Boom Wants to Bring Supersonic Civilian Travel Back
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Each of those points could be much more efficient:
1.) Prescreen me for all things so that I exit the uber and walk upto the gate directly 2.) Let me print my own baggage tag at home and drop it at the gate when I arrive 3.) Dont let cheap idiots bring on carry on baggage and take up 200 ppl's time trying to jam it into an overhead bin 4.) Dont make me sit on the plane until absolutely ready, with a runway slot ready to go 5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me instead of making me wander around an airport looking for a terribly slow conveyor belt to eventually get my bag
I presume all of the above doesnt happen because, at the end of the day, there aren't sufficient travelers willing to pay the cost of implementation.
It turns out that this has been studied quite a bit. You need to walk halfway across the airport because it reduces the amount of time you eventually stand staring at the belt waiting for your bag, and most people prefer "occupied time" (e.g., walking halfway across the airport) to "unoccupied time" (e.g., waiting at a baggage claim right next to the flight).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...
Why? But in any case, you could have a fast conveyor belt directly from the plane to the location, no need to carry them by hand.
It's mostly a problem of scale. Unloading 20 bags in the 5 minutes or so before the passengers start to deplane is no problem. Unloading 500 bags would be.
- Drive to SJC. Park in lot next to terminal about 100 feet from PSA station.
- Walk into adjacent PSA terminal section. Pay $14 in cash to clerk. No reservation needed. Register receipt is boarding pass.
- The hourly B-727 pulls up outside and lowers rear stairs. Passengers get on with carry-on luggage.
- 58 minutes flight time to LAX.
Which is a travesty. This makes absolutely zero sense, even after Econ 500 level classes I took a decade ago. It's greed, plain and simple.
It sucks from the customer perspective - in particular, if you have a sudden illness or death in a family member, the last thing on your mind should be how the airline is about to fleece you. International airlines often have bereavement fares for these situations, but US domestic carriers view it as a profit opportunity. It's often a double-whammy because your travel schedule is often unpredictable in these cases and most airline don't allow flight changes without huge penalties.
Interestingly, I've heard that plane tickets often drop significantly in price if you book really close to departure (eg. < 1 day out). Never tried it, and I don't see it in a quick spot check of the Internet, but it makes sense from an economic perspective - the seat is otherwise going to go unfilled, so any money is better than no money.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/07/death_in_the_family...
You definitely fly in comfort as a business passenger, but I wouldn't say you fly much more efficiently.
Not to pick on you specifically but, for a lot of people, bring less stuff. I don't use a roll-a-board for carry-on. I travel with fully legal soft-sided luggage that doesn't inflexibly take up as much space and a small computer bag. I rarely find I need to check luggage unless I'm doing activities that require sporting gear etc.
Airlines are partially to blame for this behavior as well, since they rarely enforce it or even give much guidance. People also walk very slowly into the plane, struggle to lift their stuff, then realize they need something out of the pocket so they hold up everyone while they get it. I also never understood why both doors aren't used for boarding and the planes boarded middle-first.
I bet I could get the boarding time down to about 40% of what it is right now with my suggested changes. In the security lines, there are too few lanes open and too few helpers. If I opt out of the idiot scanner, it adds at least 10 minutes, sometimes 30. I've had many TSA people be incredibly rude to me when I've opted out, one yelling at me for putting my carry on in front of another person's on the undriven, too-short conveyor belt after the same person had previously instructed me to remove my bag from the belt when I informed them I was opt-out (every other time I've flown, they make you wait like an idiot while your bag and the contents of your pockets sit on the other side of the conveyor, free for anyone else to take).
The security theatre on display is also infuriating. If one wanted to, travel with someone and have them not opt out, but grab your carry-on from the other side of the scanner while you wait for them to even call for someone to think about coming over to check the elastic in your underwear for a wine opener, which if they didn't confiscate, would have obviously been used to initialize the downfall of western civilization. Meanwhile, the random checks with guns in their pants get through the blow-hard machine all the time: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2015/06/01/poli...
My guess is that this is of no real benefit. Refueling, restocking, loading baggage, running maintenance checks, and other tasks need to happen before the airline can get the plane back into the air. Only extremely infrequently have I been on a plane that was able to roll back from the gate shortly after the last passenger boarded.
If the limiting factor here was passenger boarding times, airlines would have every incentive to improve the situation from where it is now. They have no incentive to speed up boarding to be any faster than the slowest of the rest of the preflight processes.
The zone system and the way most airport terminals are designed make queueing and getting on the plane a horrendous cluster fsck.
Airports remind me of legacy software in many respects: they do things the way they do because they are building on foundation of garbage processes.
[1] Too many military memories
I always bring carry-on, not because I'm cheap, but because of exactly the reasons you mentioned regarding it being a pain in the ass to drop off and pick up checked in luggage.
5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me
Maybe the idiots have more in common with you than you think?
When I was living in Beijing, I would do a few transpacific flights a year. Even Seattle was 12 hours away...
Supersonic flights make total sense for long hauls...it could make places like Australia or New Zealand "much closer" and less isolated.
Given that you are flying mainly short hauls, this isn't a feature designed for you.
