Beautifully made promotional film but also very very obviously multiple takes, drone shots, reaction shots, over the shoulder cockpit shots, out of sequence, and regrettably not nearly enough pure flight shots. It's a composite of weeks of takes.
Also, the airliner may be glass screen cockpit on screens. This one had eyeballs to the sky.
> Also, the airliner may be glass screen cockpit on screens. This one had eyeballs to the sky.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with this?
The pilot had all glass avionics here. Other than the lack of an FMS (which is just never used in small aircraft), this had everything I'd expect to see in modern systems.
But also, even in an aircraft with a glass cockpit, the pilot is supposed to be mostly eyes up. Unless you're inside inclement weather, aviation operates on the "see and avoid" principle. Especially so when you're flying low and in congested airspace like the Mojave MOAs.
Why would a couple of cameras and a screen be an insane feat of engineering? I spent a lot of time watching on the back of seat screen the tail cam and front camera of the A350 I flew on recently. One issue the Concorde had was poor visibility out of the windows which they solved by having a moveable hinged nose, cameras make this issue go away (assuming there is good redundancy)
The flight pretty much consisted of taking off, turning around and landing, it would be pretty boring if they just showed that. In particular, this didn't go even close to supersonic, this time.
Any news on the powerplant-side? Which is one if not the most critical part of the plane for commercial success. Didn't GE dropped the ball a while ago? I still see them mentioned in their website https://boomsupersonic.com/symphony
And 3 J85-15 jet engines designed in the 1950s (?)
I remember reading about these J85 engines in an issue of Popular Mechanics roughly 20 years ago. This engine was designed to be cheap and small enough to fit in a carry-on suitcase circa 1955. They are best known for powering the F5 "low-budget fighter" from 1959.
Crazy that a new aircraft is launching with such new tech, but still rocking engines that were fundamentally designed around 10 years after the dawn of jet aircraft.
> Crazy that a new aircraft is launching with such new tech, but still rocking engines that were fundamentally designed around 10 years after the dawn of jet aircraft.
Their goal is to prove the design's aerodynamics WRT sonic boom, not the engines.
As I understand it, engine sourcing has been one of Boom's challenges. Rolls Royce was originally working on an engine for them, but cancelled it in '22. Boom announced their own engine design last year but I'm assuming that's not ready.
Apparently newer engines aren't designed for supersonic flight so I'm guessing options are limited for testing this airframe.
I believe they are thinking that one is a solved problem (Jet Engine) and the other is a novel problem (Airframe with reduced supersonic noise). There has been some work done on the sonic boom problem, but not nearly as much as the jet engine problem.
They will probably just iterate from an existing engine design rather than trying to re-invent one. Just because no one is manufacturing them doesn't mean the designs are not there to be used.
Jet engine is a "solved" problem for like 4 Western companies (GE, Pratt-Whitney, Rolls-Royce, Safran) plus some Russian and Chinese state-owned enterprises that mostly do military work. These organizations guard their secret sauces vigorously. Designing a cutting edge jet engine from scratch (i.e. with competitive fuel efficiency) is NOT a trivial task.
>> Jet engine is a "solved" problem for like 4 Western companies (GE, Pratt-Whitney, Rolls-Royce, Safran) plus some Russian and Chinese state-owned enterprises that mostly do military work.
There's actually quite a few companies that make small turbojets especially for military purposes and up to a certain point, you can even DIY your own from spare parts (there are some Youtubers that have done that). That's the first tier and includes companies like Williams, usually producing <5,000 lbf engines.
Then you have companies like Garrett/Honeywell that can make engines that output tens of thousands lbf like the TFE731 for mid-range jets and fighter jets. These can power big jets but not very fuel efficiently; that's the second tier.
The next tier up is the high bypass turbofans producing tens of thousands lbf used for commercial aviation and afterburner engines for last gen fighter aircraft are a completely different story. The GP is right there are only a few players in the game. Due to scaling laws, at this point it becomes less about the design and more about the metallurgy and material science. Magic like single crystal alloys are critical here and are very closely guarded secrets because the knowledge unlocks everything from ICBMs to gaseous centrifuges to nuclear reactors.
Ha jet engine that can be certified maintained and is efficient is barely solved by GE. That’s it nobody else can make a modern commercial aircraft engine that isn’t a total money pit.
They are at least a generation behind GE and the company is on life support so I don’t see them closing the gap. Pratt now Collin’s has engines too but their commercial engines are 3-4 generations behind.
Although I think it's not going to be as easy as picking one up at the corner store, I do not think supersonic flight (which occurs every day on thousands of airframes) will compare to the level of complexity of landing a human being on an irradiated airless rock 238,900 miles above the earth's surface and returning them safely.
Edit: There are private groups that own supersonic aircraft and maintain them. EG:
They can get a hold of existing models and diagrams to produce their own copies since the patents have long since passed and been declassified for decades.
One of the key features of Overture is its planned use of e-fuels.
I think this is almost crucial. Airlines are not going to line up to buy non-renewable, fuel-guzzling, net CO2-gushing supersonic jets for use over the next couple decades.
Isn't it completely irrelevant for their development how the fuel is produced? My understanding is that E-fuels are exactly the same as "normal" fuels. They are just produced in a carbon neutral way. You can fly a 50 year old Concord on e-fuels.
Airlines are almost certain to face significant carbon regulation or carbon taxes in the next couple of decades. In turn, lots of engines will be effectively banned.
Of course, this is nothing new: noise abatement effectively banned a whole lot of engines, too.
I don't think it requires giving up on "affordable global flight". It might be a bit more expensive -- getting aircraft to be tens of decibels quieter cost something, too.
Externalities -- whether they're noise imposed on a community or climate impacts -- aren't generally addressed by the market on its own.
Indeed, we have a new regulatory regime coming into play for airplane emissions slowly-- with first effects in 2028.
I mean, it's already happening all over the world. It's not just Germany.
The UK already taxes carbon in aviation fuel. It's about to implement a carbon pricing mechanism for jet fuel obtained in jurisdictions without it.
The EU is implementing carbon taxes, and a mandate for Sustainable Aviation Fuel. In 25 years, it will be illegal across the EU27 to use aviation fuel that is not at least 70% Sustainable Aviation Fuel.
China has the world's largest emissions trading program. Civil aviation will be included next year.
Australia has a carbon tax, and will soon have mandates on civil aviation emissions.
Brazil does not yet have a carbon tax, but in the past year there has been legislation proposed, and it looks likely to be coming sometime soon.
The US EPA just announced regulations that will not force, but will certainly make it cost prohibitive to sell lots of gasoline cars ten years from now. Civil aviation is a likely next target.
The sun's variation in intensity over the solar cycle has a typical 0.2C difference... and even then, 5 years later you get the 0.2C "back".
If you're saying "another Maunder Minimum":
- There is no consensus that is going to happen; or even a majority view that it will.
- It sure doesn't look like the Maunder minimum caused significant cooling overall (perhaps at most 0.4C, so not much more than a normal solar cycle). Yes, Europe's temperatures swung more than this.
>The sun's variation in intensity over the solar cycle has a typical 0.2C difference... and even then, 5 years later you get the 0.2C "back".
On what are you basing this statement? The climate models I've looked into were wrong about the effect of clouds and ignore types of energy from the sun.
>- There is no consensus that is going to happen; or even a majority view that it will.
If I am walking towards someone in a rocking chair, they may be moving towards me or away from me at any point, but overall I will get closer. Similarly, if solar cycle causes a variation of .2C back and forth, it doesn’t eliminate a non-oscillating trend.
When weighing what is likely to happen, fringe beliefs don’t matter much. I would not bet on a Maunder minimum to save us, because A) it is not a big enough effect even if it happens, and B) it is probably not going to happen.
You've edited your comment-- I'm glad you've reconsidered including the below which violate the site guidelines:
> Oh please, spare me the polemics.
> Do you stand to benefit financially, directly or indirectly, from climate change?
But: I think most of us stand to lose significantly from climate change.
They announced they're building their own because the regular engine OEMs showed little interest. Even if required modifications to historic or military turbojets are minor, there's a lot of expense in certifying them for use for a new type of passenger aircraft, and modern economical turbofans were not designed for supersonic flight...
(Almost?) exclusively on military planes which have different return on investment needs than commercial aircraft that need to be efficient first and foremost (ask Convair and BAC/Sud Aviation how many airlines valued speed over efficiency).
If China is anything to go by, immensely more so, and you are not significantly helped even if you had all the documents and industry secrets required to design and build a modern engine!
Yeh, although on https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/inaugural-first-flight-xb1-... they say 'Supersonic intakes: XB-1’s engine intakes slow supersonic air to subsonic speeds, efficiently converting kinetic energy into pressure energy, allowing conventional jet engines to power XB-1 from takeoff through supersonic flight.' - so perhaps the engine design problem is not as tricky as it would otherwise be.
All current supersonic aircrafts do that. The only kind of jet engine that can take supersonic intake air is scramjet(supersonic combustion ramjet), which is more like a space age gas torch, not a turbine engine. Shockwaves are going to blow off turbine blades if not done or something along that.
From what I've read GE spent roughly 10 years and 10 billion dollars to develop their monocrystalline turbine blade manufacturing materials and process.
"After careful consideration, Rolls-Royce has determined that the commercial aviation supersonic market is not currently a priority for us and, therefore, will not pursue further work on the program at this time. It has been a pleasure to work with the Boom team and we wish them every success in the future."
