> No. Overture will fly without the use of afterburners, meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes. The airliner will be powered by the Symphony propulsion system. Symphony will be a medium-bypass turbofan engine designed and optimized for environmentally and economically sustainable supersonic flight.
> ... meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes
Extremely dishonest: as far as I can tell (CFR title 14, B36.5) there are no specific noise level regulations for subsonic cruise flight (i.e. not take-off and landing) because you can't hear subsonic aircraft at cruise altitude. On the other hand, however, you will be able to hear sonic booms.
It's intentionally misleading, they are technically saying they will meet the takeoff and landing requirements (which they are required to meet by law) but implying that the plane is going to be quiet at cruise (which they want to perform over the continental United States, not just over the ocean).
Moreover, their statement falsely suggests that Concorde does not "[meet] the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes" but 36.301 says that Concorde also has to meet the same standards as subsonic planes (standards which exclude operation at cruise which didn't matter for Concorde because it was over the Atlantic).
The SR-71 engine is a weird beast operating like both a ramjet and turbojet due shaping the flow and injecting fuel in the air stream.
A ramjet [1] stays efficient at high speeds even though it on the outside kind of looks like an afterburner.
It was a conventional afterburning turbojet for take-off and acceleration to Mach 2 and then used permanent compressor bleed to the afterburner above Mach 2. The way the engine worked at cruise led it to be described as "acting like a turboramjet".
The afterburner on the SR-71's engine is being fed super-compressed bypass air from the intake. It can ignite the exhaust with comparatively minuscule amounts of fuel when compared to a regular turbojet.
At speeds beyond Mach 3, you don't even need fuel to ignite the oxygen. The simple friction and drag of the airframe is enough to ignite the oxygen around it and surround the aircraft with superheated plasma.
I know nothing about Boom. Why is this impressive? We've achieved supersonic for passengers before. Are we meant to be interested just because someone is taking up the mantle again, or is there some new design that makes it impressive?
there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.
This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
"Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy.
The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though.
"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross the Pacific would be incredible.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials.
I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.
There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment
The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction
commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9
i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:
- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.
- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.
it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
I'm not sure the people who pay full-boat fares for business and first today is a sufficient market for a new supersonic plane and a viable set of airline routes (within the range of the plane which probably doesn't include trans-Pacific).
Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke basically all records. Why would there be less case for faster flights?
Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.
Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?
Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).
the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet.
people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.
at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.
> the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet
Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)
In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.
Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights, airline competition and a consolidation amongst manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on other people's schedules between airports they dont want to travel to/from.
The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).
And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.
Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...
As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)
All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.
Concorde holds the world record in both directions actually.
F-BTSD did it:
- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)
- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)
There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.
And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small.
Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.
They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.
Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]
Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.
Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.
Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly Overture won't be capable of that.
Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing
Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.
The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)
Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept
(though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)
No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.
> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.
The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.
But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.
"Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though. Suborbital range is very short on the lower end, and increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can boost to 2km/s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing really useful in between.
There actually is still significant lift. We define the edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't fly conventionally in space but lift might still be generating a force which is significant compared to your craft's weight.
Well the assumption was that there is no drag because the air density is so low. You can’t just say there’s no drag but still assume that you get lift. Your lift/drag ratio won’t go up infinitely just because you’re flying higher.
GP's assumption was travelling through space to avoid drag which doesn't necessarily imply generating lift in space.
My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.
The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude, while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km, where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital depreciation, insurance, etc.
> something to market to investors and potential employees
Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:
> The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.
I don't get the analogy. The Boom CEO explicitly stated that $100 tickets are not around the corner. Two or three generations down the line means four decades at a minimum, if we think one generation takes 20 years. Lots of things can happen in 4 decades, like: significant advances in ramjet engines, rotation detonation engines become mainstream, people get comfortable with windowless aircraft (so there's no need for drooping nose Concorde-style), airports could start being equipped with arresting wires, like aircraft carriers today, airplanes without the vertical tail fin become common place, stronger and lighter composites become available, and, who knows, maybe even some jets will start running on hydrogen rather than jet fuel (hydrogen having about 3 times more energy density per unit of mass). I have to admit the even with all these things, $100 per ticket to any place in the world still seems like a stretch, but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn
You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.
New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.
That’s overstating it. I literally did this flight in Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I’d say tickets from LA are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to Sydney next week in that range.
I hadn't made that connection but it's really apt. People watching Falcon 1 flight 4 get to orbit probably said "It's 165 kg payload, so what? We've been sending satellites to orbit for 50 years. ULA just sent (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1538) a 2000 kg payload to orbit 3 weeks ago!" It really is significant what Boom did in the time frame and budget they had.
The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel. It also could not go supersonic over land because its sonic booms were too loud. This mean that flights could only go over the ocean, and they were expensive due to fuel costs. Boom's goal is to reduce the sound of their sonic booms 30x and eliminate the need of afterburners.
No. I don't think that's correct. The Concorde used its afterburners during take off and to get through the transonic region, where the drag is very heavy. Once you've gone past that the drag drops. At that point the Concorde can turn off the after burners.
