I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :)
Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.
It’s a good start but I wouldn’t say the critics are proven wrong already.
Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it.
I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.
I don't disagree that it's proof they will succeed, it is however proof that they can build a supersonic aircraft. That is no small thing.
Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.
In terms of 'risk stacking'[1] they are definitely a big step closer to being in successful.
[1] Risk Stacking is the set of risks a company faces between the current time and being operational. Technology risk is always level 1 (can they build what they say they can build), after that comes market risk (will people buy it with enough margin for both continued operation of the company as well as further development), and the third is execution risk (can they operate efficiently enough to create a net positive economic product.)
> Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.
Not only that, but the XB-1 uses "stock" engines, while for the full-scale Overture they want to develop (and build) an all-new supersonic-capable engine. So one more challenge to put on the stack...
They were testing (at a different scale, with a different powerplant) their air intakes for the engine which are designed to enable conventional turbofan engines to operate at supersonic speed, plus some control systems. And no doubt demonstrating to investors that they could fly something at supersonic speed before they ask for the funds to design and build a new powerplant and airliner-scale airframe...
It was originally envisaged as a maiden flight that would happen within a couple of years of founding, but aerospace is hard.
When taking another look at the Wikipedia articles for the XB-1 and the Overture, I also noticed that both of them mention the fact that the XB-1 still uses the original trijet engine configuration planned for the Overture, which has however since been changed to a quad-jet (https://airinsight.com/boom-supersonic-radically-changes-ove...). So the XB-1 is even less representative of the full-scale Overture than I thought...
they're early enough in their program to switch the Overture again to twinjets :)
(only half joking, if it turns out that adjacent engines in the quadjet configuration have a negative impact on their intake technology, a twinjet would work more similarly to the trijet...)
It is in the venture capitol / startup world, not sure how much it is used outside of that which was why I took time to explain it. A VC looking at a pitch is trying to understand the risks (a VC investment is basically pricing that risk) and each kind of risk has a different method of evaluation.
Concord was actually a cash cow for all airlines who had them. The only reason why airlines stopped using Concord was because of the crash and the inherent safety issues that were found. But the actual business model worked - limited in scope but it was highly profitable.
“That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the concept of the Concorde might not have been a worldwide hit, it was certainly a good market fit for these two airlines at the time.”
Overall it was obviously a money looser because of the high development costs (paid for by the governments).
It worked because not just the development costs were paid for by the government, but acquisition costs were, too. Planes were given to the airlines for free, completely paid for by the states.
Also, only be BA made good profit on it and only after mid-1980s. Air France could barely break even.
If not the PR effect that put those airlines above all others as the only ones flying supersonically, they'd never make any sense to either of them.
These days, they'd certainly not be viable as private planes are now much more available and much cheaper than they used to be back in the day and these save a lot more time than supersonic flights. BA fare for LHR-JFK roundtrip was 10K pounds back in 2000, $15.2K at the average exchange rate, that's $28K inflation adjusted! Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?
Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so.
Their website says:
> Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7
Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC<->LON are currently 7 hours.
Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR<->JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip. I am surprised that it is so cheap. I guess that route is very competitive.
I don't understand the excitement on HN about Boom. The market is tiny. This is a terrible investment. What is the global demand for this aeroplane (if they ever build it)? Maybe... max 200. Look at the order book from the 1960s when the Concorde first flew. Less than 100 total orders. Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Also, it is terrible for the environment. The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde.
Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy?
Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure. But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.
Now the world's only supersonic passenger plane is being made in America, you might find Congress is much less worried about sonic booms.
This was done to prepare people and gauge the reaction to BOEING sonic booms, for the SST. Everything about a supersonic future was scuttled when it became obvious that people clearly suffered when planes flew supersonic above them.
Keep in mind that the US Air Force still does not go supersonic over populated areas except when absolutely necessary, like during 9/11.
This study mind you was done with SCHEDULED sonic booms. Now imagine, instead of being able to set your clock to a loud, disruptive noise and plan around it, you must deal with completely unpredictable and variable EXPLOSION of sharp noise (130ish decibels is standing 100m from a jumbo jet as it spools up or a trumpet being blasted directly into your ear from a couple feet away)
People already hate the noise of cities when that noise is an occasional quiet siren heard from a mile away a few times a day. Imagine instead if the noise was completely unpredictable explosions. Also imagine you can't move out of the city to get away from it, because the sound blankets an entire flight corridor.
