Concorde was a fantastic technological achievement; It's beautiful and revolutionary. My heart really wants it to be successful.
However, my head tells me that no amount of tweaking or tuning will change the fundamental problem with Concorde.
The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320.
Cheap, reliable aircraft are what people want. Fast, expensive ones are cool, but not really economic.
I think it all depends on how much cost savings for how much speed. In today's dollars, a round-trip ticket on Concorde from New York to London was $20,000, or 4x today's business class price. For that, you got a tiny seat in a cramped cabin.
What we're targeting at Boom is an improvement over business class. We're making it profitable for airlines to operate the plane at today's business class fares. We're getting you there in half the time. And instead of a cramped two-and-two cabin arrangement, it's a one-and-one configuration (every seat is a window AND an aisle). The seats are similar to today's domestic first class seats, only designed for productivity.
So the choice a business traveler could soon face is: Would you like to get from New York to London in 7 hours in a lay-flat bed, or in 3h15m in a comfortable, productive environment? Price is the same either way. We think most people will pick the supersonic flight.
It should be noted also that the premium cabin market today is much larger than it was a few decades ago.
And finally, premium-cabin economics are only the first step. We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.
Uh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?
Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency.
If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost, you need to use 1/10th the fuel, have 1/10th the maintenance overhead, and have 1/10th the staffing cost all at the same time.
You can't go over 100% efficiency in any area, so to see 1/10th the cost you would need the entire aircraft industry in the 1970s to be operating at under 10% efficiency, a low bar I am highly skeptical of.
It's not like Aeronautics engineers or the Airline industries were gorillas banging rocks together with no understanding of what they were doing, and I find it hard to believe there is enough room for a 10x increase in efficiency from the 1970s even with a perfectly efficient aircraft and airline behind it.
But hey, if you really believe it's possible, invest in Boom because they must have designed a cold fusion reactor running on tap water to power their jet and everyone who invests will probably become a trillionaire overnight once they reveal it.
Is it possible that in a regulated airline market $20k roundtrip went not into the marginal physical costs but regulatory overhead/profits/recovering fixed costs? If I showed you that a can of Coke in a Disney world vending machine was $3, and told you I could get a can at $0.30, would I have performed a miracle in the soda sciences?
$8K is a normal RT JFK-LHR ticket today in business class. This is vs $800 in economy. However, Boom proposes that the same $8K can support economy-style seating traveling at Mach 2.2 instead of mach .80. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 3x the speed will cost ~10x as much.
That depends on the proportions of the costs, if one area is much larger in absolute values, you can go higher than 10x improvement there, while keeping all other costs equal, while still getting an overall 10x improvement. Amdahl's law yada, yada.
> Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency.
People who have worked in computing all their lives will have seen multiple "magic 10x improvement" cycles, so might have an implicit believe that it will happen everywhere.
But one should not assume that this will happen for the task of pushing big metal tubes through the air by burning things. The physics of it is not on the side of easy 10x improvements in that case.
In 50s cars were 15mpg in average. Today’s top tier mpg cars are over 120mpg. Order of magnitude. They are also safer, quieter, faster, cheaper in maintenance, etc.
Technology does enable 10x improvements over half a century sometimes.
You just compared fleet average in one time period to an extreme outlier in another time period.
In reality, fleet average fuel economy has been nearly flat for four decades, with the biggest periods of movement being driven by brief excursions in the price of crude oil. Those efficiency excursions were in turn driven not by technological improvement, but by changes in the makeup of the vehicle fleets themselves (lighter cars, smaller engines).
and here we're comparing "average" of supersonic flight half a century ago to a potential future outlier. i don't think i'm being outrageously unreasonable here.
The Concorde is not "average", it is the most fuel efficient supersonic aircraft to date by a huge margin. Yes it's kind of old but I think you are dramatically overestimating how much aircraft turbojet engines have improved in the past 40 years.
While Concorde was efficient at supersonic cruise, it was ridiculously inefficient getting there (and this was one of the main arguments for the proposed Concorde B).
Also note most aircraft capable of supersonic cruise nowadays don't use turbojets, they use low-bypass turbofans (mostly around 0.3:1).
To be fair it has been over 40 years since the Concorde was designed and built. While I'm pretty skeptical that a start-up is going to somehow design, build and deliver a supersonic plane I don't think such improvements necessarily have to be "magic". Plain ole iterative improvements over 40 years could probably handle much of that.
If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane, which halves your amortized capital cost per flight. That doesn't get you all the way there, but it's a significant cost reduction, which combined with others, could conceivably get you there.
> If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane
Certainly not. Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. Some of these activities happen at the same time with each other, but many of them not.
Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced.
The turnaround time -- time needed for everything that happens from when the plane arrives at the gate to when it departs again -- is only comparable to flying time for smaller aircraft doing shorter domestic hops.
For aircraft doing the kinds of inter-continental segments a supersonic airliner is targeting, there's no real comparison. And airlines most certainly do optimize for time spent in the air; a plane on the ground is a plane making no money. So you see a single aircraft bounce around among a bunch of hubs all in one day, for example, or larger, longer-range aircraft doing rotations of where they fly to (like having the same aircraft do a flight from the US to South America and back, then off to Asia and back, to optimize for arrival/departure times and minimize time spent not flying)
Of course airlines optimize it, but still, boarding alone takes a significant portion of the total time needed for a long-haul flight.
If I look at the latest long-haul flight I took, the flight time was 11 hours, turn-around time at airport 4 hours, for a total of 15 hours. If you'd drop the flight time to half, and manage to do accelerate boarding, cleaning, re-fueling etc in 3 hours, you'd come up with 8.5 hours. Much better, but not even close to be able to deliver twice as many flights per day. It'd be more like a 50 % improvement.
Long-haul utilization also depends on one other factor, which is time zones. It can be worth leaving the plane on the ground longer in order to line up for a more desirable departure/arrival time.
You see this a lot with transatlantic flights, where they spend more time than necessary on the ground at each end, but doing so sets up better timing (like eastbound TATL flights departing in North American evening and arriving in European morning).
Those are marginal costs. Parent comment was talking about amortised costs, i.e. fixed costs. Such as the airplane, itself (depreciation per mile of flight aside, but that’s another point).
IIRC lifetime ratings on aircraft are most heavily based on the number of pressure cycles the airframe receives, i.e. the number of flights it does, not the length of time it spends in the air or its age. So being able to do twice as many flights in the same time just shortens the lifetime of the aircraft.
The Concorde entered service in 1976, and program launch was in the Kennedy administration. It would be surprising if technology didn't advance enough to bring huge improvements over that time period.
There are broadly three enabling technologies, plus a couple of economic factors. Technologies:
1. Carbon fiber. With the 787, we finally have a transport-category aircraft with significant amounts of carbon fiber that has gone through full FAA certification, which significantly lowers the barrier to us using it. Carbon fiber does a lot for us. It is lighter and stronger than aluminum, but it is also more thermally stable. Concorde grew about 15 inches in flight as its temperature rose in flight. Our leading edges will reach over 300ºF at Mach 2.2, and our plane will grow less than an inch in flight. That is a significant maintenance cost reducer. Carbon fiber also enables more complex geometries without expensive tooling costs. Our plane won't have a straight line on it. We can take better advantage of area ruling to improve aerodynamics. In contrast, Concorde's fuselage was a cylindrical tube.
2. Engines. There is a (much slower) Moore's law for engine cores; they get better at a rate of around 1 percent a year. Move 50+ years forward from when Concorde's engines were designed and you have a real improvement. Concorde used 4 turbojets (i.e, zero bypass ratio) and we have 3 medium-bypass turbofans. Plus no afterburners are needed. When Concorde used afterburners to punch through the transonic regime, they had a 78% increase in fuel flow for a 17% increase in thrust.
3. Computational fluid dynamics. Concorde is all the more impressive for the fact that it was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Wind tunnel tests are expensive, taking six months and costing millions of dollars. We can do virtual wind tunnel tests in software in about 30 minutes. We still use tunnels to closely test harder aspects of the design (e.g., low-speed handling qualities), but we have much more rapid design iteration than Concorde could have hoped for.
