Boom Supersonic (YC W16) XB-1 Fuselage Construction Underway
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I went to their website to learn more and (call me cynical) was surprised how emotive it was.
I understand that getting this sort of thing done requires a stupendous amount of capital but I would have thought appealing to the emotive sensibilities of your average web trudger isn't going to help for this kind of project....
I kid, but how many business pitches per week do you think start with: "Like Tesla, but airplanes!"
Edit: And I don't mean it as a bad (or good) thing. If they can pull it off, that'd be great. Aviation is a different animal, but I'd have said the same thing about the Auto Industry. It just requires the right point man.
Supersonic flight is fun, but borderline nonsensical. The cost is outrageous, it's incredibly inefficient, and the damage to the environment and local ecosystems is terrible.
Supersonic flight is the future for the 1% who can afford it and don't care about the costs they don't have to bear.
Honestly, I'd rather see Zeppelins come back before supersonic planes.
> For example, in 1997, the round-trip ticket price from New York to London was $7,995 ($12.5 thousand in 2018 dollars), more than 30 times the cost of the cheapest option to fly this route.
I just did a search for this route in January in first class for comparison and saw various options mostly starting around $6000 (round trip), which is similar to your estimate. I'm sure there are reasons people would often pay more to fly that route in first class.
And as an engineer I bet it can be a very satisfying environmemt to work in with less compromises for legacy and economic reasons.
But the problem with long flights today is not the time on the flight which would make supersonic travel worth it.
The real work should be put into optimizing the slowest step of my journey instead. Like being stuck in traffic to and from airport, the time it takes at the airport for security and to get passengers onboard, taxing to runway for 20 minutes, and waiting in queue of airplanes for take-off slot.
Also even in business class or first class there is horrible noise that makes me super-tired and I am expected to mostly just sit around and feel that free booze will make up for the lousy environment.
Give me an onboard gym, showers, less noise, proper air onboard, proper sleep compartments suitable for people being 2m tall and where I can shut myself in and not be disturbed by other pax or crew.
Maybe if this were something I was doing all the time but as a sometimes event, comfortable sleeping and entertainment options (which I can mostly handle by myself at this point) work pretty well.
(Yes, you can find cheaper flight but that's a pretty typical airfare on a major carrier today.)
Well, Scaled / Virgin Galactic has had its own fatalities, so...
Nice.
There have been many questionable design decisions coming to light in the past decade. Battery fires, cracking pickle forks, and the max8 disasters to name a few. And these issues really can have a significant negative impact and ripple effect, regardless of past track record.
In the first year of flying their most important new airplane, they managed to kill 350 passengers. This is unprecedented in modern air travel, worse than all others combined (including DC-9, Tu-154, and A320). Boeing had information on MCAS's twitchiness in 2015, so why did they allow a second plane to crash? And now they've bungled the grounding, originally suggesting to airlines they might be flying again in May: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/business/boeing-737-softw...
You must admit, their ineptitude through this whole ordeal is just incomprehensible. I'm sure you're right, and Boeing probably better people in charge of their other divisions ... but, if so, then they need to put them on the MAX!
This is part of the problem. Boeing needs to be broken up. They should have never been allowed to merge with McDonnell Douglas, and their civil aviation unit should be a separate entity from their government contracting business.
It's not a single questionable design decision; it's multiple insane management decisions interfering with design decisions involving human lives. And yes, this company deserves the death penalty; it's executives should be jailed, and its assets broken up and sold off, and the military bits nationalized.
The 787 was already basically an act of treason; outsourcing critical military technology because .... muh MBA just in time says it will be cheaper. Well it wasn't, and those secrets ain't jumping back in the bag.
Need that competition. :)
True of Soviet ICBMs (including some still operational in Russian service) and early US ICBMs, but the Minuteman I, introduced in 1962, and all later US ICBMs (Minuteman II & III, Midgetman, Peacekeeper) were solid fueled.
> and could be launched straight away but had other issues
Those “other issues” directly impact the probability of successful launch “straight away”, and did involve having to replace the fuel. (They also involved missiles exploding in their silos, which is bad enough when it's a ground based ICBM, but pretty catastrophic when it's a sub-launched ballistic missile, which cost the Soviets a number of subs apparently.)
To be fair, there were Titan II's in service almost until the very end of the cold war; into the late 80s. (And were used for satellite launches until 2003, but that's another matter.)
I expect they will eventually take a large marketshare starting with China, rest of Asia, and Africa.
This will really hurt the economies of scale for both Boeing and Airbus.
They probably have a lot of smart engineers at Comac and very strong government backing. Within 10 years I expect them to produce planes that makes a lot of economical sense for operators and are really liked by passengers for comfort.
Maybe the FAA will find reasons to keep these planes from US skies, but Boeing will suffer as their market share declines.
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