I know nothing about Boom. Why is this impressive? We've achieved supersonic for passengers before. Are we meant to be interested just because someone is taking up the mantle again, or is there some new design that makes it impressive?
Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds. The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the production model capable of supercruise.
"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..
The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.
And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?
Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.
It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.
It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.
I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.
And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.
Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..
> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "
“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”
Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.
While true, the catch is that very little technology relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that’s about it. Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints it was built for and those constraints haven’t really changed - airport parking docks remain the same size, runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the same distance apart, people don’t want to hear sonic booms, and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer to turn a profit.
There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.
Because once things are paid by consumers things get better, more responsible, efficient, and so on, compared to free money granted by states to a few at the cost of many?
The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel. It also could not go supersonic over land because its sonic booms were too loud. This mean that flights could only go over the ocean, and they were expensive due to fuel costs. Boom's goal is to reduce the sound of their sonic booms 30x and eliminate the need of afterburners.
No. I don't think that's correct. The Concorde used its afterburners during take off and to get through the transonic region, where the drag is very heavy. Once you've gone past that the drag drops. At that point the Concorde can turn off the after burners.
IIRC Concorde could super cruise a Mach 2 which is unmatched. It would also flight supersonic for most of its journey which is also presented unprecedented difficulties.
Legend says the Tu-144 used afterburners the whole time while supersonic, but, then, it seems five units have engines without afterburners (RD-36-51's replacing the Kuznetsov NK-144 used in most of the fleet).
I wonder what was the noise level in those late models.
Not really, that's like saying "they relied on closing the doors to the aircraft to achieve supersonic flight". Both happened, but aren't related if I'm reading the comments correctly.
That's a really dumb response. Yes, it relies on closing the doors to achieve supersonic flight too.
The Boom plane doesn't rely on afterburners at any point in the trajectory to achieve supersonic flight. So yes, you would be reading the comments incorrectly.
Boom is not currently flying their intended engines, the Symphony, which does not exist yet. (1) The XB-1 is flying with J85's just like a T-38 has, and just like a T-38 it can go supersonic with afterburners. If the Symphony is able to meet its design goals, it will not need afterburners for any part of flight. How much they will be able to deliver on that remains the biggest open technical question for Boom. (2)
1: Well, their Plan B intended engines. Their Plan A was that one of the Big 3- RR, PW, GE- would make engines for them, but none were interested in taking the risk that a difficult engine could be designed and built in enough volume to make the investment back.
2: Their biggest legal question is over-land supersonic regulations. Their biggest economics question- and probably the biggest and most important of all of them- is how much will people pay for civil supersonic?
Do we know how much more it's likely to cost? I could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x.
Anything beyond 2x I imagine would start to price out the average person and anything beyond 5x would probably price out the vast majority of potential customers.
People pay more than that for domestic first class, which doesn’t even have lay-flat seats. $2,500 or even $5k for a New York <> San Francisco 2-hour flight would absolutely sell.
A number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at least some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights. UA has over a half dozen Dreamliners flying back and forth daily, all with Polaris cabins. I know AA and Delta have routes with them, too. I agree, a two-hour flight time would be better!
Their business model for a long time has theorized that they can deliver an operating cost that would allow airlines to offer tickets at roughly current business class ticket costs, which would be a fraction of Concorde ticket prices expressed in current dollars.
I don't know if those theorized efficiencies will be delivered (a lot depends on that engine) or if airlines will price tickets at that level. But it's the theory so far.
When the production engine exists in physical form, we can absolutely discuss its capabilities. The XB-1 demonstrator is, using afterburner to get to speed, demonstrating other design features intended to keep the noise down.
The original plan was a commercial partner for the engines, but the big three - Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric - turned them down. It's one of the biggest remaining question marks in the entire project.
> Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner.
> Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic
Real question: How many in-production/operation engines in world can fly supersonic without afterburners? I think it is only a handful, all insanely expensive and backed with squillions of dollars of gov't/military money. And, the maintenance cycle must be out of this world expensive.
there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.
And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole ___domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small.
Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.
This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
"Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy.
The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though.
"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials.
I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.
There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment
The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction
as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross the Pacific would be incredible.
commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9
i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:
- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.
- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.
it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke basically all records. Why would there be less case for faster flights?
Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.
the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet.
people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.
at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.
> the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet
Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)
In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.
Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights, airline competition and a consolidation amongst manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on other people's schedules between airports they dont want to travel to/from.
Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?
Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).
And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
I'm not sure the people who pay full-boat fares for business and first today is a sufficient market for a new supersonic plane and a viable set of airline routes (within the range of the plane which probably doesn't include trans-Pacific).
i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).
And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.
Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...
As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)
All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.
Concorde holds the world record in both directions actually.
F-BTSD did it:
- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)
- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)
Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.
They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.
Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]
Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.
Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.
The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude, while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km, where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital depreciation, insurance, etc.
> something to market to investors and potential employees
Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:
> The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.