On the economics, we are right-sizing the aircraft. Concorde had 100 seats, but it usually flew with a very low load factor (half-empty). Our design has 55 seats, which is similar to the premium cabin on today's widebody subsonic airliner. What this means is that any route that can sustain widebody subsonic service today will basically work supersonically. We expect much higher load factors, which are helped by business class fares and a lower number of seats to fill relative to Concorde.
This leads to economies of scale. Whereas Concorde really only was profitable between New York and London, Boom flights make economic sense on hundreds of global routes. Which means we'll sell more planes and drive maintenance costs down further. Only 14 Concorde units ever saw commercial service. Ultimately, when Concorde shut down, it was because Airbus stopped making spare parts. In contrast, one public report by the Boyd Group estimated supersonic demand at 1300 planes. With almost two orders of magnitude of planes in service, we'll achieve much better scale on maintenance.
A good way to image this is, in 1969 for the moon landing they had to code the timestamps in negative. Of course it’s a joke but it tells a lot about how far that time was.
The F-22’s engines have 0.3:1, it cruised at Mach 1.8, and it’s old 90’s tech now. Correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe 2.2 is pushing it, but the claim doesn’t seem outlandish. The Boom doesn’t need the wings of an air superiority fighter, amongst other things.
What makes you think you are going to sustain that ridiculous cheap price of a ticket?
I fly to Europe constantly on first class and tickets are usually circa $8,000 round trip. When I saw your "plane" with huge seat space, huge windows and $3,500 per round trip NYC-LON I immediately looked for your phone number to send you $350,000 for my next 10 years of flying. Please just take my money!!
Bottom line it will not be sustained so some deep alteration will have to be done. I would rather spend $8,000 in first class 7 hours flight this summer, than book my 3.5hr flight with you that will happen in 2028, because you are highly overbooked. Of course adding 100x more units in flight won't cut; air space is not like bakery you just can add another oven.
> We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.
In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door. Your approach is similar to those who envisioned building harness for 100 horses in a row to go faster, right before a Diesel engine was invented.
> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door.
I feel like this assertion deserves a big "maybe" in there somewhere.
Definitely. The commenter who can't believe supersonic flight is commercially feasible by the early 2020s thinks it's because we'll fly from London to NYC via space elevator and slow through reentry via "huge magnets." To be honest, I don't know enough about the science and business of flight to know whether this pitch for Boom is feasible, but I'm not as inclined to buy this particular argument against it after this point.
For the record, I hope Boom succeeds. When I was a kid I learned about the Concorde as the future and it's been a real shame to watch it stay in the past.
> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door.
I’d like to see the trajectory that takes you from NY to London in 19 minutes without squashing you and/or causing insane amount of heating. Bonus points if the only source of thrust is a fancy air brake.
> not possible to make today with with unlimited budgets
The Lofstrom Loop is possible today for a few billion dollars. Though "catching" an incoming capsule with a Loop is going to take a while to human-certify.
> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator"
I used to imagine the same thing when I was a kid, that by the turn of the millenium we'll be piloting flying cars. But here we are in 2018 sitting in traffic jams in the same old boring four wherlers. Yes they're more efficient and reliable but still a chariot on wheels.
Nowadays I'd rather imagine supersonic flight is possible from an economic standpoint and wish Boom the best of luck with their enterprise.
It's a really personal opinion, but I don't think that we saw a lot of technological breakthrough in the last 50 years.
Except in genetic, chemistry and computer sciences, most other fields looks a lot like where they were 50 years ago.
It's true that there were a lot of incremental changes, greatly improving the overall efficiency, and also a far wider adoptions of these technologies. But the basis for most concepts/designs are in fact quite old.
The first computers are from the 50ies and the transistor from 1947, the 737 first flew in 1968, the 747 a few years later, the first nuclear plant dates back from 1956, Soyuz still flies despite being based on the 1957 R7 ICBM, the basic design of cars is pretty much established since the 20ies or 30ies.
Short of the internet (agree it's a big "short of"), our lives are not that much different than in the 70ies or 80ies (at least in the US/Europe).
And in fact, it's not a big surprise. A big factor in radically changing our material condition is to get energy, and a lot of it. First there was coal 200 years ago, then oil and gaz in the late XIXe century (plus electricity for its versatility and ease of distribution) and, finally, nuclear fission (and it was only a semi-success seeing the current and near future adoption). Short of a new energy source, with an output an order of magnitude higher than we currently have (Fusion? if we manage to pull it of), I don't see why we will have major technological changes.
Exponential scientific and technical advancements only happen in the early stages of the large scale adoption of a technology. Von Braun went from launching hand made rockets as part of a rocket club to leading the team that engineered the moon landings, but since then rocketry improvements have been incremental. I think with computer technology we're still in an early phase. Eventually we will reach the limitations of the current silicon transistor paradigm. Maybe something else will take over, maybe it won't.
But sometimes several things come together to lead to a new capabilty. SpaceX recoverable rockets aren't just due to incremental improvements in rocket engines, they're due to improvements in a whole host of different areas - materials technology for lighter rockets, software improvements, better heat shielding materials and frankly new economic imperatives. Those all came together to push us over the edge of a new capability. Maybe the same will happen with supersonic passenger planes.
Unless we have WW3, I can guarantee you the lightweight personal transportation will take on 3D shape (personal flying machines) within next 25-50 years, but it will not overlap with ability to control them. And that even better! In 20 years AI will drive much better than best human driver in worst road scenario. Why bother giving steering wheel to non-pilots, if AI can do better work by then ?
Space elevators will be wonderful... if they are feasible. We have yet to identify a material with sufficient tensile strength to construct a space elevator, and may never do so.
[...] it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.
Hence the "if". I certainly hope they will be feasible, but the fact that an alternative may be possible, contingent on the potential creation of currently nonextant materials, is absolutely not a reason to discourage development of supersonic aircraft.
That Asimov quote is actually pretty damned close to reality. Why is that exchange, of all things, sitting beside Neville "Peace for our times" Chamberlain?
> So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?
Power of 50 years of technological development. That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year. Considering that supersonic flight overall was still fairly new thing when Concorde was designed and CAD was non-existent back then, order of magnitude improvement does not sound completely implausible.
The aerospace industry isn't advancing anywhere near that fast. Most of the low-hanging fruit was picked over 50 years ago.
Case in point: The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G is a geared turbofan engine. From demonstrated prototype (1993), to flight testing (2008) to production (2016), it took _23_years_ to develop this engine. Efficiency improvement over baseline: 15-18%. That's quite a bit less than 1% y/y improvement.
I worked on an aircraft which flies with the GTF. Just FYI, that’s a poor example to cite in support of your point. The GTF was set aside for many years due to expected higher fuel costs not materializing for a good while. It took some major impetus to get the program going again.
And even though PW1000G has been in "production" for two years, it's had constant problems. Someone else here probabally knows for sure, but I think they finally fixed all their issues and hope to start producing in volume sometime soon. IIRC, they are still trying to get all the existing engines swapped out with fixed builds.
Not every technology advances at the same rate as electronics. An order of magnitude improvement in supercruise efficiency over Concorde--which is one of the biggest bottlenecks--would be a significant innovation alone.
It doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance. For recurring costs, I assume the two primary drivers are fuel and maintenance. There's been a lot of advances in fuel efficiency and maintenance costs since the 1960s.
I don't think you can hear the sonic boom when you are traveling above the speed of sound. I think that the sonic boom is only experienced by a stationary object observing the event.
That’s a poor response. Major engineering advances that nobody sees coming are exceedingly rare. By the time an advance is close, it’s usually apparent to other engineers. For example, Samuel Langley’s unmanned engine-driven plane flew seven years before the Wright Flyer. It was quite clear by the late 19th century that human flight would happen and we had a pretty good understanding of how.
Will we have supersonic commercial travel at some point? Probably. But that’s not a very interesting statement. Are we close to supersonic commercial air travel and do we have a concrete idea how to get from point A to B? That’s the interesting (and very different) question.
