to encounter during normal operation. The test is used to demonstrate a safety margin for the design and is part of the certification process to show the airplane can withstand extreme forces."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B74_w3Ar9nI
The fact that they aren't waiting before having a final metal frame before testing for instrumentation fit is a plus in my book.
http://business.financialpost.com/news/assembly-of-bombardie...
Their engine: http://boom.aero/assets/press-bg-7481f004eff02964a90134c6a46... Reference picture: http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t301/planedr2k7/100_0177....
Sorry, what connection does this have with the ozone layer?
The most sense I can make of your comment is that you're concerned about CO2 emissions from supersonic flight and don't understand the difference between global warming and ozone depletion.
I thought it was common knowledge. We learned about ozone layer hazards (and SST was among the most destructive ones) in elementary school (7th or 8th grade, Europe) when we learned about ozone layer.
(Writing this just to pre-empt the inevitable $5,000 THIS IS ONLY RICH PEOPLE comments :) )
I personally agree with the sentiment of the blog post, that a 5 hour flight across the atlantic is fast enough but it's still neat to see startups getting in to this space.
0 - http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone over 5'9"/180lbs...though I guess that's a non-issue now (except for as a museum attraction).
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/02/bottom-class...
I feel that better tele-presence just makes more sense.
I do see a stereoscopic (3D) 360 VR future someday but we have a ways to go to get the 'presence' of that down to realism still.
As video and audio conferencing proliferated the demand for in person meetings amongst customers in finance would have gone down. That would have hit Concorde pretty hard.
Business which needs to be conducted in person could be between factory and design hubs. Silicon Valley to China's manufacturing centers for example.
(Note: I'm sure parent understands this.)
Does $15,000 matter, as a business expense on a billion-dollar deal?
I agree tele-presence makes sense, but when $15,000 means as much as the price of a Starbucks coffee means to you and I, the price is so irrelevant, it's like us meeting for coffee, saying to each other "I'll get the bill", and then thinking it's more effort than it's worth to even bother expensing it.
If it was as easy as the founder makes it sound, Boeing would already be doing it.
If this was a company started by Elon, perception of this company would have been totally different.
I know "never say never", but this is about as confident a statement I or anyone with 3 minutes of reading on the airline industry can make. Margins are razor thin as it is.
A much better option (IMO) would be to research a Citation/Learjet sized supersonic aircraft. If you think of the market, the rich would be much more comfortable leaving from a smaller/private terminal in their private jet, zipping to London in 4 hours, and then zipping back on their own time, than they would going through the main terminal and all that nonsense just to save 3 hours in the air. Hell, being in the air in first class is the best part of the entire trip!
These guys (No connection whatsoever) http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/ have been trying to do the latter for 13 years. Thirteen. They just got their first order.