Guess it was a cost thing. Wasn't worth their time. Not enough customers probably.
Not sure of the relative timing, but the new CEO is super focused on profitability/cash flow. In comparison to what he described as a ‘burning platform’ when he took over. So supersonic would have needed a brilliant business case to have survived his strategy.
Falcon 9's Merlin engine is really just based on a NASA reference design for a simpler low cost rocket engine. Raptor is new tech, but that was long after SpaceX had proven itself and had the capital and talent to invest in building something like that.
It makes total sense to use flight proven engines like this off the shelf at first.
High tech manufacturing at scale is often equally as challenging as development work. Starting with a proven design let's teams focus on leveling up their manufacturing capabilities prior to introducing the double complexity of manufacturing a part that just made it out of CDR.
A bit of a tangent, but this is the genius of Musk's Merlin engine. Simple design utilizing RP9 allows the manufacturing staff to hit their stride before introducing the raptor (methalox).
>> Augmented reality vision system: Two nose-mounted cameras, digitally augmented with attitude and flight path indications, feed a high resolution pilot display enabling excellent runway visibility. This system enables improved aerodynamic efficiency without the weight and complexity of a movable nose.
(Cough) Don't tell the passengers it is all because the pilot literally cannot see the runway during landing.
ILS generally still requires manual visual approaches from the minimum altitude to the ground. Only ILS Cat III-C is a true autoland that can take the aircraft down all the way to the ground.
Even then, aircraft certification requirements even for Cat III-C capable aircraft requires that pilots be able to conduct a visual approach because the ILS system can fail.
An aircraft that has literally no recourse when ILS Cat III-C capability goes down (either on the aircraft side or the airfield side) does not seem like a good idea, especially because in this case large categories of emergencies are positively correlated with avionics failure.
For example an engine failure may cause power loss to avionics, so your fancy AR webcam feed is more likely to go down in that situation just when you need to make an emergency landing.
Not impossible to overcome of course - you certainly can ensure your avionics have its own isolated (and multiply redundant) power source so that it does stay up in the event of many kinds of emergencies, but personally I'd need to really see the homework on that before I'd feel safe flying in that kind of setup.
But whether or not it can do an ‘Autoland’ currently is irrelevant because as the parent said:
> Even then, aircraft certification requirements even for Cat III-C capable aircraft requires that pilots be able to conduct a visual approach because the ILS system can fail.
Whether or not it can do an ‘Autoland without the pilot being able to check’ while satisfying the regulator’s inevitably vastly more stringent rules is what matters.
To be fair, they do need an alternate with a better visibility. But if the computers are not working, you're not in for a good time in a modern airliner anyway.
Maybe not a 'good time', but a safe one.
Commercial airliners have standby instruments and a VHF radio that works on a battery. Which is all you need to get it on the ground in one piece.
You cannot operate fly-by-wire aircraft without computers, that's what I meant. Redundancy is name of the game, I see no problem in using cameras if they're made redundant.
Yes and no. Line of sight was one reason, but aerodynamics was another. Pointing the nose into the wind (ie slightly down) is more efficient during landing and takeoff. Boom is avoiding the concept because it would cost tens of millions to develop and test such a configuration.
Large moving parts on an airframe seem to be avoided in general these days. There’s a similar story with swing wings (which I think Boom also considered before ultimately rejecting).
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. Hermes chose to start with the same engine as Boom - The J85. I'm assuming Boom chose it for similar reasons.
I like their explanation of the choice from a recent tour:
(Youtube transcript)
"So these are out of production, the J 85s. So we didn't work with GE at all. It was all just us working with, we were really working with the maintenance, repair and overhaul shops for them. That's really where the expertise and knowledge lies. These engines were, I think originally designed in the fifties. There's not a lot of electronics on board. There's no firmware we have to work through.
And really, it's a pretty elegant but hydro mechanical system for all the controls. So really it was about understanding the configuration of it and you can kind of chase down all the different tubes and everything to understand how it works. And then there's a suite of documentation out there. So it was really on us to learn how it worked."
J85s are old technology. They're a turobjet, not a turbofan, nor do they have any electronics on board. This makes them highly inefficient engines. They're cheap, there are plenty lying around from old 4th gen fighters, and plenty of old guys who know how to work on them.
I suspect they used these just to get the XB-1 airborne, making progress while they find a better engine.
Where would the LLM get the training data? It's not as if supersonic jet designers commonly post easy-to-ingest design data online.
Besides, most countries couldn't build a modern jet engine even if they had the exact engineering drawings of an existing one available. From fashioning single-crystal turbine blades to establishing a supply chain capable of the quality controls needed, the amount of hours spent is unreal.
As a corollary to AI taking up easy jobs like CRUD apps and spreadsheets, will human work be pushed to making things like silicon chips, nuclear reactors, jet engines and space elevators?
Because you have to be able to take them on the plane, obviously. /s
But seriously I think 'fitting in a suitcase' wasn't the design goal, per se, but an approximate description of the design goals. The engine was designed to go in a missile.
That’s interesting actually - and a lot of 1950s era ‘small enough to fit in a suitcase’ descriptions (computers, nuclear warheads, jet engines…) make more sense if you realize they are a euphemism for ‘small enough to fit in a missile’. Makes me wonder what ‘small enough to fit in a cigar box’ was a euphemism for.
That's a euphemism for cigar boxes; smuggled cigars get through borders with a little rake-off at each inspection. The fact that they are actual cigars on the top layers allows all the boxes to get past slightly bent but nonetheless patriotic guards.
Eh, maybe. The suitcase itself is also, more simply, literally just something designed to be a reasonable amount of stuff that a human could carry. Many early portable PCs (e.g. Osborne) targeted a suitcase form factor just because it was a reasonable form factor for people to carry around.
And the comparison is something colloquially convenient. "The device was the size of a suitcase" is just more illustrative than "the device was 50 liters in volume"
First flights are basically never more than a basic functionality check of take-off and landing configurations. (Note that there were no pictures of it with the gear retracted, because that's also typically something you don't try on a first flight.)
I mean, if you trust the math, you can just YOLO it and see what happens. The FAA is the major hurdle there though, because they don't trust the math, nor do they have the ability to really analyze it. So how far they have to go is mostly up to what they can get approved for, and how long it'll take to provide the data the FAA needs to give them the go-ahead.
It's fairly likely they'll find things that need changing along the way, which may also result in the need for additional regulatory oversight, so, double impossible to know if this will be flying at design speeds in a year or ten years or ever.
I'm sure we'll get a HN post about it when it does however.
It's not really about trusting the math, it's trusting the math has been implemented on that real-life aircraft over there. The truism about not wanting to fly an aircraft design which relies on a function being Lebesgue-integrable but not Riemann-integrable is not questioning the mathematics.
I'm skeptical of that claim but I'll take your word for it.
It would very much be an unusual exception, in that era and now. First flights rarely even raise the landing gear, let alone push the performance envelope. Flight testing programs are designed to be incremental to manage risk as well as learn things in a deliberate vs yolo way.
Rockets are really where you see the opposite being the norm, because it's hard to do a rocket launch half way.
I love the idea of supersonic travel, but I can't help thinking that when you see how many things can go wrong in an airliner, how much safety was the result of trial and error, and how Boeing's woes shows how fragile safe manufacturing can get, how safe will an airliner built by a startup be?
Boeings problem is they have junkies assembling their aircraft down south because they cost less. The tech is well understood but the tolerances are tight and the pay isn’t high enough to ensure a competent middle management and labor force.
Site won't load, but I assume this was just a subsonic flight, gear down, etc? A major technical milestone for sure, but I think the real trick with their proposal is the economic viability of such a plane.
I noticed that bit in the video -- gear down -- why is that? Just to avoid one possible point of failure, the gear failing to deploy properly for landing?
Not an expert, but I've seen the following commented on other test flight videos: on initial test flights, landing gear is always kept down to minimize risk. If a sudden landing is needed, gear is already down, no risk of equipment getting stuck, less mental load for the pilot to perform emergency landing, etc. Basically, when testing, you want to minimize the variables being tested. When airworthyness is validated, then you can test landing gear systems.
Not sure if there is basic/core technology development being done or valuable technology being generated. Is supersonic flight essentially just throwing a lot of jet fuel at the problem of wanting to get someplace fast? Are we expecting to see novel insights and spinoff technologies from the development of this plane and industry?
I think there's a key, core military angle to this company, where their best and most stable and lucrative customers are sure to be nation-states. I think there is some real value to be generated around super-sonic technology development for missile applications, drone applications, fighter jet applications.
I think that this company gets a lot of peoples' backs up, because they don't appear to have any unique insight besides "Rich people and nation states will pay through the nose for wasteful and extremely obnoxious technologies that degrade humanity as a whole." It's a great business, might be nice and profitable, great for rich people and the most developed nation states, might not be so great for the humanity as a whole.
Airlines are also an interface for intelligence agencies and presumably a whole bunch of subtle geopolitical stuff. Great way to move your agents around, and you can run operations from the airline's local office.
> extremely obnoxious technologies that degrade humanity as a whole
What's your angle here? Jet aircraft aren't going away in the era we're heading into. We're just going to move to sustainably produced fuels from either biomass or direct carbon capture powered by solar. So there's no reason to make that as an argument against Boom.