(That is not to say I think Boom will or will not get there, I havent’t studied it closely. But I’m an aerospace engineer by education and history is littered with failures in this space, and progress since the 1980s has been grimly slow.)
Saving 3.5 hours between NYC and London is better, but not vastly better than the status quo. Your total door-to-door travel time will still be about 7-8 hours.
But in my office, just about everyone flies transpacific, or else even longer distances to Europe at least once an year. Mostly business class. And for us, halving the time would be a huge win. But for that to work, the planes need to be able to make the distance.
Good question. It's the longest flights that are the most irritating, so the willing to pay may be higher. The example given on the Boom site of Los Angeles -> Sydney becoming 7 hours instead of 15 is compelling.
There is a point here. I am so used to travelling to and from Australia, that I find flights less than 7 hours to be annoying. You go through all he hassle of getting onto the dang plane, but don't have time to experience your flight in a relaxed, enjoyable way.
Supersonic makes me dream but the most cumbersome part in air travel is not on flight, but on the ground, and could be massively improved for much wider ranges of people. But I’m not sure it can happen given that migrant protectionism growing all over the world. I’d take a 40-minutes boarding & customs experience with water, soap and pencils allowed over a supersonic flight. Well, in fact, I’m out of the market because the customs/TSA are so annoying with USA that I don’t go to US conferences at all.
I'm convinced that one or more of these advancements could revolutionize air travel:
* Back to the hub and spoke model, but without preplanned routes. You show up at the airport and they have a Just-in-time routing where you get one leg closer as soon as the plane fills to capacity. Pro: airplane almost always full. Con: you (or low fare passengers wait longer)
* (continued from above) : you dont even know which layover you will have until routing needs and weather are known. I.e. you want to go from NYC to Albuquerque. There happen to be about the same number who need to go from Tulsa to ABQ as who need to go to Tulsa from NYC. So 2 hr before your flight you find out it will stop in Tulsa so 8 people can get off/on.
* modular boarding on a mobile trolley. So instead of loitering in the jetway, everyone gets on a railcar size vehicle and gets ready to board the flight. This will allow them to queue up before they travel to the plane queue.
* planes queue up before a platform. Some mobile trolleys allow boarding from the rear while some board from the front. This theoretically halves the boarding time. Once the trolleys are vacated the plane doors close and the plane can slowly and safely taxi while the remaining passengers get seated. This would be safe so long as the brakes didn't jolt and knock an elderly person over.
* mixed cargo and passenger flights. I know this is already done to some extent. But what if there were a luxury branded airline that was first class only? And the other half of the plane were air cargo containers such that the flight were still profitable even without passengers.
* an options market for tickets. Allow traders to buy options on routes on particular dates. This may increase prices for passengers, but it would also allow airlines to insulate themselves from volatility. Let "the market" do the hard work of price calculation.
Last time I did London to New York (2 weeks ago) I spent about 25 minutes queueing in total (at both ends). I guess I got lucky, but my overall experience with flying UK to USA is that's it's actually pretty ok. I am a white guy though, so there is that.
Rocket flight would have to get a lot safer before that ever becomes a reality. Nobody is going to sign up for that if they have a 1 in 270 chance at rapid unscheduled disassembly. And even that rate hasn't been demonstrated to date - the risks for both Space X's rockets and NASA's space shuttle have so far been higher.
I hope it is a future that comes to pass. It would be amazing to buy a seat on a huge-ass rocket and take a trip to space and back. That's so far been only the realm of astronauts and billionaires.
Where are they gonna launch from, that I can get to in a reasonable amount of time from NYC, Chicago, LA, Hong Kong, London, etc? They can't build another runway at LHR, let alone a BFR launch pad.
What a disgusting travesty that a single person would ever pay $5,000 to fly anywhere in 2018, no doubt to go do pointless busywork and "negotiation" that telephones already obsoleted the need to travel for a hundred years ago.
All while people starve in the streets, having bankrupted themselves paying for healthcare, while impoverished teachers buy school supplies with their own money. God damned sickening.
NYC-SF is a 2h30m block time (gate-to-gate) if it were allowed. Our sonic boom will be quieter than Concorde's, but because of the policy challenge, we are baselining overwater operations only.
It's my understanding that, initially, it'll have to be over water but once it's proven safe they can get approval to fly over land. I don't know what that entails but that was my understanding of it last time I looked into it.
A NYC-SF or DC-SF route would be freaking amazing.
When Boom was first posted here I recall the narrative also including a lot of drag dynamics that would reduce the "boom" which would allow for more feasible overland routes / less noise pollution. Not sure where that sits now - I don't see it as much in their PR copy.
That's not how a sonic boom works. A sonic boom doesn't occur just at the moment that an object exceeds the speed of sound; it's a continuous phenomenon that is experienced by a stationary observer as a momentary event.
It's pretty disappointing to see that Boom is still using fossil fuel burning engines. Surely if you're innovating on aviation tech, Mach 2.2 flight for business people is less important than figuring out a way to fly that doesn't kill the planet.
You might as well complain about how they don't power their aircraft with unicorn farts.
I have never even seen a proposal for a supersonic electric engine. The only thing that's even remotely close is a bit of dabbling in nuclear engines in the 50s and 60s that were cancelled once people noticed that the idea was insane. Also, impractical--the radiation shielding was too heavy.
Build us a Mach-2.2 electric engine where the aircraft design closes and we'll use it! We're an airframer, not an engine company. Would love to see some innovation in engines. Maybe a good idea for another YC startup.
The point is that you're building a vehicle that (I assume) will produce far more pollution (CO2 and otherwise) per passenger mile than existing aircraft. Is that an ethical thing to do at this point in time?
I'm sure they'll reconsider as soon as someone develops jet engines capable of mach 2.2 that don't burn fossil fuels. In the meantime, since speed is their goal, they don't have much choice.
Others are working on that. The US military has already tested flying airplanes using sustainable biofuels. Once that fuel becomes commercially available, any airline will be able to use it in Boom aircraft (or any other airliners).
Well, could we stop for a second and deeply thing if we really do need to make this travel? Recently I noticed that more and more things can be done online without the tedious flight…
I've said it before, but why are you designing a plane with pilots on board? Automate as far as possible and have a remote control option as backup. It saves space, money (pilots are expensive), and human error.
Right, massive shortcuts could be taken with no pilot on board (including the awesome $$$ seats in the front row), but that’s a story for another startup with a 20-year runway.
Abdul-Jabbar could say something awesome about dragging someone or something back and forth across the Atlantic, which hopefully people would understand was a movie reference.
Pilots are pretty cheap relative to the cost of a trans-Atlantic flight. And you’re going to want some Captain type person even if you don’t need them as a pilot.
I’d actually say it’s a lot easier - there aren’t any crash barriers, planes are spaced far further apart, etc.
But at the same time, I’d never want to fly in a passenger plane without a pilot, because when emergency situations happen, autopilots usually can’t handle it and need intervention. When the engine on QF32 exploded, the pilots had to do checks and make judgements on something like 200 different error messages before they could land! Since so many of the plane’s systems were damaged by the explosion, a lot of this may not have been possible remotely.
And the stakes are much higher when an uncaught sensor error or something can mean flying into the ground from 30,000 feet - unlike a train (the only thing that actually has a good safety record running driverless so far) you can’t just stop in an emergency!
> The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
Agreed. And that's not even mentioning the climate angle of it.
I've done some reading lately about the effects of air travel on climate. I was very depressed by what I found. Basically, air travel is terrible for global warming. Besides emissions of greenhouse gasses CO2 and NOx, the trails of water vapor ("contrails") form cirrus clouds that contribute to warming.
Unlike the electric car, there is no emerging technology that can save air travel from this environmental impact. Meanwhile, air travel is growing at ~5%/year. At this rate, by mid-century air travel alone will consume the world's entire emissions allowance, if we want to keep global warming to 2 °C or less. And supersonic travel appears to be even worse for the climate.
