Concorde ‘B’
heritageconcorde.com
heritageconcorde.com
However, my head tells me that no amount of tweaking or tuning will change the fundamental problem with Concorde. The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320.
Cheap, reliable aircraft are what people want. Fast, expensive ones are cool, but not really economic.
It only makes sense if you could attract new business class customers, who would take the faster trip but wouldn't take the slower one at all.
So the airline don't need economy class to make profit, they need them to create economies of scale that bring down their cost for the high margin customers.
50$ seems crazy as supersonic flight is going to use far more fuel, but it also means the aircraft, pilot, and flight attendants can make more trips. So, a minimal cost increase might be possible.
Business is a different story since I wouldn't be paying directly and those trips are generally more fast paced and require you to be at 100% soon after getting off the plane. Those extra hours could help you finish preparing for a presentation or something.
Granted that's the outlier, but nothing says these aircraft need be limited to concord speeds either.
The difference wasn't worth paying Concorde prices, but it was an extra $200 and since my billing rate is over $500/hr and considering the hotel prices in LA, the client was happy to pay it if it meant seeing me the same day I flew in.
For a 1-2hr flight within my region, I need
a) 30m at least of security time (let's assume passenger willing to pay has pre-check/global entry/clear/et)
b) 30-60m to get to the airport. same for arrival.
c) must arrive by boarding time or airline can deny you (about 45m at least).
So that's like 3-4h for each flight (e.g. 6-8h total roundtrip) for a door-door connection, and that's the safe minimums. If security is overloaded or traffic is jammed (or train is delayed), you risk missing your flight.
A business day is still lost, but it's possible with an early flight that an early or midday meeting could be attended on late notice - which might be an acceptable compromise for your average moderate company C-level to avoid using a private jet.
And don’t forget deboarding which seems to take a least 20 minutes. And waiting for your luggage.
I also forgot customs/border control for international flights.
Of course, for personal/family, this adds probably an additional 30-60m + 30 for international.
I would love it if someone (countries) starting optimizing for full travel time. But the incentives are not there. Airports are shopping malls. Security ensures you have to buy more liquids in the mall.
Imagine: 20min train from King’s Cross / Union Station to the heart of the airport, 10 min travel to gate, 5 minut security, 15min boarding.
Equally futuristic: Plane tickets working like train tickets. Buy a flight from LA to SF. Show up (almost) any time. Take the first available. Of course optimized via estimated arrival times and demand calculations.
It was phenomenally successful for a few years. It's not clear that this model could be replicated today due to air travel security concerns.
Many small/medium European airports manage this for flights within Europe. At least in Dublin, Gatwick, Frankfurt Hahn, the security has been under 10 minutes for me, without buying any fast track passes. Add to that mobile boarding passes from most airlines eliminating the need to do anything beyond "weigh bag at automated machine without a queue, put sticker on, drop at bag drop" in the check in area, and it's a much faster experience.
The issue comes when flying to the US, where at least in Dublin, there's a second TSA-run security station behind the main security for flights going to the US. This is the only one where I've had delays of over 20 minutes for security in Dublin (which is still much better than I've had in the US, including a 1hour security queue in JFK once).
This is also where online check in is usually not an option, where there's a long queue, and where I get US customs interviewing people in the line to make it even longer.
So it seems to be the US specifically causing this problem
This is the premise of SpaceX's BFS. Though each flight will be more expensive than a 747, they can fly another BFS each hour.
Concorde did London-Sydney in around 17 hours due to the refueling stops[0].
The new Dreamliner direct route will do London to Perth in about the same time, sub-sonic but no stops[1]. I wonder if mentally that will feel to people like it is equivalent...when in reality there is another 2000 miles (a 4 hour flight) to go. I suppose many people will do a stopover in Perth and travel the next day, a stopover int he same country being that much easier of course.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Records [1]: https://dreamliner.qantas.com/article/qantas-to-fly-non-stop...
I think Concorde may have been the most beautiful plane ever built and an incredible achievement for the time. But long-haul really needs a new kind of hyperliner - preferably clean, if we're going to be writing a wish-list.
It was never going to be a popular option with Concorde technology.
A constant.
Pick two.
There's a fourth variable: time. Want cheaper, faster, AND better? Wait for advancements in technology. I had a 90's truck with 190HP that got 18mpg. Today I drive the same model but 10 years newer with 270HP without trading anything on gas milage and selling for roughly the same price. And the interior of the truck was great in the 90s, but the newer ones are worlds beyond that.
All I had to do was wait 10 years for it to be invented. Many failed products are just ideas whose time has not come yet.
old inspires the new. make something great which you saw as mediocre prior.