IIRC Concorde could super cruise a Mach 2 which is unmatched. It would also flight supersonic for most of its journey which is also presented unprecedented difficulties.
Legend says the Tu-144 used afterburners the whole time while supersonic, but, then, it seems five units have engines without afterburners (RD-36-51's replacing the Kuznetsov NK-144 used in most of the fleet).
I wonder what was the noise level in those late models.
Not really, that's like saying "they relied on closing the doors to the aircraft to achieve supersonic flight". Both happened, but aren't related if I'm reading the comments correctly.
That's a really dumb response. Yes, it relies on closing the doors to achieve supersonic flight too.
The Boom plane doesn't rely on afterburners at any point in the trajectory to achieve supersonic flight. So yes, you would be reading the comments incorrectly.
When the production engine exists in physical form, we can absolutely discuss its capabilities. The XB-1 demonstrator is, using afterburner to get to speed, demonstrating other design features intended to keep the noise down.
The original plan was a commercial partner for the engines, but the big three - Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric - turned them down. It's one of the biggest remaining question marks in the entire project.
Boom is not currently flying their intended engines, the Symphony, which does not exist yet. (1) The XB-1 is flying with J85's just like a T-38 has, and just like a T-38 it can go supersonic with afterburners. If the Symphony is able to meet its design goals, it will not need afterburners for any part of flight. How much they will be able to deliver on that remains the biggest open technical question for Boom. (2)
1: Well, their Plan B intended engines. Their Plan A was that one of the Big 3- RR, PW, GE- would make engines for them, but none were interested in taking the risk that a difficult engine could be designed and built in enough volume to make the investment back.
2: Their biggest legal question is over-land supersonic regulations. Their biggest economics question- and probably the biggest and most important of all of them- is how much will people pay for civil supersonic?
Do we know how much more it's likely to cost? I could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x.
Anything beyond 2x I imagine would start to price out the average person and anything beyond 5x would probably price out the vast majority of potential customers.
Their business model for a long time has theorized that they can deliver an operating cost that would allow airlines to offer tickets at roughly current business class ticket costs, which would be a fraction of Concorde ticket prices expressed in current dollars.
I don't know if those theorized efficiencies will be delivered (a lot depends on that engine) or if airlines will price tickets at that level. But it's the theory so far.
People pay more than that for domestic first class, which doesn’t even have lay-flat seats. $2,500 or even $5k for a New York <> San Francisco 2-hour flight would absolutely sell.
A number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at least some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights. UA has over a half dozen Dreamliners flying back and forth daily, all with Polaris cabins. I know AA and Delta have routes with them, too. I agree, a two-hour flight time would be better!
> Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner.
> Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic
Real question: How many in-production/operation engines in world can fly supersonic without afterburners? I think it is only a handful, all insanely expensive and backed with squillions of dollars of gov't/military money. And, the maintenance cycle must be out of this world expensive.
There are some interesting technological developments around fuel efficiency and minimizing the "sonic boom" that's felt on the ground. Neither of those killed Concorde though, because the entire idea of Concorde turned out to be incredibly faulty. MOST people weren't in such a hurry to get from point A to point B that they'd pay 5x-10x a normal business/first class ticket to cut a trip down by 50% or so. The intended 100+ units to be built and sold turned out to be a fantasy, airlines weren't interested.
Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new, airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID FLIGHT. Today that's routine.
So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a technological one, and the economics haven't changed.
On the live cast the presenter mentioned Boom have already secured ~130 pre-orders, including United Airlines. Not bad considering the Concorde anticipated 100+ orders but only manufactured a fraction of that.
Pre-orders are just wind until they're actually delivering product. It doesn't cost the carriers much to make the pre-orders. The calculation is that if it somehow pans out then they won't miss the boat, if the company fails then they aren't really out anything.
To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't think they would get this far. I still don't think they are going to build full scale production models and actually sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going. Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too though.
My take is it's not even an economic problem. Unless you fly really fast (like Mach 3++), flying east sucks.
Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.
If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.
With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.
But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).
> Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.
I suppose the question is whether you feel like spending 3-5 times as much for the same flight, to save a bit of that time. Perhaps you would be, but I think you can understand how most wouldn't, even if they could. That is of course assuming that unlike Concorde, this can do single-hop journeys longer than a trans-Atlantic flight.
I keep seeing you using this $10k figure, where is that coming from? I’m fortunate to fly intl biz class a lot, and I rarely see prices that high. In September I flew SG from NYC to Singapore in biz class for $4k RT.
If it's already going to be expensive and exclusive they can easily design a program where all the passengers have to be some kind of TSA++ pre-approved ahead of time and perhaps have a special terminal and/or security screening line.
The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.
There were enough passengers, and flying the Concorde actually became profitable for the airlines once they figured out they just needed to charge through the nose for it. This was despite prodigious fuel consumption and that fuel becoming much more expensive after the oil crisis.
The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.
I still don't see this being something large airlines would be overly interested in, but I wonder if there's a private market. If you're Taylor Swift maybe being able to fly from NYC to LA in half the time is well worth it.