For all the talk about fighting global warming, I almost never hear about this. It seems like the most inconvenient truth of all: if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less. This is a hard pill to swallow. Tesla is built on the idea that we can have cleaner cars without having to give up anything (because electric cars can be luxury items). But electric airplanes exist only as research curiosities -- they aren't up to the task of their fuel-burning counterparts. Right now it looks like the democratization of fast, world-wide travel might be a late 20th - early 21st century phenomenon that we can't get back. :(
> For all the talk about fighting global warming, I almost never hear about this. It seems like the most inconvenient truth of all: if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less.
I don't know what circles you hang out in, but I've heard this many times. The focus is on road vehicles and land power consumption because that's where the low hanging fruit is. And airlines do already have a profit motivation to decrease fuel consumption, which equates to reduced emissions. I'd like to see a CO2 tax to help align incentives.
Cleaner burning fuels might be an option at some point.
> But there is no electric airplane.
(I assume you're talking about commercial airplanes. Electric airplanes do exist, but have limited range and/or speed, and thus limited commercial application, due to reduced energy density.)
That could change, if batteries get a lot cheaper and lighter. Or you know, kerosene gets more expensive (government-enforced pricing of the externality of CO2 emission). Some of both.
It's obviously more viable for short-haul flights than long-haul, but even that would help.
Boeing had a choice between a more fuel efficient, durable and quieter airplane design, or a trans-sonic airframe design. The trans-sonic design lost, we got the 787.
Since then Boeing refreshed all their other planes (some might call it "stapled new wings and engines on") and called them -8 and -9 models.
But the problem is that the more efficient the tech is, the more of it people use. An extra 500 miles of range opens up decentralization of routes, which means more planes flying.
>That could change, if batteries get a lot cheaper and lighter.
The batteries could be free. Until they literally burn up so the plane can get lighter and therefore can land, it's pretty much a non-starter for anything over a few hundred miles. The max takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is 50 tons more than it's maximum landing weight, which will probably damage the gear in some capacity.
> The max takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is 50 tons more than it's maximum landing weight
I honestly don't know, but could this be part of the design simply because the engineers know the plane will weigh less on landing? Seems like that design would change if so much mass from fuel was no longer lost/burnt.
This, but the reason it's engineered that way is because landing gear face far higher loads on landing. During takeoff, landing gear essentially only have to support the weight of the aircraft. During landing, the gear have to arrest the aircraft's descent (which may be momentarily 3 or 4 g's of acceleration if the aircraft encounters turbulence while landing); and then they need to brake the entire weight of the plane within the remaining length of the runway, which is a high loading in a different direction (along the aircraft's longitudinal axis). So maximum landing weight is set by the landing gear, while maximum takeoff weight is usually set by the wings and engines.
I didn't realize that most of the braking on landing was handled by the landing gear. I'd always assumed that the obvious sound of the engines reversing when we landed did most of the work, but some casual googling suggests that it's only supplementary, to reduce the load on the landing gear.
The stronger the gear needs to be, the heavier it becomes. Planes are optimized for safety first and foremost, but weight is a very close second. Heavier plane = more batteries = more weight = more batteries etc.
yes and no, because now it's a pain in the butt when there is a takeoff issue. If there is a tail strike, an engine issue on take off, or a passenger emergency early in the flight, now they have to loop around in circles for hours with a damaged airplane before landing. Or they have to dump fuel, but they do it extremely rarely, because most planes can't even do it, and it's a pain in the butt and actually quite slow for the planes that can do it.
All aircraft landing gear are certified for landing at MTOW, they just need inspected afterwards before the plane can re-enter service. The fact that frequently the captain's judgement is to prefer to land at a lower weight is a separate issue.
It is way more complicated than just altitude, with zones and procedures, incredibly long checklists and a bit of maths. But a plane that can't reach 4000ft is probably in a mayday situation, and there is absolutely no time to try to dump fuel, it's a slow procedure.
Just to put illustrative numbers on it and not to dispute the parent comment in any way, the big 787's (787-10) have 251 Mg max take-off weight and 202 Mg max landing weight.
In comparison the A380 has a max landing weight of 386 Mg. Clearly the 787 is not up against a hard practical limit in terms of landing weight. Yes, stronger gear weighs more.
We agree that weight of batteries impacts their usefulness for aircraft. That's why I mentioned it in the quoted sentence :-).
> The 787 can operate out of many airports the A380 cannot.
Yes? I said batteries would have to be a lot lighter and kerosene a lot more expensive before they are a practical replacement. I think we agree, but I think you think we disagree?
Managing a few hundred miles on electricity would in itself have a huge positive impact. Most of the busiest air routes in the world call under that heading.
be careful with airline motivation, they are looking into their profit margins, and one way to reduce fuel price is to increase the economy of scale, that means more passengers, more pollution, more fuel, but less fuel per passenger. That was the whole point of the A380, a giant gas guzzler, but per passenger it was more efficient, it only works if you destroy smaller planes or increase passenger traffic.
The second aspect of it is that economies of scale are on the last leg, most airline companies use smaller planes, with a hub and spoke model, and a highly energy inefficient system, because it's better in their overall profit making system.
They are there to make money first, carrying passengers is the hoops they have to go through to get people's money (but by cleverly worded passenger carrying contracts, they are more and more getting around the issue), and fuel price is a variable in the system.
Incidentally Uber (who are developing electric air taxis with Embraer, et al) are live streaming their annual summit on the topic starting tomorrow. https://www.uber.com/info/elevate/summit/
The most viable long term solution for long-haul air transport will probably be carbon-neutral liquid fuels. For example, in principle it could eventually become possible to genetically engineer algae which pulls CO2 out of the air and produces kerosene.
Eventually? In principle? Ethanol is a thing, just not one that was able to compete without taxing its competitors' externalities. Not sure how the math works out for jet engines, but I suspect it works out better than batteries.
Maybe it's better than petroleum? The hell? It's not only better, EtOH becomes entirely neutral in the limit where it takes over. The carbon released from burning all comes from the plant, which in turn all comes from the air. All other carbon costs are incidental (e.g. it doesn't make sense to immediately convert transportation, farming, and production equipment) or one-off and amortizable (ploughing fields).
For long haul air transport we would have to redesign engines, fuel systems, and airport infrastructure to use ethanol safely. And even then it would make flying less efficient because ethanol contains less energy. Synthetic kerosene or something similar would be an easier transition and give better results.
Aviation is a sideshow. It accounts for around 2-4% of carbon, depending on how you count its impact. And be careful extrapolating today's trends into a straight line, it rarely works out that way.
You could stop the world from flying tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a dent in your PPM growth.
If aviation busts the carbon budget, so will most everything else, and by vastly larger margins.
Better to direct your limited resources at lower hanging fruit, unless you'd prefer the perfect to kill the good.
might be an unpopular prediction on this board but i believe climate change will be solved by technology and not reduced consumption. electricity generation also has significant environmental impact and is not a solution in itself
How much energy does it take to turn CO2 back into oil? Is there a viable synthesis pathway? Carbon neutral oil would be fabulous. I'm guessing you have to spend a significant amount of energy to turn it back into oil, but is it 1.01x? 1.5x? 10x? 200x? The lower range would be viable to work with other kinds of renewables.
Can't store solar at night? Turn atmospheric carbon into oil. It doesn't have to be cheaper than oil (it almost certainly can't be unless it gets too hard to drill), but we can subsidize it within some kind of range.
I think the idea is that humanity itself dies off in large numbers due to lack of food, potable water, wars, etc. There's how you get your reduced consumption. The earth itself is just fine with this natural cycle.
> electricity generation also has significant environmental impact
Hydropower? The primary materials used are concrete and steel, and dams last for centuries with minimal upkeep. As long as appropriate measures (such as fish ladders) are taken, the local and global environmental impact is negligible.
Here's your technological solution: Use more efficient, less polluting (and slower) turbofan engines instead of less efficient, more polluting (and faster) turbojects.
And here's the attendant public policy: Tax the turbojects' users enough to offset the negative ecological externalities incurred by their use. That will likely make commercial SST unprofitable.
As far as I know, and according to Wikipedia, most commercial airliners already use turbofans [1], which are high-bypass turbojets [2]. Unless you were referring to turboprops?