Pretty disappointing this is the top (edit: 2nd) comment. It asks and asserts several things that are easy to look up. I'd recommend reading their FAQ page: https://boomsupersonic.com/faq
It's certainly not a guarantee that this works out but that's true of any speculative enterprise. Personally, I think a speculative world where Asia <> West Coast US is as fast as West Coast US <> East Coast US is pretty exciting.
The FAQ page addresses several - not all, that's why I said "look up" - of the OP's objections. OP/you might disagree (it is marketing, like you said) but they should state and explain those disagreements instead of acting like Boom hasn't thought of them.
> Not sure if there is basic/core technology development being done or valuable technology being generated. Is supersonic flight essentially just throwing a lot of jet fuel at the problem of wanting to get someplace fast? Are we expecting to see novel insights and spinoff technologies from the development of this plane and industry?
See FAQ page entries: "Will Overture use afterburners like Concorde?" and "Why did it take so long to bring supersonic flight back after the Concorde?"
> I think there's a key, core military angle to this company, where their best and most stable and lucrative customers are sure to be nation-states. I think there is some real value to be generated around super-sonic technology development for missile applications, drone applications, fighter jet applications.
Whether the founder thinks there is a weapons angle and whether the market thinks there is a weapons angle are two different things. The founder often loses that fight.
If you're building a submarine, you don't have to call it a "future submarine" until it submerges; people understand that if you say "I'm currently building a submarine," it has yet to go under water, but the thing you're building is still a submarine. I think that's generally true of not-yet-built or not-yet-used things: it's understood that if it hasn't done the thing yet, you're describing what it's going to be/do.
The undercarriage didn't retract in the video. Was that just an artefact of the stages of flight the film came from or was the undercarriage fixed for the maiden flight?
Pure speculation on my part, but on a first flight when you're shaking out the fundamentals, it's safer to not retract landing gear in case there is a catastrophic failure in, say, your hydraulic system.
In my experience, wealthy people are typically in one of two modes: 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. That's why they own both jets and yachts, rolls and lambos. Sometimes you're going fast, sometimes you're going slow, but there isn't really a need to do anything between.
Supersonic flight isn't necessarily for the 0.1%, just the 1% (or whatever other made up number) whose price per hour times the travel time reductions is greater than the added cost of the fare.
It's not just the 0.1% who appreciate amenities over speed. A more-comfortable, reliable high speed rail so I do not have to go to airports would displace a lot of Boston-NYC-DC air travel.
Because sitting in the air is useless. When I take my family to the Maldives or w/e out-there place to holiday, I’d gladly spend $10k more to get there many hours faster.
For the first test flight of an aircraft, it's quite common to test a very limited set of parts of the aircraft, and retracting the gear might not be on that list. Also, if the gear is left down, then that's one less thing that could go wrong while the pilot is still getting used to an aircraft with a very different feel to anything they have flown before.
On the first test flight you want to minimize risk as much as possible - there’s many, many things that can go wrong, so adding variables is a bad idea. Landing gear can’t get stuck up if it’s never retracted.
While I acknowledge the cool factor, I don't like what Boom is doing. We should be looking at making air travel more efficient, reducing the energy/emissions per passenger-mile flown. We don't need to invent ways to make luxury travel by the rarified few ever more expensive and damaging.
They are making air travel more efficient. More time efficient. That's great for everyone flying, but also great for airlines. The last three flights I've been on arrived significantly ahead of schedule and were going much faster than usual. I assume this was to get the pilot to the location ASAP so they can fly again sooner.
Also how do you not see supersonic flight as just generally good for everyone flying? I want to sit in a plane for less time, always.
>> how do you not see supersonic flight as just generally good for everyone flying
Because it require vastly more energy (fuel) per mile than most any other form of travel. Because the aircraft carry fewer people per takeoff/landing cycle, congesting airports.
Those who care about time can already travel at much greater speeds. Door-to-door travel times for first class, and especially private, are already about 1/3 to 1/2 that of the common economy passenger on a domestic flight. If we wanted to speed up the process, the easy fruit is the speed of the airport rather than the aircraft.
> Those who care about time can already travel at much greater speeds
There is massive room for improvement. Consider the effect on global relations if crossing the world didn’t cost days but hours. More practically, consider an economy networked with this travel and transport competing against one sticking to trains, trucks and Zoom.
Concorde wasn't transformational for business at a time when executives couldn't work and videoconference from anywhere in the world and stay connected to the workplace for the majority of their flight duration.
The realistic potential of an operationally-expensive medium range aircraft designed for scheduled passenger flights isn't going to radically change trucks, trains and Zoom. Or business jets, for people that care enough about time to pay for it in thousand dollar multiples. Even for the small fraction who can actually afford it, a supersonic airliner is still going to have range constraints eliminating the possibility of quickly crossing the world, and for the transatlantic hops it might manage, it's the 8am JFK-LHR flight competing with a business jet at a time and origin/destination airports of the executives' choosing...
(for related reasons, I'd actually be more bullish about the economic case for supersonic bizjets, but there have been quite a lot of projects studying that market that haven't got anywhere...)
The supersonic biz jet fails because they all need longer runways. The biz jet wants to land at smaller private airports to avoid the hassle (security) of large airports. Any supersonic biz jet capable of also landing on a short runway ends up looking more like a fighter jet with some extra seats.
The Concorde wound up spending a lot of time at sub-sonic speeds, but really I think if we look to the future of air travel we can imagine surpassing supersonic speeds as well. There are already companies working on hypersonic (Mach 5+) designs with an eye towards consumer applications; obviously rich consumers to start, but that's how it often goes.
Those are some truly societally transformative speeds. You can go from the west coast of the US to Paris in less than 2 hours.
But we can't get to that without iterative improvement.
I believe the cultural integration aspects of cheap, fast, and effortless passenger transportation cannot be overstated. I'd like to see more and more people traveling to places they wouldn't travel otherwise.
It's easier to dehumanise the people you don't know, and much harder to do that when you have been with them.
The time spent in flight is not the limiting factor on globe-spanning tourism. Traveling is massively expensive (not just the cost of transportation, but also lodging, food, and itinerary), and if this just makes it more expensive, then it doesn't help in that regard.
There is a point a quantitative change becomes qualitative. Shaving 10 hours off a 20 hour flight makes it much more palatable. Shaving 19 hours (suborbital? hypersonic?) makes it a no-brainer.
Yeah, but Zoom (and its analogues) exist. Crossing the world doesn't take days OR hours; you can have a meeting with someone halfway around the world right now. I genuinely don't see an economic need for very many people to cross intercontinental distances that quickly in this day and age. How often does an executive actually need to go from New York to London? Or LA to Shanghai? We already ask "could this meeting have been an email?" Well, companies looking to save money should also be asking "could this intercontinental business trip have been a Zoom call?" Otherwise, it's just businesses subsidizing their executives' luxury travel expenses.
The existence of business class flights proves this wrong. You are probably right the relative demand for face-to-face has gone down since Concorde but the world has also gotten bigger and richer since. I suspect absolute demand is higher, particularly if they can deliver their promise of business-class prices (versus Concorde's, inflation-adjusted $20k).
> The existence of business class flights proves this wrong
I don't see how it does. Wanting a more comfortable experience than being crammed into a narrow seat for hours when travel/physical presence is actually necessary doesn't somehow translate into necessary travel being underserved.
(Specifying necessary travel because that's the GP's point - just because there are people who want to take 10 minute hops between neighbouring cities or to fly out for meetings that could have been conducted perfectly well over a call doesn't mean that the world should cater to their whims.)
Not when their ticket prices and passenger volume are similar to first class. Go to their site and scroll down until you see the picture of the seating and tell me that isn't first class.
To be entirely fair, that’s a single image, and, it’s a marketing website. Of course they’re going to show a luxurious seat. The truth is that the interior will probably look like Concorde: more spartan than luxury.
You miss my point: the optimizations on ground experience for domestic first class can save you 20-30% of the time because the actual domestic flight time isn’t that long. On a transoceanic flight, to generate similar time-savings, you have to make the plane faster.
Comparing domestic first class to transoceanic supersonic is misleading.
Priority check-in, priority security, priority boarding, priority disembarkation, priority immigration, priority baggage pickup, priority customs lanes all exist and these add up, particularly for international travel. My APEC card alone has saved me hours more times than I can count.
Travel on first class. It is a different thing, especially internationally. You don't wait in line for check-in. You don't deal with security the same way. You don't deal with immigration the same way. You don't wait around hours for your bags to come out the chute. You don't get bumped off of flights, nor do your bags. It saves hours, even on the shortest flights. When companies send their people first class it isn't about comfort so much as saving time and increasing reliability.
Hmm. Some of this is true but I never saw 1st class immigration. Possibly you get in line first, but often there's an A380 worth of economy passengers there from another flight that landed 30min prior.
Re-entering the US for US citizens, Global Entry. And, yes, getting off a plane first is usually an advantage for clearing immigration though not guaranteed to breeze through.
In general (leaving aside flying private) paying more money doesn't necessarily buy you a lot of time savings (especially if you're not the sort who tries to cut things close) but it can eliminate a lot of hassle/buy you a lot more comfort which is probably more important to me most of the time.
Priority bags/check-in does help but I try not to check luggage so really doesn't save me a lot of time at the end of the day.