I don't get the analogy. The Boom CEO explicitly stated that $100 tickets are not around the corner. Two or three generations down the line means four decades at a minimum, if we think one generation takes 20 years. Lots of things can happen in 4 decades, like: significant advances in ramjet engines, rotation detonation engines become mainstream, people get comfortable with windowless aircraft (so there's no need for drooping nose Concorde-style), airports could start being equipped with arresting wires, like aircraft carriers today, airplanes without the vertical tail fin become common place, stronger and lighter composites become available, and, who knows, maybe even some jets will start running on hydrogen rather than jet fuel (hydrogen having about 3 times more energy density per unit of mass). I have to admit the even with all these things, $100 per ticket to any place in the world still seems like a stretch, but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn
You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.
Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly Overture won't be capable of that.
Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing
Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.
The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)
Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept
(though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)
No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.
> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.
The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.
There actually is still significant lift. We define the edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't fly conventionally in space but lift might still be generating a force which is significant compared to your craft's weight.
Well the assumption was that there is no drag because the air density is so low. You can’t just say there’s no drag but still assume that you get lift. Your lift/drag ratio won’t go up infinitely just because you’re flying higher.
GP's assumption was travelling through space to avoid drag which doesn't necessarily imply generating lift in space.
My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.
But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.
"Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though. Suborbital range is very short on the lower end, and increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can boost to 2km/s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing really useful in between.
New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.
That’s overstating it. I literally did this flight in Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I’d say tickets from LA are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to Sydney next week in that range.
They're betting that they can make supersonic travel sustainable and profitable with a new aircraft and engine design. The Concord wasn't either of those.
The business case is apparently solid enough that several airlines are partnering with them during development.
This is the first actual demonstration that they can achieve supersonic flight in their demonstrator aircraft, so it is a significant milestone but they are years away from their full-scale aircraft.
It's the first supersonic plane from a YC startup or any startup for that matter. Also they are hoping to do profitable passenger travel which hasn't really been done - concorde had ups and downs but mostly lost money.
There are some interesting technological developments around fuel efficiency and minimizing the "sonic boom" that's felt on the ground. Neither of those killed Concorde though, because the entire idea of Concorde turned out to be incredibly faulty. MOST people weren't in such a hurry to get from point A to point B that they'd pay 5x-10x a normal business/first class ticket to cut a trip down by 50% or so. The intended 100+ units to be built and sold turned out to be a fantasy, airlines weren't interested.
Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new, airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID FLIGHT. Today that's routine.
So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a technological one, and the economics haven't changed.
There were enough passengers, and flying the Concorde actually became profitable for the airlines once they figured out they just needed to charge through the nose for it. This was despite prodigious fuel consumption and that fuel becoming much more expensive after the oil crisis.
The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.
I still don't see this being something large airlines would be overly interested in, but I wonder if there's a private market. If you're Taylor Swift maybe being able to fly from NYC to LA in half the time is well worth it.
> Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.
I suppose the question is whether you feel like spending 3-5 times as much for the same flight, to save a bit of that time. Perhaps you would be, but I think you can understand how most wouldn't, even if they could. That is of course assuming that unlike Concorde, this can do single-hop journeys longer than a trans-Atlantic flight.
I keep seeing you using this $10k figure, where is that coming from? I’m fortunate to fly intl biz class a lot, and I rarely see prices that high. In September I flew SG from NYC to Singapore in biz class for $4k RT.
My take is it's not even an economic problem. Unless you fly really fast (like Mach 3++), flying east sucks.
Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.
If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.
With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.
But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).
If it's already going to be expensive and exclusive they can easily design a program where all the passengers have to be some kind of TSA++ pre-approved ahead of time and perhaps have a special terminal and/or security screening line.
The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.
The line at security is typically 0-20 minutes. Add in walking time, and I'm getting from car to gate in 10-30 minutes.
But I still feel like I need to get to the airport at least 90 minutes, if not 2 hours early, just in case I end up flying on a day where 1 of the 2 security checkpoints is entirely closed and every traveler is now forced to go through a single checkpoint and it's going to take over an hour.
On the live cast the presenter mentioned Boom have already secured ~130 pre-orders, including United Airlines. Not bad considering the Concorde anticipated 100+ orders but only manufactured a fraction of that.
Pre-orders are just wind until they're actually delivering product. It doesn't cost the carriers much to make the pre-orders. The calculation is that if it somehow pans out then they won't miss the boat, if the company fails then they aren't really out anything.
To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't think they would get this far. I still don't think they are going to build full scale production models and actually sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going. Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too though.
It's not a huge deal for humanity, but it's exciting for aviation enthusiasts and those studying the air travel space.
To my layman's eye, they've built a civilian version of a trainer/fighter jet, now all they have to do is scale it up to airliner size :) Long way to go but you have to start somewhere.
I hadn't made that connection but it's really apt. People watching Falcon 1 flight 4 get to orbit probably said "It's 165 kg payload, so what? We've been sending satellites to orbit for 50 years. ULA just sent (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1538) a 2000 kg payload to orbit 3 weeks ago!" It really is significant what Boom did in the time frame and budget they had.
