Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes | Hacker News Reader

Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

boom.aero

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Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly.

Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.

How does the environmental impact per passenger compare to a modern passenger jet?

Do you actually think most anyone can afford $5000 round trip to London?

We have the same gas mileage (fuel per seat mile) as a lay-flat bed in business class. Since the aircraft can do nearly 3X as many trips in the same time, on net it's better.

That's just the start of course—with more innovation on fuel efficiency the price and emissions both come down.

$5,000 is what a business class ticket NY/London costs today, and many business travelers are able to do that routinely. This compares to up to $20k on Concorde.

We will get the $5,000 way down over time—this is just the start.

What is the biggest line item in your costs? Fuel?

Developing an airplane, I would guess.

I heard it was the little bags of peanuts :P

I meant operating costs.

Yes, fuel is the major operating cost of an airliner...

Similarly, for a jet engine, the fuel burned in it accounts for 99% of the environmental impact.

"Since the aircraft can do nearly 3X as many trips in the same time"

Isn't that a bit optimistic? I would think it's closer to 2X. 2.6 times the airspeed, but why would turnaround time at the airport be any lower than for a comparably modern 'slow' airplane?

For example, 6 hour flight plus 1 hour turnaround time versus 2.3 hours plus 1 hour turnaround time is more or less a factor of 2. For longer flights, the ratio goes up a bit, but getting it over 2.5? I doubt it, at "the 2.6 times as fast as a typical passenger jet" level.

Boarding should be faster, since it's only 40 seats and, ostensibly, roomier.

Same would apply to an all business class lay-flat flight.

> Do you actually think most anyone can afford $5000 round trip to London?

I'm genuinely curious where you got "most anyone" from their marketing copy. I read it as "affordable for people flying business class," but that might be because I was thinking in the context of Concorde pricing.

Edit: Derp, totally glossed over that part of the parent comment.

> Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly

From the original comment.

$5,000 isn't an "everyone every time" price, of course. But it's low enough for routine business travel. With more innovation (this is just V1!), we can improve fuel economy and reduce prices further.

Wasn't the V1 subsonic and V2 supersonic? Sorry...

> Do you actually think most anyone can afford $5000 round trip to London?

$5k is fairly standard for a first class ticket purchased a few weeks out. It's also much cheaper than a private jet and would yield the same, or similar, or possibly better results.

Here's another interesting subtle side effect. People on this plane would see it as an exclusive networking "club".

I can easily see finance professionals and executives loving this the whole concept.

Is SFO-NYC a feasible route for Boom?

Unfortunately, there's a ban on supersonic travel over land in the US since the 1970s. When this is reversed, we can fly SFO-JFK in about 2:20.

What's the regulatory situation in countries other than the US? Europe, Asia, Canada, Mexico, South America?

It's complicated and unclear, unfortunately. We'll have to see how things unfold when the airplanes are flying.

Might be an idea to spend a little more time on that.

The engineering is not the hard part here.

Without regulatory support and approval you don't have a product or a market, so "Let's worry about that after we get the prototype working" may not be a fully viable strategy.

Would it make sense for you to fly West from SFO, turn around, go super-sonic over the ocean and fly towards NY — then again, decelerate over the Atlantic, and turn back?

i.e. what is the distance from the shore you can boom?

Sonic booms are continuous while going faster than the speed of sound. It isn't just something that happens when you cross the barrier.

... Sonic booms happen anytime you're going supersonic speeds, it's not limited to when you cross the boundary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom

Everywhere the plane is supersonic, it emits the boom. Your question implies that the only boom is when you "go super-sonic."

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/68354/is-a-sonic-...

Would a Mach 1 plane hear a boom if overtaken by a Mach 3 plane?

http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/17243/does-a-mac...

I understand why you got downvoted, but I don't think the question was actually repellant. If it were at the top of the thread it would be annoying but here I find it a fun thought experiment.

Didn’t get down-voted overall so fine on that end.

I actually never though of the existence of a continuous cone of focus outside of the plane — the graph I had seen were all focused on the whether the plane heard it.

I guess an alternative option would be to find routes above the polar circle, or through the narrow of Central america — but the increased distance would make it less interesting at “just” Mach 2.2.

The sonic boom isn't created when the aircraft transitions through the speed of sound. Although I never hear it explained this way, I believe it is caused when the velocity of the aircraft with respect to the listener transitions the speed of sound. That's when the sound waves approaching the listener bunch up and cause the boom.

When the aircraft is directly above a listener on the ground, the relative velocity is zero, so you can see how the velocity changes from greater-than-sound to less-than-sound (twice) as the aircraft is approaching and then departing with respect to the listener. Thus the listener hears 2 booms.

The boom is usually explained in terms of shock waves emanating from the aircraft, but I think my description explains the phenomenon just as well, but more intuitively.

slight correction to the above: there is no second boom heard by the listener when the aircraft is flying away from the listener faster than the speed of sound. The listener the would simply hear no sound.

As others have said, the boom is continuous. However, what you could (and presumably would) do is gain altitude at sub-sonic speed, then go supersonic only once cruising altitude is reached. That should help with volume. Also presumably they would avoid flying over major population centers.

Is the boom attenuated by flying through much less dense air?

Possibly! Certainly if the plane was traveling in a vacuum it would produce no boom, so one would assume that the boom would be reduced as the air became less dense. However my understanding is that most of the advantage from altitude comes from the attenuation (or really spreading out) of sound with the square of distance.

Since hearing response is logarithmic, the inverse square law probably isn't as helpful as you'd expect.

Exciting work! I'd be glad if supersonic flight was a reality again.

How do you plan to tackle the challenge of opposition to supersonic flight? Overland supersonic flight has been banned in US and Europe because the loud noise of sonic booms annoyed residents that the planes flew over. Coastal residents continued to object to supersonic flight. Is there a path to offering transcontinental flights again, and if not, will the program be viable with only trans-oceanic flights? (I notice NYC/London highlighted in the marketing materials)

Alternatively, is there a viable way to make supersonic flight quiet enough to fly overland? (That would be a game changer!)

Thanks! We are very excited to be doing this.

We're starting out focused on long flights that are mostly over water, like New York - London or San Francisco - Shanghai.

Around an airport, our airplane will be about as quiet as other new aircraft. The sonic boom will also be much quieter—and we'll continue to make future iterations even quieter. It's hard to say exactly when, but I expect the supersonic overland ban will be reversed in the coming years.

> It's hard to say exactly when, but I expect the supersonic overland ban will be reversed in the coming years.

Can you elaborate on this? Is there a significant lobbying effort for this or is it something the FAA is considering of their own volition, to stimulate activity in this area?

NASA Ames has been doing some great research (in the bay area no less) on boomless supersonic crafts. There are basically two strategies: either modify the fuselage to disrupt the boom wavefront, or redirect the wavefront by going supersonic at a nontraditional attack angle. Both work.

is SYD -> SFO too far?

Curious about next steps once you've built the plane. It seems that you're core mission is commingled somewhere between "building Concorde 2.0" and "offering incredibly fast trans-ocean travel."

Many personal questions that you can ignore at your leisure:

Do you plan on operating an airline? If not, will you work with GECAS and/or ILFC directly or offer vendor financing? Are you open to partnering with an unconventional such as Virgin, Southwest to build out their international capacity, or a startup airline? It would be amusing (in a good way) to see Ohanian leverage his experience in travel at Hipmunk into operating a fleet of your jets.

Your idea is amazing and I have complete confidence in your ability to build a ridiculously fast jet. Looking forward to seeing your next steps in putting passengers in seats!

Nostalgia... In the 70s I lived in a London suburb that was under one of the approach paths to Heathrow, and could always tell when Concorde was passing over on final. Its sound was many decibels above a 747 and had a harsh, rock-crushing quality.

Indeed. I lived in Reading from 79-82 and remember that school essentially paused everytime that Concorde passed overhead because you couldn't hear anything that was being said in the classroom for a couple of minutes

I thought it was used because they didn't want the brits and french to have the market for these planes.

Obviously, shortening an international flight provides the highest value for your first major route. How well can this scale down to domestic flights? Turning a 3-4 hour flight into a 60-90 minute flight, or a 90 minute flight into a 30 minute flight, appeals quite a bit.

EDIT: your answer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330935 applies here.

Do you have concrete plans to change those regulations? Do you have solutions for the problems addressed by those regulations (e.g. noise)? Will this scale down well if you have to reach a certain altitude first?

Supersonics help most on long international flights. So that's the first focus. San Francisco - Los Angeles, so much time is spent on takeoff and landing that faster cruise doesn't help much. Hyperloop, self driving cars can help with these shorter trips.

As far as regulations, our first aircraft is much quieter than Concorde, and it will get quieter with future iterations. Altitude helps, but quieting the boom is mostly about nuances of aircraft shape.

Eventually, when you can get from San Fran to Tokyo faster than San Fran to New York, the rules will get updated.

> a 90 minute flight into a 30 minute flight, appeals quite a bit.

It does appeal, but then you have to factor in the travel to and from the airports on both ends, and various additional inherent delays.

I'm curious, since you posted a route and a ticket price: Will you be operating Boom as a new airline, or do you plan to sell your plane to other airlines?

We're teaming with existing and new airlines to bring aircraft into service.

Posted ticket prices are based on what's profitable for airlines with the efficiency and performance of the airplane. Airlines will set the final prices, but we hope they will make tickets as affordable as possible!

I wish I could share your hope.

Good luck to you - this is a really exciting idea and one that I think we need!

Thank you! It's an idea whose time has come...

For the price you quoted, what will the seating situation be? Comparable to existing international coach, or somewhere between coach and business class? Do you have approximate seating charts and spacing?

Will that vary by airline, or do you plan to standardize it?

We're baselining an experience better than domestic first class. One seat on each side of aisle, so everyone gets a window and aisle. There's more footroom and more headroom than the typical first class on a 737 or A320.

But this is something airlines can customize.

Ah, I see; it wasn't obvious from the pictures on your site that the plane is significantly smaller, closer to commuter-jet sized than 747-sized.

What's the total plane seat capacity?

In case you didn't see earlier comments, they said it was 40 seats.

Why do you think that other established players haven't entered this space (i.e. Boeing, etc)?

There's a lot of scorched earth in supersonics, since Concorde wasn't an economic success and the Boeing SST project was cancelled.

Since then, there has been research on 300 seat Mach 2.4-Mach 3 vehicles, but these are extremely challenging.

To make this happen and happen soon, you have to start much smaller than the established players usually consider. We're at 40 seats—that's the minimum economic size. Supersonics are hard, so it pays to start as small as you can and scale up over time.

I had always thought that the small size of the Concorde was what made the per seat cost so expensive and held the Concorde back economically. So my expectation was that to be economically successful, you'd have to build a supersonic plane that carried more people.

Clearly you know more about this than me, but can you elaborate on why my view isn't correct?

Actually, Concorde was too big: 100 seats. It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes. Which means you can't have many airplanes, which means no economies of scale.

With 40 seats and business class prices, the Boom airplane works on many more routes, which means we can make a lot of airplanes and enjoy economies of scale.

Looking into the future, as fuel efficiency further improves, per seat costs come down, and it will make sense to make ever larger aircraft. It's a virtuous cycle that will eventually allow supersonic flight at economy prices.

> It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes.

Your price is way off.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

It looks as if the Concorde was roughly $5K each way (or $10K RT) +/- in today's dollars--although I'm not sure a standard CPI inflation calculator is the best way to look at airline ticket price changes.

Given the existence of business class only BA NY to City of London flights, there probably is a market for expensive supersonic routes, but it's probably still pretty small. International lawyers may value the back and forth in a day, but most people who fly business/first are probably fine with comfortable seating and a nice meal even if it takes a bit longer.

From the link: "In the late 1990s I paid $11,000US each for several round trips."

That's about $16k when accounting for inflation, so $20k isn't too far off.

Without qualification, I'd assume they were quoting historical prices. It would be pretty confusing to present any kind of adjusted figures without clarifying them.

Thanks for explaining that, I had never looked at it that way. And good luck to your venture.

Nobody wants to be first in this space. Because of the fuel costs of supersonic travel (the flow is inherently dissipative above Mach 1), the margins are too tight for anything but business class travel. As soon as you have a supersonic option, you've moved business class out of your subsonic fleet, along with that revenue. With the loss of the effective subsidy of business class, coach costs go up, and the market shrinks due to elasticity of demand.

That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.

>Nobody wants to be first in this space.