For a coast to coast flight, at least 30-40% of the flight time is spent getting to the airport earlier to de-risk the TSA line, or standing in the TSA line. Or, going outside to hail a cab to the airport, sitting in airport traffic, and driving to and from the airport.
For a 5h flight from LAX -> JFK, approx 3-5 hours is spent doing these things.
So, to shorten the 8-10h of an LA to NYC trip, the easiest possible thing to do is... build a f%@#$ train.
I was with you until the last sentence. Your train trip that crosses two continental divides is still going to take you more than a day. Even a "spare no expense" rail project isn't going to make that cross-country trip palatable for most travelers.
It might be palatable if it's quite a bit less expensive, which could be the case if we start passing externalized costs (e.g. offsetting the impacts of carbon emissions, pollution, noise, etc.) down to the consumers who use these services.
It is a slow subway train that requires transfers at Jamaica to the airtrain and then an internal airport people mover. Some people need multiple transfers from
WTC/Penn/14th street are centrally connected stations that should have a direct connection to JFK.
Run an express A-C-E train from central-park, 34th, 14th, WTC, Atlantic, Jamaica, JFK. It should not be that hard. While we are at it, run an express downtown manhattan to Newark train/BRT too. LaGuardia is....hopeless.
The upstream comment ambiguously suggested a train as a solution to an 8-10 hour door to door LA to NYC travel time. Either that means connecting the airport to the city by rail or the cities themselves. Sub-8-hour LA to NYC by train is beyond any currently known technology. JFK is already connected to NYC’s subway by rail.
Sorry I meant that you can use rail to get to and from JFK to the parts of New York served by the subway.
If the claim was to build a sub-8-hour LA to NYC train that’s obviously not going to work because of physics. If the claim was we need rail to LAX and JFK that’s silly because both are already served by rail.
Most of Europe doesn't even check if you have a ticket before boarding a train. Some countries check tickets at the station, but I have never been checked for anything else. And there have definitely been incidents.
The Eurotunnel is kind of special because it is an especially long undersea tunnel. It is very much the exception, you won’t see that for any other trains in the UK or France, high speed or otherwise.
Honestly, with Pre-Check, I haven't had a security check be a major issue in years and years anyway. I still tend to get there early though because--who knows what could happen? I certainly cut things a lot closer with early morning Amtrak departures than the airport.
A myth created because Concord came to market before the American SST. Sonic booms are not the epic thunder crashes of Hollywood fame. The Concorde going by at altitude wouldn't be any louder than a truck engine braking on a nearby highway for a second or two.
Not even remotely correct. They flew supersonic aircraft over Oklhahoma City a thousand times and basically drove the city insane and had to cut testing short when it was obviously untenable to regularly Sonic Boom half a million people for commercial aviation, let alone every large city in America.
If I'm doing my calculations correct, their targeted sound pressure levels of 50-100 pascal is equivalent to 127-133 decibels, which is over the threshold of discomfort for most, and getting close to the threshold of pain.
My childhood home was in the flight path for NASA when they were given the Blackbird after it's official retirement. We also routinely had fire-retardant bombers flying eye level close enough you could read the tail numbers off with a naked eye (we were on the side of a mountain, bombers flew down the valley).
Point is: the Blackbird, flying at altitude, sounded like a tree fell on the house . Big crash/thud suddenly. The bombers, though loud, were a steady build up until they passed, then quietly faded away. The Blackbird, I literally remember leaving the house to make sure there wasn't a hole in the wall or roof.
Blackbird was a beast, literally the fastest plane out there and it never really slowed down. Compare shuttle, which came in much faster but few ever complained about its boom.
This seems bit excessive, Concorde booms were purportedly about 105-110 dB on the ground when cruising at altitude (around 60 000 ft).
I've personally only experienced sonic booms from MiG-21s. They are not painfully loud, but surely startling. They are very deep and make the windows rattle.
Many municipalities have laws against engine breaking because of how much noise pollution it causes, so I don't think your example works they way you expect. Especially considering this would cause that noise pollution for 10s of millions of people.
It's no myth. I'm old enough to remember sonic booms as a regular occurrence. We were used to them but they were definitely louder than a jake brake and they disturbed a much larger area.
In principle, yes? I also want to sit/lay more comfortably. I also want to pay less money. In general, halving my in-air time is honestly not worth a lot.
> In general, halving my in-air time is honestly not worth a lot.
It's a huge enabler - right now, flying to see my family in Brazil is a huge PITA - two airports and 12+ hours in the air. It's less horrid in business class, but still something I tend not to do more than once a year.
If I had a 5-hour direct flight, it'd be a no-brainer.
Maybe I'm just more accustomed to long flights, but a 12-hour non-stop flight in business class if I'm not really thinking about the cost much just isn't a material inhibitor for me. (And whether there are non-stop flights is a separate issue.) Certainly shaving off 6 hours of flight time wouldn't really affect my calculus much, if at all.
When scheduled commercial flights arrive ahead of time it's because ground delays were less than average and/or winds were favorable. Airlines don't control those factors and don't really account for them in crew scheduling. They can sometimes cruise at slightly higher speeds to make up a bit of time when running behind schedule, but this comes at the cost of higher fuel burn and can only save a few minutes at most.
While yes this is a pessimistic take on it, the book 'Dark Age America' called out the problems of the original Concord and I think it applies to Boom as well. The authors argument being that Boeing pulling out of the 2707 SST project, while at the time was seen as a massive loss, turned out to be one of the smartest moves they had done in the space.
Yes, super sonic flight and things like Boom are a massive technical achievement, there is no doubt about that. But, we should not conflate technical capabilities with economic viability. Concord was very technically viable, but it was an economic white elephant.
This thing could see a role in the luxury space but I don't think we can reconcile the issue of brute forcing physics and cheap transport for the masses.
Hermeus is ostensibly going after the super/hypersonic commercial transport market too, but something seems kind of off with that approach (to me).
Their quarterhorse demo aircraft has plenty of utility in a variety of unmanned military roles. To such a degree that the civilian transport angle seems like kind of a distraction in this current era of military ramp-up.
Maybe it's just a hedge so they can keep their toes in two markets simultaneously and perhaps appeal to investment via those different interests.
I keep forgetting the military angle. Again a pessimistic take but when I see things like SpaceX saying point to point travel to anywhere in the world in 30 minutes - maybe the message should be 30 minutes point to point explosive payload.
Unfortunately, I think the route to more efficiency is funneling people to massive hub airports where widebody planes carry them on less frequent runs to other hubs— but that results in longer boarding times, less flexible schedules, and more stopovers, none of which the market wants.
So instead we have a bunch of smaller "commuter" jets making point-to-point trips, many of which are short enough that they really should be trains, not air travel. And that's a whole other issue. Sigh.
A supersonic passenger jet would not find much of market on short haul flights. They would either stick to the dense pockets of wealth, the biggest airports beside the biggest cities, or rely on feeder airports to bring passengers in. Either way, I don't see this saving much in actual travel time over the current system.
It's certainly niche, but NY-LON sees ~3 million non-connecting passengers a year.
If they can make it quiet enough to be supersonic over land, it's a lot more compelling. But even being supersonic for the atlantic crossing will shave hours off of most EU routes from NY.
I think the bigger problem is the time changes on a lot of routes make EU flights pretty efficient - you don't want the overnight flights to be shorter really (and I wish most were longer).
Maybe overnight flights should optionally let you sleep on the ground before/after the flight. Charge extra, you don't have to pay pilots or for fuel, park away from the gate.
You would need power without the engines but you could hook up a generator or a feed from the airport.
I've been on redeye flights where, a few hours in, the pilot came on the PA, told us about something to see out the window, and also about the drink we could buy from the flight attendants - credit cards only please!
Air travel is just endless indignities and discomfort.
If planes are full, how can it be more efficient to fly my ~200 lbs (including lots of luggage!) from point A to B to C, adding extra distance and another takeoff, rather than directly from A to C?
The short answer seems to be no. Newer planes are much more efficient than older ones, but the most efficient aircraft and flight segment per passenger-distance are the A320 Neo and 737 Max making ~1000 mile flights.
Fuel burn is probably not the main reason airlines use the routing that they do.
I'd guess that staffing and gate time are big cost drivers. A lot of those "how Southwest succeeded" articles from back in the day cited very fast gate turnarounds as being a key thing— get the people off, get the other people on, get back in the air.
> many of which are short enough that they really should be trains
That's a good point, but rail infrastructure is very expensive to build and, unlike planes, where you only need to build the destinations, you need to build every route.
Anyway, the future of short commuter flights is electric.
The key determinant that tells you whether trains or planes are more cost-efficient is population density. If you have two cities far apart with not much in-between, then it's cheaper to build a couple of airports. If you have loads of other cities along the route, then it'd be cheaper to build a railway. The former case is true for much of North America, and the latter for much of Western Europe and UK.
Commonly cited but not really grounded in reality— lots of places that have made rail work have very similar or worse density characteristics to the coastal US routes that should be a no-brainer:
If you take into account cost-per-moved-amount-of-cargo trains are dramatically cheaper, even including infrastructure. The only reason we don't use/develop them more is social/political bs not due to choosing the ideal engineering solution for the problem and that solution being planes)
As for electric flight:
1 gallon of jet fuel has like 40 kwh of energy and weighs like 6 lbs. A Ford Lightning has a battery capacity of 100 kwh and that battery weighs 1,800 lbs. Electric flight ain't happening in a big way anytime soon with current battery tech.
