Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video](youtube.com) |
Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video](youtube.com) |
I wonder how many routes there are that would actually be well served by supersonic aircraft.
https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...
which covers over a decade, contains many hundreds of entries from Concorde pilots, crew, flight engineers, cabin crew, maintenance personnel, and air traffic control recounting anecdotes and amazing things about the plane and events surrounding it. I started reading it and spent about three absorbing hours fascinated and amazed, unable to stop until it was time to go to bed.
I'm going to resume when I have a few more hours, it's gold.
Products or technologies that launch new markets often look like 'bad ideas' until someone figures out a way to make it work profitably. Otherwise we'd already be doing them. Paul Graham wrote a good essay on this, saying basically a startup entrepreneur's job isn't just finding a good idea that hasn't been done, because anything that looks like a good idea is probably already being done. It's finding something that looks like a bad idea (so isn't being done) and figuring out it's not bad if you just do it a different way or add a certain innovation. Of course, most things which look like bad ideas are actually bad ideas but searching the edges for exceptions is the valuable thing entrepreneurs do (along with creating new jobs).
Also, you might be surprised there are several companies selling high-end transcontinental private jets. One of the newer features of the latest generation is that they can fly at .9 to .95 mach instead of .8 to .85 mach. That shaves more than an hour off a flight. It's a relatively small market but this new generation has a waiting list of those lining up to pay ~$20M more to save a few hours per round-trip. Sure, it's a small market but it's profitable. Note: I have no idea if Boost's plan involves that market but paying more to go faster, and especially having the fastest option, is usually of interest to someone.
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certific...
"By comparison, the certification of a new aircraft type can take between 5 and 9 years."
And that is just for the plane, engine certification is its own process and just as arduous.
So it's testing/validating nothing actually.
Only makes sense as a gimmick to get the next funding round.
In terms of routes that Boom's proposed plane can serve, you've got at bare minimum New York to London and Seattle to Tokyo, and lots of connections between Asian capitals where there's much less noise regulation and lots of money. I think their point is that if they can keep noise down, they will be successful operating long haul routes within NA, like LA to New York, San Francisco to New York, Seattle to New York, probably New York to Miami, LA to Toronto. My guess is that they end up with maintenance in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.
I don't see a reason to be excited about this. Their CEO compared their test flight to the Falcon 1 rocket, the Falcon 9 precursor. But a better comparison would be Blue Origin's New Shepard, or Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne, because they also mainly offer luxury services. By contrast, the Falcon 9 rockets have real (non luxury) commercial and scientific value.
Wishing them all the best! Beautiful aircraft, beautiful demonstration, and hopefully more beautiful datasets that exceed their expectations.
Just don’t Milkshake Duck this.
Pretty cool though! It was disappointing that the Concorde (along with commercial supersonic flight in general) was retired around the time I was becoming an adult and could begin to contemplate maybe taking a trip on it someday.
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.
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.
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-...
The Concorde wasn't a civil aircraft?
Also in the 60s a DC-8 was made to go faster than Mach 1
Growing pains for their camera crew
If anyone from Boom is reading this, please never do that again. Or at least pick better music.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :)
Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.
Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it.
I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.
Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.
In terms of 'risk stacking'[1] they are definitely a big step closer to being in successful.
[1] Risk Stacking is the set of risks a company faces between the current time and being operational. Technology risk is always level 1 (can they build what they say they can build), after that comes market risk (will people buy it with enough margin for both continued operation of the company as well as further development), and the third is execution risk (can they operate efficiently enough to create a net positive economic product.)
“That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the concept of the Concorde might not have been a worldwide hit, it was certainly a good market fit for these two airlines at the time.”
Overall it was obviously a money looser because of the high development costs (paid for by the governments).
It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/rutherdan.bsky.social/post/3lgstwvv... -> 2021 NASA assessment https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205009400
I mean, yeah, sure.
And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel, and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they’ve only accomplished the easiest part of what they need to accomplish in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights. Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before they’re going to reach the finish line.
And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.
"Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety."