The line at security is typically 0-20 minutes. Add in walking time, and I'm getting from car to gate in 10-30 minutes.
But I still feel like I need to get to the airport at least 90 minutes, if not 2 hours early, just in case I end up flying on a day where 1 of the 2 security checkpoints is entirely closed and every traveler is now forced to go through a single checkpoint and it's going to take over an hour.
They're betting that they can make supersonic travel sustainable and profitable with a new aircraft and engine design. The Concord wasn't either of those.
The business case is apparently solid enough that several airlines are partnering with them during development.
This is the first actual demonstration that they can achieve supersonic flight in their demonstrator aircraft, so it is a significant milestone but they are years away from their full-scale aircraft.
It's the first supersonic plane from a YC startup or any startup for that matter. Also they are hoping to do profitable passenger travel which hasn't really been done - concorde had ups and downs but mostly lost money.
Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds. The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the production model capable of supercruise.
“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”
Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.
While true, the catch is that very little technology relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that’s about it. Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints it was built for and those constraints haven’t really changed - airport parking docks remain the same size, runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the same distance apart, people don’t want to hear sonic booms, and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer to turn a profit.
> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.
Because once things are paid by consumers things get better, more responsible, efficient, and so on, compared to free money granted by states to a few at the cost of many?
There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..
The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.
And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?
Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.
It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.
It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.
I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.
And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.
Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..
> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "
It's not a huge deal for humanity, but it's exciting for aviation enthusiasts and those studying the air travel space.
To my layman's eye, they've built a civilian version of a trainer/fighter jet, now all they have to do is scale it up to airliner size :) Long way to go but you have to start somewhere.
Pretty exiting times in aerospace these days. Seeing spacex doing awesome innovation with starship and boom making good progress bringing back supersonic air travel
There's a company called Airhart that's trying to bring Fly-By-Wire to GA. But (at least in the US) I think innovation would be better focused on regulations - looking at you aeromedical specifically.
Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.
For a vivid example, look at the multi-year certification torture that even a minor new engine design (DeltaHawk https://www.deltahawk.com/ ) must endure, or hell, the comical marathon of low-lead avgas adoption, or even a basic 12V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22K-XdV7e-0 lithium battery.
GA is a hell of a fun hobby, but not a market conducive to venture capital timelines or returns.
> Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.
Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.
Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.
I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.
We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
I'm not saying repeal it all or exempt GA but the current approach is clearly the worst of both worlds and ought to be changed.
> I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.
Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic).
> We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
> Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of reasons. For a quick example, TCAS (a system that will warn you if you're going to crash into another plane) isn't mandatory for planes with less than 30 seats or with takeoff weight less than 33,000lbs.
And as for why there are still regulations for GA, it's quite easy - those planes fly in the same airspace, and them falling down on population centres or crashing into other planes can kill people just as much as a civilian airliner. You really really have to try to kill someone if your Zodiac fails.
> Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
Boeing aren't subjected to less rules. They're lucky to be in a country that doesn't care that much for rules because they're the national champion and must be protected. But the rules still are being enforced for them - they're at a very low production cap because they shat the bed so badly so many times.
I'm not saying the regulatory environment is wrong. I'm saying the market it creates (aside from avionics) is not a good fit for innovation stemming from venture capital due to venture capital's expected return magnitudes and timelines.
I cited three technologies (ICE engine redesign, low-lead gasoline, and lithium batteries) where those timelines for market adoption (outside of GA) were orders of magnitude (decades) shorter.
My comments were solely targeted at GA. Commercial aviation is an entirely different ball game.
Yes I noticed this for a lot of the ground shots - looks like they've made a mistake and we're seeing the uncorrected log curve output of the camera, and they've forgotten to load (or enable) a LUT (look up table) for the conversion to linear.
It's basically just missing half of the image processing, normally you'd only output to that to a recorder if you were going to apply all the grading later in post production (which obviously they're not doing here).
The camera also lost focus on the jet during the record where it went transonic for the first time ever (around 1:01). It looks like they struggled for a while to recover focus against the featureless sky because I would guess they had their lens set to auto focus, which uses a spot or grid of consensus edge detectors. There's no circular polarizer filter equipped because you can see window glare, and that momentarily caused the AF grid to choose the window as the subject because there wasn't (any?) a good enough stabilizer. For a relatively stationary subject like this, it's more reliable to pull focus manually because the camera can be jostled without confusing an AF algorithm. Even better to periodically use spot auto-focus to acquire the sharpest focal plane, then flip it to manual.
For those wanting to jump to where it goes supersonic, it happens a little after minute 11 on the flight time. The camera shots are clearer during subsonic flight, then it gets fairly blurry. The takeoff and climb were interesting to see; also before it goes supersonic the shots from the air are remarkably clear.
My parents certainly never did that. Very few parents did, the tickets were way out of the price range of the typical passenger. It's like pining for the days when people traveled in the opulant lounges of ocean going steamer ships, forgetting that the bulk of the people were crammed into tiny cabins with few amenities for the long journey.