People with less money than you = idiots. Nice sentiment to have ????
For business travelers, it's not about the money. Most of us get free checked bags because of airline status anyway. It's about time. I just wish not everyone, however able-bodied, felt compelled to use the rigid roller bags that take up so much room even for a 1 night trip.
Amtraks have a lot more fan fare than getting on a metro. They don't run that often and they sometimes fill up. It's much more like getting on a plane than a subway.
The time might get a little longer if you include time to get to the airport v. time to get to the station, but it's variable based on where particular people live.
That's probably +30-60 min though. An airport is outside a city; train stations usually are scattered within a city, with one in a very centre.
Qantas in Australia does this. If you fly often you can just order a permanent tag for your luggage. (you also get two anyway at higher FF levels)
> 5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me
How do you think this would work? Either the luggage or the people would have to be ordered. The way we're loading the planes and boarding, neither one is true. The carousel time is "free" for the airport, so that's the simplest solution.
People come off the plane pretty close to ordered (singled door model. A machine that reads the tags could sort the luggage cause it could know what seat you're in.
My ideal carry on baggage rules are:
- Anyone boarding with no carry on baggage has priority seat selection and boarding.
- All passengers are allowed one carry on baggage item.
- Additional carry on baggage has a $50 fee per item.
- All passengers are allowed 2 free checked bags.
- Additional checked bags have fuel offset fees.
Any airline that put this into place would immediately have all of my business the routes they operate, relevant to my travel needs.
(edit: formatting)
Airlines like people who carry on. It's no slower (for the airline), requires fewer ground staff, and leaves more room in the hold for paying cargo. Empty space on a plane is like fruit rotting on a supermarket shelf.
If you're not willing to fix 2 and 5, as well as airlines losing, misdirecting, or mishandling/damaging luggage, then you will get people like me who refuse to ever check a bag. I'd like everything I bring with me to show up, intact, and not have to wait on baggage at the other end, so I carry it with me. (I do, however, make sure it fits well within the specified carry-on dimensions, so I never have problems fitting it easily into the overhead bin.)
I don't mind gate-checked bags as much; that solves every problem except for damaged/mishandled luggage, and in particular I know I can simply pick up the bag directly from the cart on the tarmac when I get off the plane. That only tends to happen for tiny planes, though, and I don't know that it'd scale to a 400-person flight.
Personally, I'd like to see a solution that involves finer-grained boarding. Don't board a dozen rows at a time; board in outside-in order, so that everyone walks directly to the correct row, loads their luggage in parallel without blocking anyone, and sits down in parallel.
The only company that I would take seriosly right now is Aerion (http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/). They are working on a supersonic private jet (12 passengers). They already have quite a few orders (notably 20 jets for Flexjet, 120 Mil a piece) and a cooperation with Airbus, who is apparently helping them. Probably in exchange for their drag reducing "laminar flow" technology.
Building a new aircraft is a huge undertaking, both in terms of technical challenges, financing and organization. A supersonic one even more so.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but this doesn't sound too promising.
The international aviation market is probably the largest it has ever been and I believe the expectation is that it will continue to grow. That could be a factor in determining how successful the next iteration of supersonic aircraft will be. I travel from the US to New Zealand often. I don't care about getting to LAX in 1.5 hours instead of 3 but I would love to be able to go from LAX to AKL in 5 hours. The airlines would love to be able to provide quicker service to Europe or Asia from the US.
Until, of course, this sort of thing becomes trivial and super-reliable, and then the price will drop through the floor.
The Concorde was flying between 45,000 and a maximum altitude of 60,000 feet. If Boom flies at 60,000 feet, radiation is also going to be a bigger issue. I'm curious how the engineers are planning to address this.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12785320
[2] http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/AGU-NAIRAS.html
Your intuition about carbon-fiber is correct.
What I would guess they are doing though is a layered system, as it is hard to make up the difference with just dopants. Other materials are good too, like Kevlar [2]. So you layer these materials together and get better overall protection. Lots of research being done for this right now actually. NASA has some SBIR phase II funding for low weight, structural radiation shields. Though on Earth you can get away with a lot more than you could in space (launch weight).
[1] http://www.aviationdoc.com/articles/Radiation%20and%20Aircre...
[2] http://esmat.esa.int/materials_news/isme09/pdf/3-ground/s3%2...
There is a big difference between being not Sci-Fi and being economically feasible. Though arguably, there is a subset of Sci-Fi that also includes social science ideas.
“You kind of design a plane around an engine rather than the other way around,” Aboulafia says. “Let me know when we can hear their engine.”
There are plenty of other considerations outside of the factory floor and design rooms to consider - operating costs, the availability of qualified A&Ps to fix the thing, the parts network, the cost of the parts (if you buy a $15M plane, you're going to pay $15M plane prices for spares and overhauls). Insurance will surely take their pound of flesh for something that's A) a company's first product B) a new category, and C) supersonic. Finally, with the general public being decidedly anti-aviation, the noise profile of this plane might very well limit where it can fly in and out of. It's a basic matter of aeodynamics, and the same problem that the Concorde experienced almost 50 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tes...