Yeah, there already was a first in this space, and it went down in flames.

One major crash, at an airline with serious maintenance issues. The final cancellation was supposedly on economic grounds but politics factored into it (I have heard it claimed that AF deliberately overstated maintenance costs to prevent BA from continuing to operate Concorde).

> That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.

Honestly, I'm not even convinced that bit's true. Copying what others are doing is often the least effective way of competing. If supersonic premium carriers actually start eating into your business class demand, the sensible, conservative response is to refit your existing transatlantic fleet with more economy seats, refocus it on new routes or consider shedding an aircraft or two. You lose a stream of profit and a touch of prestige, but don't gain the problem of having to profitably operate new aircraft specialised for a highly volatile market segment. Especially when it's a new airframe programme from a no-name manufacturer.

To be honest, in a hypothetical and unlikely near future in which business class priced supersonic transport exists, subsonic premium services will happily coexist alongside them due to better start times, destinations and connections, even on the few routes actually suited for supersonic transport. But yes, there might be fewer flights and higher coach class ticket prices on a handful of routes.

For the most part major airlines didn't benefit from trying to cannibalise part of their existing business to copy [reliably profitable] low cost carriers, and they'll do just fine without the riskier option of supersonic medium haul all-premium flights.

I think (and I've spoken with considerably more commercial airline fleet planners than the average person) the sales challenge with this concept is even bigger than the engineering challenge, which is saying something.

One word: risk!

If there are only two equally large competitors left in the market you won't get radical innovation.

Even "conventional" programs like the 787 and the A350 had big problems because they tried out new things. If you screw up a big program, you may loose lot of 50% market share for the next two decades.

How many of these would you need to sell (or operate) to recover the development costs?

What will your pilots do, just as a for instance, if ... say a lone Cessna asks tower for his ground speed ... and then a bit later a navy F-18 pilot also asks tower for his ground speed ?

What will they do in that situation ?

Hilarious context, for those who haven't read it yet: http://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912704...

Oh man what hilarious story! Thanks for posting it.

i think that depends on how badass the copilot is

Brian Shul is a steely-eyed missile man. :-)

Nitpick: Walt Watson is the back-seater in question — Brian Shul was just the guy on the stick (and the author of the story, of course).

specially if the F-18 pilot is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is.

I've read and re-read that story so many times, each reading results in a fresh batch of goosebumps. I'd love to read the book (Sled Driver, I think?), but it is over $500 on Amazon. I wish they either ordered another print OR published as an ebook.

There is an ebook version floating around the internet.

Yikes! I have two copies, having thought that I'd lost mine years ago -- bought a new one -- then found the original again.

Are you interested in selling one of them? If so I promise to give it a very good home, I still have books from my childhood in great condition.

Someone emailed me a pdf (thank you!) but I'd love to be able to have a physical copy too.

If you feel like parting with one it would be cool to consider the pilot who posted the story (as he's lamenting that it's too expensive) :D

Elon Musk says that eventually we will move to VTOL supersonic electric jets, but he is too busy with other projects to implement it.

Have you thought about this idea, and in what time frame do you think someone might try to implement it?

Elon's basic idea is that air-breathing jets are limited to altitudes at which oxygen tops out, and then are mostly fighting drag from nitrogen. Electric ones can go to higher altitudes and experience less drag at much higher speeds. However wings designed to do that won't help you get off the ground, therefore you need vertical take off and landing. Which eliminates the need for a large airport, allowing you to locate more conveniently to major cities.

The specific energy of kerosene is ~40 MJ/kg [0] while the specific energy of lithium ion batteries is ~1 MJ/kg [1].

Unsure how much energy you'd save from the difference in drag, but I'd guess that significant improvements in electric energy storage would be required to make an electric plane doable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene#Properties [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery

exactly

And yet Musk claims transcontinental range (NY-LA) would be possible with 400 Wh/kg batteries and mid-70% battery mass fraction.

http://www.aviation.com/general-aviation/elon-musk-toying-de...

A 70% battery mass fraction seems like a huge engineering challenge for an aircraft. I did a quick calculation of fuel mass fraction for the various Boeing 777 models [0] which ranged from ~13% to ~36%.

Not saying it's impossible. Just hard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Specifications

I don't see that the engineering is hard. You could just take an existing design and replace most of the cabin with batteries.

Building an economically viable mass-market aircraft with a 70% mass fraction might be another question, but if we're just talking about the engineering challenge of building it at all I don't think that's hard?

And on top of that, "refueling" wouldn't cost the 250k figure that usually gets thrown in comments. I imagine it being more in the space of a 1-2k$ ; in which case the reduced passenger capacity might still be worth the premium in batteries.

Plus a conventional airplane sheds weight as it travels.

Nothing that recoverable drop-tank batteries can't solve. I'm mostly kidding.

Refueling via amazon drone?

To be fair to our electric friends, electric motors are >90% efficient while turbofans top out at somewhere near 35% efficiency (as far as I can find).. So what appears to be a 40:1 advantage to kerosene is more like a 15:1 advantage -- substantial but much more accessible with ongoing battery improvements. Though as another commenter mentioned, fuel planes do definitely benefit from shedding weight the entire time they're moving.

A jet engine (e.g. turbofan) relies on combustion in the engine in order to function. The ignition of the fuel from within the engine is key… it is not just there to just create energy to drive rotational force. You would you use an electric motor on a plane without going back to what is essentially a propeller design?

An engine is just a mechanism for converting stored energy into forward motion - the details are, well, details. There's nothing wrong with propellers (probably impellers will be more efficient), and those efficiency numbers are (presumably) including that.

No, the details are completely critical to making it work!

I'm kind of surprised that Elon Musk, who clearly knows his stuff in rocketry, is handwaving the difficulties of an electric jet. Personally I see it as far more likely that we'll continue to use conventional aircraft but start synthesising fuel from renewable energy. The US Navy is already looking at doing this to make jet fuel from spare carrier nuclear power:

http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2014/nrl-fuel-fr...

You can get supersonic by having air intake, expansion chamber, blade, high pressure chamber, exhaust port.

Think something like this: <=|=>

Importantly the air flows through the compression chamber at Subsonic speeds.

PS: While simplified this is the general approach for low mach speeds as burning stuff in a supersonic combustion chamber is much more difficult.

Actually, a good 80% of a modern airliner's thrust comes from the huge fan in front of the engine.

A turbine after the combustion chamber steals some of the energy to move the compressor and the fan. Most of the air (>90%) just goes through the fan and bypasses the engine. You could argue that these engines are _already_ cleverly camouflaged propellers :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbofan https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-a-jet-engines-thrust-is-de...

To be fair, you can manufacture kerosene from renewable electricity. If you use carbon from the atmosphere, it's even completely carbon neutral. Think of it as a less cost efficient, but more energy dense battery. I kind of doubt that batteries are the way to go when energy density matters.

Specific energy of hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg. Why not a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric jet?

Because hydrogen is very hard to store in any reasonable size or shape, and that's even without focusing on the inefficiency of generating it.

Ammonia doesn't have this or several of the other drawbacks of hydrogen, but is otherwise equivalent.

Drag on a bigger airframe.

Unfortunately, aerospace is a place where energy density really really matters. If your car's battery weighs twice as much as equivalent hydrocarbon fuel, that will decrease your range, but probably won't affect your performance or total energy usage all that much.

For planes, however, using a more environmentally-friendly but heavier energy storage medium is self-defeating, because you have to spend a lot more energy lifting the extra energy-storage weight. Unfortunate, but it is what it is.

schwarrrtz and azernik nailed it.

Today's batteries don't store enough energy for long international flights. There are some battery technologies in the lab (Google Lithium-air batteries) that might make this feasible, but they're not ready yet. Yet alone proven safe to carry passengers.

As fans of speed, we want to bring supersonics to market as quickly as possible. So, we're only using core technologies that have flown on other airplanes and are accepted by regulators.

There's plenty of opportunity for radical innovation in V2 and V3 once V1 is working!

Batteries do make sense on aircraft in place of APUs for backup and start and such, of course, just not thrust.

Yeah but you are getting 50:1 difference in energy density between hydrocarbon fuel and battery. Also, vertical takeoff is extremely inefficient because a wing can generate a lot of lift compared to drag. this in addition to the fact that a vertical lift system is only used during take off and landing while being dead weight the rest of the trip.

even elon can't override physics

The big power requirement of VTOL is not the problem in the overall energy budget because the hovering time is very short compared to the total flight time. Main problem is the additional weight of the more powerful engines.

BUT: If you want to fly supersonic, you need very powerful engines anyways, so if you can re-use them for VTOL it's a win win.

To fly supersonic you need an engine that is very powerful at supersonic speed.

VTOL requires an engine that is powerful at low speed.

The harrier jump jet, a most famous VTOL aircraft, didn't have supersonic capability when all its contemporaries did and can only take off vertically with reduced payload or it would burn all its fuel just taking off.

While I don't have the numbers I think VTOL supersonic aircraft would be VERY hard indeed and it would be something that has to be seen to be believed.

The F35-B is both supersonic and VSTOL [1]: very hard indeed, but done. Just like the Harrier, the F35-B probably doesn't take off vertically with any significant payload though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

The F-35-B has essentially two different types of engine (the main engines and the lift fan) to make that work.

What type of intake design are you using? Comparable to the F-22A fixed square intakes?

Are you using current turbofan engines (GE F110?) or something exotic?

Really good questions. We aren't sharing the details of the technical design quite yet (but will have more to say as we approach first flight).

Regarding engines: our first prototype (1/3 scale) flies with an off-the-shelf GE engine. For the product airplane, we're taking an existing subsonic engine and adapting it for supersonic flight. (Sorry, I know that's vague—much more to say about this in due time.)

How are you reducing the boom? Are you widening part of the forebody to increase the local air temp & mach no to weaken the shock? What about redirecting the shock?

Sonic boom physics are subtle and counter-intuitive. High level, you: (1) keep the airplane as small and light as possible (reduces total shock energy) (2) carefully shape the fuselage and wings, so the shocks don't combine as strongly

NASA and Boeing have a design that has the engines on the upper part of the wings saying it reflects most of the boom upward. (see ninth paragraph) https://www.nasa.gov/aero/centers_tackle_sonic_boom.html

It's such a silly thing, but I love the name.

Thanks! :-)

I wonder if you should just sell exclusivity per company.

Imagine if Goldman Sachs were the only bank in NYC with supersonic transport for staff and customers for 5-10y. That might be worth more to them than $5k per seat on every flight. Maybe also to a law firm. Etc.

Exclusivity within a vertical is worth huge practical and status advantages.

TBH we really don't want to lock people out. I was disappointed that I never got to fly Concorde, not even once, and we want to open this to everyone (eventually make it routine).

Thank you for that.

That's awesome, but if the GP strategy has a good enough chance of helping you get to your goal sooner than otherwise, totally go for it.

Who are your investors?

Given that sonic booms are one of the main reasons the Concorde didn't work, is calling your company "Boom" the best idea? Half-kidding.

Having said that, I'm a huge Concorde fanboy, and I really hope you guys can make affordable supersonic travel a reality!

Also given the association that "boom" has with explosions, a very bold name choice.

i am also perplexed

I am not even slightly perplexed. It's a great name and great mission and I wish them well.

Thank you!

Wasn't one of the issues with Concorde that is was just too expensive as well, in terms of running it (from a fuel stand point) and maintenance?

Notwithstanding the accidents.

How instrumental was YC in the development of Boom (money/advice wise)?

YC has been awesome and supportive in so many ways, far beyond money. 5 stars, would do again!! :-)

What's your opinion on the Skylon engine? http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html

I'm very curious about this too.

1. How much money do you need to get to first flight?

2. How much money do you have?

Or more accurately: How many cargo containers full of money do you have?

Honest / naive question. How do you even start an aerospace company "in your basement"?

Blueprints, math, models.

Or start by building a small plane, which you can do in a (large) basement.

It's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan

Terrific premise; I hope you succeed. But advice:

1. "boom" is not the right name. Explosions. Annoying/scary sonic boom. These are not the associations you're looking for. Try "glide," "zip"—something along those lines.

2. In your very first team picture I see a grumpy-looking fellow with hands in pockets. A few images on he's still there, now joined by another grump with crossed arms. These people look disengaged and/or disgruntled. Call me shallow, but it just doesn't look right for a team supposedly revolutionizing aviation. Ask your team to look engaged when taking PR photos. Or if there's a deeper attitude/team dynamics issue there, man fix it now. I don't want my life "booming" into oblivion because some guy was fed up.

