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.
.svg){kind=link}