Airshipping to see the landscape of Europe would be kinda awesome (the Alps, or the fjords of Norway, the award-winning fjords)...
Also, simply, flying.
Agreed. And that's not even mentioning the climate angle of it.
I've done some reading lately about the effects of air travel on climate. I was very depressed by what I found. Basically, air travel is terrible for global warming. Besides emissions of greenhouse gasses CO2 and NOx, the trails of water vapor ("contrails") form cirrus clouds that contribute to warming.
Unlike the electric car, there is no emerging technology that can save air travel from this environmental impact. Meanwhile, air travel is growing at ~5%/year. At this rate, by mid-century air travel alone will consume the world's entire emissions allowance, if we want to keep global warming to 2 °C or less. And supersonic travel appears to be even worse for the climate.
For all the talk about fighting global warming, I almost never hear about this. It seems like the most inconvenient truth of all: if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less. This is a hard pill to swallow. Tesla is built on the idea that we can have cleaner cars without having to give up anything (because electric cars can be luxury items). But electric airplanes exist only as research curiosities -- they aren't up to the task of their fuel-burning counterparts. Right now it looks like the democratization of fast, world-wide travel might be a late 20th - early 21st century phenomenon that we can't get back. :(
Not for consumer use, but they exist.
Not to mention the parts of the economy that rely on air travel ;)
And here's the attendant public policy: Tax the turbojects' users enough to offset the negative ecological externalities incurred by their use. That will likely make commercial SST unprofitable.
Hydropower? The primary materials used are concrete and steel, and dams last for centuries with minimal upkeep. As long as appropriate measures (such as fish ladders) are taken, the local and global environmental impact is negligible.
Can't store solar at night? Turn atmospheric carbon into oil. It doesn't have to be cheaper than oil (it almost certainly can't be unless it gets too hard to drill), but we can subsidize it within some kind of range.
EDIT: Oh cool, some people are trying this.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407748/making-gasoline-fr...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/feature-there-s-too-...
I don't know what circles you hang out in, but I've heard this many times. The focus is on road vehicles and land power consumption because that's where the low hanging fruit is. And airlines do already have a profit motivation to decrease fuel consumption, which equates to reduced emissions. I'd like to see a CO2 tax to help align incentives.
Cleaner burning fuels might be an option at some point.
> But there is no electric airplane.
(I assume you're talking about commercial airplanes. Electric airplanes do exist, but have limited range and/or speed, and thus limited commercial application, due to reduced energy density.)
That could change, if batteries get a lot cheaper and lighter. Or you know, kerosene gets more expensive (government-enforced pricing of the externality of CO2 emission). Some of both.
It's obviously more viable for short-haul flights than long-haul, but even that would help.
The batteries could be free. Until they literally burn up so the plane can get lighter and therefore can land, it's pretty much a non-starter for anything over a few hundred miles. The max takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is 50 tons more than it's maximum landing weight, which will probably damage the gear in some capacity.
I honestly don't know, but could this be part of the design simply because the engineers know the plane will weigh less on landing? Seems like that design would change if so much mass from fuel was no longer lost/burnt.
here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSq9r05lVTo
In comparison the A380 has a max landing weight of 386 Mg. Clearly the 787 is not up against a hard practical limit in terms of landing weight. Yes, stronger gear weighs more.
We agree that weight of batteries impacts their usefulness for aircraft. That's why I mentioned it in the quoted sentence :-).
The 787 can operate out of many airports the A380 cannot.
I don't understand what that sentence means.
> The 787 can operate out of many airports the A380 cannot.
Yes? I said batteries would have to be a lot lighter and kerosene a lot more expensive before they are a practical replacement. I think we agree, but I think you think we disagree?
The second aspect of it is that economies of scale are on the last leg, most airline companies use smaller planes, with a hub and spoke model, and a highly energy inefficient system, because it's better in their overall profit making system.
They are there to make money first, carrying passengers is the hoops they have to go through to get people's money (but by cleverly worded passenger carrying contracts, they are more and more getting around the issue), and fuel price is a variable in the system.
Since then Boeing refreshed all their other planes (some might call it "stapled new wings and engines on") and called them -8 and -9 models.
But the problem is that the more efficient the tech is, the more of it people use. An extra 500 miles of range opens up decentralization of routes, which means more planes flying.
Something as simple as flying low enough to create low level cloud cover would more than reverse the net effect of NOx and CO2 produced by planes. It's just more expensive because it takes longer and consumes more fuel.