Many of the comments related to Boom about them not being able to do what they say are about the timeframes they give. I know I've commented on their unrealistic dates before and likely will again. In 2016 they said they would be flying it in 2017-2018. And they did in fact completely fail to do that as the above commenter predicted. Unless you are saying being off about your schedule by 7 years is achieving your goal?
They say they will be flying their passenger aircraft in 2030. I invite anyone that reads this to check back then and see how they're doing. I can tell you right now though, you are not going to be able to buy a ticket.
You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years.
Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.
To me, life is a sand box. And my dream is that it would be the reality for everyone.
Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight.
Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering.
Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad.
Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland.
[1] https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SS...
Any case - truly impressed by their persistance. Pushing something for such a long time despite being so far from any commercial traction feels insance to me.
They must have something that you ain't got...
There's much more to this. Their biggest competition may be cheaper Meta headsets paired via Starlink. Why travel as fast as possible when you can simply be there instantly for a fraction of the cost?
What advantage does Starlink provide here? Isn't it a higher-latency, slower connection than most people have access to at home?
How is Boom tracking to their timelines?
https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2022/American-Airlines...
I'm guessing rollout realistically is more like 2029-2030... but even that is a tall order. Unless, of course, they're a lot farther ahead on Overture development generally than they've revealed.
Hint: it's because the XB-1 is a one-third scale model of their fully fledged Overture.
There have been many supersonic bizjet projects.[1] Spike [2] seems to be the only one other than Boom still alive.
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.
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.
(which I think is good but ymmv)
Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077 - Jan 2025 (99 comments)
I have forever been jealous of a colleague in the 90s that got bumped off a business flight, put on the next available Concorde flight a couple of hours later, and still arrived earlier than his original flight.
I'm also quite worried about Airbus after winning against Boeing becoming complacent since Chinese or Russians are not even close.
Mike Bannister’s excellent book Concorde talks at length about how “handsomely profitable” the BA service was (as opposed to the Air France one) from 1984 until the 2000 crash and subsequent grounding put them in to a spiral where keeping enough people certified was too expensive.
One part of this profitable change in 1984 was surveying their customers (who typically did not book their own tickets) to see what they thought the price was. About $5000 was the perception. It was actually $3000, so they quickly raised the price to the perceived one.
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...
Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today
If you take a look at NASA's low boom demonstrator [2], you can see that it's much skinnier and the nose is crazy elongated. This is intended to break up the bow shock into multiple parts, thereby decreasing the amount of energy each one has.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_cone_design#Von_K%C3%A1rm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
>However, in the first 14 weeks, 147 windows in the city's two tallest buildings, the First National Bank and Liberty National Bank, were broken.
If a sonic boom is "noticeable", that's one thing. But the problem is that even from cruising altitude they're shockingly loud. If the sonic boom is merely bearable, that's quite an improvement.
- Symphony engine being produced by EOY '25
- 3 years to have first full size Overture roll off the line
- About 4 years to have it in the air for first time.
Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation.
Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about building and iterating new engines hundreds of times until you've made enough iterations that things stop melting in corner cases. It's about finding out, the hard way, every single way your assembly could possibly fail, melt, explode, wear too fast, or otherwise fail.
Understand that making modern engines often requires significant innovation in non-destructive testing to ensure the actual parts you are buying/making are up to spec.
Understand that Russia has a portion of decades of experience building, designing, and INNOVATING in jet engines and still struggles to build modern jet engines.
Understand that China struggles to produce economical modern jet engines despite massive funding, huge incentive, and literal national security concerns. The C19 jetliner currently uses an American engine.
Empirically, building modern jet engines seems HARDER than building modern rocket engines! It seems to require maintaining literal decades of raw engineering experience and patience, and now scale all that effort to a company that in 9 years has been told by all existing engine manufacturers "Nope, we won't make a profit on this plan", and has instead spent their time building a single demo plane that does not demonstrate any experience in building engines.
Rich people prefer the Rolls or Bentley when being a passenger, Sport/ performance vehicles are only fun if you are driving, I would expect the G650/800 style jets would be the preferred plane even if it is slower when you can travel in style and with your entourage.
