American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft(boomsupersonic.com) |
American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft(boomsupersonic.com) |
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
Is this better or worse on that account? I have no idea. But it potentially could be substantially different either way.
7hrs London to NYC are more than acceptable, too bad it ends up being 10hrs
So, possibly zero. OK, thanks for the update.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/28/irish-lessors-have-terminate...
"Aircraft Leasing Ireland (ALI), members of which include SMBC Aviation Capital, Avolon, Aircastle and AerCap Holdings, which is the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, said that all of its members have complied fully with the sanctions."
Pretty glad I don't own American stock right now, because they're apparently led by madmen.
"American Airlines to buy 20 Overture aircraft from Boom Supersonic"
When reading the original title, I had the impression that the company was going to be acquired by AA.
Instead, it's "just" an order of 20 aircrafts.
Note that this is not a new move by Boom, they played this card when raising money when they pitched at YC demo day, and they're doing it again. The problem I have with this is the following:
> agreement to purchase up to 20 Overture aircraft, with an option for an additional 40. American has paid a non-refundable deposit on the initial 20 aircraft
It's "up to 20", and not "20", and there is a non-disclosed non-refundable deposit. If it's a, say, $10,000 per aircraft, total of $200,000 (ouch, should I say... up to $200,000?), it's a just a cheaper ad for AA, and ammo for the CEO when the board asks "where are you innovating?".
Good luck to Boom, but I am unconvinced this is a viable company and a viable business.
There is so much opportunity for innovation in areas of aviation where we desperately need to innovate: Getting rid leaded avgas, moving away from fossil fuels altogether which includes fields like energy storage and electric propulsion, developing an efficient trainer to replace the piston lead-gasoline burning C172 that is so ubiquitous and makes up much of the 1500 required hours for an ATP license. So many opportunities.
Aviation is ripe for innovation. This ain't it.
But, it's an interesting thought, and in line with a very interesting thread that kragen brought to my attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32009925
FedEx likes to buy out Boeing facilities so that they're not "completely reliant" on Boeing for anything, see https://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/news/102874-fedex-to-take... "Air cargo carrier FedEx Express (FX, Memphis Int'l) is to take over the lease of Boeing's Dreamlifter Operations Centre at Paine Field, Everett, quashing any hopes of a return of the B787 Dreamliner production to Washington State."
I wonder why more airlines don't choose to do similar things.
Until the plane is actually flying in the air you should just treat any announcements as misleading (they announced that their test airframe was ready, what, 3-4 years ago?).
Same... at least they should put an S to aircraft... but then again maybe they hit the strict character limit...
But "Boom Supersonic is transforming air travel with Overture, the world’s fastest airliner, optimized for speed, safety, and sustainability. Serving both civil and government markets, Overture will fly at twice the speed of today’s airliners and is designed to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Overture’s order book, including purchases and options from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines stands at 130 aircraft. Boom is working with Northrop Grumman for government and defense applications of Overture. Suppliers and partners collaborating with Boom on the Overture program include Collins Aerospace, Eaton, Safran Landing Systems, Rolls-Royce, the United States Air Force, American Express, Climeworks, and AWS."
This^ is significant support they already have. So they could operate for 10+ years, which seems like they will (even if they are just in R&D and burning cash). In a way, it is viable to the employees and suppliers, if they get paid for such a long time haha.
Same. I think their timelines are too aggressive. I want to be proved wrong though!
Incidentally, Boom is 5 minutes from my office here in Centennial, Colorado and where I fly out of KAPA. I'd like to see innovative US aerospace companies succeed, but I feel like these guys are chasing the wrong idea.
How is single-engine piston aircraft a critical area?
edit: I do note that according to 2019 report, North American companies had >60% global marketshare in both turboprops and business jets in terms of units shipped
Neat. Love to watch traffic at KAPA - saw a Walton plane land there the other day an hour or so before Condi was named part owner of the Broncos.
Going from a 15h to 8h flight will be huge -- that's 30h to 15h round-trip.
I'm American and visited Australia once, and realized I probably never would again, it's just too far. An Australian friend of mine here in the US only went home to see his family every few years. It just takes sooo long, stuck in an economy-class seat.
Supersonic makes a lot of sense not as general-purpose, but for long-haul flights between hemispheres. At least until there's an economy-price "sleeper car" equivalent accomodation where you can actually sleep on flights.
This airliner is primarily targeted at shorter Atlantic routes; if they succeed in that market then they might build a larger successor model with the range for Pacific routes.
Wait, it looks like I either misremembered that claim, or they have backed away from it:
> "Overture’s fleet will be able to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuels."
https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability
Color me skeptical. Making existing aviation more climate-friendly would be a much more worthy goal than this ridiculous supersonic vanity project.
https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...
And there actually may be realistic optimization scenarios.
People don't want to have sympathy for 'world leaders' for example, but often physical presence is an important thing. And they waste so much time.
I don't like my own PM but I'd rather they spent a little more to cut his travel time down; his time is extremely expensive.
And this sounds ridiculous at first glance: but even if he could literally get reasonable sleep more often. His decisions are so impactful, the leverage so much, it matters. And I don't even like the guy at all.
That aside the secondary advantages from it might be positive, we need R&D that's ahead of the curve.
I'm fine with this as long as everyone isn't flying it all the time.
With the currently available conventional engine, it vastly outperforms the Cessnas and Cirruses, AFAICT.
So with the hybrid and pure electric options in development (these were planned from the start, so the plane is designed for them), it is still competitive.
https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/general-aviation...
(Not affiliated or associated in any way, just a fan of aviation innovation)
I was shocked to hear that leaded gasoline is still around, so I did a quick search. Turns out most (all?) piston-engine driven airplanes still run on leaded gas. Jet airliners don't, so I'm not sure if the overall impact is significant, but nonetheless shocking to hear that we're still spraying lead into the air we breathe.
> Turns out most (all?) piston-engine driven airplanes still run on leaded gas
Not technically all. There is unleaded avgas although it's not yet common and some piston planes are diesel.
The pandemic was terrible for the most part, but it did give us an opportunity to rethink how we live and work, including how to lessen future pandemics and enviromental degradation with our choices on transportation.
The problem is that the greenhouse gas impact will be higher for a supersonic trip compared to a subsonic one. This is on top of the issue that we don't really have a good low carbon alternative for longer range air travel (batteries don't have anywhere near enough specific energy). The best option we have is synthetic jet fuel produced from green electricity. Producing jet fuel that way is many times more expensive than fossil fuel jet fuel.