Most people prefer to say they want to fight global warming as opposed to actually doing anything. If the average person really wanted to fight climate change, they'd:
• Stop eating meat
• Buy as few new items as possible
• Never get on an airplane again
• Not have kids
And even then one person's actions really can't do a damn thing so who can blame them for just enjoying their life and doing whatever they want?
Ethanol production doesn't tend to be carbon neutral either, though maybe it's closer than petroleum pumped out of the ground.
You could stop the world from flying tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a dent in your PPM growth.
If aviation busts the carbon budget, so will most everything else, and by vastly larger margins.
Better to direct your limited resources at lower hanging fruit, unless you'd prefer the perfect to kill the good.
A lot of the time, I would gladly spend the same amount of hours—sleeping, reading, watching stuff-in the same plane.
I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist.
That's exactly why I prefer them. Because of the time savings. And I'm willing to pay more for that.
> I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist.
It's increasingly rare as airlines move to a more direct city to city model, but in the old hub and spoke days, you'd often find planes that stopped in one or two hubs on the way.
Southwest still make a lot of stops. If you want to get from the west coast to east cost, there's a really good chance of stopping in Denver, Kansas City, or Texas.
Yeah, that's what I say, I misread you first, but after reading correctly, that's the only interpretation that makes sense. I was agreeing now.
> Southwest still make a lot of stops. If you want to get from the west coast to east cost, there's a really good chance of stopping in Denver, Kansas City, or Texas.
Since I moved to the US I mostly fly overseas, and when I lived in Germany for the rest of my life before that I mostly flew to other countries. I don't know, maybe flights with stops are less common in those scenarios.
1. Search flights from A to B, show me the cheapest flights. 2. Then comes time preference(Should fly Friday instead of thursday? morning vs evening) 3. filter results by least no. of hops(This definitely shows people want to cut down on flying time and most people still pay an incentive to reach their destination faster).
I feel the world and society had many changes since 60s, 70s. People today are more interested in reaching their destination fast and can pay a small premium. This is a change in economics since the Concorde time. People who are paying for Business class and First class, would prefer paying a premium and reaching the destination faster.
People would still want cheap, reliable aircrafts and they should have that option but supersonic commercial flights on certain trans pacific & trans atlantic routes is definitely feasible.
Concorde had high maintenance costs - it required special fuel, special tires and other maintainence costs which made it financially non-viable. If any new supersonic flight addresses these costs, then it will open a whole new world of faster air travel.
As we are going with anecdata I will complete :
- it's not that i care that much of time when choosing stops, I care about consistent awful airport processes. Just getting off the plane is painfull ("Common people get off quicker pleaase")
If you build smaller planes that fly farther, you don't need the hub and spoke pattern as much. If a direct flight cuts two hours off of your trip, makes it so you don't have to board two planes instead of one, that is both objectively faster and at least for me much less stressful.
That said, most people want to fly point-to-point these days and not Hub/Spoke, and often _are_ willing to pay a few extra bucks to do it (I know I certainly will almost always take a direct flight if I can). This favours being able to use smaller airframes, and if it means avoiding a Hub airport it can be a lot more efficient. Where it gets dicey is trying to cram more and more aircraft through an already busy Hub. That leads to having to build more runways and doing things like double/triple simultaneous parallel landings.
A second aspect of speed versus price, is that in airplane travel a lot of time is spent accessing the airports, going through security, waiting in the departure queue, etc. Offsetting those 3-5h with a faster travel time might prove challenging.
But I am happy to annonce that the French rail is catching up, they have started queuing up people in the station to check the tickets before boarding, requiring clients to arrive 20 minutes early, making smaller seats, removing the bars, and building the new train stations in the outskirts with a crappy connection to downtown. Progress!
I think it all depends on how much cost savings for how much speed. In today's dollars, a round-trip ticket on Concorde from New York to London was $20,000, or 4x today's business class price. For that, you got a tiny seat in a cramped cabin.
What we're targeting at Boom is an improvement over business class. We're making it profitable for airlines to operate the plane at today's business class fares. We're getting you there in half the time. And instead of a cramped two-and-two cabin arrangement, it's a one-and-one configuration (every seat is a window AND an aisle). The seats are similar to today's domestic first class seats, only designed for productivity.
So the choice a business traveler could soon face is: Would you like to get from New York to London in 7 hours in a lay-flat bed, or in 3h15m in a comfortable, productive environment? Price is the same either way. We think most people will pick the supersonic flight.
It should be noted also that the premium cabin market today is much larger than it was a few decades ago.
And finally, premium-cabin economics are only the first step. We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.
