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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

I’m always conflicted when I hear about Boom. I’m cheering for them, but I can’t help feeling like it’s a scam. Then again, there is nothing impossible technicaly about civilian supersonic flight...

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No scam, I know Blake and they’ve been in Colorado building for years. It might not make it, but it won’t be for lack of trying or integrity.

Great to hear! Thanks! I’m excited for them to pull it off.

Trying to resurrect a gas-guzzling technology in the face of irreversible climate change is not "integrity" by any definition I've ever used.

This is a technology that could only benefit people wealthy enough to afford it. There isn't even a nice story to tell about how it helps humans as a whole.

The R&D that went into your phone can be derived from wall street types buying cell phones in the 90s.

As technology gets better, the probability that it will become affordable to the masses increases greatly. It's not guaranteed, but its definitely non-zero.

The miniaturization of transistors ain't jet science.

We don't even want it to become affordable to the masses because it uses exponentially more fuel. That's part of the problem.

A car consumes exponentially more fuel than a horse

This is equivocation - parent was discussing the founders' integrity in the sense of whether they are running a scam, not the broader moral integrity of developing this technology.

While I am dubious about commercial supersonic flight (at least without significant investments in reducing emissions, though avoiding afterburning should already help), improved designs will at the very least lead to developments in the field, and possibly in related fields such as suborbital flight and spaceplanes.

You can be dismissive by saying it's equivocal, but I explicitly mentioned that I was broadly considering all definitions of integrity that I've personally used.

It may not be a dishonest company, but lots of harm can be done honestly.

Neither is slave labor for every consumer electronics play

So you done yet?

I would love this

This an’t Woodstock ;)

I've been in an adjacent industry and am nearly always a skeptic about these sorts of things. With Boom specifically though, I don't think they're a scam. Their developmental timeline is definitely optimistic, but assuming they're able to get continued funding as needed (i.e. billions of dollars), I expect they'll succeed.

The technology around Supersonics has existed for nearly half a century. The Concorde supersonic plane was flown in 1969 - nearly nearly a half century ago. At the time, one of the big cost was gas. Significant improvements has been made to materials to improve gas efficiency for supersonics.

Boom can use the Tesla approach by starting with business class customers to prove the demand then moving down the latter to consumers. Tokyo could be a weekend trip if the flight was five hours.

The "Tesla approach" doesn't work at all with aerospace: the programme costs are all up front and you want to sell as many units as possible as quickly as possible to recover them, and the major demand all comes from the airlines. Scaling to meet demand is much less of a worry than having a product being in demand.

Business aviation is a less lucrative market than commercial, and business-only commercial flights is a market which has almost completely failed to make any profit. In automotive terms, not only are there are a lot more people buying buses than cars, you also don't make a higher profit on the cars either unless you're the interiors outfitter....

On a commercial plan, business travelers accounts for >70% of an airline's profits. My read on the article is that Boom is targeting the business customers on a commercial flight and faster transit time is one of the biggest wants for business travelers.

They're a large part of some airlines' profits because there's a small number of people willing to pay silly prices on most routes at most times of day.

That doesn't translate particularly well to less frequent 55 business class seat flights on most of those routes; even if the flights are shorter the arrival times are probably a lot less convenient for most of the executives.

The all-business class model has struggled to be economically viable even on ideal routes like London-NY. Those economy seats give you a lot more flexibility when the business class seats aren't selling.

(And as ghaff pointed out business travellers /= business class; most people travelling on business have an economy ticket sized budget)

Most business travelers don't actually travel business class. And don't get to pick premium levels of service. And that would be even less the case if those premium levels were at a premium over today's premium levels.

The rate of business travelers who fly business class is not 100%, but it's very high for most airlines.

For US and European carriers, it's around 75%. Since the cost is 4 - 7x higher than commercial, most people aren't paying for this expensive personally. Not sure about other industries, but for consulting and tech, the standard is to allow a business upgrade on international flights and not domestic.

i can't produce numbers but, anecdotally, the idea that 75% of international business travelers get to fly business seems...unlikely based on the people I know and even assuming my own terms are especially shabby. Very frequent travelers, i.e. greater than my own 75K miles per year or so, do get upgrades from time to time but the I dispute the idea that the typical tech business traveler is usually flying business.

There are enough billionaires in the world to support them if they have a product. Conventional business jets only offer more flexibility with little speed advantage beyond bypassing security.

The flexibility is worth more than the speed for most flights, and not many of the world's ~2000 billionaires are going to put down a large percentage of their net worth for a fast-depreciating personal transportation device that only becomes worthwhile if they need to leave their continent.

There is another company working on a slightly supersonic private jet (Mach 1.4).

https://www.aerionsupersonic.com

So there may end up being other options.

There's always fractional aircraft ownership. I see ads for it all the time, but I don't know if it's a viable business model.

Fractional ownership works for the likes of Netjets buying existing aircraft types, but it's another niche-sized market and essentially a way for the superrich to avoid buying aircraft.

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