> "boom" is not the right name. Explosions. Annoying/scary sonic boom. These are not the associations you're looking for. Try "glide," "zip"—something along those lines.

I'd have to disagree. The way I associate these words causes me to think of something "revolutionary" when I hear "boom". i.e., it's shaking up the market. Contrary to that, "glide" and "zip" (I know these are just examples) sound more soothing and definitely not attention-grabbing. If the aim of the company were to provide luxurious flight, then maybe that would be fitting. But as I see it, the company really does mean to shake things up, in which case their name is already fitting.

Obviously, everyone has their own opinions, but I thought sharing an opposing perspective would be useful in showing that it's definitely not a one-sided topic.

Please do not tell people what to do. Its a waste of bandwidth. Thank you.

Upvoted for irony.

>2. In your very first team picture I see a grumpy-looking fellow with hands in pockets. A few images on he's still there, now joined by another grump with crossed arms. These people look disengaged and/or disgruntled. Call me shallow, but it just doesn't look right for a team supposedly revolutionizing aviation. Ask your team to look engaged when taking PR photos. Or if there's a deeper attitude/team dynamics issue there, man fix it now. I don't want my life "booming" into oblivion because some guy was fed up.

I too have found that grumpiness and negativity are so toxic, counterproductive, and worse than useless that they are up there in terms of dealbreakers.

Im thrilled to see something like this taking flight, congrats!

I have two questions:

1) Can you tell us about your start-up process? Aside from your all-star team, I can't even imagine how you could have brought this to reality. I can't even imagine how much capital and space a prototype would have taken. At what point did you decide that it was time to apply to YC? Were there other investors? How much design work did you have completed/prototyped when you starting talking to investors? (sorry I know this is 5 questions)

2) Are you hiring?

Great idea. The airline industry needs innovation around product and service to get out of it's current race to mediocrity.

2 questions:

1) Why 2.2 times the speed of sound? (Why not aim higher?)

2) Where will you get the capital? Seems like a very big ask compared to the typical company coming out of YC.

Again - good luck! I would love to clip 4 hours from the SF to NYC flight.

Speed: Mach 2.2 is the fastest speed possible with known technology already accepted by the FAA. At that speed, you can have good takeoff performance (and comply with airport noise restrictions) and good cruise performance. We'd to build a faster V2 or V3, in due time.

Capital: I can't comment quite yet. (Sorry)

Peter Theil regularly uses lack of aerospace innovation as a yardstick for slowing progress in Technology all the time[0].

He'd pretty much have to at least take the meeting.

[0] One example is the end of the future oped he wrote. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/278758/end-future-pete...

Okay, I'm assuming you can comment now, but we already know.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346947

SF to NYC seems unlikely; the sonic booms from the transition between subsonic and supersonic are disruptive enough that they're essentially banned over land areas.

Edit: I'm informed by other comments that the boom occurs the entire time you're supersonic, not just during the transition. That makes it even worse.

Interesting. I assumed there could be an engineering way around the boom, but it's not my specialty. I'll have to settle for easier access to Honolulu and Tokyo. :-)

As I've read through the thread, I see that there are efforts to make the boom quieter. Physics won't allow it to ever go away completely, but the hope is that it might be taken down to an acceptable level so that the laws banning overland supersonic flight could be retired. Laws don't change easily though, especially when there are entrenched airlines who would not welcome any new competition - they'll be lobbying against it for sure. I wouldn't be in line for a ticket just yet.

What are you looking to build from scratch vs OTS? Anything interesting in the avionics dept?

From the Bloomberg article: "Boom’s software can also run millions of computer simulations a day on its designs, so the startup doesn’t have to spend months tweaking things in wind tunnels."

Can you elaborate what computer simulations this is referring to?

There's computational fluid dynamics—which are very good today especially at supersonic conditions. Also, we have some design optimization tools we've built in-house which let us quickly explore many alternatives and zero-in on the best design.

Are there other areas you or other readers can think of in which a technology that was previously available or in use went away entirely with no replacement?

Lots of questions here:

What are your goals/timelines with regards to funding (Very different than SAAS)? For a new plane won't you need hundreds of millions of dollars before you even get a prototype flying?

Why haven't Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup built a plane to fly supersonic ?

Is the execution of building a new plane or patents going to be your path to success ?

Wasn't Warren Buffet investing in this space a few years back ?

This is so exciting. When I was younger, one of my big to-do list items was to someday ride on the Concorde. That dream is no longer possible, but flying on one of your planes might be!

I was amazed to see the regression in flight technology from cancelling the only supersonic passenger plane without a successor. Glad to see someone taking up the reins.

Wasn't the problem that made the Concorde uneconomical fuel prices? While a barrel of oil is currently trading at around $41, I don't think many economists believe that this is a long term trend, and expect prices to rise back to around $80 - $100. Isn't this a strategic problem?

What about CO2 emissions?

Are CO2 emissions really a concern? If 5000 of these planes were flying, as a proportion of global CO2, it would be undetectable if they reduced the plane's emissions by 50%. Then you'd have the argument of how much of that CO2 had any measurable effect on climate -- and that would assume that effect was deleterious. A lot of assumptions to bet a revolutionary aircraft design upon.

Adding CO2 reduction engineering to an already difficult project means less resources available to actually get the thing to work.

Imagine if The Apollo program had to worry about CO2 emissions on top of just trying to get a rocket to launch.

You also could argue some economy of scale efficiencies. If one flight on this plane caused just 3 passengers to forego a private jet trip for the same distance, you'd save 3 private jet's worth of flights. Given the time savings, this project would certainly disrupt a segment of the private jet market.

A 777 burns 1680 gallons per hour with 365 maximum passengers. A Gulfstream G650 burns about 865 gallons per hour.. holding a max of 18 passengers. So the G650 is burning 48 gallons per hour, per passenger while the 777 is doing 4.6 gallons per hour per passenger. We're assuming fully loaded for comparison but we all know that a G650 is rarely flying a 18 pax capacity, generally it's in an 11 seat configuration.

So as you can see, even if the fuel efficiency were half of a 777, it would still be a massive efficiency compared to a G650 and thus a net gain for those concerned about CO2.

If 1969 the planet would have been at stake because of CO2, it would have been better to not fly to the moon but rather use the resources to save the planet.

Why do you bother having pilots on board? Why not have the majority of the flight directed automatically, perhaps assisted by a ground manager dealing with several planes at once?

Savvy passengers might value someone with "skin in the game".

I think you may mean "naive passengers will be reassured by two men in suits". Savvy passengers would know how pilot error is the main cause of crashes.

That will be a fair statement once there are any commercial (or general aviation!) passenger flights for which all flight operations take place without human intervention. We don't live in that world yet. Saddling an already risky endeavor with the additional risk of having to invent a completely new class of control software is really too much to ask.

If you think this will be easy, why not just start by outfitting e.g. simple four-passenger Cessnas with your amazing new software that obviates pilots? There's got to be a market there, for something that works. Then when you've got that handled, move up to bigger and faster planes.

Hence why I said "ground manager dealing with several planes at once".

So this is like USAF's drone guys in mobile homes out in the Nevada desert? One notes that they don't handle aircraft with passengers either. Your idea isn't bad in general, and someday it will probably be accomplished in some form, but we're not anywhere close to that yet. Independent joint probabilities multiply, so the last thing a highly speculative aircraft needs is a highly speculative pilot arrangement.

Pretty amazing that materials science (lighter, carbon-fiber aircraft; hotter, more efficient/powerful turbines) has made this economic. Concorde never was.

NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.

Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference. I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.

I wonder how long until there's a Business Jet variant of this, or a Government/Military/Scientific version -- the operating costs of commercial aircraft tend to be much less than purpose-built government aircraft, so there's probably a mission/role for it.

The issue with it is that supersonic flight (due to noise) is only allowed over non-populated areas so a business jet variant is less useful unless you spend most of your time flying over the ocean (and not coast-to-coast for instance).

Yeah, it's also super inefficient/cramped/etc. compared to a G650/BBJ/etc, so it would only really make sense as a "second" business jet in a corp/personal/royal fleet, or, more likely, part of a fleet somewhere like NetJets. It's the "entire aircraft, on demand" part on a mostly finite set of routes, not the "fly anywhere you want", with this.

> The issue with it is that supersonic flight (due to noise)

Actually it's with the technology currently in use with supersonic flight that there is this large amount of noise. It's technically possible to reach supersonic without the boom and NASA is currently working on it with some contractors. I hope it pans out well; I would love to be able to fly between BWI and SFO in 2 hours.

http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-building-a-jet-that-brea...

If they could make it quiet enough to go over land, transcontinental US flights would be great; LA/NY in 2.5 hours would likely have a pretty high demand.

[edit] As someone who flies LA/DC fairly regularly I do have to mention my favorite record of the SR-71 doing that flight in under 65 minutes.

I wonder if the "no booms over land" rule will always remain in force. When I was a child, the planes from Whiteman AFB broke that rule quite often. It was interesting to hear the boom over the phone when speaking with a school friend who lived say eight miles away, and then immediately hear the whole house shaking when the plane got to my end of the circuit. It would have been annoying at night, I suppose, but during the day it was not a hardship. These military planes made no particular effort to climb to high altitude before breaking the barrier, either. While the area I'm talking about is rural, it's much more heavily populated than are e.g. the Great Plains.

So, I think that high-altitude sparse-population daytime routes could be developed that would admit supersonic flight over much of North America.

You may not have minded your entire house shaking, but most would probably quickly grow to resent such unnecessary disruption.

It's a good way to kick everyone in a large region out of their zone. If this was a constant occurrence, work may quickly cease, or become greatly diminished.

Sure, but these were 1980s-era fighter/trainer jets flying at probably 1000 ft., and it only shook the whole house when they flew pretty close. Other times one might only hear the boom when outside. I think a passenger craft of recent design of recent materials, flying at 40k ft. could do much better, even before routing to avoid populated areas. I don't think anyone, even those who live on ranches in the Dakotas, really has a right not to hear a noise during the daytime.

I could have sworn the Concorde was still glass-breaking loud at 40,000. Reardless, NASA is working on getting rid of the sonic boom http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-building-a-jet-that-brea...

Maybe? I don't think the Concorde ever flew over the Ozarks, or indeed any location in which I found myself while they were still flying.

Boom's Kenrick Waithe worked on that same project when he was at Gulfstream and when he was at NASA.

I used to live under the Concorde flight path near Heathrow. Twice a day there'd be this crackling rumble and all the windows would shake; and this was flying subsonic.

Concorde was really, really loud --- a lot of that was due to being a really old plane with old engines (aircraft have gotten way quieter since the 1970s), but even back then it was considered loud:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3581192.stm

It was exempt from the usual noise regulations and on takeoff it'd set of car alarms in the airport carparks.

I still miss it, despite the noise. I'd hear the noise and look up, and there'd be this beautiful delta-wing shape slipping through the clouds...

I lived under the Concorde flight path near Dulles. I couldn't hear it, but we'd go out side to watch it fly over every now and then.

Modern aircraft are so dull! Efficient, safe, cheap, reliable even, relatively comfortable, but so boring. Even the A380 is a boring, and that's an office block with wings. How can something so incredible be so deadly dull?

...yeah, yeah, I know, being dull is an accomplishment in itself, and the duller aircraft are the better they are, and the one thing that every passenger pilot in the world wants is a thoroughly uninteresting flight. But, dammit, they're still so dull.

I miss Concorde.

A380 passes overhead here every day on final, it is uncanny how it just seems to hang there on account of it being so large that relative to its speed it takes a while to move it's own length. Sure it's still going quite fast but it doesn't seem that it does and this sets of some 'it's going to fall' alarm at the back of my mind. Weirdest feeling.

It's really hard to quiet down Turbojets. Turbofans are much easier, but they don't work well at supersonic speeds.

I don't think people have the right to pollute noise everywhere.

And I do wish humans where mindful about the noise pollution the dump where 'nobody lives'. The noise emitted by shipping vessels is having a harming effect on sea life.

At least one real-world test was conducted about how people acclimate to sonic booms[1] with an eye towards seeing how people would take SST airliners. It didn't go very well. In general, it seems that enough people do think it a hardship to kick up a fuss that will keep SSTs from being a reality over the US for awhile.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests

You're right, it has been awhile since the mid-60s. If we were talking about flying F-104s and B-58s, that would be very relevant information. As I understand it, Boom are developing a new aircraft. They're probably aware of that test and indeed lots of other information about supersonic flight.