What does “less people” mean? You mean Boom is targeting only the ultra-rich? That’s not their aim. They aim to make supersonic flight both possible and affordable.
I see no evidence that this is at all realistic, and a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Do they even have a story explaining how their new supersonic jet could possibly reduce costs?
Isn't that more chemical engineering? Boom sounds mostly mechanical.
> moving away from fossil fuels altogether which includes fields like energy storage and electric propulsion
Isn't this mostly battery tech? Seems like a stretch for these experts to be working on that.
> developing an efficient trainer to replace the piston lead-gasoline burning C172 that is so ubiquitous and makes up much of the 1500 required hours for an ATP license.
At least this sounds like something in their wheelhouse, but needless to say, there's no money in that.
Boom is developing a plane that has demand. Simple as that. Not everyone needs to try to save the world.
But basic physics dictates that supersonic flight requires a lot of power, as well as low bypass turbofans. So competitive with modern "normal" airliners in terms of cost or emissions per seat-km, nope, not gonna happen.
Synthetic jet fuel is a good idea that deserves R&D money (if we're gonna keep flying long distance in a carbon constrained world I think something like that is going to be necessary), but is orthogonal to a supersonic airliner. Unsure why they think that bundling synthetic jet fuel (itself a high-risk R&D project) with their supersonic jet (another high risk R&D project) will do anything but increase the risk of failure of the entire project. Well, the uncharitable explanation why they're doing it is of course greenwashing.
But 50 years have passed since the Concorde was designed. Both computational fluid dynamics algorithms and computing power have made tremendous progress. It's quite likely Ouverture will have a much better fuel economy than Concorde, if only for the fact that it will use turbofan rather than turbojet.
Where do you think airline pilots come from? New pilots learn to fly in single-engine piston planes. And then again as flight instructors and commercial (non-ATP) pilots while building time to get their ATP rating and move onto the airlines. The continual slow death of GA is only going to worse an increasingly dire pilot shortage.
You could also argue that US pilots have superior training due to their GA experience as well. The over-reliance on automation and lack of stick and rudder skills is becoming a liability in those foreign airlines that train pilots exclusively in simulators and then throw them into the right seat of airliners where they're essentially computer operators instead of pilots.
The inability to for an airline pilot to land without autopilot is a very real thing: https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-c...
Or the ability to fly in IMC conditions without an autopilot: https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/experienced-crew-struggl...
Since the "means by which" is uncountable (craft) then the plural should be the same as the singular; i.e. one craft, many craft. This also applies in English to older agglutinates like aircraft. Newer agglutinates (for example laptop) are far less likely to follow this rule; one laptop, many laptops.
English, due to its muddled heritage and well intentioned but half informed linguists over the years, is a very messy language.
I think for river travel it was common to build a boat/raft to make a journey and then break it up at the destination. In that context maybe the object of the boat was secondary to the act of making the boat. And at some point boats became more personified and thought of as things in their own right.
Without removing freedom of mobility, the only way we have to mitigate environmental costs is through price pressures which could be used to fund net neutral technologies.
Yes, strictly you don’t need to travel anywhere, but we should allow people to travel in the most economical way feasible. Supersonic jet travel is not that.
If 15 hours in an economy class is too much for you, but you can afford a supersonic flight ticket, perhaps you should consider upgrading to a business class. Or if you don’t like that, consider braking the flight up in 2 or 3 parts sleeping at a nice hotel in between. This is a much more climate friendly option then a supersonic flight that only saves a few hours of your time.
I'm glad you considered all possible ways to mitigate the environmental costs of flying. Seems like wasteful supersonic jets aren't one of them?
> Use for "small boat" is first recorded 1670s, probably from a phrase similar to "vessels of small craft" and referring either to the trade they did or the seamanship they required, or perhaps it preserves the word in its original sense of "power."
https://www.etymonline.com/word/craft?ref=etymonline_crossre...
I'd never even though about this, so thanks for that.
The English word "boat" comes directly from German; "das Boot".
https://www.airway.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Boom_Ov...
to a very scaled down Boeing 2707-300 configuration :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707
(that tiny fin tho...). While reducing cruise speed to 1.7 mach. I see no visible changes to deal with the sonic booms problem. So operation would be like Concorde I suppose, subsonic (or hi-subsonic) over land and Supersonic over ocean only. Unless the super-rich manage the regulation to change.
EDIT : ah yes :) "2x FASTER OVER WATER" and "20% FASTER OVER LAND"...
Also : Maybe good to remember that 18 airlines had once placed orders for Concorde, with only the 2 national carriers flying it in service eventually. And that The Boeing 2707 was ordered by 27 airlines before the program being canceled…
The small niche of customers willing to pay a significant premium in order to save some travel hours is not big enough to sustain an entire industry of specialized mechanics, parts suppliers, pilots, etc... Basically you need a critical mass of people riding these aircraft every year before the relatively high fixed costs eat you alive, and it's very hard to get a lot of people to buy into a high priced luxury service.
Going from the Concrods 3550nm range to 4250nm should help with that as it opens up several new routes and longer routes see a more significant drop in travel times.
Who in their right mind wants to spend top dollar to fly internationally on an American airline, worst of all AA, one of the two worst airlines on the planet?
Anyone with some money who wants a nice international flight is going to take one of the Asian or Middle Eastern airlines, not one of the shitty American-run airlines. The level of service is so far superior it's not even funny. AA is infamous for their horrible service in First Class.
I know I would pay a premium for this experience. Simply because it fits into my imagined jet set lifestyle phenomenally well. Maybe once every two years for a special occasion or treat ;)
I also think the economically limiting term is still the turbine blades. Lifetimes for commercial service turbines run 100k+ hours. Supersonic is maybe 1/10 that. And have higher rates of oxidation, cavitation, catastrophic fatigue, etc. We need a new Alphafold! For phase stability of alloys exhibiting high strain resistance at high temps and fast cycles...
But will the range be there? Concorde was severely range limited, which somewhat defeats the purpose of faster travel (if it only works on medium length routes).
Cutting a 14hr SYD-SFO flight down to 8.5hrs is just more impactful than cutting a 7h LHR-JFK flight down to 4.2 (when taking into consideration significant time at the airfields for taxi, boarding, security checks etc)
Concorde didn't have the range for long haul and once you need to land to refuel you lose all time savings.