“Designed to run on up to 100%” says nothing about what percentage it will in practice operate on in service.
I am capable of running on a sustainable diet of 100% nutrient balanced meals and a strictly controlled daily calorie intake. In practice, I’m operating on a mixture of pizza and Oreos right now.
SAF is a good investment - it allows us to use the current airplanes while we transition the shorter distances to electrics. It also allows for a gradual infrastructure transition, because you can run a jet engine with any mix of kerosene and SAF.
If SAFs are to be economically viable at all, they'll almost certainly need to be able to run in existing, unmodified engines. So: all engines will be able to run on some amount of SAFs anywhere for 0% to 100%, as will this new engine. This statement has no information content whatsoever.
To be honest, the best air travel is high speed rail. Replacing regional flights with train trips would save so much energy and reduce emissions monstrously. I'm not even worried about these supersonic flights to be honest. They are 40 planes out of over ten thousand in service today.
Now, if Boom was working on a supersonic train? That would be AMAZING!
Every single other major jet manufacturer is already making air travel cheaper and more efficient every year. It's all airlines who buy from Boeing or Airbus care about. The underserved niche is premium and small, not scale. Commercial aircraft will get 1% more efficient every year with or without new companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...).
If we start in supersonic today, and innovate at the same pace for 20 years, you might match the efficiency boom from the "jet age" and make supersonic twice as efficient as today.
I also disagree. As a fan of aviation, theres never enough experiments going on. We need to stop it with this carbon virtue signaling when everyone of us here would be glad to own a used 2017 Bombardier Global 6000
I applaud Boom's efforts I just don't know if its viable because if Airbus isn't working on it then it probably isn't safe/worth the insurance upkeep.
Airbus lost a bunch of money developing the A380 and are understandably nervous to undertake any more high risk development projects. This is actually a great case for an aviation startup. If Airbus failed to develop a modern SST that might bankrupt them and disrupt the entire industry, but if Boom fails it only destroys a nascent startup that no one depends upon yet.
Boom (and supersonic aircraft) are a strategic investment priority for Saudi Arabia to sustain demand for oil. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about their impact on emissions I don’t know what else does.
I think their sights are set on military contracts (I believe they already have some military funding) and commercial aviation is a way to fund the development.
Military supersonics just aren't that important. We don't have Mach 3+ planes anymore not because we forgot or some nonsense, but because the things we used them for we now use space for: Need to spy on someone? The USSR is less happy to shoot a satellite out of the sky (this will change soon) than Mr. Powers in a plane. Want to nuke someone in a few minutes? ICBMs are mature technology.
So what are they supposedly offering the military?
Seems a little silly, the military is exempt from the regulatory burden they're spending a fortune to work around and has extremely deep pockets. It would be much easier to start with military contracts and establish everything they need to make supersonic planes and then transition that to civilian supersonic planes then to try and do everything and then some with no revenue and an unproven business plan.
That’s one of the most shortsighted views I’ve seen in awhile.
They are making air travel more efficient. Improvements in aircraft aerodynamics and engine efficiency to achieve supersonic flight can sometimes apply backwards and make a normal plane more efficient. We can apply some of the same technologies to shorten runways and reduce the sprawling layout airports need. There’s so many places technology like this can go that it’s insane we ever stopped researching it.
Writing it off because of vague fear-mongered potential environmental impacts is silly. As another commenter said, you can swim to Europe if you’d like but I will take the supersonic jet personally.
That's what sustainable air fuel is. There is a lot being done to certify existing engines to run on it. Moving to an incompatible power source (such as hydrogen) isn't feasible because it would require scrapping the current fleets (and well maintained planes live longer than their pilots).
There's no "we" here. You're not a part of Boom, and I daresay you aren't working to make commercial air travel more efficient either. You're kibitzing.
Certainly a Stalinist “Who, whom” thing here. This assumption of collectivism and that the “we” are not only a thing but actually a decision maker is presumptuous at minimum. That there’s some “we” that knows best!
I’ve always found the best way to fight for American freedoms is to post “CCP?” at people that I disagree with on the internet. These cyber actors may be well trained but they cannot stand up to the rigor of my investigative methods
> While I acknowledge the cool factor, I don't like what Boom is doing. We should be looking at making air travel more efficient, reducing the energy/emissions per passenger-mile flown. We don't need to invent ways to make luxury travel by the rarified few ever more expensive and damaging.
Didn't they say it could run on sustainable fuel?
I'm sorry, but I want to maximize my (and really all humans) time on this Earth, if that costs energy, that's the cost. I wouldn't be concerned about emissions per passenger-mile as that's nothing more than a rounding error in "emissions". You're welcome to walk / swim from San Francisco to Europe, but don't expect me to.
>> Didn't they say it could run on sustainable fuel?
The same can be said about my car/boat/monster truck/jet fighter and anything else that pumps out carbon. The average jet engine can be tuned to run rather well on olive oil. "Can run on X" is a far cry from "actually runs on X".
> I'm sorry, but I want to maximize my (and really all humans) time on this Earth, if that costs energy, that's the cost
But by using too much energy, you are reducing the expected lifespan of future generations. I can't tell if your being sarcastic. Tragedy of the commons.
Plenty of people around the world have legitimate needs to travel via airplane. Think about the millions of immigrants in USA with family abroad. Tech to better connect the world is worth celebrating.
Noise is a valid complaint but where these planes will really shine is oceanic flights, USA to Japan, Australia, Singapore are 3 routes mostly over ocean or uninhabited areas that could use the reduced travel time.
NASA is working on designs to significantly reduce noise from breaking the sound barrier, which I'm sure will inform changing requirements for supersonic flight over the United States. Right now the regulation is a very strict "you cannot fly supersonic over the US", except military aircraft of course
I doubt it, outside of very small portions of the country. IIRC, the plan was to have huge airports in places like florida that the 2707 would land at and people would get on subsonic jets to connect to where they wanted to go. Unless sentiment changed due to people hearing how quiet a "sonic boom" actually is when one of them was cruising.
Most of eurpoe also banned overland supersonic flights.
"On June 3, 2021, United Airlines announced they had signed an agreement to purchase 15 Overture aircraft with an additional 35 options, expecting to start passenger flights by 2029.[14][15] On August 16, 2022, American Airlines announced an agreement to purchase 20 Overture aircraft with an additional 40 options.[16]"
later on...
"On December 13, 2022, Boom announced that it would develop its own turbofan engine after "Big Three" engine manufacturers Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, as well as CFM and Safran previously declined to develop a new engine due to high capital costs.[29][30][31][32] Named Symphony, (see § Engines below) the engine will be developed under partnership with three entities: Kratos subsidiary Florida Turbine Technologies for engine design; StandardAero for maintenance; and General Electric subsidiary GE Additive for consulting on printing components.[33]"
So not only do they think they are going to finish designing, prototyping, testing, certifying, and moving to production an entirely new aircraft, they also think they are going to design a brand new engine, that the big three didn't think made sense and also get it through all those efforts? All in the next 5 years?
If it doesn't come to anything, which seems likely, atleast it sounds like a fun way to spend lots of money.
Note that SpaceX did this. They developed their own engines (altho initial 5 flights did get a 3rd party built turbopump, analogous to XB-1, I suppose), developed their own highly vertically integrated rocket, and offered launch services. Now, RocketLab does the same and they’re being joined by Firefly, Blue Origin, and Relativity, all being at least F9-level reusable eventually.
Everyone takes for granted launch vehicles being “easier” than airliners now, but go back to the 1990s and the attitude would’ve been switched (PARTICULARLY high-rate and economic reusable launch vehicles, which were considered virtually unattainable).
I think it’s totally doable to make both an airliner and an engine, and the main reason we don’t think so is successful PR by old aerospace primes.
Lets say they are really good and they are ready to test fly in 3 years to meet that 5 year goal (which I'll tell you right now is not happening), they still need engines. 3 years to design, develop, and build a clean sheet engine. It took GE and Safran (CFM) 10 years between the announcement of the LEAP and its certification:
So no, it is quite unlikely that a company with no experience in commercial jet engines (Florida Turbines, subsidiary of Kratos) will be able to field the equivalent of a modern day concord engine in 3 years. I would say the main reason people think it could be is successful PR from new startups.
Projections for these projects are always very optimistic. Why are you focusing so heavily on their runway being tied to some ideal date in 2 early contracts they signed?
It's not optimistic, it's not an ideal date, it's marketing fluff with no bases in reality. Maybe I'm the odd one out here but does that not bother you?
Flying an engine once before a quick refurbish without risking human life isn’t the same as flying an engine for weeks before any significant downtime/maintenance.
SpaceX did it but nowhere like on the timelines they have anticipated. They also expected 4 years from start to Falcon 5 flight - which was cancelled and replaced by Falcon 9 eventually - but it took 8 years and then another 3 years before regular flights and another 5 before reusability started to really work.
Lack of an industrial base and native experience in doing so. Once one company does it, the experience gained can spread to other companies via employees moving around and forming suppliers for those same companies. For India it also has the issue of brain drain as any of the people working on India's engines could easily jump ship and move to the UK or the US and get pretty good jobs in our aerospace industries and get paid a whole lot more.
Also China does have it's own engines used in its military aircraft.