This whole "engineering vs physics" question reminds me of the misunderstandings people have of modern radio technology. Yes, in the 1920s they had to divide the spectrum into exclusive-use bands so that any particular use could transmit and receive clearly, but that was a limitation of engineering, not of physics. In the 2010s that is not a limitation we face, in general. Likewise, I expect that with modern materials and engineering software, progress can be made on the sonic boom issue.

I do generally agree with you, but I'm not really talking about engineering or physics, I'm talking about social acceptance.

If - via engineering, physics, magic or whatever - sonic booms can be minimized to the point of being indistinguishable from general background noise (or even only as intrusive as current subsonic airliners), I could be convinced that an SST project has a bright future. Until then, I don't think that they will - your first post mentioned that "the whole house shaking" didn't really seem to be hardship when it happened during the day; I'm merely commenting that there are some studies that indicate society as a whole isn't so accepting.

I used to live near an army training area. There were regular artillery exercises, and the bigger shells would literally shake the walls of the house. The smaller shells just made things fall off shelves.

I think any design that literally goes "boom" over land, even a little, isn't going to work. It's too much of an open legal target.

The design really does need to be damn near silent, or at least closer to a mild and unobjectionable "whomp", to have any hope of commercial success.

I think I've only heard one in my life. It was on surfside beach TX where I lived at the time. I was on a dock and heard a really low thunder sound. I can't say that it was "loud" like it would hurt your ears, but it really rattled everything around me (including my insides). And with that the neighbor's dogs came running over to me with their tails between their legs, and off in the distance I could here a jet really cuttin' through some wind.

The no commercial sonic booms legislation might go away if it were an American company asking for it. I have no doubt that the Concorde being foreign owned helped speed that legislation through Congress.

Of course being a little no-name company won't help matters much here, but I expect that actual production of this would involve a partnership (or probably buyout) with one of the big name companies that have a lot of congressmen on their payroll.

There has also been a lot of research into minimizing Sonic Booms since the 70s. Military jets typically don't care, but passenger jets could definitely benefit.

If they can get supersonic passenger planes flying over the ocean again, they won't be an obscure company anymore.

I've known test pilots who have flown supersonic routes over continental USA at high altitude and had zero complaints. The boom intensity depends on weather conditions. Other times they did get complaints because the boom sounded like gunshots and got reported to the police.

Cruising above 60000 ft the boom from a larger aircraft might be noticed but not be objectionably loud.

I doubt the cost would be low enough to support demand.

Transonic (approximately Mach 0.80 - 1.2) flight uses significantly more fuel than subsonic flight does. Business jets like the Gulfstream G550 burn more fuel at M0.9 than regional Boeing 717(MD-95) at M0.75 with 4 times more passengers.

The F-22 Raptor can supercruise at M1.6, with half the range compared to cruise at M0.85 similar to other fighters.

If Boom can optimize an aircraft for supersonic transport it would still be expensive to operate. For comparison, no US operator has all business class scheduled flights from LA-NY, and British Airways flies their all business class NY-London flights in an VIP A320 series jet that cruises at M0.7 which is slower than most airliners on the route.

The Boeing 747 has one of the lowest cost/passenger mile (CPM) of any aircraft, and cruises at Mach 0.85. Different aircraft have been optimized for different speeds, and while it is true that a supersonic aircraft will likely have a higher fuel cost than a comparable subsonic aircraft, the difference may not be as large as we currently think.

There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.

The 747 efficiency drops off sharply above M0.85 cruise. I remember reading that the VC-25 (747-200 based) 100% thrust cruise speed is around M0.96 with considerable range penalty. The 747-400 has newer engines but pretty close 100% cruise speed. This is above the approved Mmo for the 747 and not authorized operationally.

Test pilots have reported that a Gulfstream G550 airframe can handle supersonic flight, and the BR710 turbofan engines can handle it. The limit is the engine intake design.

With an optimized intake, its entirely possible the fuel consumption at M2.2 would be comparable to ~M0.98

>There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.

that is one of the major issues here. Modern turbofans on large passenger planes like 787, 380, etc... are that efficient in major part because of high by-pass ratio. Which is not really an option for 2Mach+ speed.

As somebody mentioned, more comfortable 0.85Mach flight would be preferable in many situations to uncomfortable and very expensive 2Mach. If i were starting something like this i'd go straight for suborbital SFO to Singapore in under couple hours. Technology-level wise not that different, money is no issue in that segment (Branson's $200K is not that far from super-premium-business class for your priceless CEO) and there is always large money-no-issue fallback customer - military.

That's why the ticket is $5K. Even if your fuel estimates are correct, they will burn 4-5 times more fuel, but they will charge 10 times per ticket compared to economy. I just checked, and you can get $532 roundtrip NYC<->LON.

But a given airplane can carry a lot less people in a business-grade seat than in an economy seat. Also, NYC <-> LON for $500 is the price of only very few seats in a plane.

Yes- due to the time change, heading east from coast to coast is practically a day away as well.

Yeah, flying West to East, more speed wouldn't be a great help. I lose 2 hours getting there, 3 hours in time zones, an hour upon arrival. So red-eyes are the way to go. But if the reverse could be improved, that'd be a big help. I could fly West in the morning, get there the same time as I left, do a days business, and take the red-eye home. All in a day.

> has made this economic.

That remains to be seen. They don't even have an engine yet, so this is still firmly in the "we'll see" category.

Seriously. People here are way underestimating the costs to develop and certify a major commercial airframe, especially across the multiple regulatory regimes inherent to international flight. You're probably talking about on the order of a billion dollars even if you're playing it cheap. If you want to start re-engineering components instead of buying off the shelf, that number will go uphill rapidly.

This is not a field that's amenable to "disruption". Cutting corners means that dozens of people plummet to their deaths, not to mention the abrupt end of your airline as their families sue you into oblivion. If you try to play this like Uber and flout the regulations, the FAA and EAA will ground and impound your gear so fast your head will spin, and rightly so. Even a test aircraft is a gigantic tank full of explosive fuel hurtling through the air on a couple flimsy wings. When things go wrong people die, and the FAA does not play games.

Airlines are an incredibly low-margin business in the best case, and supersonic airliners in particular are a very niche market and have immense operating expenses (to purchase and maintain the airplane and to slake its immense thirst for fuel). The Concorde's operators could never make it profitable.

Never say never, but this just seems like fantasy. Supersonic airliners are a problem domain that has been pored over by engineers for decades, six engineers are not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and solve all the technical problems, then get it certified, then start an airline. Each of those is a problem that requires a national-scale corporation to handle.

How many people did SpaceX start with? Certainly not the thousands of workers it has today. Everything you said about requiring a "national scale corp" was said about launching rockets to orbit as well. Looking at Boom's roster they have some seriously experienced industry vets working for them or advising them. This isn't just fresh grads. They've been through FAA/EASA cert trials of new aircraft, testing and understand it a fair bit more than you do I suspect. I'd give them a bit more credit and assume they know that they're in for the long haul with this airliner.

SpaceX has also had a lot of stuff blow up. That's fine with a rocket, but it's a company killer with a new plane.

SpaceX has also had a lot of [issues commensurate with the nature of their industry]. That's fine with a rocket, [and also fine with a new airplane, as long as the issues are proportionate with what is common in their industry].

I wouldn't put a passenger jet in the same category as rockets when it comes "things that could blow up". The safety factor of an airplane is substantially higher than a rocket. The Concorde was even one of the safest jets before it had its first hull loss in 2000 due to a metal strip on the runway that punctured its fuel tank. Boom's jet is more likely to fail due to external factors such as human error or negligence.

SpaceX very nearly didn't make it. One more F1 failure and they'd've been out of business.

cost of developing the falcon 9 is estimated at about $300M (wikipedia quoting spacex). that's a surprisingly small mountain of money. a supersonic passenger jet should be probably in the same ballpark, right?

Most importantly, the Falcon-9 is not a human-rated system, or at least not yet. And everyone acknowledges there's risks to spaceflight - even a "human-rated" system is expected to fail about 1-in-270 missions (launch or re-entry). That's not acceptable for commercial aviation - your time between catastrophic failures should be measured in years or decades.

It also probably helps significantly that they could fly unmanned missions right away to make money while working out the bugs. You can't fly an uncertified aircraft for commercial purposes.

That's also the figure for just the Falcon-9 rocket. The Dragon cost another $800M. The engines were also developed in-house and may not be factored into that cost either (can't tell). So the total system is costing north of $1.1B.

The Boom model looks to be about the same size as a regional airliner, or a small narrowbody. For some recent points of comparison: the Bombardier CRJ1000 (developed 2007-2012) has a flyaway cost of $46M [1] and an estimated development cost of $300M [1]. A small narrowbody like the Bombardier Cseries costs $72-82M each and cost $5.4B to develop [3]. The Embraer E-jet E2 series (a second iteration on the E-jet airframe) is estimated to cost $1.7B [4].

It's much easier to develop iterations on a single airframe than to certify a new airframe from scratch. And those are all conventional construction, no carbon fiber or anything like that. And while you can develop components in-house - those need to be certified too. So much like any Not-Invented-Here syndrome - you really need to ask the question of whether you want to be a company who makes airplanes, or a company who makes airplane parts.

You can certainly do it some cheaper, but probably not a factor of 10. Overall I think Embraer tends to be one of the more budget-minded manufacturers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CRJ700_series

[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/crj1000-takes-on-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CSeries

[4] http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/embraer-e-jet-e...

Hell, they'll have half a billion just in the computing & control systems. Having worked to design, build, and certify the avionics systems on three major commercial aiframes, one of which is now flying (787), I am hopeful but beyond skeptical. When a company backed by the government of the world's largest economy (Comac) can't make decent progress on a subsonic airframe built with 20+ year old and well understood technologies, and when leading airframers like Boeing had a helluva tough learning curve building a composite subsonic airframer (787), I'm beyond doubtful that this startup is going to build a supersonic composite airplane before it goes bankrupt. Google '787 wing box' and '787 delamination' if you want to know the kind of pain Boeing went through when trying to build a composite airframe.

If you want to get and idea of the magnitude of the regulatory hurdles in a domain that most here will understand, google DO-178C. The mountains of documentation that you have to produce for the software will push any integrated avionics development effort well into the hundreds of millions, unless they plan on using bog standard off-the-shelf parts, and even then they'll have to deal with the flight control system, which will have to be custom by necessity. For some google food, search on 'wcet analysis', 'structural coverage analysis, 'MCDC analysis', 'requirements traceability', 'stack analysis', etc. There are huge hurdles to leap through to get certified, and that's just for the software.

I hate being a wet blanket :(.

OTOH, if they can get capital in the 5-10+ billion range, poach all the best folks from Boeing, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, GE, UTC, Gulfstream, etc. etc. etc. (which will involve setting up offices in Seattle, Phoenix, Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Savannah, the UK, France, etc. -- the aviation scene is a bit older, people have families, and are not so keen to move), then they might actually pull it off. Which would be awesome. And I'd totally be in (if they set up an office in my area, that is).

> single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.

Was the LON-NYC flight time the problem, though? I think that to go door-to-door right now you spend 50% of the time in the air and the other 50% on the ground.

With this company, you'll be spending 3.5 hours in the air and 8 hours getting to and from airports and through security.

I would think that the people that can afford this have Uber helicopter service to/from the airport and all the line skipping extras paid for already. Not sure it is really 8 hours to and from airports/security.

Right. Selling at this price point they can easily focus on expensive extras. Special terminal with super fast security, then really quick transfers in both ends. If you could do a small airport experience in both ends (1h from hotel room to liftoff) they can charge what they want.

At one point in New York, it was pretty routine for first class passengers on Pan Am to take a helicopter from JFK to the Pan Am building, which had a helipad on the roof. The service may even have been included as part of the fare. (This service was discontinued after an accident though, at least for a time, I believe there was still service to a helipad next to the East River.)

There are still several services providing service to JFK from Manhattan helipads. Blade is one example: https://www.flyblade.com/

It depends on the airport that you are travelling from. London City has famously fast security, currently you can check-in upto 15 minutes before the scheduled time of departure for a flight to New York. [1]

[1] http://www.londoncityairport.com/travelandbooking/page/check...

When flying in from Amsterdam that 'famously fast security' takes more time than the actual flight.