Probably will be very expensive but it's exciting for future possibilities
Of course things didn’t work out that way with Concorde, which was not commercially successful and more of a spectacle than something founded in business fundamentals. But if Boom can make supersonic passenger travel economics work out it would certainly be hugely disruptive.
I guess that's not nothing given how these sorts of contracts usually give the big name brand company lots of outs if the speculative company goes bust, but by bragging about it without specifying the amount, I'm guessing it's a low amount.
14 commercial aircraft were delivered of 20 total.
So why should I trust that their main airliner is anywhere even close to on-time.
I've learned to appreciate slow-travel using trains and have been a supporter of electric planes for reaching further places.
Rather than high speed rail to get the masses into cities for work, we are getting fast planes for the wealthy to work in NYC and spend the weekend in European villas.
Makes you scratch your head trying to justify this while climate change is encouraging people to eat bugs.
That wouldn't really work outside of some very specific cases. High speed rail (300km/h+) needs some distance to get to its cruising speed. Below that it's a waste of money. The shortest high-speed rail route i know of is Paris-Reims and it takes 40 minutes, which is decent for a commute, depending on home/work to train station distance.
https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...
At the beginning of the take off roll, each engine would be burning around 21 tonnes/hour.
Anyway, back to some figues; at Mach 2, 50,000', the typical fuel burn per engine would be around 5 tonnes/hour, falling to around 4.2 tonnes/hour at 60,000'
Better title - and still within HN limits - would have been:
"American Airlines to buy 20 Overture aircraft from Boom Supersonic"
Wouldnt be surprised if American put less than 1m down, which makes this nothing more than a slightly expensive PR campaign.
this is the worst possible time for launch and the name will be quite poetic
On a personal note, this company is based out of Centennial Airport (KAPA) which is in my neighborhood
At this point a new aircraft program is easily $15B+ of development. That kind of money is hard to come by for a new aviation company.
China, Russia, and Japan have all tried breaking into the market as well without much success.
There are already new companies doing short-distance electric passenger flight. These companies could well scale to longer distance flights.
You could also imagine a company like Tesla getting in that business as well.
But Boeing and Airbus aren't invisible if you are offering a product they don't sell. See A220 with somewhere 220+ units sold. It did end up in hands of Airbus, but it was effort by Bombardier.
If supersonic travel was in demand post-pandemic and rising inflation, interest rates, Airbus would've been all over it.
Boeing has almost entirely ceded replacement of its own 757 and 767 to Airbus since it offers nothing in that midsize range today. Airbus fucked up thinking that the A380 was going to make money, and it took them a while to get the A350 right despite pressure from airlines to actually compete with the B787.
The costs of flying an airplane isn't proportional to its fuel usage. The faster an aircraft is, the more flights it can perform per day.
The carbon emissions impact of flying a gas-guzzling supersonic aircraft aren't evident either. Of course, more gas is used per trip but fewer planes need to be manufactured. Since there is no supersonic business jet, it could also make sense for some people who used to fly private for the speed and convenience to reconsider as they may get faster to their destination by flying supersonic.
It is indeed not proportional, but not in the way you are thinking. Drag (and ~fuel consumption) scales with velocity squared, so a plane flying twice at fast (and neglecting any time at the airport, which would make the argument even worse) would use four times as much fuel. I.e., even if twice the amount of passengers would be served, it would be done for four times the fuel consumption and four times the carbon emissions (or twice the fuel consumption per trip).
As cost of fuel is only a percentage of the price of the ticket, it's pretty obvious that there is a threshold as a percentage of total ticket cost under which spending 4x more in fuel to fly say 1.5x more passengers (because the airplane isn't flying 24/7) makes business sense.
That is obviously one of the reasons why they are starting with business class tickets because, fuel consists of a smaller percentage of ticket cost.
I'll guess that American's "non-refundable deposit" for the first 20 Boom aircraft was pretty small, and came out of American's marketing budget. Or was a negotiating tactic, to help American get a better price from some real aircraft manufacturer.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/american-airlines-to-cu...
I live in a neighboring town not far from the boutique Triad Semiconductor, which designs digital/analog chips and components for many applications, including space.
That's just domestic. For international travel it has been a literal exponential decrease in hassle.
Of course, this all depends on whether or not the airport you use (and it is 100% dependent on the airport itself) has deployed all of the automated systems being used to lower terminal transit times.
My humble opinion is that it's aviation company without huge innovation or disruption of the industry. More like a fast horse rather than car.
This is slower and smaller than concorde, so we'll see if the market really values speed over convenience / luxury. Boeing made the opposite decision 20 years ago when they cancelled the sonic cruiser.
However, although I'm rooting for any company that's making a sincere (as opposed to fraudulent) attempt at bringing back supersonic travel, the hardest challenges may still be ahead for Boom. The biggest one is the need to find or build a new engine. They've recently redesigned the Overture to use four engines instead of two, which should ease required engine specs, but there's no engine that would meet the reliability, noise, fuel consumption, and dimension requirements for a supersonic passenger aircraft.
Related to the engines: money. It sounds impressive that boom raised at least $150 million, including $60 million from the US Air Force (which has the added advantage of creating a new customer segment in the military)... until you learn engine development alone would require in the ballpark of $6 BILLION of capital. Aviation history is rife with examples of amazing, innovative aircraft designs that failed because no suitable engine was available.
Also, Boom leadership has set some ambitious goals, which makes me a bit skeptical. They plan on using sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Great! But now they not only need to create a new engine, they need to create a new engine that runs off of a new fuel. Additionally, they've set a goal price of $5,000 for a New York to London roundtrip whereas Concorde would've cost $20,000 for the same route. Heck, I once paid $8,000 for a Boston to Tokyo roundtrip business class flight. Nothing wrong with setting such a goal (and Boom isn't even the party that sets route prices) and it's OK for marketing claims to be a tad optimistic, but this tests the limits of credibility.