Designing very efficient engines that are also cost efficient is the focus of a lot of those big primes in the US/UK/Europe so competing with them may be difficult, however there is currently no one trying to make very efficient _supersonic_ engines. All supersonic engines are destined for military jets which care a lot more about peak performance as the primary design parameter. In other words there is no one operating in the segment Boom is trying to develop an engine and they can hire a lot of people from the rest of the US industry who already have a lot of experience designing engines or people who were trained by said people.
Ironically it may be SpaceX who kills off Boom if they're successful in implementing suborbital long distance passenger travel with Starship, though that's still very much an open question if it's possible. Such travel would, if successful, most likely be way faster and cheaper than supersonic long distance travel because of the reduced losses from drag.
If it happens, it'll have to happen dozens of miles out to sea.
This video is outdated (and a surface ferry like shown would be too slow... probably would have to be some sort of aircraft, or the time on the ferry would make the rocket trip not worth it), but this shows the idea: https://youtu.be/zqE-ultsWt0
in the case of India, their engine development project for the HAL Tejas started out with ~50 million USD in 1989 and had a target goal of 5 years.
Given that (even after a 650% cost overrun and 30 years) the total engine development cost is still about $400 million USD, that buys about one and a half F-35Bs.
Even when picking good and cheap, there’s cheap and then there’s shoestring.
>and the main reason we don’t think so is successful PR by old aerospace primes.
It's partly that, and also partly that making engines successful is a different business. For capital intensive industries, it's natural that they separate and consolidate into specialties, which is why you see things work they way they do today. SpaceX is probably the exception that prove the rule, at least for space access. It would be nice to see Boom become that same exception for passenger jet aircraft. For obvious reasons, given the ongoings with Boeing.
One dynamic that may be at play: Designing a new engine is a gamble. For a company who already makes money with existing designs, there may be little upside on a small-volume new product. This is likely the reason the "Big 3" passed on designing an engine they don't have an off-the-shelf option for.
Boom would probably be the primary beneficiary of such an engine existing, so it isn't all that surprising that they will have to fund the development. The second supersonic airframe that can use their engine would be the one to turn that R&D profitable for Boom (and ease the introduction of more supersonic airframe options).
I would agree that the big three didn't think they could make it work, be that for technical reasons, money reasons, limited market reasons, etc. the end result is the same.
Where I would disagree is that Boom can make it work. The amount of specialized knowledge you need in design and analysis as well as test and manufacturing facilities makes it near impossible for an outsider get in the game. Which is why there aren't any in the commercial jet engine space. GE, PW, RR and I guess Safran is pretty much it. You can't just decide you are going to do the R&D yourself and pop out a new engine in 5 years.
It took them almost 20 years to do a manned flight though. And that's with professional astronauts knowingly taking the kind of risk you can't do with a passenger aircraft, unless you want to do a OceanGate.
That's the tricky bit. I guess they can put something together in that amount of time. But making sure it's safe? More skeptical on that. Look at the recent woes at Boeing for example, and while Boeing's organisational issues are at fault for no small part, it does show all of this is tricky business. Also many other aircraft have had serious design issues, including Concorde.
Also not convinced on the economic potential on all of this. There may be also issues with increased noise, environmental impact (possibly via regulations), and things like that.
"Amended type certificates typically take 3-5 years to complete. By comparison, the certification of a new aircraft type can take between 5 and 9 years."
> It took them almost 20 years to do a manned flight though.
Given that manned flight occurred in 1903, manned supersonic flight occurred in 1947, and manned spaceflight didn't occur until 1961, it appears that manned spaceflight is considerably more challenging.
I think if we were just talking about the airframe I would agree that is was possible. Not the engines though. Look at some of the costs and timeframes involved in one of the big 3's newer engines:
Now consider that you aren't starting with existing knowledge base, talent, facilities, etc. (which SpaceX had already started to build up) but from scratch. SpaceX also had nearly a billion in Falcon 9 and Dragon, Boom in its totality looks like it's worth a few hundred million? Lastly SpaceX had 150 employees in 2005 and 1150 in 2010. Boom has 150 and Florida Turbines (the part of Kratos working on this) has 100.
All of that is to say they need more money, more people, and more facilities very quickly if they were to have any chance of hitting any of those timeframes.
> Not the engines though. Look at some of the costs and timeframes involved in one of the big 3's newer engines
Compare the cost of rockets when SpaceX started. People laughed SpaceX off too.
SpaceX didn't start with an existing knowledge base, talent and facilities either.
The idea of starting a rocket company and building reusable rockets was so laughable at the time that they couldn't even hire anyone for the chief engineer (Elon assumed the role because no-one else would do it).
In 2002 SpaceX realised it wasn't going to be able to buy an existing engine from the Russians, and decided to make their own <- this is essentially the place where Boom is now.
In 2008 they successfully launched Falcon 1 to orbit (on the 4th attempt), and would've gone bankrupt if that 4th attempt had failed like the first 3 <- Boom might never get to this point, but good on them for trying.
2002 SpaceX is more where Boom was a decade ago when they were founded, what have they been doing since? They have one demo aircraft, not to scale of what they are marketing, and have not even demoed an engine yet. What about that makes you think they are the next SpaceX?
Even the comparison is poor. SpaceX had I guess the pieces that what would become ULA as competition? None of the players in the field had innovated for decades because they didn't need to, exactly the sort of area that is good for new people to come in and take a shot at getting a piece of the pie. And on top of that, you have an incredible amount of money and desire for the service. This has no where near the same market.
On top of that the commercial jet / engine world is incredibly competitive. Boeing/airbus and pw/ge/rr/safran have not been sitting idling by for decades reusing the same old designs with the same old technology. If you think that because this is supersonic it's not in competition with them... well I guess that's your choice in how to look at it.
No one was laughing at the idea of self landing rockets, because the DC-X did it 1993, and even by then it was known that it was probably feasible within Earth's atmosphere. The issue was always around the economic feasibility of it, since you have to carry the propellant needed to bring the vehicle back, and whether or not a silicon valley billionaire with no aerospace experience could break through into the industry. I think at this point, history is on Musk's side, but I also think there were valid reasons to be skeptical.
And I'm skeptical that these guys are going to be able to type certify a new engine in the timeframe they've given. Jet engines are harder than rocket motors in some ways. Certainly the way in which they're used imposes stricter reliability requirements. They run constantly, and can take weeks to spool down, for example, when a rocket might only fire a few short burns on a mission. Realistically, I think they would need similar government support as SpaceX received to bring this kind of product to market, but that's just my opinion. It's good that they're trying, and I hope I'm wrong, but this stuff is hard and expensive.
Not in commercial jet engines. The four big players have been in the engine game since the 1920s-1940s. Others came and went, some were bought or merged into them, but no one has eaten their lunch.
If they were still using the same designs they made 50+ years ago (like the rocket industry in the 2000s) I would agree with you... but they aren't. They have been constantly pushing performance to get better thrust-to-weight, efficiency, noise, etc. Whenever they get lazy (which they have) one of the other players is the one that gets to dine well. Look up "The Airforce and the Great Engine War" for an example.
There's significant differences between SpaceX and Boom though.
SpaceX got lots of funding because of military/government potential. The US had no domestic capability to place people into orbit. SpaceX also promised cheaper satellite insertion.
Boom promises... ultra-wealthy people a few hours shorter flights?
Concord failed because of cost - few people could afford the ticket price, and even fewer actually needed to cross the ocean a few hours faster.
There's less than zero percent chance Boom will be able to offer cheap "everyday joe" prices on their aircraft. It will fail for the same reasons as Concord...
Practically every bleeding edge advancement is only available to the "wealthy", it's the "wealthy" who pay the First Adopters Tax so eventually the technology might trickle down to the commons.
I say "wealthy" in quotes since those concerned aren't even that particularly richer than most people. Just people with slightly more surplus money in their wallet to throw around.
I get the audience here is primarily FOSS and considers the very notion of money a fucking heresy, but the real world doesn't operate like that.
slightly is doing a lot of work there. I'll admit I'm doing okay myself, and can afford $300 for a commercial plane ticket every once in a while, but there's a gulf between that, and being able to afford a $4,000 plane ticket, and another jump to $10,000 for a plane ticket, to being ever able to afford a to blow $250k on a trip to see the Titanic, however I'll fated that might be.
There's the top 1%, but there's also a .1% and .01% that is, actually, wealthy. But you're right that there's a weird "can't touch money" vibe in some circles that's weird.
Even in that range. I've flown business class--generally because a client was paying or an upgrade through a combination of miles and 3 digit $s--whenever I'm tempted I come down to thousands of dollars will pay for a lot of meal upgrades and theater on the other side of the pond. It's a lot of money, even for someone who can afford it, to save a few hours or be more comfortable for a day in a metal tube in any case. If it's just pocket change, why not? But maybe now you just fly Netjets.
Of course not - but this exact idea was tried and failed. What is Boom going to offer that makes it survive? So far, it seems nothing.
There's estimates that if Concord still flew today, Trans-Atlantic ticket prices would start around $10,000. How many people actually want to fly in a cramped cabin for that fee? You can get very luxurious first class cabin space for much less.
Ultimately, Boom will fail just like Concord. After the novelty wears off, there's very few actual customers - and even fewer repeat customers.
I think it’s kind of bizarre that all the armchair airplane developers here know how this will end already.
You could, presumably have faith that both the founders and investors have asked themselves the same questions and have come up with an answer that satisfies at least them.