Nor did my parents, but I guess I should have clarified better. They at least had the option to be able to do this. It was taken away when Concorde was grounded, but now we have an opportunity for supersonic flight for people, of course with a price tag.
Scott Manley posted an interesting video including some interviews and technical details on XB-1 (as well as some time in the XB-1 simulator near the end of the video).
Computer-based modelling, advances in our understanding of supersonic flight and sonic booms and a mature civil (and private) aviation industry make the profit case much more compelling than it was for the Concorde. (The real test will be in their engine.)
I assume the question was about the questionable economics of running a super-sonic airplane profitably.
The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money.
Maybe the premium aspect will be enough, given that we have a bigger and bigger chasm between rich and poor, or maybe the economics of running it won't compete against sub-sonic, lower fuel consumption planes.
I'm skeptical. Trans-Pacific would be interesting for some because that's a long time in a plane even with lie-flat seating. But then you need a lot of range because once you have to refuel you've cut into your time advantage.
NYC to London or Paris? Sure.
But now you still need to find people willing and able to spend $5K+ each way. I'd like to do it but realistically I'm not going to.
European airfares from the US can be really funky. I'm doing a trip in a couple months with a roundtrip for Heathrow and I'm actually taking the Eurostar back to London because returning directly from Paris was going to be so expensive. Open jaws in particular can be fairly OK or can be really expensive (as in my case).
I'd expect for trans-oceanic, you'd have people scheduling their travel around limited flights, given the unique offering.
I.e. you aren't trying to figure out "How do I 100% capacity a 8:17am daily flight?" (traditional subsonic carriers) but rather "How much demand is there per week/month?" (Boom)
If the flight is Wednesdays-only, then folks line their travel up on Wednesday. Because the alternative is a much longer flight.
There are usually at least daily flights on most routes. Business travelers, in particular, aren't going to wait a few days to take a flight that's a few hours faster. Absolutely no one is heading out 5 days early to shave 3 or 4 hours off their flight time.
If they go for the low-rich market, their target customer moves schedules around themselves. If a CEO can't be in Europe until Wednesday, then the meeting happens Wednesday.
And the key thing Boom will be selling is literally unique: fewer hours on a plane.
To some, that's a nice to have. To people who hate being on a plane, it's worth a lot.
And even lie-flat first class sucks... it's nice, but you're still crammed into a dehydrating box.
Color me skeptical. I don't think CEOs have as much schedule flexibility as you think they do. A lot of the time they're traveling to meet with customers, analysts/media, investors, and so forth. And they have a lot of timing constraints. Senior execs tend to travel a lot. It's part of the job description basically along with early morning and late night conference calls and, generally, often grueling hours although some maintain better balance than others.
And trans-Atlantic flights just aren't all that long. I'd pay some premium to avoid a red-eye but not likely $5K-$10K even if I could. That's probably about what I'm paying for a whole 3 week trip today.
I'm seeing you jump back-and-forth from business travel to your own personal travel and conflating the decisions into one skeptical argument.
You don't buy first class, or even business class seats, as far as I can tell from this comment. You have to set aside your own reactions because you aren't in the target market.
"People scheduling their travel around limited flights" drove extra operational complexity and expenditure for Concorde; it's not a hassle-free business case.
BA and Air France understood that people paid extra to be able to quickly travel transatlantic[0].
That premium value proposition depends heavily on passengers' expectation that the flight WILL go at the scheduled time. The airlines had to invest significant extra resources in spare parts, additional staffing, and standby airframes to ensure on-time performance.
If the Concorde were to ever develop a reputation for six-hour departure delays or days of cancellations in a row, no one among their premium customer base would bother paying extra for it.
British Airways and Air France did profit from them prior to the 9/11 hijackings and the flight 4590 crash, so it's not an impossible hurdle to clear for Boom. But the value proposition for a new SST is going to be vulnerable to operational concerns that don't affect the rest of an airline's fleet.
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[0] https://omegataupodcast.net/166-flying-the-concorde/ - "Every now and then they'd have a survey amongst the regular passengers [...] 'What do you think you paid for your Concorde flight today?' These people haven't got a clue what they paid for their Concorde flight today. They just tell their secretary, 'book me on tomorrow's Concorde, I need to get to New York in a hurry!'"
$10k transatlantic return hop. Add expedited immigration. Does not sound insane. First class tickets London-NY can be already in this price range. Not for everyone of course (certainly way out of my price range).
There's a market, just not sure how big. Business class works mostly because there's a big plane full of people paying for Economy (and maybe Economy Premium) and I suspect a lot of business is upgrades for flyers with a lot of status or mostly using miles. With e-entry (not sure how it will work with ETA now), I haven't waited long in London for immigration in ages.
British Airways business class-only flights from the City airport have been off and on. Don't know their current status. I could afford business but it seems like a poor value relative to other things I could do other than maybe a co-pay with miles trans-Pacific.
I see this stated all the time on HN, yet there's a whole section at the top of this very comments thread where people are talking about how very profitable the Concorde was.
