Appreciate conservative industries like aerospace need optimists like yourself to back ambitious projects that Airbus and Boeing have commercial reasons to avoid trying for themselves even if they thought they might be viable, but point 2 of your FAQ alarms me.

~$2bn is a ludicrously small sum of capital to get a "final plane", even compared with airframe programmes that took the 737 as a starting point and had the relatively straightforward objective of being a 737 but a few percentage points more fuel efficient and with a nice new cockpit. And no, you really can't debt-finance a new aircraft research programme with outstanding orders. Most of the money in an aircraft transaction changes hands at the delivery stage (deposits are a small fraction of the aircraft cost, pre-delivery payments are also a small fraction and are made in the months immediately prior to an aircraft delivery, not as r&d funding). The airlines usually need external financing to actually manage these payments which comes from the asset finance arms of conservative financial institutions looking to earn steady ROI from having assets with predictable residual values on their balance sheet, not a punt on a research project which may or may not actually deliver an aircraft. Boom's going to have to raise VC-type funding themselves; the airlines can't and won't do it for them at any scale. (I used to speak with senior executives at airlines involved in aircraft finance on a day to day basis so I'm not just being cynical here). And please correct me if there is undisclosed information and I am wrong on this point, but at the moment as I understand it Boom does not have "many billions" in orders, it has non-binding LOIs for an entirely notional 76 aircraft and $10m in equity investment from JAL is the only financial commitment from any airline.

So I'd be extremely worried if this was the basis from which investors in general were considering their risk-adjusted returns. I suspect this is more your attempt at an HN-friendly summary of the prospects based on casual conversations with employees, as someone who yourself backed the project for other reasons at a much earlier stage. But if they were making claims about funding much of their r&d from their order book in representations to investors (as I said, I suspect they aren't) I'd start viewing it a Theranos-level heist as opposed to yet another well-intentioned aerospace project full of good engineers trying something wildly ambitious (which is where I think they actually are).