Aircraft fuel can be carbon neutral, if the fuel is made by CO2 reduction (CO2 to methanol/methane and Fischer-Tropsch). It's just not economical today. CO2 reduction will never compete with electric cars, because it's just too inefficient, but for aircraft, even throwing away 2/3 of your input energy might make economic sense if that energy is clean.
Do I understand you correctly that if we would stop flying right now, we could reverse some effects of global warming (the water vapor part of it would be gone instantly)?
Jet engines are massively more efficient at high altitude. Turbulence is much worse at lower altitude. Safety margins are reduced at lower altitude. Winds are far less predictable at lower altitude.
> if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less
Most people prefer to say they want to fight global warming as opposed to actually doing anything. If the average person really wanted to fight climate change, they'd:
• Stop eating meat
• Buy as few new items as possible
• Never get on an airplane again
• Not have kids
And even then one person's actions really can't do a damn thing so who can blame them for just enjoying their life and doing whatever they want?
This isn't even remotely true: "Unlike the electric car, there is no emerging technology that can save air travel from this environmental impact."
Something as simple as flying low enough to create low level cloud cover would more than reverse the net effect of NOx and CO2 produced by planes. It's just more expensive because it takes longer and consumes more fuel.
I don't think it's that simple, if you asked someone if they would pay 50$ to save 8+ hours off a long flight I think a significant portion would say hell yes. So, it's more a question of cost vs. saved time.
50$ seems crazy as supersonic flight is going to use far more fuel, but it also means the aircraft, pilot, and flight attendants can make more trips. So, a minimal cost increase might be possible.
I think there are thresholds there. Reducing a 12-hours long flight to 8-hours long flight makes no practical difference to people traveling. Cutting it down to 6 hours might start. Cutting it down to 2-3 hours (or under an hour, as SpaceX is proposing) enables new use cases for which people might be willing to pay premium. Suddenly, a company can send someone to a meeting/conference on the other side of the world and have them back the same day.
Traveling for business, I've paid extra for a flight that cut my coast-to-coast travel time from 8 hours to 6 hours (can't get nonstop flights to LA from my airport). That was the difference between "do I visit my client today for a few hours or do I go straight to the hotel and see them tomorrow".
The difference wasn't worth paying Concorde prices, but it was an extra $200 and since my billing rate is over $500/hr and considering the hotel prices in LA, the client was happy to pay it if it meant seeing me the same day I flew in.
I'm an information security consultant. I don't make $500/hr, that's just what my company bills clients for my time. I make a small fraction of that :)
I haven't imagined the cases like yours, but that's exactly the thing I was aiming at - there are thresholds for which a shorter trip makes a qualitative difference, which is worth paying a premium for.
Almost everyone I know who flies recreationally would pay to reduce 12 to 8, and I have done so myself. Maybe those routes/budgets are not a big enough proportion of the overall flight volume?
30% more for a plane ticket to add an extra half day to vacation (landing at noon vs 3-4pm) is something i'd do; I already do with minimizing legs and length of layovers. How many* people willing to pay more are the key as the flight needs to be filled.
I wouldn't for any personal international trips, honestly. With the current air network, you can generally find a route that takes you in when you want it to (more or less), and that first day is already so disorienting that I don't think adding a few hours to it even if you can't find such a route is going to really affect the vacation as a whole that much.
Business is a different story since I wouldn't be paying directly and those trips are generally more fast paced and require you to be at 100% soon after getting off the plane. Those extra hours could help you finish preparing for a presentation or something.
Longest flight is currently 17 hours, 40 minutes assuming concord speeds that would save over 10 hours and again on the way back. That's just short of a full day less flight time round trip.
Granted that's the outlier, but nothing says these aircraft need be limited to concord speeds either.
I don’t know, I fly Marseille-Frankfurt-SFO every month and cutting my 11.5 hour leg down to 8 would be a big win for me. I’d pay a business class fare for an economy seat if it cut 4 hours from my travel time. Tourists probably wouldn’t care so much, but for business travel — I’d definitely be interested.
Are we forgetting the security lines and 2ndary transport times?
For a 1-2hr flight within my region, I need
a) 30m at least of security time (let's assume passenger willing to pay has pre-check/global entry/clear/et)
b) 30-60m to get to the airport. same for arrival.
c) must arrive by boarding time or airline can deny you (about 45m at least).
So that's like 3-4h for each flight (e.g. 6-8h total roundtrip) for a door-door connection, and that's the safe minimums. If security is overloaded or traffic is jammed (or train is delayed), you risk missing your flight.
A business day is still lost, but it's possible with an early flight that an early or midday meeting could be attended on late notice - which might be an acceptable compromise for your average moderate company C-level to avoid using a private jet.
I check luggage maybe one in twenty flights. And rarely drive myself to the airport. So your mileage will vary. That said, I hate cutting flights close so I always try to arrive st the airport 90-120 minutes before the flight even if I essentially never need to have done so.
I love Space X, but this was my first thought when intra-planetary flight was announced. You save a lot of flight time, but if it’s gonna take the same or more preflight time, the savings are vastly diminished.
I would love it if someone (countries) starting optimizing for full travel time. But the incentives are not there. Airports are shopping malls. Security ensures you have to buy more liquids in the mall.
Imagine: 20min train from King’s Cross / Union Station to the heart of the airport, 10 min travel to gate, 5 minut security, 15min boarding.
Equally futuristic: Plane tickets working like train tickets. Buy a flight from LA to SF. Show up (almost) any time. Take the first available. Of course optimized via estimated arrival times and demand calculations.
Many small/medium European airports manage this for flights within Europe. At least in Dublin, Gatwick, Frankfurt Hahn, the security has been under 10 minutes for me, without buying any fast track passes. Add to that mobile boarding passes from most airlines eliminating the need to do anything beyond "weigh bag at automated machine without a queue, put sticker on, drop at bag drop" in the check in area, and it's a much faster experience.
The issue comes when flying to the US, where at least in Dublin, there's a second TSA-run security station behind the main security for flights going to the US. This is the only one where I've had delays of over 20 minutes for security in Dublin (which is still much better than I've had in the US, including a 1hour security queue in JFK once).
This is also where online check in is usually not an option, where there's a long queue, and where I get US customs interviewing people in the line to make it even longer.
So it seems to be the US specifically causing this problem
PeopleExpress used to do this. When it first launched, customers purchased tickets for a flight without booking a particular flight or seat. They would show up to the airport and get seated on a first-come, first-serve basis on the next available flight. All flights were non-stop shuttle flights (back and forth between two destinations).
It was phenomenally successful for a few years. It's not clear that this model could be replicated today due to air travel security concerns.
Also depends on range. If a supersonic flight makes, say, London or JFK - Sydney doable, then you've just shaved a lot of time off with connections as well.
In the UK I think it is common to think about the longest plane trip as flying to Australia, it is after all a trip to the other side of the world.
Concorde did London-Sydney in around 17 hours due to the refueling stops[0].
The new Dreamliner direct route will do London to Perth in about the same time, sub-sonic but no stops[1]. I wonder if mentally that will feel to people like it is equivalent...when in reality there is another 2000 miles (a 4 hour flight) to go. I suppose many people will do a stopover in Perth and travel the next day, a stopover int he same country being that much easier of course.
The cabin in Concorde was smaller and more cramped. 17 hours with stops would have been challenging.
I think Concorde may have been the most beautiful plane ever built and an incredible achievement for the time. But long-haul really needs a new kind of hyperliner - preferably clean, if we're going to be writing a wish-list.
It was never going to be a popular option with Concorde technology.
Concord had almost no capacity. less than 100 passengers. And its seats were way less comfortable than even business class nowadays. Its ok for a two hours flight between the UK and JFK but beyond that the feeling of travelling premium fades very fast.
You're not really going to knock off 8 hours unless you're doing like LA to Moscow non-stop. LA to London is theoretically only 10 hours in a 747. Sure that'd be like 4 hours in the Concorde, except that it didn't have the range for that so you'd have to add at least an hour, probably two to circle around JFK refuel then take off again.