Lastly, there's the issue of possible routes, which is primarily limited by noise constraints. Unlike the Concorde, which needed afterburners to produce sufficient thrust for takeoff, Boom is going for a no-afterburner design. While this should expand the number of airports the Overture can use since afterburners won’t be blasting the neighborhood, you’re still not going to be able to fly over land. Boom suggest 500 routes are supersonically viable[1], which I’d assume means “pairs of international airports separated mostly by water”. We might be talking about something like 50 actual airports. only a fraction of those routes are not just supersonically viable, but economically viable. Of course, commercial aircraft are designed for particular types of routes. An Embraer ERJ-145 regional jet and the Boeing 787 long-range wide-body jet fly different routes. I’m not expert on this though; maybe 500 routes is plenty for a “total addressable market” in the aviation industry,
To bring it all together: my big issues with Boom are, one, engine development and, two, the choice of “hard problems” they decided to take on (specifically, SAF & cheap tickets). My hopes are that the engines are in development, using SAF instead of conventional fuel isn’t a big deal if you design for from the start, and the $5,000 thing is more about saying how low, hypothetically, an airline could price tickets while making money. I’d also like to know what the current status of the state-of-the-art is in quiet supersonic flight. NASA’s quiet supersonic demonstrator, the Lockheed Martin X-59 QuSST, combined with regulators’ desire to decide on supersonic overland travel in 2028, would open up new routes like JFK-LAX for planes meeting noise requirements, should regulators decide to allow it.
My hypothesis on Boom’s design choices? Quiet supersonic cruise is still technically challenging and has an uncertain regulatory future, and the political tide may be turning towards greater regulation on fossil fuels. So, by using SAF, Boom ensures that their plan will at least fly in an uncertain regulatory future, even if there’s no overland flight. And, using what they learned developing the Overture, they’ll be in a position to develop a quiet supersonic transport should regulators give the green light.
[1] I’d interpret routes to be something like airport-pairs, as in Laguardia-Heathrow would be one route. If you Boom could fly from three airports in the US to or from three airports in Europe, you’d have nine routes (3*3). This article talks a bit about the lack of clarity with Boom’s “route” number: <https://leehamnews.com/2021/06/04/hotr-500-destinations-for-...>
Are you kidding me! I cant recall the last time I DIDN'T need to be in Honolulu in THREE HOURS!! This is a life changer for my Macadamia nut Addiction...
---
In all seriousness, the best commercial prospect for this is high-speed-cargo.
Need a part from GuangZhu like TODAY?
Need an organ transplant from Ohio to Munich, TODAY?
Need to fire 900 employees via ZOOM call whilst flying to your other mansions to feed your pet slaves, TODAY?
Possibilities are boundless!
> Need a part from GuangZhu
CAN-LAX is 6,284 nm.
> Ohio to Munich
OK that can work, CLE-MUC is 3,759 nm.
Might be related selecting an engine. The previous version of the design had a fantasy engine that didn't exist (I think the specs came from a military engine that they couldn't use due to export restrictions), but now they are working with Rolls-Royce, and appear to have actually selected an engine design. It must be smaller than what they originally wanted, because they moved from a 3 engine design to a 4 engine design.
Has there been a render of the interior or something?
All the imagined routes are over large bodies of water. Is it key to the functionality or intent of the aircraft in some way? Why not NYC to LAX in 3 hours?
People will tolerate a sonic boom once a quarter or so, but you've better have a really good reason, like national security.
A previous entrtant in this area seemed to suggest that efficiency dropped near mach 1, but then rose again to 95% at speeds around 1.4 so being able to stay at that speed may make it cheaper to run and maximize their USP of speed.
You'd need a much longer range for this to be a real win. If you double that range then you can do JFK-SIN or PTY-SYD and then you could do an LHR-PTY-SYD flight in ~12 hours which would be a massive win.
This is true for getting to JFK from Manhattan, which is 40 minutes with 0 traffic and then the airport is absolutely massive and has long lines, but Boston -> Logan or SF to SFO is minutes. I think my total time from my door to my gate is ~30-40 minutes when I fly SFO.
I wonder if designing for synthetic fuels gives them any benefits? They can be a little bit purer.
I think it's going to come down to exactly how fast or slow this is, the price, and what the hard-product (eg the seats) are like. A modern First Class is a very, very comfortable way to travel, and other than the novelty value, I'd certainly rather spend 8 hours in lie-flat that 5 hours in a recliner. That'll also depend on the time-of-day of the flight -- worth saving the time perhaps if you're traveling East-to-West, but for West-to-East might as well just overnight it?
Long story short, I think it'll have use-cases, but it's not like Concorde -- when Concorde launched, 1st Class over the Atlantic looked a lot like 1st Class inside the states now -- comfortable, but not somewhere you wanted to spend a lot of time
Knowing this, Boom is allegedly targeting an equivalent cost per mile to a standard business class seat.
Sometimes speed isn't better :).
I haven't looked into profitability yet but a quick look at the list of busiest routes shows that Asia dominates the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...
I do agree though, LHR-JFK holds very little fascination for me. It's a relatively short flight with a lot of ground-side overhead time, so the benefits of Going Very Fast seem pretty minimal. The prospect of SFO-HND or LAX-ICN very fast though seems a lot more appealing.
At the time, Apple was booking 50 business-class seats a day just between San Francisco and Shanghai.
That's one company, on one route. Representing one segment of demand.
Certainly, things are likely to change with the effects of Covid, but I think there's a lot of substance to your perspective.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/14/united-airlines-apple-biggest...
I don't see it doing so well for the middle eastern markets, ultra long hauls on average spend a lot of time flying over land (minus the Australian flights) - for example, see LAX-DXB whose only water crossing is the arctic ocean, where supersonic might not be allowed for ice preservation purposes https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE216/history/20220815/... , DXB-Tokyo which is almost entirely land: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE318/history/20220815/... , or DXB-Cape Town, which again is mostly over land: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE772/history/20220816/...
> Concorde earned £500 million for British Airways after tax profit, this was between a loss making 1982 and a highly profitable 2000 with just seven aircraft. The first profitable year was 1983 (£14 million) increasing to £54 million in 1987. BA had good and bad years, in 1992 they actually even made a small loss, but then quickly returned to profitability. Immediately before the crash the profit levels were running at nearly £60 million and could have returned had they kept flying. (Even the last 6 months of operation in 2003 netted £50 million profit).
And:
> With unprofitable routes mounting, Concorde was going through rough times in the early 1980s. At this point, British Airways made a move that potentially saved supersonic travel. In 1981, British Airways managing director Sir John King managed to purchase the Concorde fleet from the British Government outright for £16.5 million plus the first year’s profits. Following the purchase, British Airways increased fares, bringing Concorde routes closer to profitability. With the fleet now owned outright, British Airways added additional routes.
[0] https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde--british-airways
I hope any airline that gets these gets punished by all the other customers for the environmental irresponsibility of pushing this gass gussling technology.