Power of 50 years of technological development. That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year. Considering that supersonic flight overall was still fairly new thing when Concorde was designed and CAD was non-existent back then, order of magnitude improvement does not sound completely implausible.
The aerospace industry isn't advancing anywhere near that fast. Most of the low-hanging fruit was picked over 50 years ago.
Case in point: The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G is a geared turbofan engine. From demonstrated prototype (1993), to flight testing (2008) to production (2016), it took _23_years_ to develop this engine. Efficiency improvement over baseline: 15-18%. That's quite a bit less than 1% y/y improvement.
For what it's worth. As a passenger it's my preferred ride on short and medium distances.
There are broadly three enabling technologies, plus a couple of economic factors. Technologies:
1. Carbon fiber. With the 787, we finally have a transport-category aircraft with significant amounts of carbon fiber that has gone through full FAA certification, which significantly lowers the barrier to us using it. Carbon fiber does a lot for us. It is lighter and stronger than aluminum, but it is also more thermally stable. Concorde grew about 15 inches in flight as its temperature rose in flight. Our leading edges will reach over 300ºF at Mach 2.2, and our plane will grow less than an inch in flight. That is a significant maintenance cost reducer. Carbon fiber also enables more complex geometries without expensive tooling costs. Our plane won't have a straight line on it. We can take better advantage of area ruling to improve aerodynamics. In contrast, Concorde's fuselage was a cylindrical tube.
2. Engines. There is a (much slower) Moore's law for engine cores; they get better at a rate of around 1 percent a year. Move 50+ years forward from when Concorde's engines were designed and you have a real improvement. Concorde used 4 turbojets (i.e, zero bypass ratio) and we have 3 medium-bypass turbofans. Plus no afterburners are needed. When Concorde used afterburners to punch through the transonic regime, they had a 78% increase in fuel flow for a 17% increase in thrust.
3. Computational fluid dynamics. Concorde is all the more impressive for the fact that it was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Wind tunnel tests are expensive, taking six months and costing millions of dollars. We can do virtual wind tunnel tests in software in about 30 minutes. We still use tunnels to closely test harder aspects of the design (e.g., low-speed handling qualities), but we have much more rapid design iteration than Concorde could have hoped for.
On the economics, we are right-sizing the aircraft. Concorde had 100 seats, but it usually flew with a very low load factor (half-empty). Our design has 55 seats, which is similar to the premium cabin on today's widebody subsonic airliner. What this means is that any route that can sustain widebody subsonic service today will basically work supersonically. We expect much higher load factors, which are helped by business class fares and a lower number of seats to fill relative to Concorde.
This leads to economies of scale. Whereas Concorde really only was profitable between New York and London, Boom flights make economic sense on hundreds of global routes. Which means we'll sell more planes and drive maintenance costs down further. Only 14 Concorde units ever saw commercial service. Ultimately, when Concorde shut down, it was because Airbus stopped making spare parts. In contrast, one public report by the Boyd Group estimated supersonic demand at 1300 planes. With almost two orders of magnitude of planes in service, we'll achieve much better scale on maintenance.
Hope this answers your question about the magic.
"黙ってお金を取る" - JALエグゼクティブ
I fly to Europe constantly on first class and tickets are usually circa $8,000 round trip. When I saw your "plane" with huge seat space, huge windows and $3,500 per round trip NYC-LON I immediately looked for your phone number to send you $350,000 for my next 10 years of flying. Please just take my money!!
Bottom line it will not be sustained so some deep alteration will have to be done. I would rather spend $8,000 in first class 7 hours flight this summer, than book my 3.5hr flight with you that will happen in 2028, because you are highly overbooked. Of course adding 100x more units in flight won't cut; air space is not like bakery you just can add another oven.
> We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.
In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door. Your approach is similar to those who envisioned building harness for 100 horses in a row to go faster, right before a Diesel engine was invented.
I feel like this assertion deserves a big "maybe" in there somewhere.
For the record, I hope Boom succeeds. When I was a kid I learned about the Concorde as the future and it's been a real shame to watch it stay in the past.
More fun facts: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions
I’d like to see the trajectory that takes you from NY to London in 19 minutes without squashing you and/or causing insane amount of heating. Bonus points if the only source of thrust is a fancy air brake.
I used to imagine the same thing when I was a kid, that by the turn of the millenium we'll be piloting flying cars. But here we are in 2018 sitting in traffic jams in the same old boring four wherlers. Yes they're more efficient and reliable but still a chariot on wheels.
Nowadays I'd rather imagine supersonic flight is possible from an economic standpoint and wish Boom the best of luck with their enterprise.
Except in genetic, chemistry and computer sciences, most other fields looks a lot like where they were 50 years ago.