Vastly expidited security lines have been available for purchase for a while. It's not even that expensive. Pre, Global Entry, etc.

This was business travelers who would all already have precheck or whatever it's called.

"Pretty amazing that materials science has made this economic."

That, I think, still is an open question. Someone must think there is a decent chance it will be, but if this were a no-brainer, there would be multiple players in this market. Also, oil price fluctuations, the bane of any airline company, will hit those running these planes harder.

I was curious about fuel costs and found that the fuel cost per seat per mile for Delta and Southwest was around $.04 per mile in 2Q 2014. At that rate, even if this new aircraft uses 4x as much fuel per person it would amount to around 20% of the ticket price.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/southwest-fuel-hedging-overvie...

> I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.

Agreed. I spent 5 of the most uncomfortable hours of my life on an airplane from JFK to San Diego, being 6'1 and not particularly slim. Thereafter, I upgraded my seats on that flight to Economy Plus. I guess I could stand a 2 hour flight like that, but not too much more. Getting me there faster, but in a more cramped space won't make me feel better.

I can almost guarantee that you will not be cramped in these planes. They're selling it as an alternative to business class.

Concorde was almost coach level cramped. There is no way this will be as comfortable as top end subsonic lie flat business or first class. For 3h vs 6h that doesn't matter. For 7h vs 13h I assert it does.

In a number of ways, modern upper class air travel is significantly more comfortable than it was throughout most of the Concorde era. First class and then business class were a lot more like today's domestic first/business class even for long haul international flights. Of course, things like entertainment options are a lot better today as well. (Though there's no 747 upstairs first class lounge :-))

Security, etc. is worse of course--though that's largely outside of the airline's control.

So was Concorde, but they were very uncomfortable (been on a couple in museums). Concorde feels like coach in a small commuter plane.

The top speed of a 747 is 0.85 Mach, so it should cut the duration by more than 2x.

Only in the best case scenario.

One of the reasons Concord "failed" is that it could never fly supersonic over land and had to start slowing long before the destination otherwise it would overshoot (along with fuel costs causing Concord to be more expensive than business class).

Speed only matters for the cruise part of the flight. The first and last 45 mins, plus airport time are not different. The slowdown portion of a Mach 2.2 flight will be even longer.

(edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)

They likely accelerate much faster, and slowing down from mach 2.2 is also fast.

Data from an actual Concorde flight shows slowdown-to-land of around 45 mins, so around the same as a regular flight.

http://www.blodtandsmidigt.com/concordeprofiles.html

Yes, but if the Concorde slows from Mach 2 to 0 over 45 mins then it's average may be ~mach 1. Which is faster than the average velocity of a normal 747.

Granted, if the Concorde shows up and needs to circle the airport for 20 minutes then that's the same delay.

Those data show slowdown to subsonic over the first 10-15 mins of that period.

It also shows fairly linear acceleration to Mach 2 over the first 30 minutes of flight and very rapid deceleration from Mach 2 to Mach 1. Which IMO suggests they could use a different decent profile.

Amdahls law

> Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference.

As someone who travels to the south pacific every year (mostly in economy seating), I strongly disagree. 15h flights are no picnic, in any class. I'll stand if it would get me there in 6-7h - that is a dream.

On the other hand, when you have have a video call instantly and practically for free this looks like a very self-indulgent expense. Not exactly the eco-friendly option either.

In what possible way is a video call equivalent to international travel?

Seriously, I could start listing the things you can accomplish with one and not the other and I would never run out of steam.

Very skeptical this little company can go all the way with this. Look at how hard it is to get a new automobile company up and running. Tesla almost went completely bankrupt more than once.

I do think there is a need and market for faster than sound air travel. We have the technology to even minimize the sonic booms for over land travel.

Still, it would take an enormous amount of capital to get a new company up and running. I would love to see an innovated tesla-like company in the aerospace industry though. It's badly needed, IMO.

I honestly started laughing halfway through scrolling because I thought this was satire mocking the startup scene. Wow.

I hope so much that you'll find this comment in a decade and laugh about how wrong you were!

I hope so as well.

Yes, we've taken a lot of inspiration from what Elon has accomplished at SpaceX and Tesla. Supersonics are technically challenging and capitally intensive. But the world should have faster travel—and it doesn't look like the big aerospace companies are about to make it happen. (I'm a founder at Boom)

Ofcourse everybody is a little skeptical but I think it's great that you took the first step!

I hope in 10 years or so we say: yeah 10 years back we laughed at Boom but now they are booming business.

I am not saying this is easy, but what they need to do is build one airplane, and get it to fly back and forth. That is nothing like the scalability and repeated reliability that building thousands of car is asking for.

I know several people (starting by my brother) who build their own plane (granted, it was a two-seater several several times louder than a grass-mower and seemingly slower, but you get the idea). One plane feels fairly doable as far as hard- to-predict financial issues go — if you have engineers who know super-sonic, and I can’t imagine having the idea without.

Your brother's plane is likely an ultralight or light-sport category, and regardless as a kit-built is nowhere near the certification required for commercial operation. A key requirement of kit-built or experimental aircraft is that you can't ask money to fly passengers on them. He's not even allowed to ask for gas money if you take a trip together.

Commercial requirements literally start at "one aircraft that gets the wings overstressed (if not actually snapped off) during destructive testing" and the requirements continue steeply onwards from there. You can figure on having it built by FAA-certified mechanics as well.

The FAA likes having a paper trail if the wings fall off (an extremely common problem with ultralight/sport aircraft built by non-certified personnel). Not OK when you're carrying passengers for hire.

It was, originally but with some improvements since, and it got the wing-stress that you mention involuntarily and while in flight (my mom & his wife were watching — fun times). He got out without a scratch and improved the next one further.

I can completely see the expected extra cost of having to make two prototypes — and, yes, my first reaction to the article was: “please, please, let them have a billion in VC money”. But the truth is, the success ratio of projects about “we want to make a plane that goes that fast” seems far higher than success ratios of any company.

The business side sounds a lot more doable, given how many people fly those destinations and would like to do it faster.

Sounds like the prototypical "build something that doesn't scale". I have no idea how capital intensive this is (other than...a lot) but I too think building a Boom-0 and flying it NYC-London as often as possible is the best first step. Just make sure to have the first couple of flights filled with investor types ;) You really want some innovators that spread the word. Some lawyer telling their friends how he was able to close a deal because of that flight, some top executive peddling the "home to tuck in the kids" story at the next business meeting etc.

> Very skeptical this little company can go all the way with this.

I suspect they intend to become a bigger company.

And the environmental impact is... what? Amazing that this is not a consideration, especially since we are now in emergency territory:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/21/global-wa...

It's great for you to leave SF in the morning, go to Sydney to watch the opera and be back in SF by midnight. But is the environmental impact of you doing that worth it for everyone else?

My first thought as well.

The drop in the price of oil has discouraged airlines from investing in more efficient engines for their fleet, I assume there are similar economics at play here.

That’s simply not true! Airplanes are developed over decades and then stays in service over decades, current low fuel prices won’t change decisions that are being made years into the future.

All current in development airplanes (and I’m talking non-GA non military here), focus on increased efficiency and fuel consumption.

Absolutely worth it. We live in the future. If you can fly half way around the world to watch an opera and be home by midnight, do it.

Riding your bicycle to work isn't going to save the planet, neither is reconsidering a flight.

Environmental concerns should be that of multi-national corporations and governments. The 1% flying around the world isn't killing the planet. It's industrial output from cattle and energy production for electricity (coal, nat gas, oil) and fossil fuels burned for industrial use.

I'm tired of the misplaced moral imperatives. Change needs to happen on a global, industrial scale, not in your decision to eat a locally-grown kale salad.

Wake up people.

Personally, I live in the present.

Snarkiness aside, I think you're mistaken. You can't say 'industrial use' or 'industrial output' and absolve yourself of responsibility. The electronics that you wrote this comment on were all built with yucky industrial machines, running on yucky industrial oil which had to pulled out of the ground by yucky, messy drilling machines. And the kicker is that people did all of that because they knew that you would buy the resulting device.

If no one bought them, they wouldn't make them! The industrial output is all there for your benefit. If we all decided that protecting the planet was more important and invested in making slower, more efficient travel more comfortable, then it would make a big difference.

EDIT: Also the kale salad thing - since you bring up industrial output from cattle farming being a major pollutant then surely you have just made an argument for eating kale salad instead of a tasty burger?

Fully agree with you on the kale salad thing. It's delicious, don't get me wrong, and eating more kale and less burgers will contribute to a reduction in cattle rearing, reduction in methane gas / deforestation.

My main point is it needs to be a national conversation, one the government is involved in.

Riding a bicycle to work arguably does a lot more to save the planet than flying on a more fuel efficient airplane, if for no other reason than the indirect benefits of taking a car off the road.

Definitely worth mentioning in the article, but not a big concern. Even if this plane actually comes to market and is successful according to their wildest hopes, it'll only be a very tiny fraction of the aviation market. This is due to many factors: small cabin, limited capacity, limited routes (only over water)...

> it'll only be a very tiny fraction of the aviation market.

So is everyone driving in the morning: a tiny fraction of the transport pollution. Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction.

To add to staceymakano's point: in the transport industry, I feel very uncomfortable when a a new alternative doesn't perform better on the environmental side.

Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction.

Not even remotely true in this case. Aviation accounts for about 2% of carbon emissions, by my cursory Google search. Boom aircraft will, in the absolute best of outcomes, never account for more than a very small fraction of that number. And a small fraction of 2% is still, no matter how one tries to spin it, a very small fraction.

In any event, power (P) required to increase velocity (V) is a cubic relationship (P=FV, where F is the drag force, which has as one of its components V^2), so doubling speed requires 8 times the power. There are ways to mitigate that increase -- fly higher to reduce air density, reduce drag by using specialized airfoils and reducing excrescence, take advantage of increasing engine efficiencies, etc. -- but I think it's safe to say that a supersonic aircraft will always require gobs more fuel than its subsonic cousins. By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.

Full disclosure: I once worked as an aerospace engineer.

> By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.

Correct. My nerd side tells me supersonic planes are the coolest thing on earth, my hippie side is telling me we'll live better without it.

And I still disagree about the fact that a tiny fraction can be ignored.

The main reason why climate change is a thing is because we consistently and repeatedly failed to acknowledge our impact on the environment and justified it by comparing it to other people's impact (and I include myself in that statement).

I'm always intrigued to see what sorts of comments are so transgressive as to require green-bean HN accounts.

After a certain point, airplane technology is no longer going to be the limiting factor, and we'll have to finally eliminate the TSA to get under 5 hours of total travel time.

'eliminate the TSA' is a kill list phrase, I'm so sorry

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.

Aircraft are hard, you need an army of experienced engineers, like thousands, and hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and resources to design a 21st century aircraft. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or whoever, that's the state of the art nowadays. You need to run numerous (supersonic!) wind tunnel tests of a design (each test spanning months, with year long lead time before testing, and months of analysis and design in between tests). There are only a few facilities in the world (like the 10x10 at Glenn Research Center) that can provide such wind tunnel testing. Structural and aerodynamic work will take years of iteration to meet basic design challenges. Actuators, flight computers, air data sensors, etc... need to be chosen with very careful forethought via trades with big name suppliers, and lead times for these things can be 9 months to 1.5 years easy. The engine is as important as the entire airframe its self, and there are only three engine manufacturers in the entire world that could make an engine for a plane like this. One would need to be designed from scratch from one of these manufacturers and would easily take 3-5 years! Oh, and they would need a ton of capital and thousands of engineers to do it too. This doesn't happen from a scrappy looking start up with random engine parts sitting in a room with a whiteboard. This is a joke, investing in this company is a sure way to throw away your investment. Sorry, that's the cold hard facts.

Yea, spacex managed to succeed, at least so far, but look how big they are now and how long it took them to get where they are today. And I would argue that spacex's engineering challenges are easier than those needed for a 21st century supersonic jet transport.

Sorry, that's just the state of aerospace engineering today. Major new aircrarft are only developed by the big boys with the experience and resources to make it happen over a 10-20 year time frame with continued but small investments in R&D, and incremental leaps in technology.

I sadly agree. I would love to see a supersonic business jet but the regulatory requirements alone to get a new aircraft certified takes years.

