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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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!

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.

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