Wow, you can blow through your whole annual carbon budget in only 4 hours!!
Who are the new “non-legacy” carriers in this setting?
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/boom-xb1-superson...
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/20/centennial-boom-supers...
https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/paris-boom-xb-1-schedu...
Overture is a production model for commercial operations.
The main issue is that their production aircraft will need more powerful engines, and modern civilian airliner engines have large fans, high bypass ratios, and high compression ratios, all of which make them difficult to adapt to supersonic flight. It looks like their plan is to collaborate with Rolls-Royce to build a suitable engine using an existing engine core. I hope they can pull it off.
And the proposed aircraft are less than half the size of the aircraft they'd most likely replace, so actually sell fewer tickets on double the flight numbers
Not that this only applies if they fly at the same altitude. If you fly higher you can avoid that. That of course causes other problems but it is a relevant factor.
https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-anno...
However you may also be stuck where the people who will pay for the faster time are the types who will NOT sit in cattle class, so your airplane will have to mainly be first-class/business style seating.
And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard. Really hard, it is with the potential exception of life science the most regulated industry on earth. None of the automotive experience (close to none, but you get the point) translate into an aerospace environment. And even if, we are still looking at billions of development cost for small aircraft to be used commercialy, in the range of ten billion plus for commercial airliners.
Yeah, I wasn't making any time prediction, but big technology changes can break established industry patterns.
> The latter of which falls squarely into the helicopter segment.
There are lots of markets in the past that flew these kind of routes and with electric other can again and more routes can be added because of the changed economics. Helicopters are unsafe and have low capacity, I don't really think they are actually competing in the same space.
They address something different then something like the Heart Aerospace ES-19. That plane is 400km, 19 seater designed to launch in 2026.
And that is with incredibly conservative choices, conservative air-frame, conservative batteries and so on.
There is a huge amount of potential for increasing the range left once you fully optimize every aspect of the plane around electric.
> And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard.
I picked Tesla for a reason. Tesla works with SpaceX. Those two companies already work together on many fronts. Tesla battery packs and electric motors in SpaceX vehicles. They have shared research divisions in material science and likely other things. Musk has been talking about electric plans for decades, its pretty clear that he wants to develop them and has mentioned before that between Tesla and SpaceX he has the ingredients. Its just that there is so much more scaling to do in automotive and trucking that it doesn't yet make sense to invest the resources.
Lets just be real, Tesla knows much more about electric motors and batteries then companies like Heart Aerospace, or existing companies like Boeing/Airbus. Yes the industry is regulated more and certifications are more strict, but a company that produces 3+ million electric motors a year (more large electric motors then anybody else in the world) fully vertically integrated, can manage to match companies like Heart or Airbus when developing battery packs and electric motors and get them certified and produced.
SpaceX speaks for itself, they outperform Boeing to an almost embracing degree in space, see Crew Dragon compared to Starliner. I am confident that if they were to work on an airplane they could do it. They had to do a huge amount of certification work for DoD, for NASA, they know how to work with regulators and the get hardware certified.
Now of course, it would not be easy and success in aerospace is never guaranteed. But the ingredients are there and the is little question they could raise the required funding. I think that would be a better thing to focus on then robots to be honest.
That was Columbia, not Challenger. Challenger exploded on launch from Cape Canaveral.
I flew 2,000 miles between the Midwest and the west coast last week. $109 each way, with checked baggage, booked three weeks out.
I like Utah, but let's not pretend that your flight (or mine) is representative of anything.
We are talking about a plane that will burn much more fuel (which they claim will be carbon neutral) and fly a fraction of the passengers per trip, on routes that are already very competitive. 100 USD will only be a heavily subsidized fare at best. In reality the cost per route will much more likely be far higher.
Plus, it's just f*cking exhausting to fly 10-18 hours, so people may well be willing to spend more on those extra-long-haul flights just to spare their mind and body. I don't believe any commercial supersonic jets were even able to fly trans-Pacific in the past, and ties between those regions were a tiny fraction of what they are today anyway. Faster trans-Pacific transport simply seems inevitable.
I heard they put enough fuel in it to take off and get up to temperature and then refueled it in the air for safety reasons.
It must be less efficient than a winged flyer - even a fast one like boom's, because it won't need so much energy to get out of the atmosphere like a starship has, right? I want starship to succeed but I'm guessing it will be so much more expensive and risky.
But keep in mind neither BA nor AF really paid for their fleet...
A crosscountry scheduled supersonic flight will have to overfly populated areas twice a day - booming all the way.
(Something that causes a lot of confusion - people often think a sonic boom is an instantaneous thing that happens when the plane breaks the sound barrier - it is not, it’s a continuous shockwave that travels with the aircraft while it is flying above Mach 1; anyone on the ground who the shockwave passes over along the flight path hears a sonic boom)
If you’ve ever heard thunder from lightning 15 miles away compared to thunder directly overhead, that might give you some framework for figuring out the difference.
I think it was a mistake for the US to ban supersonic flight outright and especially at all altitudes. I can't imagine a sonic boom being a huge problem, if you are 10 miles up or higher.
Not so, not for Russia anyway:
There are other commercial aircraft manufacturers but essentially in each size segment you will only see two players. Embraer doesn‘t make any direct competitors with Airbus or Boeing, as an example.
This will end up running LAX-JFK-LHR in my opinion.
Currently airline passengers don’t have to pay for their carbon emissions, but I doubt that’s gonna last for much longer (we are in an emergency after all). And I’ve seen elsewhere in this thread that the emissions are likely gonna be somewhere between 5x and 10x of normal sub-sonic flights. The price of this extra carbon emission will probably be something that even affluent passengers will want to skip.
Starting to tax airplane fuel would be an important step towards reducing the CO2 output. Possibly that would trigger a switch to synthetic and carbon neutral fuels.
Subsonic flight has become much more efficient, cheaper and when paying for higher class, more comfortable. This is one of the reasons often mentioned for the economic demise of the concorde. The audience willing to pay $6000 on a concorde ticket, could now spend $4000 on first class subsonic with a seat that fully reclines into a bed. They can fly a little longer at night but sleep the whole journey.
Wendover did a good economic analysis of the concorde: https://youtu.be/n1QEj09Pe6k
At least.
Even if you think price is a barrier, think about how many more millionaires and billionaires there are in America and Europe today than there were just 20 years ago.
Tack on our society's rediscovered fascination with conspicuous consumption ("influencers"), and I don't think filling seats will be the problem today that it once was.