Unless NASA finds a way to magically evaporate all the energy in a sonic boom such that it makes almost no noise at ground level, we would have to literally depopulate mile wide corridors of the US just so a bunch of stupidly rich people can get from NY to LA in an hour? Nah
This isn't true. The backlash to sonic booms grew well before Concorde and was part of why the US government canceled its support of the SST program. Boeing canceled their part of the 2707 because of the (extremely) unexpected success of the 747 program (a larger plane slower addressed a larger market) and the 737 success.
Sources:
Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet
Sure, being a domestic enterprise might help here, but you will have to deal with regulations abroad, too (and Concorde had arguably the edge there because it had both London and continental Europe as home court).
I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).
> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom?
Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder.
> The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
5-7 times as much.
My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
> My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.
The one new factor is the route fragmentation that occurred over the Atlantic with the 757 and 767 and the fragmentation that occurred over the Pacific with the 777 and 787. These changed from a model where only hub to hub flights where every seat had to be sold to be viable from a financial point of view to enabling many city pairs to work, and airlines still to make a profit, even if the business class seats are not fully sold. This led to a much larger market, which plenty of room for 3-10k "business class" tickets on these flights.
If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA <-> Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.
They claim they have sonic boom solved by modifying the airframe shape. Otherwise, i agree with you. It will be a thing of no real consequence just like the original Concorde.
Firstly, my claim that they say this is evidenced by the link. I did not assert it as historic fact that this thing works, just that this is what they say. The words "Selling point" and "proposed" are in that sentence for a reason: it's not actual yet. But if you think it's a deliberate fraud, then say so.
Secondly: Although the final proof of it is in the full scale aircraft for sure, a lot can be done with software modelling (1) and wind tunnels these days. And with the scale model that just flew, to be followed by "checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly." (2)
Thirdly, I point you to other "quieter supersonic" aircraft work in progress, the X-59. Some of their evidence-gathering process is detailed at the Wikipedia link, "development" section. (3)
It will be interesting to see how these work out; but if they do not, then it's a failure of modelling and design, not because they missed the directly obvious. But if you are an aerospace engineer and know more about this subfield, then say so.
1) "Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel"."
A sonic boom is not necessary when moving faster than sound, the Busemann biplane resolves that completely.
There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.
> Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours.
I feel that you're getting diminishing returns at the point of reducing 4 hours to 3h30, given that flight time is just a part of the whole "door to door" time, there are several hours at least that aren't flight time, and that the expensive tickets all come with an hour or three in an airport lounge.
I think the real advantage would be for transpacific flights. San Francisco to Tokyo is currently about 11.5 hours, assuming a similar ratio (maybe slightly better due to flying supersonic for longer), Boom’s time would be around 6.5 to 7 hours. Savings would be more significant for East Coast flights, ATL-HND would go from 14.5 hours to under 8.5.
East Coast US to Japan supersonic? This is the stuff of fantasy. With the insanely high fuel burn and very small aeroplane body size, where are you going to put all the fuel for a trans-Pacific flight? NYC<->LON was already nearly the limit for the Concorde. As I understand, they had high priority when landing due to low fuel.
Interesting, I hadn’t realized the range was so short. I guess if they did trans-Pacific it would mostly be limited to Seattle to Tokyo, or routes with a stopover in Hawaii.
The problem with $50,000 tickets is a higher price means fewer customers, and at a certain point that means less money coming in overall, worse economies of scale, and less ability to cover your upfront engineering costs.
The Toyota Camry is a $30,000 car that sells 300,000 units per year. The Lamborghini Huracan is a $300,000 car that sells 600 units per year. Much easier to cover the costs of developing a reliable electrical system, or a new hybrid drivetrain, when you're Toyota.
Concorde couldn't repay its development costs for the same reason.
In fairness, there's little practical benefit (and, in fact, a lot of downsides) to a supercar whereas a plane that does trans-oceanic in half the time is useful--of course, if you can build it, and sell tickets economically for maybe today's business class prices--keeping in mind that a lot of people flying business are doing so on upgrades/miles.
I used to work for a big 6 accountancy and audit firm. their senior partners used to fly concorde, wheras us underlings flew virgin upper class (like first class on other carriers).
> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?
Nobody. That's part of Boom's plan: they want to make the Overture jet cheap enough to fly that tickets will cost about what business class costs on regular intercontinental flights. They're keeping the problems of the Concorde in mind as part of the design process.
> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?