Also range would be a consideration to this type of jet for passenger travel. Travel times makes difference only for long distance over the ocean flights, these jets tend to be quite short ranged.
XB-1 is only designed for 1000nm at 2.2 Mach compared to the 7000nm of G650 with cruise speed of 0.92 Mach. Basically XB-1 can fly for 40minutes at a time at its cruise(top?) speed of 2.2Mach
https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hydro...
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.)
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.
$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:
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?
Source: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-engine-re-heats
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 Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel.
> Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner.
> Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
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.
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
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...
That's while my tesla robotaxi is making that 100 bucks driving leprechauns to their golden pots!
Totally not vaporware guys.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.
It doesn’t take 2 hours to go through security , certainly not in the first class section in any case.
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.
Per their site - https://boomsupersonic.com/overture
“Lord King’s edict that the aircraft had to be profitable within two-and-a-half years had been realised. There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits”.
The true nail in the coffin was the development of the lie flat business seat, which meant that you could cross the Atlantic in three hours in a plush but cramped seat, or spend less money to sleep for six on a redeye and arrive well rested. At that point three hours was not a compelling enough time savings, but the Concorde also didn't fly far enough to do routes where the speed resulted in more significant time savings, like on transpacific routes.
Bannister knows probably more than anyone about the topic and tells the story well. Thoroughly recommend the book. His tale of a guy called Bill being invited into the cockpit and discreetly given the controls to fly supersonic was awesome. Of course, later over a beer Bill (Weaver) talked of his times flying the Blackbird at twice the speed, and of the time it disintegrated around him.
Just mind boggling to think of, no trouble finding 100 people daily who want to do a day-trip to California.
Regarding LA<->NYC, I think you could make a dent in that market with an all business class flight that flies slightly less than Mach 1 (0.95 or whatever) and has special security screening and baggage handling. People might be willing to pay 30-50% more compared to business class on a regular flight.
Last: Is there a video game like Theme Park or Railroad Tycoon that allows for the simulation of an airline market? That could be fun.
Meanwhile, Boeing 737 MAX... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They didn't stop flying due to a crash. It was the money.
Concorde was a very unique plane, the pilots were specially trained for it, and having them sit around was expensive.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...
Edit: Of course, the Blackbird had the benefit of refuelling mid-air.
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".
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.
It would be horrible!
Not one year. "produced by EOY '25" means they're almost certainly already very far along in the development process. There's no way they'd have a target date that early if they hadn't even started yet.
Looks like this article from last year says they were already doing hardware testing back then: https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/boom-supersonic-accelerates...
That said, as with any other aerospace project, I expect delays.
Now I'd put their wilder hopes of eventually taking over the subsonic economy market at considerably below 1%.
But I'm hopeful for that $5-10k ticket to London within the next twenty years.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-tries-again-to-reduce-star...
Rolls and Bentley are normally driven slower than even regular cars like high end sedans, they are big and unwieldy, and their passengers really care about ride quality, the scene from parasite about coffee cup comes to mind.
If you had the money to own either car, you are rich enough that whenever you reach the destination is on time, other people work on your schedule, then speed becomes less important.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In that "hour" I'd watched (IIRC) Fellowship of the Ring, Sunset Boulevard, and—out of a morbid sense of curiosity that I regret—Moonfall.
Unfortunately for Airbus, it also stopped being profitable before they finished the A380.
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.
Also, only be BA made good profit on it and only after mid-1980s. Air France could barely break even.
If not the PR effect that put those airlines above all others as the only ones flying supersonically, they'd never make any sense to either of them.
These days, they'd certainly not be viable as private planes are now much more available and much cheaper than they used to be back in the day and these save a lot more time than supersonic flights. BA fare for LHR-JFK roundtrip was 10K pounds back in 2000, $15.2K at the average exchange rate, that's $28K inflation adjusted! Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?
Now, Boom might say (have they? I'm not following them) that the XB-1 is a demonstrator that they can do supersonic flight, and that the sonic boom reduction work will follow on. In that case asking what today's boom was is not that interesting.
The chase planes also went supersonic, so they would have contributed to the sonic boom, which might complicate that analysis (well, there would be at most 3 pairs of sonic booms, and it should be possible to tell which ones correspond to which planes).