And because the overall experience was so cool -- board directly from the lounge, the led display showing how fast you were going, seeing the curvature of the earth (sorry flat earthers), arriving before you left, etc. -- you never thought about the seat. I'm sure if you took it all the time you might care but most people it was awesome.
The seats do look very cramped and the windows are very small.
The museum of flight is amazing and much more interactive than most air museums.
https://www.intrepidmuseum.org/The-Intrepid-Experience/Exhib...
https://boomsupersonic.com/static/images/overture-experience...
Interior buildout in planes is always at the discretion of the airline, and the concepts shown by manufacturers should not be taken as realistic.
They'll get a fair gain from just not having reheat, yet alone the rest of the benefit of decades of aerodynamic design around engine exhaust flows.
(I didn't know and had to look it up)
Consider the difference between a large shop fan, and a small high pressure compressed air nozzle commonly used in workshops for cleaning, with both sized to give the same "reaction force" (i.e. the same thrust). The high-pressure nozzle makes much more noise.
Just add a refueling stop at ANC, the same as most cargo flights today (and the same as most passenger flights in the past).
According to a Great Circle mapper, CAN-ANC-LAX is only about 250 km longer than CAN-LAX.
It's a small enough issue that it's the routine route for cargo flights between China and the U.S. West Coast.
Anchorage is the second-largest cargo airport in the United States (after FedEx's home base in Memphis).
What’s a few shattered windows and waking up entire states with bangs at 3am? They shouldn’t have chosen to live under a flight path between an organ donor and recipient.
God, I fn Love you.
No, but it’s the only airport in London that the big US legacy carriers - American, Delta, and United - fly to.
Its prolly something like 5x-10x worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Exceptional...
And there is zero logic behind your second obviousm, as your premise is already wrong. The reason they start with business class is because you can charge more per seat. Seems pretty obvious.
You're right that they start with business seats because they cost more. Business class seats cost 3-4x time economy while occupying less than 2x the space so the cost of fuel as a percentage of the ticket price is lower. It might not be obvious to you but I'm happy to explain it :)
[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel-logistics-and-inf...
See, your claim is that fuel cost is the sole reason they do this. I'd argue it's obvious they'd do that even if all fuel was free.
> Aircraft speed as barely budged since we transitioned from turboprop to jets.
Ah, it's again one of those nonlinearities you seem to have trouble with. See, the cost increase is, again, not proportional to speed. On top of the quadratic scaling, you have a very nonlinear and steep (not-proportional!) increase in drag coefficient. So, when you look up that what I say is true, but you want to weasel your way out by saying 'it's not by much', you're missing that the impact on drag (and fuel) is substantial.
There will be a global cost scheme for carbon at some point in the future. I hope it will be a simple tax (imposed by each state by some international agreements; although some weird cap-and-trade scheme with limited effect is probably more likely given how governments are behaving) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is mostly in effect by the time Boom plains are in commercial operations.
Whatever the scheme there will probably not be an exception for international flights (I’m guessing countries will be focusing their efforts on exempting their militaries). The thing is that every industry is going to try to get a discount, and that is simply not possible (we are in an emergency after all). So it doesn’t matter if it only shaves of 0.3% of global emissions (which honestly would be a disaster and not acceptable in the long run). What matters is that all industries (except the arms industry; lets be realistic here) will have to suffer equally for their sustained pollution.
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=KSEA-RJAA&MS=wls&DU=mi&E=60&EV=...
At todays Jet 1 A US fuel price of $3.07 per gallon it would cost $108k to fill the Concord. Which holds 120 passengers. That comes out to a cost of $900 per person passenger on a full fight.
If the cost of fuel were double like a few months ago then that cost would be $1,800 per flight.
Compared to a Boeing 737 which has a fuel cost of ~24k at max capacity of 7,878 gallons at todays prices. A passenger limit of 177 and a fuel cost as low as $136.64 per passenger on a full fight.
Thus fuel while expensive wasn’t a deal killer over most of it’s history as long as they could keep most seats filled.
BA001 LHR 10:30AM -> JFK 09:25AM
BA002 JFK 08:30AM -> LHR 05:15PM
AF002 CDG 10:30AM -> JFK 08:15AM
AF001 JFK 08:00AM -> CDG 05:45PM
That's why flying westbound supersonic is less of an advantage. Because as you can see, flying west, your day is still wasted, even if you leave early.
And realistically, from your plane at JFK to Manhattan, that's got to be a least an hour and a half (immigration and cab/limo). And assuming you'd have to be at JFK just an hour before your flight (and for an international flight that's ballsy), plus with transportation still taking an hour, you just wasted 3.5 hours commuting forth and back to the airport.
That schedule wouldn't work unless you flew to Manhattan. And even then, it'd be tight.
Have to be charging a great deal to the small number of passengers for it to be worth swapping in to a fully loaded 777 spot
You could also upgrade a couple of the 777-200 or 787 routes to a 777-300 to get more seat miles to offset those lost to loosing a slot to a smaller aircraft.
That's still two aircraft instead of one, which means acquiring another slot.
Edit: Apparently Overture is 65-88 seats depending on configuration.
Them selling out to Airbus had more to do with general issues at the parent conglomerate (they also exited trains and snowmobiles to raise cash). But they still make corporate jets.
j/k, it stands for "Extended Range Twin Operations"
https://www.caa.co.uk/commercial-industry/aircraft/operation...
https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...
Monocrystaline fan blades have very different material properties from the polycrystaline blades that (I am guessing) were used on Concorde.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...
One of the patents mentioned is how VerSnyder was able to grow a turbine blade in a monodirectional crystalline structure: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3260505?oq=versnyder+196... just using a special mold and a specific alloy. That would later form the turbine blades of the SR-71 Blackbird.
The first monodirectional blades were introduced to commercial jet engines in 1974, so Concorde definitely did not have this technology with the original engines.
American already has several slots into LHR. I counted 24 arrivals into LHR tomorrow.
One 777 all economy plus one Boom aircraft all business is roughly equal in seat miles to 2x 777 (first + business + premium economy + economy).
An upstart airline would need to acquire a slot to get a new aircraft into LHR. However American could add a super sonic aircraft to its service and still maintain the number of the seats it has going in. Yes, it would have to take one aircraft out, but there are enough pax that will be connecting and can be sold a different routing that it can use flexibility with seat configuration to not be limited by slots.