It's true that there were a lot of incremental changes, greatly improving the overall efficiency, and also a far wider adoptions of these technologies. But the basis for most concepts/designs are in fact quite old.
The first computers are from the 50ies and the transistor from 1947, the 737 first flew in 1968, the 747 a few years later, the first nuclear plant dates back from 1956, Soyuz still flies despite being based on the 1957 R7 ICBM, the basic design of cars is pretty much established since the 20ies or 30ies.
Short of the internet (agree it's a big "short of"), our lives are not that much different than in the 70ies or 80ies (at least in the US/Europe).
And in fact, it's not a big surprise. A big factor in radically changing our material condition is to get energy, and a lot of it. First there was coal 200 years ago, then oil and gaz in the late XIXe century (plus electricity for its versatility and ease of distribution) and, finally, nuclear fission (and it was only a semi-success seeing the current and near future adoption). Short of a new energy source, with an output an order of magnitude higher than we currently have (Fusion? if we manage to pull it of), I don't see why we will have major technological changes.
But sometimes several things come together to lead to a new capabilty. SpaceX recoverable rockets aren't just due to incremental improvements in rocket engines, they're due to improvements in a whole host of different areas - materials technology for lighter rockets, software improvements, better heat shielding materials and frankly new economic imperatives. Those all came together to push us over the edge of a new capability. Maybe the same will happen with supersonic passenger planes.
One past example of predicting the future with unlimited budgets is the xerox alto.
The Lofstrom Loop is possible today for a few billion dollars. Though "catching" an incoming capsule with a Loop is going to take a while to human-certify.
That said, I sincerely wish you prove me wrong and pull it off.
It's a huge risk and certainly deserves to be rewarded.
Certainly not. Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. Some of these activities happen at the same time with each other, but many of them not.
The turnaround time -- time needed for everything that happens from when the plane arrives at the gate to when it departs again -- is only comparable to flying time for smaller aircraft doing shorter domestic hops.
For aircraft doing the kinds of inter-continental segments a supersonic airliner is targeting, there's no real comparison. And airlines most certainly do optimize for time spent in the air; a plane on the ground is a plane making no money. So you see a single aircraft bounce around among a bunch of hubs all in one day, for example, or larger, longer-range aircraft doing rotations of where they fly to (like having the same aircraft do a flight from the US to South America and back, then off to Asia and back, to optimize for arrival/departure times and minimize time spent not flying)
If I look at the latest long-haul flight I took, the flight time was 11 hours, turn-around time at airport 4 hours, for a total of 15 hours. If you'd drop the flight time to half, and manage to do accelerate boarding, cleaning, re-fueling etc in 3 hours, you'd come up with 8.5 hours. Much better, but not even close to be able to deliver twice as many flights per day. It'd be more like a 50 % improvement.
You see this a lot with transatlantic flights, where they spend more time than necessary on the ground at each end, but doing so sets up better timing (like eastbound TATL flights departing in North American evening and arriving in European morning).
If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost, you need to use 1/10th the fuel, have 1/10th the maintenance overhead, and have 1/10th the staffing cost all at the same time.
You can't go over 100% efficiency in any area, so to see 1/10th the cost you would need the entire aircraft industry in the 1970s to be operating at under 10% efficiency, a low bar I am highly skeptical of.
It's not like Aeronautics engineers or the Airline industries were gorillas banging rocks together with no understanding of what they were doing, and I find it hard to believe there is enough room for a 10x increase in efficiency from the 1970s even with a perfectly efficient aircraft and airline behind it.
But hey, if you really believe it's possible, invest in Boom because they must have designed a cold fusion reactor running on tap water to power their jet and everyone who invests will probably become a trillionaire overnight once they reveal it.
And remember that both BA and Air France got their Concordes “for free”
Technology does enable 10x improvements over half a century sometimes.
In reality, fleet average fuel economy has been nearly flat for four decades, with the biggest periods of movement being driven by brief excursions in the price of crude oil. Those efficiency excursions were in turn driven not by technological improvement, but by changes in the makeup of the vehicle fleets themselves (lighter cars, smaller engines).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
Also note most aircraft capable of supersonic cruise nowadays don't use turbojets, they use low-bypass turbofans (mostly around 0.3:1).
$8K is a normal RT JFK-LHR ticket today in business class. This is vs $800 in economy. However, Boom proposes that the same $8K can support economy-style seating traveling at Mach 2.2 instead of mach .80. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 3x the speed will cost ~10x as much.
People who have worked in computing all their lives will have seen multiple "magic 10x improvement" cycles, so might have an implicit believe that it will happen everywhere.