One person quoted the line "There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits."
The key point is that the seven aircraft (two of which they paid £1 for!) spent very few hours per week in the air, because whilst it was profitable on one transatlantic route at very high prices, it would have lost money on just about any other route or with more frequent operation. And to have a profitable airframe programme you need your customers to be able to operate more than a couple of routes.
(the 40% figure is more an indication of BA's sometimes thin margins than massive unfulfilled potential)
My understanding is that it was profitable if you got the aircraft for free and already had pilots capable of flying them.
If the Concorde had been an actual financial success they would have developed it further and made a successor. And if BA and Air France had thought that the Concorde would continue making them money they wouldn't have retired it after one tragic accident in 30 years of operation. The 737 Max is still being made after much worse.
If I recall correctly, that's one of the well documented places where I had understood the fact that the concorde wasn't profitable, and would more or less never by in its current context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBvPue70l8
That's over 8,000 miles. An aircraft with that kind of unrefueuled range could go pretty much anywhere from New York, except Australia, SE Asia, or the tips of Africa and India.
Planned range for the Boom Overture is 4900 miles, so only a little better than the 4500 miles of Concorde, which occasionally had to make a refueling stop going westward over the Atlantic. So it won't have the capability for transpolar or Trans-Pacific flights.
More of the same but bigger? While it is a feat of engineering to make an aircraft the size of an A380 it is essentially the same design as every other commercial airliner, not revolutionary.
Super impressive, but I agree with this, it was an easier project to plot on a spreadsheet and forecast a path to profitability.
Using current technology and looking back at the Concorde to make any predictions on supersonic passenger travel generates a spreadsheet with a lot of red on it.
If somebody wants to burn their time and money trying I am totally cool with it. If they succeed in their vision they will be handsomely rewarded and transport gets faster. If they fail they still tried to make the future more amazing.
They won't do supersonic jets in particular, but they already have a ton of moonshots to try make sustainable aviation possible and with economics that make sense. Stuff like hydrogen propulsion, hydrogen electric, and battery electric designs, with a variety of weird shapes and forms. They're the only big aircraft manufacturer with such a wide array of potentially groundbreaking (if they make it) research. And theirs is drastically more important than Boom - time and time again, it has been proven that mass aviation is all about economics, not speed. Soon it will be economics + sustainability, speed being a niche which might not even be profitable (Concorde, Convair and many others have tried differentiating themselves on speed and failed).
This is slightly off topic, but why cant we start rebuilding Concorde?
Wouldn't it be much easier to rebuild using modern technology? And try to get Mach 3 over the Atlantic so London to New York could hopefully be under 3 hours including take off and landing.
For Concorde the entire supply chain is long gone. A clean sheet design based around currently available parts would be cheaper than trying to resurrect an old design.
As for speed, Mach 3 is really tough because of extreme airframe heating. Mach 2 is about the highest sustained speed an airplane can manage without using really exotic materials or active cooling.
You can either a) rebuild the Concord or b) use modern technology.
If you use modern technology, its not a Concord anymore.
And you can't magically go Mach 3 just because you say its 'modern'. What existing engine can do that? And even if you had an engine, a Concord will not do that anyway.
So really you are talking about developing a whole new plane. And that's gone cost 10-20 billion $ and including the engine like quite a bit more.
So why is this happening but SST got pilloried due to noise, vibration, moisture in the stratosphere, ozone layer, etc. Did these issues get solved with the Boom aircraft, or is the solution to route around them via marketing and hope no one opens a history book?
The F16 is already cheap, proven, integrated with everything, and available in great numbers. The Air Force also has a super sonic bomber in the B1 lancer, and a mass produced supersonic stealth fighter/bomber in the F35, which is actually pretty cost effective despite its public perception. Maybe there's a place for a large supersonic transport but the Air Force also has a lot of very heavy logistics aircraft already.
You should be asking yourself why the US would buy a supersonic military aircraft when they've spent the last 70 years moving AWAY from higher speeds because it doesn't provide any value.
Why would you spend a single dollar on making your launch platform go a little bit faster when the thing you are launching goes faster than Mach 4? And that was true in the 80s.
Power output is important but top speed is not a priority. The B1 Program was cut partially because you could just buy 100 stealthy cruise missiles for the price of one B1 bomber which the Air Force did not think was more survivable than a B52. In the 80s.
Every country has built slower planes entirely because higher sustained top speed just means a more expensive engine, more fuel usage, and more frequent maintenance.
Boom insists they will somehow magically overcome all of those problems.
I'm not saying that supersonic aircraft is particularly useful. I'm saying that it's not widely presented in the USAF.
I'd say that manned military aircraft should generally be on decline, and manned fighter aircraft, tenfold so. The future belongs to drones that can withstand 30G, and have the "brain" more evenly distributed within the craft to increase survivability, and which can carry extra 1000 lb of payload because they have no human + cockpit + ejector seat + life support system on board.
If Boom succeeds in making a supercruise engine that can stay supersonic without needing afterburners, then the military may be interested because that will be cheaper than their current engines that need afterburners and use more fuel.