People willing to throw money at connecting with others who do the same thing. That was the main value proposition back then I think, getting from continent to continent in a short time has never been more than a tangential benefit. Of course this type of business only really works when everybody involved claims the opposite.
It only needs to be economically viable for billionaires bored with collecting yachts and $100 millionaires who want to flex with charter flights. Scheduled commercial service is a pipe dream but not a requirement for success.
I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.
It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.
Probably optimism talking, but I'd put Boom's chances of bringing to market an airliner capable of supersonic travel at equal-to-first-class-ticket-prices at 60%.
Now I'd put their wilder hopes of eventually taking over the subsonic economy market at considerably below 1%.
But I'm hopeful for that $5-10k ticket to London within the next twenty years.
You also have to make it environmentally sustainable like they did when they talked about a partnership with Prometheus fuels back in 2019, even then what's the point compared to regular planes if these "are likely to burn between 4.5 and 7.5X more fuel than subsonic aircraft in 2035." [0]
I'm so glad that buried deep in the HN commments in an individual who cares about the environment. In the other conversations I've seen about this no one mentions or thinks about fuel consumption. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes. It's like "Yay! We figured out another way to accelerate the disastrous consequences of climate change. Go us!"
My metric for success is simply making more money than they spent.
Supersonic planes are already proven technology. We made the Concorde and the Tu-144 in the 70s, and have plenty of supersonic military planes in active service. The assumption was simply that you can't make a profit by selling them as civil aviation planes. That's the assumption Boom is challenging, and to be proven correct they have to turn a profit. And not just an operating profit by selling planes for more than they cost to make but make back the research and development costs as well
Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).
The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.
Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.
With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.
SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.
Of course you can exclude them, to determine whether the aircraft themselves are a viable commercial proposition for the people who bought them (the airlines) -- which they were, just as other aircraft such as the A380 today are. The people who bought A380s are happy, and will be using them for decades. Emirates would still like to buy more (and may end up buying used ones from less successful airlines)
The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.
There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.
If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.
Flying fish that are increasingly not sustainably harvested on insanely fuel in-efficient supersonic planes is exactly humanity deserves to go extinct.
Hence why everyone thinks supersonic passenger planes are a bad idea. Lots of profitable military supersonic planes, but every existing example of a civilian supersonic plane is only justified as a Cold War dick-measuring contest.
> And make every government purchase ever, successful?
yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.
That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.
> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?
what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.
Success should be measured against the stated objectives, the promises made to investors, or general positive influence on society. In this case the objective was "supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly." [0]
> Basically, the critics
You're being uncharitable and hyperbolizing the criticism to more easily dismiss it. Would you hyperbolize any praise as "identifying another way this won't work is also a success in itself"?
This is only true from the point of capital - if a startup changes the world in a way you like it can be a success to you. Profitability brings a certain approval and sustainability, but don't confuse that with your goals in what you are working on.
Sort of. There's a class of startups that's not meant to be profitable, except maybe by happy accident. Many (most?) tech startups are like that now. After all, the investors don't care about creating profitable companies - they just want to make money, which they're positioned to do in many ways. One of them is to help create profitable companies. Another is to help grow companies to be sold to other companies and/or to the public for maximum value, giving the investors back a large multiple of initial investments, after which... they don't care anymore.
It's like with modern husbandry: you can make money selling milk, eggs and meat by sustainably raising animals living comfortable lives, but you can make more money by sticking them in cages, pumping them up with antibiotics and optimized fodder, to maximize production rates and minimize costs. The two approaches are inherently incompatible with each other. And I dare to say, modern startup ecosystem kind of entered the era of "factory farming" some time ago now.
Aiming to build a company to be bought by Microsoft or whoever is still aiming to be profitable, the product is simply the company’s assets (IP, customer list, etc).
It’s unsustainable in that the profit is a one time event, but that doesn’t mean you’re not to turn cash into something worth more than what you spent and then sell that thing.
Cooking books and falsifying projections is fraud.
Asking for investments with a clear disclaimer that the goal is a social good that won’t be profitable? If that’s fraud, then every major arts institution everywhere is guilty.
There is a reason we usually use the word donation in that context. And don’t call it investments. As those tend to be associated with an expectation to be paid back times x.
If you want money to provide a social good without the expectation that the money will be paid back, you're asking for a donation. You can also ask for money as a loan, fee for service, etc.
But an actual investment isn’t “investing in our community” it’s asking for money in exchange for to potential to gain more money etc.