Even the new Pilatus PC-24 (small business jet) announced in 2013 is not expecting to ship until 2017. The second prototype just went airborne. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilatus_PC-24

It describes their values as something like 'fly long distance in the morning, do a bunch of meetings there, and be back before the end of the day'. Does it make sense to travel 20,000km on one day to make a bunch of meetings, spending 15,000$?

I feel that better tele-presence just makes more sense.

If being there in person gives you a 2% better chance to close a million dollar deal, then it already makes sense to blow $20k on the ticket.

You mean a million dollar profit deal

The telepresence rooms we have at our corp. are 100's of thousands for a room. And you have to have another room on the other end. If it will be a consistent meeting then it makes sense to set them up but for one off meetings at different locations then the cost is not justified.

I do see a stereoscopic (3D) 360 VR future someday but we have a ways to go to get the 'presence' of that down to realism still.

Startup idea: rentable tele-presence rooms. tele-presence restaurants, tele-presence bars.

Lots of hotels that cater to business customers already to this - go to the local Hilton and pay $XYZ to use their telepresence room for an hour.

But can I buy the guy on the other end a beer?

Sure, unless the hotel at his end is in a "dry" location.

In the financial world, where the physical presence of a trusted deal quarterback (who may fill that role for multiple deals at once) makes all the difference, the answer is a resounding yes. I love telepresence as much as anyone, but the reality is that nothing replaces a good firm handshake at the right moment, and nothing will unless we start living the majority of our waking hours in VR.

So tele-presence needs to be good enough to transmit that good, firm handshake.

I wonder if the original demand for Concorde between NYC-LDN was due to the clear link as major financial centers.

As video and audio conferencing proliferated the demand for in person meetings amongst customers in finance would have gone down. That would have hit Concorde pretty hard.

Business which needs to be conducted in person could be between factory and design hubs. Silicon Valley to China's manufacturing centers for example.

Not just the money, the environmental impact of this gives me pause. Don't get me wrong, the tech is cool. But it's just enabling a behaviour that doesn't have a positive effect on the planet.

You have just described a huge fraction of my adult life. Take my word for it, being there in person is still the only way to close critical business deals.

This. That's why silicon valley. That's why working remotely doesn't work very well for most people. Non verbal communication is very important for trust.

Now I'm imagining a meeting in silicon valley where participants are using only sign language.

Its also not just closing a single deal but also creating the relationship for the next X deals.

(Note: I'm sure parent understands this.)

I wonder how Virtual and augmented reality will change that. Just being able to Skype or use Whatsup with my clients during the day, ad-hock, has hugely changed the way I build business relationships.

Telepresence will definitely be a greater and greater percentage of the market. The overall meeting-market is also expanding. I think the subset of the market which ends up as in person meetings will continue to expand for a long time.

It's hard to buy your client a beer over tele-presence.

Again, seems like a much simpler problem to solve rather than super-sonic passenger aircraft.

"I cared so much about you that I paid 10x the fare just so I could leave as quickly as possible. You better chug that beer!"

I am with you, even though I like what Boom proposes.

Does $15,000 matter, to people earning $50,000 a day?

Does $15,000 matter, as a business expense on a billion-dollar deal?

I agree tele-presence makes sense, but when $15,000 means as much as the price of a Starbucks coffee means to you and I, the price is so irrelevant, it's like us meeting for coffee, saying to each other "I'll get the bill", and then thinking it's more effort than it's worth to even bother expensing it.

This seems nice, but there's no way 6 guys in a hanger in Denver are going to build a viable supersonic passenger aircraft that meets FAA standards for mass passenger travel, is fuel efficient enough that tickets aren't $20K and somehow also turns a profit.

I know "never say never", but this is about as confident a statement I or anyone with 3 minutes of reading on the airline industry can make. Margins are razor thin as it is.

A much better option (IMO) would be to research a Citation/Learjet sized supersonic aircraft. If you think of the market, the rich would be much more comfortable leaving from a smaller/private terminal in their private jet, zipping to London in 4 hours, and then zipping back on their own time, than they would going through the main terminal and all that nonsense just to save 3 hours in the air. Hell, being in the air in first class is the best part of the entire trip!

These guys (No connection whatsoever) http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/ have been trying to do the latter for 13 years. Thirteen. They just got their first order.

I was lucky enough to fly on Concorde in 2002, when they were offering steep discounts to get passengers back after the crash in 2000. It was clear at the time that the service was totally uneconomic. The seats were comparable to economy (although service was champagne and caviar).

I'll always cherish my memories of seeing the curvature of the Earth and the windows feeling hot to the touch (as well as my Concorde cufflinks).

Sorry but is "Boom" really a good name for an aircraft company? I get it's supersonic, but my first association was an exploding airplane.

I also get that it's the sounds of the plane... but really, boom ?

I agree with you - why not choose a more "boring" name that would make passengers feel more safe?

Like air coach or air bus or something?

I agree. Of all the options, quite possibly one of the worst names you could have picked. I'm surprised the negative associations weren't obvious to them.

Agreed, terrible name. Can you imagine getting on an airplane with Boom painted on the side or waiting in the Boom terminal? I like fast airplanes, but I think they need to come up with a better name.

It could work until they have an accident, at which point the double meaning will kick in hard-core... especially since the traditional airline industry will PR flak them. (Flak pun intended.)

Yep, that headline is pretty much going to write itself.

And I'm sure the TSA agents will love a bunch of people saying "boom" at the airport, although maybe if it desensitizes them to it it's a good thing.

You don't say "Boeing" when you go through TSA as it is. That said, this thing will never fly.

Funny I had assumed that Boom was the name of the "airline" but on second look the name seems to be both an airline and the name of the plane?

Or is the 5k just a price point for selling the plane? Now I'm confused what these guys do...

Boom is the company making the plane. The $5000 is an estimated ticket price based on the plane's relative cost of operation compared to modern jetliners.

"Bad" names can attract lots of attention. Perhaps they're more interested in turning heads than setting up the best possible brand connotations.

The best possible brand connotations are an interesting way of putting it. When you are trying to get a company off the ground (figuratively) that is experimental in nature and will require a lot of capital investment, why hinder yourself with this 'bad' name right out of the gate? There are any number of edgy names they could have picked that people didn't associate with the last thing you want to have happen on an airplane. It is just unnecessary, and not well thought out. Even if the intent was to get attention, I wonder how many people at Boom talked to the founders and said: "Are we sure about 'Boom'?"

I didn't associate it with anything negative the first time when I saw the headline. Didn't even think about it being a bad name till I read the comment.

Not sure as many people will think it is negative as you think.

Well, what they think when they first see it, and what they think after it's made the rounds of the late shows (Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, etc) might be entirely different. This is low hanging fruit.

What are some positive associations with booms?

Case in point: Soylent

I still don't get that name choice. I'm guessing it's tongue-in-cheek, but in the back of my mind I still can't help wonder whether it'll turn out to be some sick prank. Then, it's like "well, it was right there on the label".

I know the chances of that are next to nil, but why even put that image in potential customer's heads?

Brands? Who cares? Are they the cheapest, fastest etc? I don't care which characters constitute their name, nor which bitmap they've chosen for their current logo.

You don't have to care about it, it was just pointed out for you a possible reason for the name. You can go on and care about the price, speed, etc now.

Supersonic jet goes "Boom" on first flight. Rescue personal are looking for the test pilots.

If they wanted to associate with a sonic boom..

Maybe.. SonicBee or something cuter?

Agreed that Boom is not a name I would immediately associate with sonic boom instead of ka-boom.

We used to have concord fly over our house at supersonic speeds and the BOOM BOOM was fucking annoying day in day out.

Planey McPlaneface?

It gets scarier, they compare it to the Concorde based on price:

Unlike Concorde, flying Boom is affordable—the same price as business class.

Ok, so the Concorde had some critical engineering faults, making it cheaper definitely sounds more secure.

The early promises for Concorde said it would be cost effective too.

Prior to the (2000) accident, Concorde had been arguably the safest operational passenger airliner in the world in passenger deaths-per-kilometres travelled with zero

Isn't the deaths-per-km generally zero prior to the first accident of any airliner?

How may airliners are in service for 24 years before their first fatal accident? (The 717 is up to 17 years. The A340 is almost at 24.)

There were 14 in-service Concordes. There are hundreds of most airliners.

After the single accident, the Concorde's death per passenger km record doesn't look so hot.

ipad got a lot of bad association initially because of the feminine hygiene product. NYT, CNN, WSJ, and many tech press criticized it soundly.

Nobody cares anymore.

I have been involved with product naming over the years and have seen firsthand the incredible effort that goes into and angst generated by the process. EVERYONE has an opinion about names! It's also my considered opinion that most of the time it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, barring something really dumb or a trademark infringement.

Man, HN's standards for a top story and a top comment are really different, are they?

The comment is actually more than relevant... A lot of people have fear of flights and the name which brings negative emotions is an issue.

What I find is that arguments in the comments are held to a lower standard. There's no way an original article can get away with the kind of hand-waviness we in the peanut gallery can. If someone writes an article whose primary assertion was unsupported by evidence or credible source, it's probably going to get flagged.

Do it in the comments, and the hive-mind takes over. Which, now that I think about it, could be a good thing in a sense. As article authors, we write to a larger audience, indicating what they're probably going read is researched and edited. As comment readers and writers, we put down the quill-and-ink and offer insights and opinions more directly from our own experience and intuition.

Quick, unadulterated thinking yields different results than the more grueling, task-oriented process of essay writing. And there's little reason to believe that these styles should be appraised one-dimensionally. Are some techniques not better suited to different circumstances?

Gladwell comes to mind, as well as Kahneman in support of less calculated approaches, however I am unfamiliar with the literature (beyond the layman-acclaimed NYT bestsellers). Is there a way to test the success of on-the-fly human heuristics against their slower and more deliberate procedures? Maybe one-size-does not fit all, but surely a skilled problem-solver would choose the right instrument for the gig.

People are only trying to help. Better now than when the press hears about it and starts taking the piss out of them.

I upvoted your comment for the meta-irony

Well it hasn't hurt "Bomb ba dear" :-) (that is the pronunciation I've heard for Bombardier)

So no, name is probably not an issue. Getting a passenger plane to market without any other supporting business, that is much much harder than explaining the name. Not a lot of people can raise funds for 10 years of expensive runway (no pun intended).

Bomb bar dee eh

Yes. I actually also speak French (after a fashion) and recognize its actual pronunciation. But for folks who don't, their phonetics lead them astray. I've flown on a number of flights where the incorrect pronunciation was used by the flight crew in describing the safety features of the plane.

"Bombardier" is French for 'bomber', an aircraft built to drop bombs; certainly a curious choice for a commercial aircraft supplier.

The company is named after Joseph-Armand Bombardier, who built his first snow vehicle at 15.

http://www.bombardier.com/en/about-us/history.html

> Today’s Bombardier grew out of a young mechanic’s inventive genius and entrepreneurial spirit. Born in 1907, Joseph-Armand Bombardier builds his first “snow vehicle” at the ripe age of 15. His motivation? To help people travel across the snow-covered roads of rural Québec in Canada.

> In 1937, J.-Armand achieves his first major commercial success with the launch of the seven-passenger B7 snowmobile.

Sure, that's what they want you to think.

That's actually a perfectly reasonable explanation of how they ended up with such a name, but it's still unfortunate.

Bombardier makes you think you're the one dropping the bombs (since that's what the word means), not the one going boom.

No worse than ups being a delivery company.

UPS's clients are the senders, so as long as it makes sense to them... Up your Packages with UPS!

Even if it's named after the sonic boom the plane makes, you would think they would be trying to minimize that association as much as possible. People dont like sonic booms. Seems like an awfully tone-deaf choice.

Look no farther than Bombardier, a relatively small but nonetheless very experienced company that's sadly nearly bankrupted themselves by simply trying to develop 787-like version of a regional jet. It doesn't appear like this kind of commercial aircraft development is suitable for anyone other than Boeing and Airbus.

Fastest jet in the world still doesn't solve tarmac delays at JFK.

TEB + JATO + Boom = Profit? (TEB-LCY would actually be an interesting market for all-business-class STOL transatlantic)

That's Teterboro Airport + Jet Assisted Takeoff, and (Teterboro-London City Airport) for those like me who aren't in the know.

Correct-- the real problem with air travel isn't the flight time but the terrible and inefficient process on the ground with security, customs, baggage claim. I'd much prefer a longer flight in a slower, less aerodynamic plane that was safer and roomier.

I wonder if there's a market for premium private air terminals, or even entire airports.