How is that special? The military already has the F-22 which can supercruise just fine. Or the Eurofighter if your military isn’t the USAF.
And also, fuel cost is probably the last concern of an Air Force. Maybe logistics of supplying fuel in an actual war is important, but I think the money for buying the fuel itself is basically zero compared to maintenance and getting the plane in the first place.
The military has never had an operational supersonic transport aircraft. It's not a high enough priority for them to fund development of one from scratch, but if it's available on the civilian market then they'll probably buy a few. There are a few potential missions such as dignitary transport or rapid delivery of special operations teams.
I can't think of a single aerospace company that is not dual-use. I doubt Boom is building with that in mind but if they're around in 50 years, I'd be shocked if they did not have a thriving defense business.
Lockheed Martin Space employs quarter of their total workforce and does both, they built the Hubble, and now working on Orion and so on. Key components of Hubble did come from "dual-use" technology i.e. spy satellites.
They have some interest in a "special mission" version, a common aerospace euphemism for militarized.
They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.
That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...
Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.
544 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] thread> Will Overture use afterburners like Concorde?
> No. Overture will fly without the use of afterburners, meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes. The airliner will be powered by the Symphony propulsion system. Symphony will be a medium-bypass turbofan engine designed and optimized for environmentally and economically sustainable supersonic flight.
Extremely dishonest: as far as I can tell (CFR title 14, B36.5) there are no specific noise level regulations for subsonic cruise flight (i.e. not take-off and landing) because you can't hear subsonic aircraft at cruise altitude. On the other hand, however, you will be able to hear sonic booms.
Moreover, their statement falsely suggests that Concorde does not "[meet] the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes" but 36.301 says that Concorde also has to meet the same standards as subsonic planes (standards which exclude operation at cruise which didn't matter for Concorde because it was over the Atlantic).
Edit: Of course, the Blackbird had the benefit of refuelling mid-air.
[1] https://youtu.be/gkyVZxtsubM
A ramjet [1] stays efficient at high speeds even though it on the outside kind of looks like an afterburner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet
At speeds beyond Mach 3, you don't even need fuel to ignite the oxygen. The simple friction and drag of the airframe is enough to ignite the oxygen around it and surround the aircraft with superheated plasma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.
This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.
The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
Still impressively cool.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
i just think the little plane is neat.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.
The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction
commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9
i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:
- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.
- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.
it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
Worse: drag in the transonic regime is generally worse than subsonic or supersonic.
Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.
Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?
people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.
at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.
Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)
In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
Certainly they're fast, wikipedia says the the G650 can get to mach 0.9, but it's called the sound barrier for a reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_barrier
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.
And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.
Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...
As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil aircraft going supersonic.
F-BTSD did it:
- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)
- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde_histories_and_aircraf...
Having the tech sounds funny. In some abstract way maybe. Actually being able to build a supersonic airframe and everything connected.
And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.
They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.
Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]
Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...
The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)
The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.
But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.
My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.
Most likely it's aspirational, something to market to investors and potential employees.
Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.
LA to Sydney is $10k on a good day for lie flat. You could probably charge $15 even 20k a seat and (a) turn a profit (b) filling the plane.
>> You could probably charge $15 even 20k a seat
Neither do I.
That's while my tesla robotaxi is making that 100 bucks driving leprechauns to their golden pots!
Totally not vaporware guys.
Per their site - https://boomsupersonic.com/overture
Source: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-engine-re-heats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...
It was really an unique plane.
I wonder what was the noise level in those late models.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transonic
The Boom plane doesn't rely on afterburners at any point in the trajectory to achieve supersonic flight. So yes, you would be reading the comments incorrectly.
Gosh this website is full of ignorant people.
"The Concorde used its afterburners ... to get through the transonic region..."
Am I missing something, or is there no difference between these sentences?
You can watch them kick in on the telemetry (which goes from "100%" to "A/B" for all three engines) at the bottom of the video around the 58:35 mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/-qisIViAHwI?feature=shared&t=35...
The original plan was a commercial partner for the engines, but the big three - Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric - turned them down. It's one of the biggest remaining question marks in the entire project.
There IS no production plane, nor can there be. The last company they wanted to use for engines dropped them as a client years ago (others did earlier): https://english.alarabiya.net/business/aviation-and-transpor...
1: Well, their Plan B intended engines. Their Plan A was that one of the Big 3- RR, PW, GE- would make engines for them, but none were interested in taking the risk that a difficult engine could be designed and built in enough volume to make the investment back.
2: Their biggest legal question is over-land supersonic regulations. Their biggest economics question- and probably the biggest and most important of all of them- is how much will people pay for civil supersonic?
Do we know how much more it's likely to cost? I could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x.
Anything beyond 2x I imagine would start to price out the average person and anything beyond 5x would probably price out the vast majority of potential customers.
I don't know if those theorized efficiencies will be delivered (a lot depends on that engine) or if airlines will price tickets at that level. But it's the theory so far.