For American, a bigger factor is probably what kind of seats they can sell. For instance, DFW->LHR has a 75% load factor tomorrow for first class but a 68% load factor for economy class. However, later in the week economy has a higher load factor.
Those first class seats are a lot more profitable than an economy. Adding first class seats while taking away economy seats is profitable if you can fill the first seats.
Yes, and this was mostly necessary because of the small unit counts and small number of routes, not because of fuel costs (though the latter certainly did not help.
Both could be significantly better with Boom: more routes, and lower fuel costs.
Great Britain is the name of the post 1707 Union of England and Scotland. It's not neutral if you are a member of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland.
The United Kingdom is the name used by the country at the UN but is, of course, not neutral if one is a member of the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland.
No one uses .co.gb domains.
People often use the terms imprecisely, but (for example) if Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom, it'd still be part of the island of Great Britain.
Yes I know.. that's not how the word is meant in this context...
There was enough demand for one return flight a day carrying a small proportion of the overall passengers on the immensely-popular with wealthy people JFK-LHR and JFK-CDG routes. That wasn't enough to utilise the 14 production aircraft properly, never mind enough demand for it to have been viable as an airframe programme ...
That said, boom is building a significantly smaller aircraft which should again open up more possible routes.
cool, so you're on board with nuclear + hydro as a more sustainable base load solution than lithium-based batteries
https://www.prometheusfuels.com/
(very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing)
Maybe I'm just old-school, but this was sooooo annoying. It'd be a cool intro to a Telltale game or something, but having it take over all the navigation (scrolling barely works, getting to the point takes forever) to tell its fancy 3d story was just a waste of my time, IMO. I want to know how their fuels work, not that they can hire someone to make a 3D game intro inside their browser. Just unnecessary shiny that gets in the way of usability :(
Utility scale renewables are in pennies pwr kWh in Levelized Cost, and continually dropping.
There are 10kWh/liter of jet fuel. Utility scale solar is 3c/kWh LCOE today.
Assuming a pessimistic 10% efficiency in electricity to synthetic jet fuel conversion via H2 hydrolysis and the Fischer Tropsch process, that's a hypothetical $3/liter of synthetic jet fuel.
Current petroleum based jet fuel is $1.50/liter.
If you improve the conversion efficiency to 20% and lower the LCOE of utility scale solar to 1c/kWh (projected by 2050), and the hypothetical liter of synthetic jet fuel drops to 50c/liter, all while petroleum jet-fuel grows increasingly scarce and more expensive.
The efficiency of synfuel production could rise significantly as the efficiency of feedstocks like H2 hydrolysis (already 50%+) increase, and if if CO for Fischer Tropsch can be sourced from biomass instead of sourcing it from atmospheric CO2.
Finally, it's likely that in the future we'll switch to using hydrogen directly as an aviation fuel, bypassing hydrocarbons altogether, at which point the electricity to air conversion efficiency nears 80%.
At those prices, you can begin to afford to overbuild renewable capacity to drive a synfuel pipeline to store that energy chemically, which we will arguably need to do for seasonal energy storage anyways.
edit: had to correlate sources to find that a bunch of popular aviation blogs got the original design wrong. was actually 3x turbofan -> 4x turbofan
> The Overture supersonic aircraft will be powered by three turboprop engines, which includes two that will be mounted under each wing, while the third engine will be fitted at the end of the fuselage.
https://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/overture-super...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech
edit: see parent edit, i was wrong. you guys are pretty good at making someone with misinfo feel bad though
It’s the original source of the mistake that should feel bad as they’re supposed to be experts in the field.
Can these be 'stacked' - Can you have a turboFan in line with a turboProp such that the output of the wash of the Fan feeds into the Prop, but with a portion of the wash spinning to thrust on the outer ring of output.=, via a design in the cowlings which is hyper directed thrust vents (think the grid of straws used to funnel water into a cohesive column, which can be directed)
Imagine a small diameter turboprop behind a much larger turbofan
So hopefully you see how your question is an interesting one, and one that has already been sorta done. Turbofans and turboprops are really quite similar, but at mach speeds only the turbofans have the right environment to be able to work efficiently. Your idea would have the prop in a supersonic air stream, which would make it effectively useless.
Leading micro eddys can solve this.
If the induction is a straight stream, it will fail - you need to direct micro eddys
If you do this with mechanical means (deflection cowlings) you will hit a limit.
The ideal design is in the funneling of eddys as they traverse in a super spiral between the front eddy and as it spirals to the thrust vector.
however, pre-ionizaton, and then magnetic ion direction can swirl the eddy to the desired output. However, AIR is not the thrust component at this time, its ionized energy which is being "thrust" (thrust is typically thought of as a 'push' - but this is actually a 'pull'
Identify a spot, pull yourself to it. As opp
You might be interested in reading this stack overflow answer about differences between turbo prop, jet, and fan. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/71301/what-is-t...
Another aspect to consider is changing engine characteristics for different conditions. An example is changing the structures guiding air into the engine.
If everyone were to take their response as if they were educating a youngling, to grow with an understanding, the world would be a better place.
You could. But there's no way the efficiency and complexity penalty having props feeding fans or fans feeding props comes out ahead of "pick one and make it bigger"
Sustainable really depends on how much we need. There is probably enough wind energy for the process, so long as we only use it for things where high energy density is needed. That means drive an EV car or electrified transit, but we can use synthetic fuel for airplanes. Maybe, this last is mostly my guess, it is a real problem to work on.
What makes the turboprop itself supersonic is the blades are traveling super sonic. Normal turboprops are limited by keeping their blade tips below super sonic to prevent booms and vibration. It is not special to go super sonic at the blade tips, this experimental plane only served to confirm that.
So it is correct to say no turboprop plane has ever gone super sonic and the idea that boom is turboprop powered is wrong on its face.
Since this is the pedant thread I feel obliged to point out that turboprops are propellers attached to gas turbine engines, not jet engines. Jet engines are gas turbine engines that produce thrust using a jet of hot exhaust gas out the back. Gas turbine engines that don't produce thrust using a jet of exhaust gas aren't jet engines; examples are turboprop engines and turboshaft engines (popular in helicopters, some tanks, etc.) Turbofan engines produce at least some of their thrust with an exhaust jet, so it's fair enough to call those jet engines. Probably the truest sort of jet engines are turbojet engines, which are no longer used for commercial aviation and only have some niche applications remaining (for instance cruise missiles.)