Not just theoretically, LA to London (LAX to Gatwick or Heathrow) is 10:15-10:30 — there are several flights per day. (interestingly it's 11:10-11:30 in the opposite direction because of the wind patterns).
> 50$ seems crazy as supersonic flight is going to use far more fuel, but it also means the aircraft, pilot, and flight attendants can make more trips. So, a minimal cost increase might be possible.
This is the premise of SpaceX's BFS. Though each flight will be more expensive than a 747, they can fly another BFS each hour.
You could easily find out if you’re right. Most airlines offer the same routes direct both with and without stops. The non-stop flights usually cost more (sometimes a lot more) and are often full. At least some of those people are optimizing for time. So clearly there is a demand to pay more for shorter flights.
I choose direct flights whenever I can. I don’t really care about the time, I care about the hassle, the interruption and the waiting that comes with having to change flights.
A lot of the time, I would gladly spend the same amount of hours—sleeping, reading, watching stuff-in the same plane.
Oh, I didn't see that important distinction. That makes sense, then, don't see why you would prefer non-stop over stops if it's the same plane you keep sitting in, other than that it takes less time.
I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist.
> don't see why you would prefer non-stop over stops if it's the same plane you keep sitting in, other than that it takes less time.
That's exactly why I prefer them. Because of the time savings. And I'm willing to pay more for that.
> I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist.
It's increasingly rare as airlines move to a more direct city to city model, but in the old hub and spoke days, you'd often find planes that stopped in one or two hubs on the way.
Southwest still make a lot of stops. If you want to get from the west coast to east cost, there's a really good chance of stopping in Denver, Kansas City, or Texas.
> That's exactly why I prefer them. Because of the time savings. And I'm willing to pay more for that.
Yeah, that's what I say, I misread you first, but after reading correctly, that's the only interpretation that makes sense. I was agreeing now.
> Southwest still make a lot of stops. If you want to get from the west coast to east cost, there's a really good chance of stopping in Denver, Kansas City, or Texas.
Since I moved to the US I mostly fly overseas, and when I lived in Germany for the rest of my life before that I mostly flew to other countries. I don't know, maybe flights with stops are less common in those scenarios.
Big airports are already pretty saturated for traffic, and what most of us don't realize is that airplanes create vortices around the runway that the airport has to wait out. So more small planes can take off in an hour than large planes.
If you build smaller planes that fly farther, you don't need the hub and spoke pattern as much. If a direct flight cuts two hours off of your trip, makes it so you don't have to board two planes instead of one, that is both objectively faster and at least for me much less stressful.
Yes, but the bigger planes carry more than twice as many passengers. If we're talking about airport throughput efficiency of A380s vs Embraer 170/190s, the Airbus is going to win every time.
That said, most people want to fly point-to-point these days and not Hub/Spoke, and often _are_ willing to pay a few extra bucks to do it (I know I certainly will almost always take a direct flight if I can). This favours being able to use smaller airframes, and if it means avoiding a Hub airport it can be a lot more efficient. Where it gets dicey is trying to cram more and more aircraft through an already busy Hub. That leads to having to build more runways and doing things like double/triple simultaneous parallel landings.
According to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc First/business class seats are where the airlines make all of their money, so Concord would be economically viable today.
While I'm sure most profits/margin come from first/business class, I think that's only viable because the large number of economic class passengers help marginalize the cost per passenger. To give a concrete example, suppose the airline is flying 20 business seats per flight. The cost of those seats to the airline if it had no economy class, and it were forced to allocate an entire plane for them would be immense -- marginal the cost per seat would be (illustration) ~Airplane_Cost/20+Accomodation_Cost. Now suppose a current airline will carry perhaps 200 economy class passengers where it makes 0 profit. The marginal cost of the business class seats to the airline now will be much lower, something like ~Airplane Cost/(200+20)+Accomodation_Cost.
So the airline don't need economy class to make profit, they need them to create economies of scale that bring down their cost for the high margin customers.
I have been on a 747 that was business class only (Singapore Airlines). But the economy class passengers are definitely required for scale on most flights.
If true, concord alone would be viable, but a combination of concord and regular planes on the same route would lead to all the business passengers taking concord, and the economy ones left in standard planes, which would no longer be viable.
In that case you could raise the price of Concorde tickets to push surplus business customers back to regular planes. But this raises the question, why would you even want to bother with Concorde in the first place?
It only makes sense if you could attract new business class customers, who would take the faster trip but wouldn't take the slower one at all.
At the same time, when Concorde stopped flying after the accident in 2000, people who used to fly on her, flew on other things, so these passengers weren't lost revenue wise.
Some people didn't fly at all when they would've flown if a Concorde had been available. And those who did fly on other planes paid significantly less.
A significant share of those customers must have been lost by the two companies that flew the Concorde, as the alternatives to it are commoditized and offered by many other companies.
For the moment. I don't know that I'd want to build a business - and certainly not an aircraft production line - on the assumption that oil will remain this cheap.
> The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
I don't think this can be generalized to 100% of the market. There's probably a good percrnt of the personal travel market that would gladly pay more for a non stop flight than save a few bucks with a stop or two. Then buisness travelers whose company pays for their flights will probably not mind the small cost difference for saving of time.
It needs to be a big difference in price for me to take a stop vs. non-stop even for personal travel. Every stop is an additional opportunity for missed connections, flight problems, etc. I rarely make stops voluntarily.
not sure, in western Europe I take the bullet train even when the airplane is cheaper, because it's faster and more convenient. But of course the bullet train is generally only slightly more expensive, if we were talking 20x price difference, I might learn patience.
A second aspect of speed versus price, is that in airplane travel a lot of time is spent accessing the airports, going through security, waiting in the departure queue, etc. Offsetting those 3-5h with a faster travel time might prove challenging.
But I am happy to annonce that the French rail is catching up, they have started queuing up people in the station to check the tickets before boarding, requiring clients to arrive 20 minutes early, making smaller seats, removing the bars, and building the new train stations in the outskirts with a crappy connection to downtown. Progress!
Eh, Concorde turned a decent profit for BA of £50m a year or thereabouts.
It wasn't for "normal" people, it was for the super rich, captains of industry and movie stars for whom saving 4.5 hours was worth spending the equivalent of a 1st class cabin seat on a slow airliner.
[1]There's a great story about the making of the Band Aid "Do they know it's Christmas?" record. The recording session was underway and Boy George hadn't turned up. He was eventually tracked down to his New York hotel, sleeping off a heavy night. He got up, high tailed it to the airport and caught the next Concorde to London - and made it before the end of the recording session.
A lot of the original capital investment costs for the Concorde were effectively subsidized by the British government, that would not be the case with a new Concorde most likely so the math on profitability would be substantially altered.
There are certainly some diminishing returns with high speed air travel. If it takes you, say, at least an hour to travel to/from the airport in the best case (e.g. no security wait or using TSA precheck) then the difference between a Mach 0.8 and Mach 2 flight isn't that huge percentage wise, especially when you factor in the time it takes to get to cruising altitude. On extremely long flights it would make a bigger difference which might result in a more comfortable flight but it doesn't fundamentally change whether or not the flight takes up most of an entire day or not.
That doesn't change until you get into extremely fast travel such as ballistic point-to-point transport. When you have flight travel times that are on the order of an hour or two (including overhead like vehicle loading and unloading) then it becomes possible to integrate them into a day where they are just a part, which opens up a lot more possibilities and might justify the expense.
Depends. In general I would say you are right, but that leaves out the business traveler of today. Concorde was to far ahead of its time and then got 100% screwed on bad luck with the Oil crisis in the 70s.
I have done 50K miles so far this year between CA and APAC. The flight is 12+ hours most times. Give me something that is +25-40% $ on a business class ticket today that take the flight time to 3 hours and I will buy it. I think that to be true even for the economy tickets for the long haul flights. I think people in the back of the plan would pay lets say $1200 for that flight to Tokyo over the current $900 for the flight time to be cut by 8-9 hours.