People pay more than that for domestic first class, which doesn’t even have lay-flat seats. $2,500 or even $5k for a New York <> San Francisco 2-hour flight would absolutely sell.
They're limited. And I regularly see them going for $4k+.
Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new, airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID FLIGHT. Today that's routine.
So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a technological one, and the economics haven't changed.
To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't think they would get this far. I still don't think they are going to build full scale production models and actually sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going. Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too though.
Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.
If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.
With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.
But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).
Concorde did that in 3 hours FYI.
Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.
Plenty of people do for comfort. And these seats don’t look horrendous.
The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.
The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.
It doesn’t take 2 hours to go through security , certainly not in the first class section in any case.
The line at security is typically 0-20 minutes. Add in walking time, and I'm getting from car to gate in 10-30 minutes.
But I still feel like I need to get to the airport at least 90 minutes, if not 2 hours early, just in case I end up flying on a day where 1 of the 2 security checkpoints is entirely closed and every traveler is now forced to go through a single checkpoint and it's going to take over an hour.
The business case is apparently solid enough that several airlines are partnering with them during development.
This is the first actual demonstration that they can achieve supersonic flight in their demonstrator aircraft, so it is a significant milestone but they are years away from their full-scale aircraft.
For the rest of us, isn't air travel supposed to be something we're giving up/ramping down due to climate change?
I would think that is not very hard to accomplish. Their first flight is almost half a century after Concorde’s. Technology has progressed.
As an (imperfect) comparison, in subsonic flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Past):
“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”
Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.
Why is this interesting?
$200 million in North Carolina for production:
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/nc-...
$60 million from the US Air Force for development:
https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/flight-te...
$2 million SBIR grant for development:
https://www.sbir.gov/awards/187787
And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?
It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.
It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.
And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.
Just talking about the "$200M" number.
> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "
To my layman's eye, they've built a civilian version of a trainer/fighter jet, now all they have to do is scale it up to airliner size :) Long way to go but you have to start somewhere.
Can someone innovate general aviation
For a vivid example, look at the multi-year certification torture that even a minor new engine design (DeltaHawk https://www.deltahawk.com/ ) must endure, or hell, the comical marathon of low-lead avgas adoption, or even a basic 12V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22K-XdV7e-0 lithium battery.
GA is a hell of a fun hobby, but not a market conducive to venture capital timelines or returns.
Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.
Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.
We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
I'm not saying repeal it all or exempt GA but the current approach is clearly the worst of both worlds and ought to be changed.
Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic).
> We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
> Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of reasons. For a quick example, TCAS (a system that will warn you if you're going to crash into another plane) isn't mandatory for planes with less than 30 seats or with takeoff weight less than 33,000lbs.
And as for why there are still regulations for GA, it's quite easy - those planes fly in the same airspace, and them falling down on population centres or crashing into other planes can kill people just as much as a civilian airliner. You really really have to try to kill someone if your Zodiac fails.
> Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
Boeing aren't subjected to less rules. They're lucky to be in a country that doesn't care that much for rules because they're the national champion and must be protected. But the rules still are being enforced for them - they're at a very low production cap because they shat the bed so badly so many times.
I cited three technologies (ICE engine redesign, low-lead gasoline, and lithium batteries) where those timelines for market adoption (outside of GA) were orders of magnitude (decades) shorter.
My comments were solely targeted at GA. Commercial aviation is an entirely different ball game.
Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ap8k564N_w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_profile
It's basically just missing half of the image processing, normally you'd only output to that to a recorder if you were going to apply all the grading later in post production (which obviously they're not doing here).
See this random article for a bit of a rundown - https://pixflow.net/blog/difference-between-raw-log-and-rec-...
More technology advances please so we can break through this zeitgeist of human pessimism and introspection.
Onwards and upwards!
That's a good thing in my books.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITGgRhjcHAM
Hint: it's because the XB-1 is a one-third scale model of their fully fledged Overture.
It would be horrible!
On a side note: Channing Tatum is a shoe-in for playing the pilot, Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg, if this ever gets made into a movie.
I'm also quite worried about Airbus after winning against Boeing becoming complacent since Chinese or Russians are not even close.
Selling it for more than it costs to build.
Computer-based modelling, advances in our understanding of supersonic flight and sonic booms and a mature civil (and private) aviation industry make the profit case much more compelling than it was for the Concorde. (The real test will be in their engine.)
The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money.
Maybe the premium aspect will be enough, given that we have a bigger and bigger chasm between rich and poor, or maybe the economics of running it won't compete against sub-sonic, lower fuel consumption planes.
NYC to London or Paris? Sure.
But now you still need to find people willing and able to spend $5K+ each way. I'd like to do it but realistically I'm not going to.
La Première will regularly go for $20k one way.
I.e. you aren't trying to figure out "How do I 100% capacity a 8:17am daily flight?" (traditional subsonic carriers) but rather "How much demand is there per week/month?" (Boom)
If the flight is Wednesdays-only, then folks line their travel up on Wednesday. Because the alternative is a much longer flight.
Even for tourism, I wouldn't.
