> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people
This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range.
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
To be fair, modern airliners, even budget ones, are way more comfortable than Concorde. You can visit one in a museum, it's very cramped, and noisier. Concorde had way better service tho.
> We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance.
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
As an aside, anyone care to speculate on the “secret seat configuration”?
I guess maybe it’s a recliner with feet pointing to the outside (maybe just two seats per row)? That’s the only new configuration I can imagine that would require reshaping the hull.
Forget luxury. Forget speed. Hands down, the best flying experience I've ever had was on a dirty, slow, late and loud C-130. After an announced delay on the ground, I wedged myself between a cargo pallet and the wall, threw a ratchet strap across as a "belt" and passed out on a metal floor with a backpack for a pillow. No in-flight meals. No safety briefs. No entertainment systems. No drink service. Nothing. I don't even remember the takeoff. The only thing anyone said to me was "Uh, sir... We are about to land. You have to get up." THAT is what I want from flying. Give me a bit of peace, a chance to sleep, and I couldn't care less how fast or slow the journey.
AKA they're doing what every other aerospace company has been doing for decades, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization [0] with simulation in the loop. If you were to ask them how they're leveraging Design of Experiments I bet it'd be met with "design of what?".
Looks like investors and potential employees are asking if Boom is fast growth tech company and this seems like a lame attempt to make up an answer instead of saying- we're solving a different problem on a different timeline. Can't imagine Elon writing something like this 10 years ago.
TLDR: We changed our plane design and lost range, we used ai in helping tweak our engine design to get back our range, we were successful in our computer models.
This article is just another from what are fundamentally hardware companies proclaiming how they're implementing "ai" and it's doing so much to help to gather more stock/venture investors but with no actual substance.
Everything he discusses taking into account are things that airplane/engine manufacturers already do and it doesn't require ai, just some python or god forbid, an excel sheet.
His statement about the relationship between airplane and engine manufacturers is factual correct but so blatantly wrong. You think GE/PW and Boeing/Airbus engineering don't work closely with each other when a new model is being developed? You think either would risk hundreds of millions and years of development without talking to each other? How does anyone take this guy seriously enough to give him millions of dollars?
"This close approach gave rise to mkBoom, our proprietary airplane design software. Initially created in a simpler form for XB-1, mkBoom has evolved significantly and is now pivotal to designing our Overture airliner."
This is the same overture airframe that supposedly had it's final design released in July of 2022? And was supposed to be rolled out in 2025? And have it's first commercial passengers in 2029? (Ref. 1)
But apparently 18 months ago the structure was being redesigned in such a way that caused a 1000 mile range loss (that is described as "subtle" fuselage change)? And in response to that last year they completely redesigned the engines and regained that 1000 miles of lost range... Sure.
More importantly, given the FAA states they a new aircraft takes 5-9 years to certify (Ref 2.) it seems the 2029 target is not viable any longer right? So are you going to tell American or should I?
> At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI.
As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job.
As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
They keep calling this thing an "airliner." Assuming they ever go into production, they'll definitely sell some units to Saudi princes, but commercial airlines? Nope. Any customer that could afford a seat on this thing could afford to rent a Gulfstream and not have to share it with others.
Anyone know what their simulation stack might be using? From the modest amount I know, mechanical engineering usually dislike their CAD tool and Ansys FEA simulations don't always converge. So how on earth are they simulating an entire aircraft with a single command?
When they say simulate, so they actually mean just using ideal mathematical models in Matlab?
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary, because everything a wind tunnel test could tell you can be predicted via simulation.
Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
"It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people—compared to the hundreds or even thousands that would have been employed by a traditional big aerospace company. And we did this with roughly a tenth of the budget that would traditionally be required. People have marveled at how our small team of just 50 people at Boom designed, built, and successfully flew the XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. And we did this with about a tenth the capital as any other supersonic program."
Is the repetition a sign of AI writing the article?
20 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 40.1 ms ] threadThis is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
I guess maybe it’s a recliner with feet pointing to the outside (maybe just two seats per row)? That’s the only new configuration I can imagine that would require reshaping the hull.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidisciplinary_design_optim...
Which makes perfect sense. Software is about automating things. And the more you automate, the faster you go.
A bit like how Jane Street operates I think.
This article is just another from what are fundamentally hardware companies proclaiming how they're implementing "ai" and it's doing so much to help to gather more stock/venture investors but with no actual substance.
Everything he discusses taking into account are things that airplane/engine manufacturers already do and it doesn't require ai, just some python or god forbid, an excel sheet.
His statement about the relationship between airplane and engine manufacturers is factual correct but so blatantly wrong. You think GE/PW and Boeing/Airbus engineering don't work closely with each other when a new model is being developed? You think either would risk hundreds of millions and years of development without talking to each other? How does anyone take this guy seriously enough to give him millions of dollars?
"This close approach gave rise to mkBoom, our proprietary airplane design software. Initially created in a simpler form for XB-1, mkBoom has evolved significantly and is now pivotal to designing our Overture airliner."
This is the same overture airframe that supposedly had it's final design released in July of 2022? And was supposed to be rolled out in 2025? And have it's first commercial passengers in 2029? (Ref. 1)
But apparently 18 months ago the structure was being redesigned in such a way that caused a 1000 mile range loss (that is described as "subtle" fuselage change)? And in response to that last year they completely redesigned the engines and regained that 1000 miles of lost range... Sure.
More importantly, given the FAA states they a new aircraft takes 5-9 years to certify (Ref 2.) it seems the 2029 target is not viable any longer right? So are you going to tell American or should I?
Ref. 1 https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2022/American-Airlines...
Ref. 2 https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certific...
As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job.
As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
I saw Reed Solomon codes were invented for fast, accurate missile guidance and (in my head) that's the connection I made to his super sonic startup
When they say simulate, so they actually mean just using ideal mathematical models in Matlab?
Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
IIRC, the last news was that Rolls-Royce noped out of that (1), which is an indicator that it's either not technically or commercially feasible.
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house?
I'm not an expert, but this seems like it's on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure.
i.e. Without engines, they have nothing, and if Rolls-Royce can't do it, then who can?
1) https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
"It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people—compared to the hundreds or even thousands that would have been employed by a traditional big aerospace company. And we did this with roughly a tenth of the budget that would traditionally be required. People have marveled at how our small team of just 50 people at Boom designed, built, and successfully flew the XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. And we did this with about a tenth the capital as any other supersonic program."
Is the repetition a sign of AI writing the article?