That's what private planes are for.

Huge cost delta for transatlantic vs transpacific flights on a commercial aircraft vs a plane which can deadhead.

Roomier classes in planes (as well as private air terminals for private planes) are all things that pretty much exist today; you just need to be willing and able to pay a huge premium for them. (Both because the costs are higher and they're priced for a less-sensitive clientele.)

What are the odds that VC's funneling cash into Boom would build dedicated airports for these? :)

Didn't the Concorde have special security lines to let you get to the plane much faster than usual?

Hey Blake, I'm Salim. I like what you guys are doing :)

Interested in understanding more about how you plan to tackle cooling and heating when gaining altitude and hitting supersonic speeds respectively through materials different to the Aluminium used on the Concorde (you mentioned carbon fiber), which considering you're planning on reaching M3 will be important

Also interested in understanding more about what you're base case assumption for affordability is / what mitigants you've put in place for any change in these assumptions (rise in oil prices, airlines being able to charge crazy amounts due to product exclusivity (clearly will be just a handful of player who have access to this engineering in our life time I imagine) etc...). Would be nice to hear a bit about what engineering thinking has gone into the cost saving..are we still looking at the same delta wing we saw previously?

From what I've seen so far very cool and exciting - look forward to following your story!

As tangent, instead of focusing on NYC to London, a Mach 2.2 travel actually will make travel from Americas to Asia more comfortable. US to India and US to China routes benefit the most, and perhaps where people will be interested in paying top-dollar vs. Europe.

I believe the problem with those was always the sonic boom created by flying at > 1 Mach. It shattered windows on the ground.

Could be wrong tho

Most of that route would be over the Pacific, so it would be fine, too (although ex-West Coast US).

It might be a fuel issue on distance, but probably not. Also potentially an ETOPS range issue.

However, there are three big issues with transpac: (not impossible issues, but strong reasons why NYC-LON is ideal as MVP)

1) Greater number of destination cities on each side; for transatlantic, NYC-LON really is the main market. LAX-NRT is probably the best first pass. but LAX/SFO/SEA/LAS/Texas/NY/DC could all make solid claims on being sources of traffic, and there are >10 cities in Asia which would be destinations and fairly far apart? I'd almost certainly prefer a nonstop NYC-PEK to a domestic NYC-LAX, switch to LAX-NRT supersonic, then another subsonic NRT-PEK.

2) A lot of the good cities are inland, so no supersonic for those parts of the flights. NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG (corrected) would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there. So you're also stuck doing something suboptimal, either connecting flights or operating outside supersonic regime.

3) After a certain point, comfort is a priority over absolute speed. If it lets you accomplish a mission (meeting, etc.) in a single day, that's a new capability. if it means you get 5h of cramped sleep and then another 7h of cramped sleep on the way back, that's not really better for most missions than 8-10h of comfortable sleep in a full-sized suite for the same price. There clearly is a value in 1-4h flights from USA to China/India, but that requires more than Mach 2.2 -- maybe exoatmospheric.

Another option is probably "events"; special flights to follow F1 and stuff like that. Concorde did a lot of that toward the end.

NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there.

A lot of really sparsely populated inland. How politically influential are the Siberian fur trappers this route [0] overflies? Enough to counteract the fat overflight fees that Russia likes to charge?

[0] http://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper/rout...

You are right -- there would be a bit of extra subsonic about 150km into Canada, but it would work.

Flight time at 2.2 would still suck, but there could be a market. Probably depends on the total traffic between the city pairs, since some fraction would pay for supersonic coach-size business vs subsonic business/first.

I figured it took that far just to get to a suitable altitude. This isn't a King Air Beech 90 one can just keep cranking back while jamming the throttle. It was designed with very different goals.

Supersonic flight is banned over populated areas. I'm not sure if it's from shattering windows or not.

Is there any reason you can't fly subsonic over land, then accelerate to supersonic over the ocean?

Supersonic-capable aircraft tend to be absurdly fuel-inefficient when operating subsonic (for aerodynamic reasons I don't really understand).

Grew up in Germany during the Cold War. Sonic booms from military jets were not rare. In the low level flight training areas the population really suffered.

Mythbusters tested the sonic boom myth. An F/A-18 flew ridiculously low (200 ft AGL) before the window cracked with a supersonic flyby.

A sonic boom from a fighter jet above around 10,000 ft usually doesn't break any windows. In one case, a General flew a F-22 in supercruise just off the Florida coast at over 50,000 ft and nobody "reported" the boom until the media story ended up on the news.

For low level supersonic flight, what typically happens is the pressure wave created either overflexes the window pane, or the window frame isn't strong enough and the glass falls out.

For a larger aircraft like the Concorde flying above 40,000 ft they wont break windows. People complain about the noise.

London on New York are two of the top finance industry cities in the world. There are few other city pairs that are close enough that Mach 2.2 makes the difference between comfortably being able to pop over for a business meeting and return the same day vs. getting a really long and tiring day, and that has such a large population of people where their salaries are high enough that paying $5k to cut a few hours of a trip is cheaper than hiring more people.

On top of that, unless their planes revolutionise supersonic flights, sonic booms is a major limiting factor - they need city pairs where very little of the flight goes over land that anyone cares about, because otherwise permits becomes a major problem.

Does it talk about distance limitations at all? Sydney->everywhere could use this.

I wish you the best. Would also like to see this in my lifetime, sooner than later. Calling it "Boom" seems super facepalmy though, for the obvious reasons.

Great idea, but even with optimistic assumptions it will require a lot of capital. Something in order of SpaceX $100 mln to get first commercial plane.

We live in a world right now where interest rates are bouncing off zero and sometimes going negative. Capital is probably the least limiting factor here, assuming there's a viable plan and clear market.

The world is only awash in capital if you can convince people you can repay them.

$100M would be a steal! FYI the Dreamliner was estimated to cost more than $12B to develop.

> We're building our prototype now—and will fly late next year.

Will fly late next year? Where have I heard that one before...

A brand new advanced composite supersonic jet flying in a year's time? Color me skeptical. There are literally millions of things that need to be designed for this, and many of them will be bleeding edge. And this is from some tiny startup?

A line like that sets off some big flashing red lights for me. Either they're incompetent and have grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to complete this, or it's a scam.

Not quite. According to [1], what they'll be flying is actually a one-third-scale prototype, which I'd imagine is a lot easier to build. And they've already been going for two years.

The real issue that I'm not seeing addressed is capital. No investors listed anywhere.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-21/this-aeros...

EDIT: Forgot to actually include the link.

That link didn't make me feel much better. They're planning to "tweak an off the shelf engine for supersonic speed". When I hear off the shelf engines, I think turbofans, but no amount of tweaking is going to make a turbofan work at supersonic speeds. It's possible they can get some military grade afterburning turbojets from somewhere, but it's not something you can buy off of the shelf.

Their webpage has a bunch of guys standing around what looks like a Vietnam-era jet engine.

Also, if they're planning to have something flying in 20 months, they should be beyond the cardboard and plywood mockup phase of development.

The more I see about this company the more I think it's a scam.

For comparison, the Concorde took about 21 years to develop. Granted, it was a massive clusterfuck, but they also had to solve a lot of issues along the way.

> but no amount of tweaking is going to make a turbofan work at supersonic speeds

Sure they can. It's the inlet's job to slow the flow to subsonic. Turbofans have been used on supersonic military aircraft since the 1960's. Go read about intake ramps. Then learn about diverterless supersonic intakes.

You're yelling scam pretty loud for someone that clearly doesn't know basics of the topic area.

Edit: My guess is the engine they're standing in front of is a JT8 of some flavor, which have been heavily used by both military and commercial aircraft.

But those intakes don't work for free. You will encounter huge losses and drag penalties. And military jets aren't designed to fly 3500 miles supersonically the entire way. The vast majority of miltiary jets have a maximum supersonic time that can be measured in minutes.

This isn't quite so cut and dried: the ram effect can help or hurt depending on the exact context and numbers.

There are several 4th generation fighters with sustained supersonic cruise, as well as older aircraft like the B1. The basic technology has been around for decades. Nothing about the proposed supersonic small commuter jet is impossible from an engineering perspective, though aspects of it won't be _easy_, and it is entirely possible the business case doesn't work out.

I mostly replied above because of the categorical statement that supersonic flight with turbofans is impossible. The reality is that virtually all supersonic aircraft use engines with some bypass. The Concorde's engines oddly enough are one of the few zero bypass designs used in industry.

So I've actually worked on a couple of aviation projects in career as a biz dev person. A usual development technique is to build at small scale and then work your way up.

The problem is that when you get closer to 1:1 scale, new always issues come up with bigger challenges. You solve one problem at 1:5 scale, only to realize that doesn't work at 1:3 and the whole thing needs to be redesigned from the ground up.

The annals of aviation history are littered with aircraft unable to move past 1:n scale.

Lockheed Skunkworks have actually built prototype jets in under 2 years from go ahead to first flight. The A-12 (predecessor to the SR-71) went from contract to first flight in just over 2 years.

Didn't Burt Rutan make a composite aircraft from design to first flight in a year back in the 80s?

Getting the aircraft certified and into production is where most of the actual expense is.

A company like this that manages to produce a supersonic flying scale model will probably have access to the capital required for those later steps.

For comparison: Tesla's first business plan stated they'd need $30m in capital to get the Roadster into production. It was closer to $300m before they started production deliveries.

There's Aerion.[1] They were going to build an 8-passenger supersonic bizjet. Top speed Mach 1.5, cruise Mach 1.4, price $120 million, first flight planned for 2021. They're still talking about where to build the factory, but they're already taking pre-orders.

[1] http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/

Since the founder is in the thread, why did they target cruise > Mach 2 and a 40 passenger size? The business jet segment makes a lot of sense for high speed flight, but this seems like more of a stretch.

That's good news for ozone layer. Luckily this seems to be only a few guys, a wish, and a rendering.

> That's good news for ozone layer. Luckily this seems to be only a few guys, a wish, and a rendering.

Sorry, what connection does this have with the ozone layer?

The most sense I can make of your comment is that you're concerned about CO2 emissions from supersonic flight and don't understand the difference between global warming and ozone depletion.

The problem is not CO2, but reactive chemicals such as nitrogen oxides released near the ozone layer, which is a particular concern with supersonic transport because of the high cruise altitude. See: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/270/5233/70

mrob already provided you with an answer. There's some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport#History

I thought it was common knowledge. We learned about ozone layer hazards (and SST was among the most destructive ones) in elementary school (7th or 8th grade, Europe) when we learned about ozone layer.

There are many reasons why Boeing and Airbus have not entered the supersonic market, the most important being that there is simply very limited appetite for supersonic travel other than for novelty purposes. It's much more economical to build big, subsonic airliners but increase the comfort and level of service.

The Concorde is the most uncomfortably small aircraft that I've ever been aboard.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone over 5'9"/180lbs...though I guess that's a non-issue now (except for as a museum attraction).

My dad flew it once because he got "bumped up" from First class on the flight he normally took. His reaction was more or less "meh." First on the 747 was more comfortable and arriving a few hours earlier meant he had to grab dinner in London when he arrived rather than having a nice meal in First on the plane.

It seems to be a race to the bottom if anything. People like to complain but really they want cheap. The market has spoken.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/02/bottom-class...

Be interesting to see how they manage to increase range and payload substantially where Concorde wasn't able to.

Interesting from a tech point if they manage to build and certify a brand new supersonic airplane based on new materials. From a customer's stand point though, hardly anything new.

One advantage they might have over Concorde is that design began in the 2010s rather than the 1950s...

I really like how this talk summarizes the reason supersonic air travel never took off: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm.

How can they discuss cost and dates when it sounds like they don't even have firm plans on the engine? The promise of Boom is very compelling and good luck to them, but it's just a dream right now.

If it was as easy as the founder makes it sound, Boeing would already be doing it.

I agree, this is an insanely hard problem to solve. There are dozens of companies with tons of capital and massive R&D budgets that haven't already done this, presumably because they either think it's too hard, the regulatory hurdles are too high, or the market is not ready. Why can this startup do what they can't?

...because they really want to do it? If there's one thing I've learnt, looking at what the big companies are doing/didn't do is a really bad metric for things like this.

If this was a company started by Elon, perception of this company would have been totally different.

That's partially because Elon was already massively rich and was able to attract even more money because he was investing so much of his own.