But one should not assume that this will happen for the task of pushing big metal tubes through the air by burning things. The physics of it is not on the side of easy 10x improvements in that case.
* Back to the hub and spoke model, but without preplanned routes. You show up at the airport and they have a Just-in-time routing where you get one leg closer as soon as the plane fills to capacity. Pro: airplane almost always full. Con: you (or low fare passengers wait longer)
* (continued from above) : you dont even know which layover you will have until routing needs and weather are known. I.e. you want to go from NYC to Albuquerque. There happen to be about the same number who need to go from Tulsa to ABQ as who need to go to Tulsa from NYC. So 2 hr before your flight you find out it will stop in Tulsa so 8 people can get off/on.
* modular boarding on a mobile trolley. So instead of loitering in the jetway, everyone gets on a railcar size vehicle and gets ready to board the flight. This will allow them to queue up before they travel to the plane queue.
* planes queue up before a platform. Some mobile trolleys allow boarding from the rear while some board from the front. This theoretically halves the boarding time. Once the trolleys are vacated the plane doors close and the plane can slowly and safely taxi while the remaining passengers get seated. This would be safe so long as the brakes didn't jolt and knock an elderly person over.
* mixed cargo and passenger flights. I know this is already done to some extent. But what if there were a luxury branded airline that was first class only? And the other half of the plane were air cargo containers such that the flight were still profitable even without passengers.
* an options market for tickets. Allow traders to buy options on routes on particular dates. This may increase prices for passengers, but it would also allow airlines to insulate themselves from volatility. Let "the market" do the hard work of price calculation.
A NYC-SF or DC-SF route would be freaking amazing.
The prohibition on supersonic airliners over land is about noise, not safety.
It looks like the answer should be the same to this and your question.
I have never even seen a proposal for a supersonic electric engine. The only thing that's even remotely close is a bit of dabbling in nuclear engines in the 50s and 60s that were cancelled once people noticed that the idea was insane. Also, impractical--the radiation shielding was too heavy.
Startup idea: accelerate paying customers on the ground to Mach 1 to make the sonic boom go away.
(Spoiler: “no”.)
But at the same time, I’d never want to fly in a passenger plane without a pilot, because when emergency situations happen, autopilots usually can’t handle it and need intervention. When the engine on QF32 exploded, the pilots had to do checks and make judgements on something like 200 different error messages before they could land! Since so many of the plane’s systems were damaged by the explosion, a lot of this may not have been possible remotely.
And the stakes are much higher when an uncaught sensor error or something can mean flying into the ground from 30,000 feet - unlike a train (the only thing that actually has a good safety record running driverless so far) you can’t just stop in an emergency!
Driverless cars are only mildly succeeding right now because of Amercica's low standards when it comes safety.
Will we have supersonic commercial travel at some point? Probably. But that’s not a very interesting statement. Are we close to supersonic commercial air travel and do we have a concrete idea how to get from point A to B? That’s the interesting (and very different) question.
(That is not to say I think Boom will or will not get there, I havent’t studied it closely. But I’m an aerospace engineer by education and history is littered with failures in this space, and progress since the 1980s has been grimly slow.)
External estimates of a BFR launch, combined with his stated goal of 850 passengers, comes out to around 9k. Which is more. But...30 minutes...
No land purchase. No construction. A good radius from any buildings in case of accident.
I wish you all the best and if the concept piccy on your web site is close to reality then we'll see little delta winged flying needles in the skies.
Could you give us a very rough idea of say London to New York fare on this thing?
Saving 3.5 hours between NYC and London is better, but not vastly better than the status quo. Your total door-to-door travel time will still be about 7-8 hours.
But in my office, just about everyone flies transpacific, or else even longer distances to Europe at least once an year. Mostly business class. And for us, halving the time would be a huge win. But for that to work, the planes need to be able to make the distance.
All while people starve in the streets, having bankrupted themselves paying for healthcare, while impoverished teachers buy school supplies with their own money. God damned sickening.
I don't think this can be generalized to 100% of the market. There's probably a good percrnt of the personal travel market that would gladly pay more for a non stop flight than save a few bucks with a stop or two. Then buisness travelers whose company pays for their flights will probably not mind the small cost difference for saving of time.
It wasn't for "normal" people, it was for the super rich, captains of industry and movie stars for whom saving 4.5 hours was worth spending the equivalent of a 1st class cabin seat on a slow airliner.
[1]There's a great story about the making of the Band Aid "Do they know it's Christmas?" record. The recording session was underway and Boy George hadn't turned up. He was eventually tracked down to his New York hotel, sleeping off a heavy night. He got up, high tailed it to the airport and caught the next Concorde to London - and made it before the end of the recording session.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/making-of-band-a...