For international flights the technology is more than proven. It's purely a market problem. I wish the boom teem well.
[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-begins-work-to-build-...
Plus anyone in the airport discussing your company will be invited for some enhanced screening.
It's likely that the carbon footprint is several times higher, perhaps nearing an order of magnitude.
Now JetA isn't service station gas so its slightly unfair to compare the 15 pMPG of a Concorde to a 12 MPG single passenger pickup truck. But it does give you a general idea that everything being equal (size, technology level, risk?) the supersonic plane will burn about twice the carbon footprint of a similar subsonic plane.
Note that with a full modern subsonic plane its quite easy to get a carbon footprint staggeringly better than a single driver in an obese modern SUV or truck. The problem is if you're fair and let the aircraft people use any thing they want such as 2016 technology and engineering, you have to let the car people use any thing they want, and my wife's Prius is trivially capable of providing reasonable comfort at 300 passenger miles per gallon.
Supposedly the largest 777 model does better than 70 pMPG per my commercial pilot buddy (who teased me quite a bit about my wife's Prius only getting 60 pMPG when there's only one passenger, so he burns less gas flying than she does driving). So everything being equal if stereotypical subsonic planes have roughly doubled in pMPG then its not ridiculous to expect over 30 pMPG on a modern supersonic plane. My Yaris commuter car struggles to get 30 pMPG with a single passenger (me) so to a first approximation a modern supersonic aircraft damages the environment about as much as driving alone in my subcompact commuter car. Not great, not awful. Eh.
Obviously my car's performance in transatlantic and transpacific service is somewhat inferior to the performance of the proposed plane.
I never saw any hard statistics, but it's definitely not cars 90% 1 occupant, planes always near-full. It's anecdotal evidence for sure, but my car is, on average, as full as average plane I took. Especially if we count per-mile rather than per-trip.
Aacargo.com division of american airlines proudly advertises they ship 100 million pounds of cargo per week, and also advertise they have 6000 flights per day so thats averaging about a ton of cargo on every flight and a ton represents maybe ten empty passenger seats, so your average flight should have ten empty seats. Of course reality is the seats might be near empty at midnight and 100% full during the day, etc.
So the goal was always to go supersonic as quickly as possible as the fastest she went the better the mpg got...
Edit: also, lovely big windows.
As faster satellite wifi becomes a thing the longer flights are tolerable, but it's still time you could be on the ground doing something more useful.
I suspect that it's highly questionable whether a supersonic design would be able to do the "brutally long" flights without refueling. The market for the Concorde and I imagine the market for this is the CEO/investment banker/international lawyer who wants to do a quick hop from NYC to London or Paris--including day trips.
Cut it down to five hours, and I'll gladly pay $5000 for a round trip ticket.
On the other hand, I'm very doubtful about Boom; the fact that they mostly seem to be talking about the passenger cabin does not inspire a ton of confidence, and even if they get their plane built, I have doubts about their ticket price projections.
The routes given for this plane - across the pacific - are not over land.
Can this plane go supersonic over land?
The problem is not technical, but regulatory. The Concorde's sonic boom was very loud and a big nuisance. That's why it was forbidden.
There are multiple supersonic jets in development (private jets), that all plan on having a much reduced sonic boom that should allow regulations to be lifted. But that will have to be demonstrated to regulators first.
If you can't fly supersonic overland, it severely limits the utility and the possible routes.
Supersonic aircraft are TERRIBLY inefficient when flying subsonic, and use up a lot of fuel when doing so.
Apparently the Concorde was only purchased/operated by Air France and British Airways, on transAtlantic routes.
Also, mach 2.2 is more than "slightly" faster than mach 0.8
(On the other hand, I typically fly internationally in coach, which often has as much seat and leg room as domestic first class.)
I can tell you, if it's truly the same price as J, and you get a domestic FC seat -- it's totally worth it. A typical TATL-EastCoast segment is about 7-9 hours long depending on many factors. If they can cut that to 3 hours, it's a huge win.
First of all, it means that instead of leaving the EU Sunday so I can work Monday morning, I could leave Monday morning about 8AM, and arrive in the USA (assume I have one connection, could be on either side) about 8AM. I've just gained an entire (_weekend_) day of my life back.
Now going home, TATL flights are always overnight. Instead though, I could sleep in a normal bed, get up at 4/5am (I try and stay on EU time anyway for my 5-day trips, get up early, go to bed early), and then land same day and be home before dinner -- and not spend the entire arrival day running on 5 hours of (crap) "sleep".
Not true, at least NY to London. You can leave in the AM and arrive (relatively late) at night.
Building an economically attractive passenger plane is the first part. Then it'll need to be certified. At some point, it'll have to be sold for profit.
I genuinely wish them good luck. They chose a formidable challenge.
Proposed title change: clear which company was pushing supersonic air travel, but unclear what kind of company it is.
Actual title change: unclear that a company is involved at all. What is "Boom"? Do they just mean that a general economic boom is going to bring supersonic air travel back?
Edit: I have worked on several teams in the past where the leadership consisted of people who "don't know what can't be done". They hire a bunch of domain experts, then ignore and/or contradict them until the company runs out of money.