Boom was founded by 3 people, 2 software guys and Joe Wilding (who had actual aerospace development experience). Now it's run by the only remaining software guy. sure there's an impressive staff, 700M invested in the company, but it's nowhere near the required many billions. and even after that there's zero guarantee that they can make money.
I would not disagree that you can do it, but I am skeptical that you can do it in 5 years.
Honda did develop their HF118 turbofan engine apparently from scratch, but it took about 8 years [1]. And for the actual commercialization they teamed up with GE and then it took another 10 years until certification of the successor HF120 [2].
There's a world of difference between 2000 lb and 20,000 lb thrust though. And as you mentioned, they teamed up with GE in the end because, to be frank, turbojets are just hard.
CFM (GE + Safran) own 39%, PW has 26%, RR has 18%, GE on it's own has 16%. So together they own 99% of the market.
Honeywell and Williams don't do anything over 10k-lb thrust (that I see). UEC is russian state owned, so I don't see anyone working with them anytime soon and AVIC is chinese state owned so kinda the same deal.
If you are talking small turbofans (smaller than 10k-lb thrust) there are a variety of companies out there but as soon as you start looking for bigger stuff to power your 737 Max or 320NEO class planes, you are talking about a very exclusive club.
As an aside, I would love to see more competition, I just think it's a really tough space to enter.
Kratos has begun the first engine tests at its X-58 test facility. The newly commissioned test facility is used to carry out demonstrator engine development testing, allowing Kratos to grow its offering of low cost and high-performance small jet engines. The fully mobile test facility can accommodate fully instrumented engines up to 3000-lb thrust. Inlet and exhaust noise suppression is provided to reduce environmental impacts. All connections are designed to reduce test article set-up time thereby reducing program costs. The state-of-the-art data acquisition system and communications allow for high speed remote monitoring and real time data processing. Kratos is introducing several engines to support the need for low cost and high-performance engines for cruise missiles, powered munitions and UAVs.
3000-lb thrust is about an order of magnitude smaller than you need for a single row conventional commercial jet with two engines. Yes, they are ostensibly working in the same field but I don't think I can stress enough how different those two things are.
It's always possible to innovate. It just happens that often the people claiming too are mostly innovating at separating people from their money. If you want to chat why I think this is more the later than the former feel free to reach out, I love talking aerospace.
So funny thing is you're in a thread about aerospace. If I might hazard a guess, discussing the concrete reasons why you think this is a scam can help educate curious readers about the challenges in this field and can probably start a discussion on the technical details of supersonic aircraft that has less emotional and more technical content.
It doesn't always work out that way though shrug.
From my own context, the work of certifying the airframe alone takes forever, let alone prototyping another engine and one that requires the thrust requirements a supersonic aircraft needs, so I too am really dubious of the timelines. But I'm curious why you think this is a scam as opposed to general exuberance, or why you think innovation in this space in particular is unlikely. There's other variables here like United's purchase; we all know companies like Theranos have defrauded established players like Walgreens, but do you think United did not do their due diligence here?
(I'm also deeply curious on why you feel that high-level criticism of the idea is relevant for this forum but the details of your criticism are not. I feel it'll teach me a lot about what motivates folks to use HN these days, but that's just my own curiosity.)
I wouldn't call it a scam, I think it's like alot of start ups. It looks good, has lots of cool marketing, and "in theory" could work. But after a few years of missing deadlines and goals (because they were unrealistic) and eating up money, the "in theory" could work turns into "in practice" did not. I work in the area so maybe it's just more galling to me hence my snarky response.
If by "innovation in this space" you mean supersonic commercial air travel, then not really. I could see someone making a couple planes that get bought by the saudi's and a few billionares but if you are talking in terms of eventually reaching all commercial air travel... that's a long way off if ever. Going faster takes you in the wrong direction in terms of efficiency (and thus cost and environmental impact), sound, manufacturability (and thus cost), maintenance (and thus cost), you get the picture.
As for United, I'm sure it sounded good at some point to someone. I guess we can check back in 5 years and see how that investment is going.
>But after a few years of missing deadlines and goals (because they were unrealistic) and eating up money, the "in theory" could work turns into "in practice" did not. I work in the area so maybe it's just more galling to me hence my snarky response.
What are the technical reasons they are behind schedule? Is the physics problem just too difficult, and the problem they've set out to solve just too hard without, idk, government backing?
It's not really one thing it's that it takes time and immense resources to put planes/engines through the engineering process and get certified. The 737 Max, took something like a year from conception to beginning of certification, another 3 years for the first prototype, 2 more years to get certified and go into production. 6 years total an that was:
1. Only a plane modification, not a brand new plane in a novel space,
2. Being designed and built by an organization 100x the size that lives in that space.
3. Was not also hinging on designing brand new engines.
On the technical side, engines are very difficult to get right. You are often operating at or beyond material temperature limits, relying on complex analysis that take years to perform and then years to validate with actual testing, and then pushing parts to fatigue limits in service.
you realize this is a non comment that just says “this is complicated” right?
Sure it’s complicated but if SpaceX could start falcon design in 2002 and send one to suborbital flight by 2007, I don’t see why Boom cannot.
Maybe their execution is not on par with SpaceX, maybe it’s mismanaged but that’s a different thing entirely compared to your view of “It’s so complex, so many different factors etc etc”.
You realize you could have made the exact same argument about spaceX and Boeing/ ULA. ULA had stupidly long timelines to bring a rocket to production, no plans ever to make it reusable and now they’ve been disrupted, perhaps permanently. All they have is a few government contracts keeping them alive.
If Boom succeeds it will be similar, people will laugh Boeing and their bloated timelines off the room, Boeing will only be alive due to some govt contracts and Boom will thrive.
"Amended type certificates typically take 3-5 years to complete. By comparison, the certification of a new aircraft type can take between 5 and 9 years."
Boom doesn't get to ignore FAA certification, neither would the organization making brand new engines for them, which are not included in that 5-9 year number (although it could go in parallel). I'm not pulling this out of thin air, there is a huge amount of history of developing planes and engines that you can look at (I'm more familiar with the engines side). It is not cheap, fast, or easy... so yes, I guess I am saying it's complicated, haha.
Separately, look at the market for rocket launches in the 2000's. There was no one innovating, people were using decades old tech and not pushing anything new because they didn't have too. There was a place for SpaceX to come in. If you asked me then though, yes, I think I would not have thought there chances were great, and for similar reasons, but I think I would have thought it was possible.
The difference is there is no market here. You don't have governments and commercial entities lined up around the corner to get a seat to go from NYC to London a few hours quicker. You do have competitors that are the last survivors of 70 years of competition (on the engine side) that have not been resting on their laurels and are some of the most technically competent companies in the world in any field. Boom is not in the same position SpaceX was. Look at Boom's last 10 years and SpaceX's first 10 and give an honest assessment if you think they are comparable.
You make valid points about the market, I cannot be sure how big the market for supersonic travel is, but I’m glad they are trying.
I don’t know about the FAA, I would expect they had similarly long timelines for rockets but when a company as fast as SpaceX came, they adjusted, but then again rockets does not involve humans while planes do, so I can see why it would be more rigorous and extensive, but still 5-9 seems really slow.
I guess my criticism is high level because, in my mind, the timeframe they market and what they claim to be trying to do in it, is so beyond what is reasonable that touching on simple aspects of the project, such as all the steps they need to go through before getting to their goal, is adequate to highlight unrealistic marketing for what it is.
If you look at some of my other answers I go more in depth on specific topics to provide more technical content. If you are curious to learn something more you can always ask? Alot of my posts are questions.
Edit: I wrote this and then saw there was more to your post I missed (or got added? maybe I'm having a stroke, do you smell toast?), will respond in below.
And the history of aerospace is littered with companies that made lofty claims, raised a bunch of money, and eventually went under. When Boom launched eight years ago, they were telling investors they were going to have a prototype flying in two years. For anyone who has any experience in aerospace, this is unrealistic to the point of being fraudulent. People said as much back then [1]. And sure enough, it took eight years, not two. And the actual hard parts are still ahead of them!
99% chance the full-size supersonic aircraft never flies, and 100% chance it won’t be before 2035.
It’s not always economical though. When you have the top jet engine manufacturers in the world turning down your business the time has come to ask some tough questions.
This is old technology, we know how to do this - what we’ve not figured out is how to make it profitable. There were supposed to be 350 Concorde built but we got 14. Operating an Airline is a brutal business now matter how cool the planes may be.
Delusional project planning kills products and companies. How many years before Starship rockets achieve rapid reuse after being caught by launch tower chopsticks and are reflown quickly enough to supply a yet to be designed and launched orbiting fuel station before the fuel and oxidizer boil off so that Starship can go beyond Earth orbit?
The critical path will bite you in the ass especially if your idea of project management comes from software projects. If you pile on enough dependencies, especially on untried concepts, you might not know which possible critical path will bite the hardest.
Boil-off can be prevented by loosely wrapping in 50~100 layers of aluminized mylar ("space blanket"), adding some solar panels and heat rejection panels, and a 2 or 3 stage refrigerator to keep the contents cold enough to not trigger the boil-off safety overpressure valve.
If you're clever with the orientation or possibly with a movable sun shade, you might even get by with just using space as a heat dump, by insulating against the earth and the sun and exposing to empty space to radiate the leakage heat away without a refrigerator.