My flight to visit family is 21 hours in the air. Add layover - 2hrs, check-in, security and customs, we are looking at 30 hours of travel one way. I'd happily pay 50% more for a faster nonstop flight.
There is a niche of people willing to pay extra to go faster and a number of startups are looking at providing supersonic (Mach 2) commercial flights (Boom is the most famous).
what if they made a flying hotel and it timed it's flight for you arrive at a convenient time? that way it could be very slow and carry a lot of passengers.
They exist. I’m not sure where there are true sleeping compartments outside of Emirates but international business class seating (and first even more so) with lie flat seats is pretty comfortable
I would take more vacations just for the chance to take a leisurely flight on a dirigible with a world class chef. In fact, the flight might be the vacation.
I guess that's the cruise ship model. Normally you go on a ship to get somewhere, but on a cruise ship, the vacation starts as you board, and end as you disembark (excluding the dockings for day trips of course...).
Airshipping to see the landscape of Europe would be kinda awesome (the Alps, or the fjords of Norway, the award-winning fjords)...
I'm not a cruise ship kind of guy either. Part of the reason is because - from what I've seen - cruise ships are just one big indoor party, with nothing interesting outside to look at. An airship flying over land would have ever-changing interesting vistas to look at.
Very much depends on the cruise. I took a cruise down the Danube that I'd highly recommend - like a road trip but without the hassle of packing and unpacking your stuff every night.
People don't mind paying a small incentive to cut travel time. I don't have analytics data to prove this, but this is how generally people book flights when searching on expedia or any other website:
1. Search flights from A to B, show me the cheapest flights.
2. Then comes time preference(Should fly Friday instead of thursday? morning vs evening)
3. filter results by least no. of hops(This definitely shows people want to cut down on flying time and most people still pay an incentive to reach their destination faster).
I feel the world and society had many changes since 60s, 70s. People today are more interested in reaching their destination fast and can pay a small premium. This is a change in economics since the Concorde time. People who are paying for Business class and First class, would prefer paying a premium and reaching the destination faster.
People would still want cheap, reliable aircrafts and they should have that option but supersonic commercial flights on certain trans pacific & trans atlantic routes is definitely feasible.
Concorde had high maintenance costs - it required special fuel, special tires and other maintainence costs which made it financially non-viable. If any new supersonic flight addresses these costs, then it will open a whole new world of faster air travel.
Opposing evidence: carriers continually find new ways to show a lower price and then make it back up in fees (like some US carriers charging for carry on luggage). This is specifically because people sort by price.
> (This definitely shows people want to cut down on flying time and most people still pay an incentive to reach their destination faster)
As we are going with anecdata I will complete :
- it's not that i care that much of time when choosing stops, I care about consistent awful airport processes. Just getting off the plane is painfull ("Common people get off quicker pleaase")
> The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320.
Correct, the Concorde program kickstarted the French aeronautic industry. I don’t know for the UK part, but I think UK was pretty advanced already with the De Havailland and DC-3/4 companies. Which, ironically, collapsed for trying to do things too fast and being earlier than others. For example the DC-9 would famously lose parts and doors, one of those which founds its way in the... Concorde, causing the crash in Paris.
Problem is that cheap and fast and good are all moving targets. Cheap and fast and good meant very different things 30 years ago for planes, 10 years ago for cars, and 2 years ago for technology.
There's a fourth variable: time. Want cheaper, faster, AND better? Wait for advancements in technology. I had a 90's truck with 190HP that got 18mpg. Today I drive the same model but 10 years newer with 270HP without trading anything on gas milage and selling for roughly the same price. And the interior of the truck was great in the 90s, but the newer ones are worlds beyond that.
All I had to do was wait 10 years for it to be invented. Many failed products are just ideas whose time has not come yet.
and you know what is lovely; its the kids that were riding around in that truck ten years ago that were thinking to themselves " this sucks - i can design better when i am older" that 'invented' that worlds apart truck!
old inspires the new. make something great which you saw as mediocre prior.
I have a hard time imagining SST making any sense given that we spend hours stuck in traffic, then stuck in the TSA line, customs, stuck in traffic again. The gain of a few hours from NY to London or Paris doesn't seem enough. If you could extend the range to where you can do really long-haul flights maybe it would be interesting to a tiny elite.
There's a wealth of public transit options that will reliably get you from Manhattan to JFK in about an hour.
I haven't waited in a security line at an airport for more than 30 minutes in years. When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly. I imagine people who are willing to pay for SST would also pay the troll toll and spend comparatively very little time in security lines.
For context, I fly (usually coast to coast) about a dozen or more times a year.
I was (trying) to fly out of jfk terminal 7 yesterday coast to coast. The line at security was 2-3 hours long and there is no precheck lane. They were still naked scanning over 50% of passengers. I had to cut the line to make my flight.
This is not typical, but it does still happen even at the airports you mentioned.
The X-ray scanners with the naked images have all been removed. The RF backscatter machines do not produce full body imagery, they highlight areas of concern on a cartoon figure.
Turn around after you go through and you can see exactly what they see. There are no back rooms with naked images connected to the RF scanners.
The display is a generic human outline, but the TSA still requires[1] that its scanners all save the full images and the images produced by millimeter wave scanners. Those images[2] are about as revealing as the backscatter ones. NB: check the source for that image- it comes from the TSA's own site about how the millimeter scanner works. It's not a backscatter image, it's from the machines they use currently. That page has since been taken down. In a previous version of the machine[3] some marshalls improperly saved over 35,000 images of naked people, which were then leaked.
So you aren't literally being seen naked by people 10 feet away any more, but you're still being photographed through your clothing and if the TSA has any reason to check their archives at the time you were passing through the passport (ie checking if someone snuck something onboard, or validating the machines by hand), people will be looking at you in your birthday suit.
And for the record, I am not a nut about this stuff. There's no health issue with them, or even with the backscatter machines. It seems slightly puritanical to be outraged over it, and I personally am only slightly more indignant than I am about having all of my stuff X-rayed. If it was actually justified I'd be less bothered by the scanners than I am by getting naked for my doctor. However the TSA is a ridiculous imposition and the leadership is every bit as insane as the leadership of MADD or the NRA. They actively believe they're entitled to this kind of thing and were actively trying to extend their domain to other kinds of transport, sports arenas, public buildings etc. The TSA is fucking awful and its often more practical to assume the worst about anything they're doing until proven otherwise.
Interesting.... I believe the difference may be “active” vs “passive” millimeter wave scanners, where the active type can provide a higher resolution image?
Passive can also do high resolution[1]. It depends heavily on the wavelength being measured. Your second link is talking about far infrared (300+ GHz), or close to. Those waves are blocked more by clothing compared to the <100 GHz (30 GHz?) that Brijot and the current scanners use. The high frequency stuff will show a dark spot where something may be hidden, but is very dim compared to active scanners. They have similar resolution but are much blurrier.
Passive scanners at 30 GHz are by necessity lower resolution at the same price point, because the human body doesn't emit too much around there. However since all the waves are coming from the body, anything hidden under the clothing will block the waves completely and show up as an obvious dark spot. You don't need detail because of that.
Active scanners on the other hand are super detailed, again by necessity. That wavelength goes straight through clothing but since waves are being produced by the machine, anything besides metal will look basically the same as skin. You need to be able to make out the shape and texture to identify it, so the sensors are very high resolution. They need to see the trigger of a gun to know it isn't just a weird rectangle, so that means they can also see your foreskin.
Generally, security rules are made and enforced by USA authorities. Any airport which doesn't fly to the USA only needs to follow local rules of the country they are in, which while typically are as strict as the USA rules, are typically not enforced.
Some airports for example only xray one in 10 bags at peak times, or none at all if the machines broken.
Source: Personal experience only, but I've been to a lot of airports.
Hartsfield International does this regularly in Atlanta when lines backup too much. They'll open additional security lines, divert people into the Special Needs and TSA Pre-Check lines, a shut off the nudy scanners (backscatter x-ray) and just run everyone through the metal detectors as fast as possible.
US airport security is not separated between international and domestic flights. I don't know what the parent poster meant but it can't be that, at least not for US airports.