If they go for the low-rich market, their target customer moves schedules around themselves. If a CEO can't be in Europe until Wednesday, then the meeting happens Wednesday.
And the key thing Boom will be selling is literally unique: fewer hours on a plane.
To some, that's a nice to have. To people who hate being on a plane, it's worth a lot.
And even lie-flat first class sucks... it's nice, but you're still crammed into a dehydrating box.
And trans-Atlantic flights just aren't all that long. I'd pay some premium to avoid a red-eye but not likely $5K-$10K even if I could. That's probably about what I'm paying for a whole 3 week trip today.
You don't buy first class, or even business class seats, as far as I can tell from this comment. You have to set aside your own reactions because you aren't in the target market.
BA and Air France understood that people paid extra to be able to quickly travel transatlantic[0]. That premium value proposition depends heavily on passengers' expectation that the flight WILL go at the scheduled time. The airlines had to invest significant extra resources in spare parts, additional staffing, and standby airframes to ensure on-time performance.
If the Concorde were to ever develop a reputation for six-hour departure delays or days of cancellations in a row, no one among their premium customer base would bother paying extra for it.
British Airways and Air France did profit from them prior to the 9/11 hijackings and the flight 4590 crash, so it's not an impossible hurdle to clear for Boom. But the value proposition for a new SST is going to be vulnerable to operational concerns that don't affect the rest of an airline's fleet.
--
[0] https://omegataupodcast.net/166-flying-the-concorde/ - "Every now and then they'd have a survey amongst the regular passengers [...] 'What do you think you paid for your Concorde flight today?' These people haven't got a clue what they paid for their Concorde flight today. They just tell their secretary, 'book me on tomorrow's Concorde, I need to get to New York in a hurry!'"
British Airways business class-only flights from the City airport have been off and on. Don't know their current status. I could afford business but it seems like a poor value relative to other things I could do other than maybe a co-pay with miles trans-Pacific.
I see this stated all the time on HN, yet there's a whole section at the top of this very comments thread where people are talking about how very profitable the Concorde was.
One person quoted the line "There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits."
(the 40% figure is more an indication of BA's sometimes thin margins than massive unfulfilled potential)
If the Concorde had been an actual financial success they would have developed it further and made a successor. And if BA and Air France had thought that the Concorde would continue making them money they wouldn't have retired it after one tragic accident in 30 years of operation. The 737 Max is still being made after much worse.
Which isn't to say Boom may not succeed.
Using current technology and looking back at the Concorde to make any predictions on supersonic passenger travel generates a spreadsheet with a lot of red on it.
Unfortunately for Airbus, it also stopped being profitable before they finished the A380.
https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hydro...
Wouldn't it be much easier to rebuild using modern technology? And try to get Mach 3 over the Atlantic so London to New York could hopefully be under 3 hours including take off and landing.
As for speed, Mach 3 is really tough because of extreme airframe heating. Mach 2 is about the highest sustained speed an airplane can manage without using really exotic materials or active cooling.
You can either a) rebuild the Concord or b) use modern technology.
If you use modern technology, its not a Concord anymore.
And you can't magically go Mach 3 just because you say its 'modern'. What existing engine can do that? And even if you had an engine, a Concord will not do that anyway.
So really you are talking about developing a whole new plane. And that's gone cost 10-20 billion $ and including the engine like quite a bit more.
Wishing them all the best! Beautiful aircraft, beautiful demonstration, and hopefully more beautiful datasets that exceed their expectations.
Just don’t Milkshake Duck this.
Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077 - Jan 2025 (99 comments)
F-22 is a marvel, and can fly supersonic for much longer, but its cost is exorbitant, and it's not even produced any more.
F-35 is more economical but it literally can fly supersonic for a minute or two with the currently installed engines.
Why would you spend a single dollar on making your launch platform go a little bit faster when the thing you are launching goes faster than Mach 4? And that was true in the 80s.
Power output is important but top speed is not a priority. The B1 Program was cut partially because you could just buy 100 stealthy cruise missiles for the price of one B1 bomber which the Air Force did not think was more survivable than a B52. In the 80s.
Every country has built slower planes entirely because higher sustained top speed just means a more expensive engine, more fuel usage, and more frequent maintenance.
Boom insists they will somehow magically overcome all of those problems.
I'd say that manned military aircraft should generally be on decline, and manned fighter aircraft, tenfold so. The future belongs to drones that can withstand 30G, and have the "brain" more evenly distributed within the craft to increase survivability, and which can carry extra 1000 lb of payload because they have no human + cockpit + ejector seat + life support system on board.
And also, fuel cost is probably the last concern of an Air Force. Maybe logistics of supplying fuel in an actual war is important, but I think the money for buying the fuel itself is basically zero compared to maintenance and getting the plane in the first place.
(which I think is good but ymmv)
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are pretty squarely military only.
Government contractor would be closer i think.
Lockheed Martin Space employs quarter of their total workforce and does both, they built the Hubble, and now working on Orion and so on. Key components of Hubble did come from "dual-use" technology i.e. spy satellites.
They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.
That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...
Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.