Then there are the "jet engines" which aren't gas turbines at all; jetskis use gasoline powered piston engines to produce thrust using a jet of water. And rockets, which don't breath air, could be called jet engines in a sense because they produce thrust using a jet of exhaust gas. But if you go around calling rocket engines "jet engines" you're going to get a lot of people correcting you by pointing out that rocket engines don't breath air. Many rocket engines do contain gas turbines though, using gas turbines to power propellant pumps, e.g. turbopumps...
And if we really want to get into the weeds, some piston powered aircraft get a small amount of thrust from their exhaust too. And some exploit the "Meredith effect", wherein air over the radiators gets heated and produces a small amount of thrust. These effects may contribute a few percentage points of the total thrust of the plane, and in truth, some turboprop configurations do this too. But >90% of the thrust is coming from the propeller, not the exhaust.
The Republic XF-84H "Thunderscreech" was an American experimental turboprop aircraft derived from the F-84F Thunderstreak. Powered by a turbine engine that was mated to a supersonic propeller, the XF-84H had the potential of setting the unofficial air speed record for propeller-driven aircraft, but was unable to overcome aerodynamic deficiencies and engine reliability problems, resulting in the program's cancellation.
[. . .]
Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards. The shock wave was actually powerful enough to knock a man down; an unfortunate crew chief who was inside a nearby C-47 was severely incapacitated during a 30-minute ground run. Coupled with the already considerable noise from the subsonic aspect of the propeller and the T40's dual turbine sections, the aircraft was notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews. In one report, a Republic engineer suffered a seizure after close range exposure to the shock waves emanating from a powered-up XF-84H.
The XF-84H design top speed was Mach .9 and probably made it to .7 in testing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscree...
Further, if you wer to dimple/convex in an alternating pattern the leading edge of any aero ... efficiencies would increase.
Micro-dimples are better.
Understand the eddys, as Da vinci would say....
Thus, the front prop gets almost 20% more torque than the rear prop.
0. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/74787/why-dont-...
1. https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showatt.php?attachmentid=281...
But eastbound makes a lot less sense, unless you're just trying to save time. Because flying at night eastbound won't make you gain much compared to a regular red eye and flying during the day, you'll land at night...
Flying east fast after a day of meetings means you get in bed on time.
The above poster is correct - supersonics are suboptimal for eastbound, especially when you consider they can only be used at speed over the ocean.
A super sonic flight that leaves JFK at 6PM arrives at 2AM in LHR after 3 hours of flying plus a 5 hour time zone change.
It's much more optimal to take a lie flat seat on a traditional aircraft, get a decent nights sleep on the flight, land at 7AM, shower at the lounge, and charge forth with the day.
My view is that the lie flat bed is really what made supersonic obsolete, and I see Boom as largely a folly.
I think if I had a decent internet connection (happening more and more) and comfortable seat I'd happily take a 7/8 hour flight over a 5 hour one in a coach-style seat.
Its always a tradeoff of comfort vs speed.
It does make me appreciate human engineering though. When you think about all the parts that work correctly day in and day out to have these longs flights run back and forth nearly non-stop.
100% this. After 16 hours, I could have kissed the ground when I walked off that plane. At some point, after maybe 8-10 hours, order seems to break down a bit. People stop caring so much about keeping clean, the plane starts to get really cluttered and nasty, food ground into the carpet. I feel for the cleaning crews that have to spruce up the interior after a really long international flight.
I still remember the first time I flew home from the north, we had taken off from Dubai and were headed to Seattle, which goes over the north pole. I watched that silly map more than I should have (it just makes things slower, I'm sure...) and I was so elated the moment we went 'feet dry' over North America. And then I realized that we still had six plus hours to go, more than if we were starting at the east coast. I was so sad for a few minutes I could have cried.
It was not fun.
3 hour flight will change a lot of things for JFK-LON business trips as they open up opportunities to loose only 1 full day during business trip instead of loosing two full days. I generally stay on NYC time with meetings in the afternoon LON time if trip is less than 5 days so short flight is game changer.
Thank goodness for Zoom
Not so much the other way though.
The worst flight I've had in a long time was a British Airways flight to Nairobi. Not actually all that long a flight to Nairobi from London, but BA uses their "This plane is definitely about to be decommissioned" planes on that flight. The panel between the cabin and the fuselage came loose when I nudged it with my foot and slid down into the hold, so I spent the whole flight with essentially all my possessions wrapped around me, certain that anything I dropped would vanish into the void.
Haha, yes. At some point people stop caring. You see people mulling around, getting their own food and drinks - just anything to pass the time.
It's high-cost, non-vacation, long distance travel/transport where ocean liners were beaten in the 1960s by airliners (and airlines, in contrast, are generally not very profitable).
In any case, the lack of senior business executives choosing seven day trips in plush private cabins as their preferred mode of transatlantic crossing isn't much of an indication of whether people in that price bracket will tend to prefer pay more to spend four hours in discomfort rather than eight hours mostly asleep.
For me, there's no way to take a good break on a plane. I can't really get up and stretch my legs (unless you try to pace the aisle), and any kind of distraction is going to be on a screen.
It is more comfortable than coach, but it's still not really comfortable. Coach is actively uncomfortable, first class is just kind of neutral; not actively comfortable or uncomfortable.
I usually get more done sitting in the terminal than I do on the plane itself.
If I have a lie-flat business class option with decent food, getting to my destination a few hours early with less comfortable seating isn't a clear win. Like most people, I'm not jetting over to London to have lunch and sign a deal and heading home to sleep in my own bed.
Just having somebody watching transformers in the corner of my eye... on a flight a couple of years ago I watched 2 bollywood movies start to finish cuz the lady in the row in front of me was watching it and I couldn't help just watching on her screen.
Thank you for enlightening me. As someone nowhere near rich enough for this to be relevant, my upper bound for pleasant W-E transatlantic flight is being able to sleep. Shortening that sleep seems like a loss. But if you have a private jet on call, you can skip connecting flights, airport security, schedules, and all the things that actually make flying slow and miserable. I guess this company is aiming at the people who don’t quite have that kind of money.
Flying can still be a hassle flying business/first mostly because of cancellations/schedule changes--which can still happen otherwise because of weather, air traffic, etc.--but is less frequent I assume. A lot of the hassles of commercial flight (security lines, lack of overhead space, airport crowds in the waiting area, cramped seating, etc.) can be mitigated to a significant degree however.