A British Airways first class LHR-JFK roundtrip is $10K today for an 8h flight. Supersonic would be 3h.
Their website says:
> Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7
Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR<->JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip. I am surprised that it is so cheap. I guess that route is very competitive.
I don't understand the excitement on HN about Boom. The market is tiny. This is a terrible investment. What is the global demand for this aeroplane (if they ever build it)? Maybe... max 200. Look at the order book from the 1960s when the Concorde first flew. Less than 100 total orders. Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Also, it is terrible for the environment. The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
(Various edits.)
Government people. I remember Kissinger flying on it.
A first class ticket on the Titanic would be $50,000 today.
The Toyota Camry is a $30,000 car that sells 300,000 units per year. The Lamborghini Huracan is a $300,000 car that sells 600 units per year. Much easier to cover the costs of developing a reliable electrical system, or a new hybrid drivetrain, when you're Toyota.
Concorde couldn't repay its development costs for the same reason.
Nobody. That's part of Boom's plan: they want to make the Overture jet cheap enough to fly that tickets will cost about what business class costs on regular intercontinental flights. They're keeping the problems of the Concorde in mind as part of the design process.
People willing to throw money at connecting with others who do the same thing. That was the main value proposition back then I think, getting from continent to continent in a short time has never been more than a tangential benefit. Of course this type of business only really works when everybody involved claims the opposite.
Supersonic planes are already proven technology. We made the Concorde and the Tu-144 in the 70s, and have plenty of supersonic military planes in active service. The assumption was simply that you can't make a profit by selling them as civil aviation planes. That's the assumption Boom is challenging, and to be proven correct they have to turn a profit. And not just an operating profit by selling planes for more than they cost to make but make back the research and development costs as well
The Tu-144 was famously not reasonable at all.
The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.
Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.
With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.
SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.
> Basically, the critics
You're being uncharitable and hyperbolizing the criticism to more easily dismiss it. Would you hyperbolize any praise as "identifying another way this won't work is also a success in itself"?
However, when you’re asking for investments your goal better be profit or you’ve just committed fraud.
(I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)
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).
It breaks noise regs to fly most subsonic 1960s eras jets with their original engines these days, you have to modify them with hush kits, etc.
They forced a lot of these very American jets to be quiet for the sake of just the landing and takeoff phases. I have a hard time seeing that they would/will find a way to make sonic booms acceptable to the general public.
NASA has a research craft aiming to make the noise profile more of a "thump" than "boom": https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-lockheed-martin-revea...
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.
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.
Raises more questions though, because there were two other chase planes. Did the other planes stay below the sound barrier at all times?
Edit to add: Was no audible boom expected because of the planes themselves or because of where the people were watching from?
The distance between the planes appeared to be around 30-50 m at the supersonic transition time, as much as I can estimate the size of the planes. A sound recording made under the flight path should allow to measure how many dB was the demonstrator's boom.
> Was the sonic boom noticeable?
> Noticeable is certainly a way of putting it.
As in, "Yes it was noticeable, and then some." At least, that's how I read it.
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.
"The Concorde used its afterburners ... to get through the transonic region..."
Am I missing something, or is there no difference between these sentences?
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. "
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Not only that, but the XB-1 uses "stock" engines, while for the full-scale Overture they want to develop (and build) an all-new supersonic-capable engine. So one more challenge to put on the stack...
It was originally envisaged as a maiden flight that would happen within a couple of years of founding, but aerospace is hard.
Plenty of people do for comfort. And these seats don’t look horrendous.
This is not even remotely comparable.
But just for comparison, Aérospatiale and BAC actually built a real supersonic plane (Concorde) and managed to fly and operate that plane for decades. It's hard to find much measurable impact on the world at all. What do you propose would be different here, given that the discussion is already presuming a world in which they haven't succeeded economically?
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.
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.
It's like with modern husbandry: you can make money selling milk, eggs and meat by sustainably raising animals living comfortable lives, but you can make more money by sticking them in cages, pumping them up with antibiotics and optimized fodder, to maximize production rates and minimize costs. The two approaches are inherently incompatible with each other. And I dare to say, modern startup ecosystem kind of entered the era of "factory farming" some time ago now.