Super smart - make good margins on a use case for the wealthy to subsidize R&D and development of scale economics, hopefully eventually get that price down so we can all use it. Hope it works!

(Writing this just to pre-empt the inevitable $5,000 THIS IS ONLY RICH PEOPLE comments :) )

Exactly. Already, this is way more affordable than private jets or Concorde. We'll keep innovating on fuel efficiency, so prices can keep coming down.

The major difference here is the Concorde was real and actually flew. A few guys with a cardboard mockup of a cockpit can toss out any number for what it will cost for a ticket.

One issue with this is the "boom" (from their name). It only works across non-populated areas due to the noise as their sample routes show. It's going to severely limit the opportunity.

I would guess this mostly designed for ocean crossing flights. Their example is NYC to London, as soon as you take off from NYC you're over the ocean. By the time you accelerate to mach 1.12 and are at the appropriate altitude, you'd be far enough away from the city for the boom to not matter.

Exactly, that's what I said. There are may across ocean routes but this means it limits its market and the routes it can run. It also makes less sense to have it as a single private jet.

That's correct. We're starting with overwater supersonic because there's no regulatory barrier to launching service. You can make a much quieter sonic boom than Concorde, and eventually supersonic overland will be allowed.

Feel like their tagline should be "We're making supersonic flight a reality. Again" :P

Looks interesting though

Good point. It's so sad that Concorde came and went without a replacement in place. (FYI, I'm a founder at Boom).

I'm reminded of the first half of "Web Design: The First Hundred Years"[0]. Commercial planes have not gotten faster and have in fact gotten slower.

I personally agree with the sentiment of the blog post, that a 5 hour flight across the atlantic is fast enough but it's still neat to see startups getting in to this space.

0 - http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

I don't agree. Faster travel is always better - whatever the mode of transportation. Once you hit a certain speed and price point, it will radically change the lifestyle of people. For example, the hyperloop with 30 min travel time between SF and LA would mean that people could literally live in one city and work in another city.

So are they building their own plane, and launching a new airline? Will they also sell the plane to other airlines? Or is this trying to be vertically integrated, like Apple / Tesla?

Also, I echo the other sentiments here about the name, really don't want to fly on an airline named "Boom". Nor "Explode", "Kapow", or "Blast". And god forbid if one of their planes crashes during test flights, the PR nightmare that would result.

Boeing tried that and it was banned.

I hope they have billions of dollars in the bank. Concorde production was stopped for a reason.

Given SpaceX's well documented experience, I would not trust any cost estimates from the legacy aerospace industry. It's a deeply moribund field as a result of decades of stagnation and dependence on government/military funding.

Still I would be absolutely floored if they could do it for under $500mil, so what you say still applies-- maybe just not quite to the point of billionS with an S.

There's a steep difference in the acceptable safety of a space vehicle and of a commercial airliner.

There's also a steep difference in the tolerances you can permit. A rocket -- especially one with any hope of reusability -- is something that can't be built without getting very very close to the maximum tolerances possible within the bounds of physics. Look at the temperature differentials in a rocket engine for example... it involves nearly instantaneous transitions from deep cryptogenic temperatures to ones far beyond the melting point of any known material that can only be sustained with constant active cooling. The fact that we can achieve any level of reliability with a device this insane is really a testament to human ingenuity, but it doesn't give you much margin for error. Screw up just a tiny bit and the rocket is going to do what the laws of thermodynamics really want it to do: explode in every direction instead of just downward.

An airliner, even a supersonic one, is more forgiving. Over-engineering goes a long way toward adding nines to your reliability. We've been doing supersonic flight with reusable craft since the 1950s, and there aren't a whole lot of unknowns remaining. That means it's mostly a manufacturing and operations optimization problem.

It is easier to build a rocket, than supersonic commercial airliner. Soviets build many rockets, but practically failed on commercial airliner. Americans gave up.

This is perhaps the best thing about income inequality: Things with initial high cost, low volume are doable until investment dollars, etc, can reduce the cost.

I'm really excited to see this!

However, there's no indication as to what kind of seating you're going for. Will these be economy, premium economy (aka, US-national business), or business (aka, lie-flat) seats?

Naming aside this seems to be positioned really well. 5k NYC/London in that time is quite the game changer. I like how they position it to cater to the busy executive who'd love to spend more time with their family.

How can you position it so well and chose such a bad name :D Either way really excited for this even though I'm likely to fly on it 0 times.

Looks interesting. Anyone know what kind of tech the IT systems are built on? I'd be interested in sending a resume. I actually used to have a valid A&P mechanic's license. Always wanted to do software development for airlines but the large enterprise style environment has always turned me off.

I wonder if petrr theil is an investor. He uses the deprecation of the concord as an example our socoety is slowing down technologically (literally & figuratively).

I have to imagine demand for international biz class flights have gone up since the concord retired given that global is a given for almost all industries.

If you are an executive (even a well paid employee) it could be worth your time to do this. It is ~1200 usd for a roundtrip flight from NYC to LON.

By the time these guys launch, it will likely be much more. The opportunity cost/math will be simple. I think that there is a high correlation of people who value their time > $200 that need international flights.

Depending how prices shake out I could see this working. Obviously, super hard to do an airline company.

sentiment: cautiously opyimistic

There is negative chance this project gets off the ground. If the Boeing 2707, which even with heavy government funds, still failed to make it out the door I don't think these guys have a chance in hell.

I think what you guys are doing is amazing and the world is due for airlines like Boom. I'm also happy to see that this venture is backed by YC. This is a huge step forward. Your prices bite a little and will likely be out of range for typical travelers but I'm sure this can be worked on. Is the airplane designed completely from scratch or will you be basing your engineering work on the designs of Concorde planes in some way, shape or form?

"""While carrying a full load, Concorde achieved 15.8 passenger miles per gallon of fuel, while the Boeing 707 reached 33.3 pm/g, the Boeing 747 46.4 pm/g""" It's like an SUV for the sky. We have to get antropogenic carbon dioxide to 0 until 2050 if we want our species to survive and people come up with less energy efficient transportation?

No where does it mention proposed range. This is a big deal: with thirsty supersonic cruise, your fuel mass fraction will exponentially grow according to the Rocket Equation. Simply put, the more fuel you carry, the more fuel you must carry to bring that fuel along.

Flying twice the distance will mean >>2x the fuel. LON-NYC might be attainable, but tran-pacific will certainly be difficult.

The rocket equation applies when you're continuously accelerating your fuel to ever higher speeds.

The work in supersonic flight is fighting drag, which while many times larger that for subsonic does not have an appreciable weight dependency. Why would flying longer require more than proportionally additional fuel?

My assumption is that drag (esp lift induced) is a function of weight. The more fuel you must carry, the more drag you incur. The more drag you incur, the more fuel you must carry to over-come it.

I know this is certainly true of subsonic flight. How much it affects supersonic flight it unknown to me.

looks like an investors-bait.

Has the FAA given any indication on what the decibel threshold might be to potentially reverse the overland ban on supersonics? You had mentioned in another comment that the tipping point might be the feasibility and eventual popularity from going LAX/SFO - Tokyo but that in and of itself may not be enough satisfy residents and other groups.

Very interesting and relevant article about the American Concordes which never flew: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160321-the-american-concor...

I would be very interested to see their YC application. Maybe an unfair competitive advantage?

This sounds awesome. However I'm a bit saddened that there is no mention of CO2 or climate change in this discussion. What about building solar planes vs just faster planes will do even more harm to the environment if people start flying more because time is now shorter?

Just think how much C02 you'd produce if you took a ship across the ocean for days on end....

Like, a sailing ship?

The airline industry, stagnant since the 1960's is ripe for disruption.

I hope your company motto is "Move Fast and Break Things."

This is cool but I would love to see research and investment going into making planes big enough and (more importantly) efficient enough just to comfortably sit in.

Can you carry enough fuel to do a non-stop flight from NYC to HKG or SIN or SYD? (You give SFO-SYD as an example, so NYC-HKG should be possible I suspect.)

Oh, I guess the issue is the boom. What about flying subsonic over populated Canada, and then (slightly shifting the conventional NYC-HKG route) head over Hudson Bay to accelerate to supersonic velocity?

The return route is often done over the Pacific (because of prevailing wind patterns), so there would not necessarily be a need to sonic boom over southeast China.

$5000.00 and I can be there in 3.4 hours. $900 if I decide to go slow.

Hmmm... I'm not that impatient.

But then, I'm not that rich either, so maybe that's my problem.

I didn't realize the left-right arrows in the hero show other possible routes.

Are you planning on operating as an airline or selling to airlines?

Beyond the name, seeing the parts of the plane, with green garage sale price tags, sitting on a table doesn't instill confidence.

Mark Kelly on the advisory board, not bad. It's the only person on the team page that I've heard of.

The photo of the engineer in what is clearly a cardboard mock-up: http://boom.aero/assets/boom-3-cd0822d52cb5c9ecaac404d5cfd09... .... does not inspire confidence.

Presumably they're just testing the ergonomics of their seat/cockpit layout, or something along those lines. Unless you're worried that they're actually going to try to build an airplane out of cardboard, I don't see what the problem is.

This is what a scrappy airplane startup looks like in the early days. The wooden mockups validate sizing and ergonomics before you lay down expensive carbon fiber.

"Unless you're worried that they're actually going to try to build an airplane out of cardboard"

I dunno. They do say "carbon fiber" a lot... and that is a description of cardboard....

Carbon fiber is incredibly strong when engineered properly:

"During the test, the wings on the 787 were flexed upward “approximately 25 feet” which equates to 150 percent of the most extreme forces the airplane is ever expected to encounter during normal operation. The test is used to demonstrate a safety margin for the design and is part of the certification process to show the airplane can withstand extreme forces."

I don't know what a foot is any more, but here's a video of the A380 doing its wing flex test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B74_w3Ar9nI

This is called Lean Design and saves millions http://www.leanconstruction.org/about-us/what-is-lean-constr...

Cardboard mock-ups are extraordinarily helpful in making real the space that will define the product (as opposed to CAD drawings). They are regularly used in rapid prototyping.

The fact that they aren't waiting before having a final metal frame before testing for instrumentation fit is a plus in my book.

There might even be a wooden plane or two before they get around to actual carbon fiber and metal.

http://business.financialpost.com/news/assembly-of-bombardie...

What does not inspire confidence in me is that they are toying around with what appears to be a small General Electric CJ610 turbojet engine, developed in the 60s from the earlier J85. Doesn't seem like the best propulsive plant for a supersonic airliner!

Their engine: http://boom.aero/assets/press-bg-7481f004eff02964a90134c6a46... Reference picture: http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t301/planedr2k7/100_0177....

A CJ610 engine doesn't have complicated electronics to integrate, and would allow aerodynamic test data from a subscale model. For comparison, the two J85 engines in a F-5E could push it to over M1.4 at altitude.

Do you foresee any special challenges in keeping nitrous oxides emissions down?

I have a feeling they will eventually acquired by SpaceX.

Short version: NYC-LON in 3.4 hours.

It doesn't talk about the sonic booms, which was the main problem with Concorde (and the fees resulting from it)

Excellent job of trolling us.

didn't YC also invest in a nuclear startup? how's that going?

Two of them. Helion got some VC https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/helion-energy

UPower less so.

Half the comments on here are like:

The plane is made of cardboard and that just doesn't make me confortable....

Is it just me or "Boom" sounds like the worst-name-ever for an airline?

I'm serious. My immediate association for "boom" is an explosion sound, not a sonic boom. I would feel just as comfortable flying an airline called "Bang", "Crash", "Kaboom", "Blast" or "OhMyGodWeAreGoingDown".

Please, do rethink that name, I dream of shorter trips to Bora Bora every single day of my life (not serious now).

It is absolutely the worst.

I'm not sure "Boom" is the word I want to mentally associate with aircraft.

People do pay 5K for just a meeting?

No, the company does.

this is just a PR disaster waiting to happen. who in their right minds would trust this small team to design a supersonic plane vs army of aerospace engineers at boeing and airbus?

I'd rather enjoy the comfort of flying with Boeing. Track record means a lot and they have the balls to say they are working on a prototype like they are building an Android app.

loool, the article highlighting arrogance of SV is real.

tldr: no way I'm getting on this plane and neither should you, it looks dangerous as fuck.

I dont have a good reason to go to london but you bet your ass im going to fly on this

Will it use up 25% of its fuel taxiing to the runway like the concorde?

Cause fuel aint cheap like it used to be.

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