I have done 50K miles so far this year between CA and APAC. The flight is 12+ hours most times. Give me something that is +25-40% $ on a business class ticket today that take the flight time to 3 hours and I will buy it. I think that to be true even for the economy tickets for the long haul flights. I think people in the back of the plan would pay lets say $1200 for that flight to Tokyo over the current $900 for the flight time to be cut by 8-9 hours.
Correct, the Concorde program kickstarted the French aeronautic industry. I don’t know for the UK part, but I think UK was pretty advanced already with the De Havailland and DC-3/4 companies. Which, ironically, collapsed for trying to do things too fast and being earlier than others. For example the DC-9 would famously lose parts and doors, one of those which founds its way in the... Concorde, causing the crash in Paris.
That doesn't change until you get into extremely fast travel such as ballistic point-to-point transport. When you have flight travel times that are on the order of an hour or two (including overhead like vehicle loading and unloading) then it becomes possible to integrate them into a day where they are just a part, which opens up a lot more possibilities and might justify the expense.
I haven't waited in a security line at an airport for more than 30 minutes in years. When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly. I imagine people who are willing to pay for SST would also pay the troll toll and spend comparatively very little time in security lines.
For context, I fly (usually coast to coast) about a dozen or more times a year.
Which airports? US domestic flights? Because internationally I've never seen this happen.
Generally, security rules are made and enforced by USA authorities. Any airport which doesn't fly to the USA only needs to follow local rules of the country they are in, which while typically are as strict as the USA rules, are typically not enforced.
Some airports for example only xray one in 10 bags at peak times, or none at all if the machines broken.
Source: Personal experience only, but I've been to a lot of airports.
This is not typical, but it does still happen even at the airports you mentioned.
The X-ray scanners with the naked images have all been removed. The RF backscatter machines do not produce full body imagery, they highlight areas of concern on a cartoon figure.
Turn around after you go through and you can see exactly what they see. There are no back rooms with naked images connected to the RF scanners.
So you aren't literally being seen naked by people 10 feet away any more, but you're still being photographed through your clothing and if the TSA has any reason to check their archives at the time you were passing through the passport (ie checking if someone snuck something onboard, or validating the machines by hand), people will be looking at you in your birthday suit.
And for the record, I am not a nut about this stuff. There's no health issue with them, or even with the backscatter machines. It seems slightly puritanical to be outraged over it, and I personally am only slightly more indignant than I am about having all of my stuff X-rayed. If it was actually justified I'd be less bothered by the scanners than I am by getting naked for my doctor. However the TSA is a ridiculous imposition and the leadership is every bit as insane as the leadership of MADD or the NRA. They actively believe they're entitled to this kind of thing and were actively trying to extend their domain to other kinds of transport, sports arenas, public buildings etc. The TSA is fucking awful and its often more practical to assume the worst about anything they're doing until proven otherwise.
[1]: https://epic.org/open_gov/foia/TSA_Procurement_Specs.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mmw_large.jpg
[3]: https://gizmodo.com/5690749/these-are-the-first-100-leaked-b...
https://www.nap.edu/read/24936/chapter/4
https://www.nap.edu/read/24936/chapter/15
Also the Gizmodo video showing the leaked mmw images matches up with that fairly well;
https://gizmodo.com/5690749/these-are-the-first-100-leaked-b...
But then on L3’s site you see this for their SafeView product:
http://www.sds.l-3com.com/advancedimaging/safeview.htm
But then for the version TSA uses:
http://www.sds.l-3com.com/advancedimaging/provision-2.htm
Interesting.... I believe the difference may be “active” vs “passive” millimeter wave scanners, where the active type can provide a higher resolution image?
Passive can also do high resolution[1]. It depends heavily on the wavelength being measured. Your second link is talking about far infrared (300+ GHz), or close to. Those waves are blocked more by clothing compared to the <100 GHz (30 GHz?) that Brijot and the current scanners use. The high frequency stuff will show a dark spot where something may be hidden, but is very dim compared to active scanners. They have similar resolution but are much blurrier.
Passive scanners at 30 GHz are by necessity lower resolution at the same price point, because the human body doesn't emit too much around there. However since all the waves are coming from the body, anything hidden under the clothing will block the waves completely and show up as an obvious dark spot. You don't need detail because of that.
Active scanners on the other hand are super detailed, again by necessity. That wavelength goes straight through clothing but since waves are being produced by the machine, anything besides metal will look basically the same as skin. You need to be able to make out the shape and texture to identify it, so the sensors are very high resolution. They need to see the trigger of a gun to know it isn't just a weird rectangle, so that means they can also see your foreskin.