I think they have enough experience with orbital electromechanical design to make this not a problem with much suffering.
"Supersonic intakes: XB-1’s engine intakes slow supersonic air to subsonic speeds, efficiently converting kinetic energy into pressure energy, allowing conventional jet engines to power XB-1 from takeoff through supersonic flight."
I'm under the impression that's something most jet engines do.
Yes, this is what every supersonic intake does. The leading edge of the intake for supersonic flows is meant to create an oblique shockwave that reflects off the other parts of the intake to progressively slow the flow to subsonic speeds before reaching the front of the engine. Fixed intakes, like the one on the XB-1, are optimized for a certain speed.
The gap between the intake and the fuselage diverts the dirty boundary layer air so that the intake is more efficient.
It sounds like marketing fluff, which I think alot of their site is, but this is a real thing. As soon as you start flying faster than sound you have to do extra work on the intake for your engine you wouldn't otherwise need to do (put simply).
The swarm of negative comments here is both disheartening and unwarranted. How many of you are building ad networks or chat-with-PDF while these folks are working on truly difficult problems?
Flying supersonic is awesome, actually. Count me in for one at the first opportunity (25% of the cost of a Concorde ticket would really be something)
Flying supersonic is awesome. Living near people who fly supersonic is awful. Since there are far more people in group B than group A, a ban is warranted.
Also, now we have the climate crisis to deal with, commercial supersonic flight should be consigned to the history books where it belongs.
I don't find giving rich people a way to make loud banging noises in the sky more inspiring than building ad networks. Not all difficult challenges are worthy.
I cant imagine where we would be if people were having this mentality back in the early 1900s when rich people were trying to fly using loud, terrible airplanes. Fwiw I don't think super sonic travel is going to succeed any time soon, but it's crazy how prevalent this type of NIMBY mentality has become.
There's nothing wrong with people finding sonic booms annoying. Even Boom conceded this by naming itself after its worst externality, and pretending (in its early startup phase) that it was pursuing technology to make supersonic flight less loud.
Supersonic flight over land has been banned in the US since the 1970s. Boom isn’t going to be making “banging noises in the sky” anywhere you’re going to hear them.
This airliner will draw the kind of people who fly business and first class today, which will reduce demand for those tickets and depress prices for everyone.
So are NASA and Lockheed. The restrictions are based on noise pollution. If aerodynamics can be developed that reduce the boom then the restrictions can be relaxed. This is consistent with existing subsonic flight noise regulations.
We will not have supersonic transport for average people unless outsiders do it first. There are only two meaningfully large manufacturers now, Airbus and Boeing.
Boeing and Airbus both cannot financially afford a technologically promising but possible failure now. Boeing built the 737 MAXX because they couldn’t afford a clean sheet update of 70-year old technology despite the savings. Airbus lost almost as much as the entire company was worth on the A380, kept afloat by EU subsidies.
All new technology happens for the wealthy first - we would not have smartphones today if Apple was forced to price them at the median price of cell phones in 2004.
> Boeing built the 737 MAXX because they couldn’t afford a clean sheet update of 70-year old technology despite the savings.
Boeing ABSOLUTELY could afford a clean sheet replacement of the 737. They chose not to because it would have opened them up to competition and reduced short term profits. Anyone claiming otherwise is blowing smoke.
I agree with your sentiment, but not the reason - instead of concern about competition/short-term profitability, Boeing has always thrown huge amounts of money into stock buybacks, even while development is running over budget. This article is a great window into the institutional rot at Boeing, and I think it highlights the problems caused by large companies' decisions being dominated by their own stock price: https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
Just wrong. Read about the 7J7. The 787 cost something north of 20 billion to develop. The clean sheet 737 would have cost much more in today’s dollars. Boeing makes an average of less than 5% profit margin from the 1970s to now. It was a relatively obvious financial decision from Boeing’s perspective.
> The 787 cost something north of 20 billion to develop.
So on top of existing R&D, ignoring all of the money they dumped into stock buybacks, roughly 2 years of profits to create a plane design that would last 30 years.
I assume you never lived under the Concorde flight path.
There will never be supersonic transport for normal people simply because the technology is unsuitable for use near people. Most people want to fly between cities and cities tend to be inhabited by people, hence the essential tension.
Supersonic flight only works for a few specific flight paths where you are flying entirely over the ocean between two coastal airports. The moment you have to fly over people those people are going to get very angry and ban you from their airspace.
That's the game though. Unfortunately, there's no room for subtlety once you get to a certain audience size, and you need to make as much noise and project as much confidence as possible to stand out. While us HNers might appreciate subtlety and humility, I don't think it translates very well to the average person.
HN lives in a closet world of React/Angular/Docker/Kubernetes/etc and is so thoroughly jaded and burnt by bland, bloated business technology apps that they have zero affinity or understanding of what kind of exciting technology is happening in other sectors.
Agree. In years past the negative comments were because it was 'vapor', just an empty overhyped startup. But It is not just vapor now, they have a flying prototype.
It is most definitely warranted. This idea is horrific for the environment and sonic booms are bad for residents. It solves a "problem" nobody but rich elites have. This company is a zero-interest rate phenomenon. I wish people would work on impactful projects instead.
Even without incident, it's a poor choice of brand for a product most people associate with the deafening sound of the sound barrier being broken. It's what killed its predecessor.
My understanding is the the Concorde wasn't profitable to fly (too large!)
You can fly subsonic over land and go supersonic over oceans. That would make a trip to Japan much faster! And won't impact humans living underneath the flight path (since it won't go supersonic until it's over the ocean)
Flights these days often aren't even traveling close to the speed of sound, so there's room to design a plane more efficient at that speed as well.
Assuming it has the range. Trans-Atlantic is IMO not that interesting. You can already get to London from the East Coast same day. The continent is mostly a red-eye but that's OK in lie-flat business class. Even comfortable trans-Pacific is a slog but that takes a lot of range.
> the deafening sound of the sound barrier being broken
As someone who grew up hearing sonic booms all the time this is very puzzling to me. I keep seeing mentions of how the sonic boom is such a huge issue... really?
They're setting themselves up to get "Ok Boomer"'d
I can't help but imagine people used to think about these things, but they haven't for a while. I remember checking what was on the in-flight radio ~8 years ago to hear "Love when you hit the ground, girl."
This technology, like all technology, increases humanity's collective capacity to create solutions to problems and implement them. Faster travel means more time to solve problems. LESS planes and LESS speed make the world a worse place.
Sure, new technology does create new issues, and can make others worse, that doesn't mean, however, that technology doesn't also increase our ability to continue improving and doesn't make the world a better place.
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As a consumer, the pain-point of flying isn't that the plane is slow (although it'd be nice to go faster) - it's the slap-dash construction of the planes. I know it's safe statistically, but I just can't stomach entrusting my life to a system that lets Boeing's many ridiculous failures through the cracks.
The other major issue is having to be at the airport hours early, and the planes can't fix that.
While the planes can’t fix needing to show up at the airport early, business class fares (usually) help. Priority security and priority checkin mean that, while you can’t show up 5 minutes before your flight, you also don’t need to show up 3 hours early. And, if you do, you have a lounge to relax in with as much food and drink as you can swallow while you wait.
I would imagine that every seat on these flights would be a business or first class fare (as I don’t see any other way they can make money), and would get you all of those benefits.
This will never make it past prototype stages, unfortunately. Realistically, you need federal involvement to make something like this happen, a la concorde. I could see the US government getting involved for nationalism purposes if China starts actually building jets in large numbers to reassert US manufacturing supremacy.
It was sexy marketing for the Concorde to travel between NYC and Paris/London back in the 70s-90s. Today however, with the emergence of the middle east as a major travel hub, would supersonic travel be viable there? Dubai-Singapore? Dubai-Doha? Dubai-Moscow? Europe to Middle east wouldn't work due to having to fly over europe, right?
Also, is there enough luxury/high speed travel demand between asia and the north american west coast for something like this? It's nice to leave north america in the evening, sleep 8 hours, and arrive as the plane is landing in tokyo. Is there any demand to be get to Tokyo in 6-7ish hours?
It seems like the people that can afford 20-30k tickets can also afford to fly private, and with the internet there's much less need to be in person for making deals. Sadly, until fuel costs become negligible and they can make supersonic airplanes hold 200+ people, i think most people would rather fly private or fly first class on an A380 than on a cramped Overture.
Why assume "cramped overture"? What if overture feels like first class but is ~faster?
I suspect fast planes are going to have an enormous amount of demand - people value their time. What's the most important part of travel? The flight cost? The lodging? The days off of work?
If people value their time how come there was no serious appetite for upgrading and eventually replacing Concorde decades ago?
After all they could have just built improved versions of them and had fleets of them flying across the Atlantic, perhaps even a larger extended range version for trans-Pacific routes.
And if time is really the driver how come Boom Overture is going to be slower than Concorde?
Because nobody did it! Airlines are absolutely brutal businesses. Airplane manufacturing is at least as brutal. Trivia question: how long did it take the Boeing _ (pick any make) to become profitable?
It's an enormous risk to build a new airplane, to convince airlines to take a risk on you and buy it, for them to train pilots on it, etc etc etc
It's a small miracle Boom has gotten as far as they have.
Boom is not competing with Concorde!! You can't buy Concorde tickets today! Concorde was never profitable!
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Also, the airliner may be glass screen cockpit on screens. This one had eyeballs to the sky.