It’s unsustainable in that the profit is a one time event, but that doesn’t mean you’re not to turn cash into something worth more than what you spent and then sell that thing.
Cooking books and falsifying projections is fraud.
Asking for investments with a clear disclaimer that the goal is a social good that won’t be profitable? If that’s fraud, then every major arts institution everywhere is guilty.
But an actual investment isn’t “investing in our community” it’s asking for money in exchange for to potential to gain more money etc.
Always quite busy, and personally I’d much rather not try to get a good night’s sleep on a barely 6 hour flight.
Two-thirds of BA's Concorde regular passengers died on 9/11. The service never recovered financially from that loss.
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]:
> The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
La Première will regularly go for $20k one way.
Could we at least limit it to choices made by elected governments?
If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison.
Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison.
LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail.
Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?
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.
yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.
That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.
> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?
what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.
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.
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!'"
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 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.)
Exactly, and we know for sure that Boom are definitely NOT in that place, how?
It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
> Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).
> Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023).
You should look at the costs of the F-35 :)
And yes, the program is expensive but there will be thousands of F35s by the end of it all (1000+ already)
They're limited. And I regularly see them going for $4k+.
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.
The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.
There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.
If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.
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.
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
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 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...
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.
OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil aircraft going supersonic.
Having the tech sounds funny. In some abstract way maybe. Actually being able to build a supersonic airframe and everything connected.
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...
Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy?
Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure. But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.
Now the world's only supersonic passenger plane is being made in America, you might find Congress is much less worried about sonic booms.
You are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
This was done to prepare people and gauge the reaction to BOEING sonic booms, for the SST. Everything about a supersonic future was scuttled when it became obvious that people clearly suffered when planes flew supersonic above them.
Keep in mind that the US Air Force still does not go supersonic over populated areas except when absolutely necessary, like during 9/11.
This study mind you was done with SCHEDULED sonic booms. Now imagine, instead of being able to set your clock to a loud, disruptive noise and plan around it, you must deal with completely unpredictable and variable EXPLOSION of sharp noise (130ish decibels is standing 100m from a jumbo jet as it spools up or a trumpet being blasted directly into your ear from a couple feet away)
People already hate the noise of cities when that noise is an occasional quiet siren heard from a mile away a few times a day. Imagine instead if the noise was completely unpredictable explosions. Also imagine you can't move out of the city to get away from it, because the sound blankets an entire flight corridor.
Unless NASA finds a way to magically evaporate all the energy in a sonic boom such that it makes almost no noise at ground level, we would have to literally depopulate mile wide corridors of the US just so a bunch of stupidly rich people can get from NY to LA in an hour? Nah
Sources:
Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet
Thomas Petzinger, Hard Landing
I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).
Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder.
> The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
5-7 times as much.
My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.
If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA <-> Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.
One of the unique selling points of their proposed aircraft is that it won't be so loud:
> Boom says Overture will be a lot quieter than Concorde and the supersonic military aircraft that were flying at the time the FAA ban
I feel that you're getting diminishing returns at the point of reducing 4 hours to 3h30, given that flight time is just a part of the whole "door to door" time, there are several hours at least that aren't flight time, and that the expensive tickets all come with an hour or three in an airport lounge.
How have they demonstrated that they know how to cause quieter sonic booms?
Secondly: Although the final proof of it is in the full scale aircraft for sure, a lot can be done with software modelling (1) and wind tunnels these days. And with the scale model that just flew, to be followed by "checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly." (2)
Thirdly, I point you to other "quieter supersonic" aircraft work in progress, the X-59. Some of their evidence-gathering process is detailed at the Wikipedia link, "development" section. (3)
It will be interesting to see how these work out; but if they do not, then it's a failure of modelling and design, not because they missed the directly obvious. But if you are an aerospace engineer and know more about this subfield, then say so.
1) "Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel"."
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/28/travel/boom-supersonic-fi...
2) https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/boom-supe...
3) https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/x-59-quiet-sup...
There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
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