The cost of putting a single car and driver-for-hire on the streets is a handful of dollars, so it's easy to do many of them at a loss. The cost of putting a single instance of a new airplane design of this scale into the air with even a single paying passenger is in the range of billions if not tens-of-billions of dollars.
This is not even remotely comparable.
But just for comparison, Aérospatiale and BAC actually built a real supersonic plane (Concorde) and managed to fly and operate that plane for decades. It's hard to find much measurable impact on the world at all. What do you propose would be different here, given that the discussion is already presuming a world in which they haven't succeeded economically?
if your only measure of success is monetary profit, then sure. i think that shouldn't be the only metric, and in fact, the focus on that so completely is a big part of the problem with what people term "late-stage capitalism"
I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either.
(I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)
I’ve been one of the skeptical commenters (under another username), not because I think it’s technically impossible, or because I hate innovation or bold bets, but because I don’t think the economics make sense, and their original timelines and cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude, at least. Aviation is littered with startups that burned through hundreds of millions over the course of a decade or two and then disappeared.
And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel, and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they’ve only accomplished the easiest part of what they need to accomplish in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights. Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before they’re going to reach the finish line.
Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards.
And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.
For companies with executives that travel a lot (visiting different offices or store locations or lots of in-person client visits across the country) it might be literally saving them money. And even if it doesn't save them money, the prestige and the fact that the people who approve the purchase are the same people who get to use it help justify the cost
Lots of companies have execs who do those things that still don't fly private jets today and may not even have execs who always fly business class unless they have the status to routinely get upgraded. Certainly no company I've ever worked for and I've worked for some pretty large ones.
Honestly if that is all they are hoping for, I sincerely hope they fail spectacularly. The world is unequal as it is and I certainly don’t want the rich flexing their wealth with vanity like this, especially not considering the climate cost of all this, and the fact that we are already in a climate catastrophe that is disproportionately caused by the rich while harming the poor.
Even if (a big if) Boom can come out with a supersonic passenger jet that is economically viable, you can be pretty certain it will be for people who routinely buy business/first tickets (or fly Netjets/other private) today.
Or $50 anyway. I have used miles to upgrade trans-Pacific and reluctantly even paid a few hundred $ co-pay out-of-pocket if I couldn't expense it. But I agree with your basic point. I'm almost certainly not going pay a few thousand extra even for a long flight out of pocket. I could but my money is limited and there are a lot better experiences I could purchase with $5K.
Taken from the first doubtful comment I found in the post you linked.
"Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety."
Many of the comments related to Boom about them not being able to do what they say are about the timeframes they give. I know I've commented on their unrealistic dates before and likely will again. In 2016 they said they would be flying it in 2017-2018. And they did in fact completely fail to do that as the above commenter predicted. Unless you are saying being off about your schedule by 7 years is achieving your goal?
They say they will be flying their passenger aircraft in 2030. I invite anyone that reads this to check back then and see how they're doing. I can tell you right now though, you are not going to be able to buy a ticket.
You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years.
Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.
Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.
Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them).
If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.
Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number.
The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed.
It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance.
Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison.
Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
"Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.
Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted.
Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison.
LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
I don't think you fully appreciate the number of obstacles in the way of new entrants building commerically-operable airplanes. Flying a supersonic prototype is amazing. But it is a depressingly-small amount of the overall work necessary to simply start taking passengers, much less make something economical, and even less to make something succeed.
Yes, I'm fully aware the market for building commercial jets is probably one of the most locked-down on the planet.
But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail.
Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?
I hope they succeed! It’s not throwing rocks at them to point out the obscene numbers of and size of obstacles they need to overcome to others on the sidelines who seem to think that this is anything more than a very, very early step along the way of a still-unlikely future product.
Yes! Where did enthusiasm go in this world? It's easy to be a critic but when blanket pessimism is the default answer its very tiresome reading the comments.
This is one of the precious little gifts of living in the future. You get to see what (some) people want to achieve and a few actually make this. It's literally people turning their time and resources into magic. Sure, most of the time they fail and you never hear of them again, but the few that can make something that seems virtually impossible happen are a living standard.
To me, life is a sand box. And my dream is that it would be the reality for everyone.
I have been very critical because the environmental impact of possibly affordable supersonic flight is very concerning. The fuel usage per airplane should be much higher than conventional flights (due to extra drag and extra km flown per day), and they want to have 1000 airpalnes of those one day.
Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight.
Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering.
Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad.
Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :)
Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.