[1]: http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/sites/default/files/...
I fly very frequently, and JFK is (unfortunately) my home airport.
For all my complaints about how awful security at JFK is, it's relatively fast. With pre-check, it's always under ten minutes from the moment I step in line to the moment I have my bags in hand on the other side.
Without pre-check, it is slower, but nothing close to 30 minutes, unless you get pulled aside for secondary and/or detained (at which point there's no predicting how long things will take).
For what it's worth, security at JFK tends to be a bit slower than other US airports that have pre-check, but still noticeably faster than most other airports that I've been to globally in the last few years.
Also you can get to SFO from SF in about 30 minutes with an uber, and get through the lines fairly quick with pre-check & global entry. These flights would be godsends for the apple engineer that has to get on a flight to china asap for some factory issue.
A car collects you at your house and drives you to the airport. You are checked on to your flight whilst still in the car when you arrive, and your suitcases are taken out of the boot of the car. You then walk through security and passport control and into the lounge. I don't recall any queuing at all.
I'm not saying the aggravations you discuss don't exist, but at the price point for SST planes (which I imagine would be predominantly business class tickets), they are dramatically reduced.
Yes I'm French, yes I'm salty.
Or is it Concorde, due to its thrust and speed aren't / can't be as comfortable ?
You’ll need to build a whole supporting infrastructure around it which doesn’t exist.
No pilots, no crew to serve no parts, it can’t land or take off from most airports and it can’t fly over most areas due to ban on supersonic flight.
At this point you’ll need to start a whole aerospace company to support it, recertify it with civilian air transport authorities and possibly even build new airports or runways for it. Even if you have 50 billion net worth that would be out of your reach.
Jumbo jets would not require anywhere near the amount of investment the concorde would even if you didn't had to recertify it from scratch.
For the most part the "uber rich" would use a private jet as long as they can make money of it as in being able to get where they need to be at the shortest of notices which the concord won't allow them.
You can land a gulfstream anywhere same goes for something like a 737, a 747 is a bit more restrictive but it still can land in virtually every metropolitan airport in the world.
Heck the fuel costs alone would be over the top even for the uber rich were talking about $50-60,000 an hour at it's cruising speed of 1260 knots.
Almost every airport in the world has infrastructure to handle a 747. Very few can handle something like Concorde. (Talking mainly runway length requirements and noise abatement regulations). Not to mention service facilities (and the Concorde needs LOTS of servicing between flight sequences).
Also, 747 qualified pilots, mechanics and support personnel are easily found whereas Concorde experts are like hens teeth, and likely very expensive to boot.
Plenty of lease companies and boneyards have spares and components to keep a 747 flying too, but very few have replacement Concorde engines or avionics on hand.
Added to the mix, these 'uber rich' who can afford a 747 also like things like King sized beds, shower facilities, meeting rooms, even spas in their aircraft for maximum comfort. There is simply no room in the Concorde's narrow airframe or limited payload capacity to even think of trying to fit these things in.
The thing that killed it was runway debris.
The newest model had been built in 78 (G-BOAF, Aircrat 216). Think about it, how many airlines back in 2000 were flying planes that were between 22 and 25 years old? Not that many. Just looking right now, AF and BA are around 12 to 13 years for their average fleet age.
Yes, the airframe was aging slowly because high temperatures while flying would prevent humidity from building up but the maintenance on this aircrat was expensive as hell compared to more recent aircrafts.
And it was a downward sliding slope. Anything was costlier on this thing because pretty much everything had to be custom built compared to other planes.
And in the end, it stopped flying not only because AF and BA decided to retire their Concorde fleet but above all because Airbus retired the aircraft certificate of airworthiness.
Is it political? Economical? Honestly, probably both. Airbus probably didn't want to get dragged in the mud again if anything else were to happen.
By way of comparison, the last BA 747-100 flight was late 1999, on G-AWNO, which had been delivered to BOAC in 1973. The last 747-200 flight was not much later (2001, G-BDXO), despite being a far, far newer airframe (delivered 1987).
Which is 5 more than the whole Concorde fleet.
167 747-100 were built says wiki... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Model_summary
Think about economy of scales for parts, training, maintenance, ...
Tires? As in plural? I thought it only happened once and that was due to parts from another plane being left on the runway. Any aircraft with tires mounted under a wing (fuel tank) will have the potential that if a tire blows, a piece with enough force could knock a hole through it.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590#Previou...
CliveL was my favorite.
https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...