> I haven't waited in a security line at an airport for more than 30 minutes in years. When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly. I imagine people who are willing to pay for SST would also pay the troll toll and spend comparatively very little time in security lines.
I fly very frequently, and JFK is (unfortunately) my home airport.
For all my complaints about how awful security at JFK is, it's relatively fast. With pre-check, it's always under ten minutes from the moment I step in line to the moment I have my bags in hand on the other side.
Without pre-check, it is slower, but nothing close to 30 minutes, unless you get pulled aside for secondary and/or detained (at which point there's no predicting how long things will take).
For what it's worth, security at JFK tends to be a bit slower than other US airports that have pre-check, but still noticeably faster than most other airports that I've been to globally in the last few years.
Ditto. I waited in line at SFO once for 25 minutes and it felt like an eternity. For domestic flights, I don't bother showing up to the airport more than 30-40 mins before boarding time. Even on international flights, I target maybe 90 minutes before boarding, and even then, it's usually WAY too much. But you have to be mindful of the baggage checkin deadline.
I've been lucky enough to fly business class with work - Virgin from Heathrow to New York.
A car collects you at your house and drives you to the airport. You are checked on to your flight whilst still in the car when you arrive, and your suitcases are taken out of the boot of the car. You then walk through security and passport control and into the lounge. I don't recall any queuing at all.
I'm not saying the aggravations you discuss don't exist, but at the price point for SST planes (which I imagine would be predominantly business class tickets), they are dramatically reduced.
These will be most useful for flights that cross the sleep time barrier, going across the pacific. There is a segment of people that cannot sleep on flights, and another segment that wouldn't need the larger first class sleep pod seats if it can be done in 5 hours.
Also you can get to SFO from SF in about 30 minutes with an uber, and get through the lines fairly quick with pre-check & global entry. These flights would be godsends for the apple engineer that has to get on a flight to china asap for some factory issue.
Is there any reason why people don't buy Concorde for Private jet? Surely there are lot more people who can afford this compare to what was 20 years ago. And those who buy private jet are likely to care about the much shorter trip.
Or is it Concorde, due to its thrust and speed aren't / can't be as comfortable ?
Actually I don’t think there is anyone who can afford it tbh.
You’ll need to build a whole supporting infrastructure around it which doesn’t exist.
No pilots, no crew to serve no parts, it can’t land or take off from most airports and it can’t fly over most areas due to ban on supersonic flight.
At this point you’ll need to start a whole aerospace company to support it, recertify it with civilian air transport authorities and possibly even build new airports or runways for it.
Even if you have 50 billion net worth that would be out of your reach.
There are certainly people who can afford it, but at that level there is literally no reason to. With that kind of cash people come to you, there's no reason to try and rush across the globe in a cramped jet to make a meeting. The uber rich tend to like jumbo jets outfitted to the max and get to set their own schedules.
When you look at $ per flying hour (the standard measurement of aircraft ownership), the 747 is peanuts compared to something like Concorde.
Almost every airport in the world has infrastructure to handle a 747. Very few can handle something like Concorde. (Talking mainly runway length requirements and noise abatement regulations). Not to mention service facilities (and the Concorde needs LOTS of servicing between flight sequences).
Also, 747 qualified pilots, mechanics and support personnel are easily found whereas Concorde experts are like hens teeth, and likely very expensive to boot.
Plenty of lease companies and boneyards have spares and components to keep a 747 flying too, but very few have replacement Concorde engines or avionics on hand.
Added to the mix, these 'uber rich' who can afford a 747 also like things like King sized beds, shower facilities, meeting rooms, even spas in their aircraft for maximum comfort. There is simply no room in the Concorde's narrow airframe or limited payload capacity to even think of trying to fit these things in.
Jumbo jets aren't nearly as expensive as people think, these are often rented and those which are not can be resold.
Jumbo jets would not require anywhere near the amount of investment the concorde would even if you didn't had to recertify it from scratch.
For the most part the "uber rich" would use a private jet as long as they can make money of it as in being able to get where they need to be at the shortest of notices which the concord won't allow them.
You can land a gulfstream anywhere same goes for something like a 737, a 747 is a bit more restrictive but it still can land in virtually every metropolitan airport in the world.
Heck the fuel costs alone would be over the top even for the uber rich were talking about $50-60,000 an hour at it's cruising speed of 1260 knots.
It is really sad that this design wasn't built. The Concorde was a great design, but obviously, you don't hit perfection on the first attempt. The Concorde "B" shows, that as with any design, it is important to have enough iterations to get real efficiency.
The Shuttle was a great design for the late 70ies. If it had at least a significant design iteration every 5-10 years, it could have been a bigger success. Similarly if the Concorde hat gotten 2-3 design iterations over its life, it could have been very successfull.
SpaceX is successful, because they are not trying to fly the initial F9 - it is said that they actually didn't built the exact same rocket twice, but always added small improvements.
I was explicitly talking about iterations after the production version. As the linked article shows, there were significant updates possible relative to the production version.
It wasn't really the issue. Yes, that was a major problem but the real issue was the plane was old.
The newest model had been built in 78 (G-BOAF, Aircrat 216). Think about it, how many airlines back in 2000 were flying planes that were between 22 and 25 years old? Not that many. Just looking right now, AF and BA are around 12 to 13 years for their average fleet age.
Yes, the airframe was aging slowly because high temperatures while flying would prevent humidity from building up but the maintenance on this aircrat was expensive as hell compared to more recent aircrafts.
And it was a downward sliding slope. Anything was costlier on this thing because pretty much everything had to be custom built compared to other planes.
And in the end, it stopped flying not only because AF and BA decided to retire their Concorde fleet but above all because Airbus retired the aircraft certificate of airworthiness.
Is it political? Economical? Honestly, probably both. Airbus probably didn't want to get dragged in the mud again if anything else were to happen.
> The newest model had been built in 78 (G-BOAF, Aircrat 216). Think about it, how many airlines back in 2000 were flying planes that were between 22 and 25 years old? Not that many. Just looking right now, AF and BA are around 12 to 13 years for their average fleet age.
By way of comparison, the last BA 747-100 flight was late 1999, on G-AWNO, which had been delivered to BOAC in 1973. The last 747-200 flight was not much later (2001, G-BDXO), despite being a far, far newer airframe (delivered 1987).
Also worth noting that BA got rid of all of their aircraft that had flight engineers relatively close together around that time (Concorde was the last to go).
Tires? As in plural? I thought it only happened once and that was due to parts from another plane being left on the runway. Any aircraft with tires mounted under a wing (fuel tank) will have the potential that if a tire blows, a piece with enough force could knock a hole through it.
"During its 27 years in service, Concorde had about 70 tyre- or wheel-related incidents, 7 of which caused serious damage to the aircraft or were potentially catastrophic."
They did, they got new tires which would be less likely to break into shards and installed liners in wing tanks so shock waves wouldn't pierce the fuselage.
Future engine economics would have been interesting, as well as digital design models once there was a market for Concorde B+, C and so on. Current engines for commercial jets are bypass fan designs. If the same efficiency gains had been achieved for the type of engine in a concorde... (who knows? maybe military jets are now significantly more efficient)
An interesting aspect in the demise of the Concorde has nothing to do with the Concorde, but how other long haul airplanes changed with time. By the late 90s, you had lay-flat business class seats, in flight entertainment, and even fancier service in first class. The Concorde, on the other hand, was a small plane (2 by 2, single aisle), and while it cost more than first class, seats were similar to premium economy today (38" seat pitch). As you had to pay much more for a crappier seat, it is rumored that as much as half the passengers on each flight were just free upgrades and award flights.
It would be nice to make one of these much like a resto mod car or how one might make a space invaders game cabinet with a Raspberry Pi on board. Imagine if you could 3D print the thing, slap in the dashboard from an A340 and the engines from some retired Eurofighter Typhoons.
However, my head tells me that no amount of tweaking or tuning will change the fundamental problem with Concorde. The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320.
Cheap, reliable aircraft are what people want. Fast, expensive ones are cool, but not really economic.