This is one of my favorite YC companies and I'm really rooting for them. The aviation industry really needs a shakeup and more competition. Boeing has really lost their way.
End result is that Bombardier suffered a huge loss, had to sell IP to airbus (joint venture deal), prices to end consumer are higher, and aviation manufacturing competition is stiffed.
I am a free-trader, and think all tariffs are bad, but Boeing acted in the spirit of that law.
Bombardier's aspirations were stymied by an incredibly expensive certification process, which they underestimated.
The A220 has something like 600+ firm orders from what I recall. It's going to be hugely profitable and Airbus is basically making all the profits. Was it politically motivated? Why wouldn't Canada want an aerospace sector?
I'm failing to see how this wasn't a sure bet...
Oil and gas, Hydro power in Newfoundland and auto plants all got bailed out.
I'm surprised they would give up support for a cutting edge industry like aerospace. That type of expertise will be almost impossible to rebuild.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-world-bank-... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/3354398/bombardier-trudeau-hammer... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bombardier-what-happ...
Regional jets have been optimized over the better part of a century, are heavily regulated and have heavy competition from incumbent players. Based on the historic gains in commuter flight performance we're likely within 10-20% of the optimum plane configuration for any given market. A new entrant would take ~10 years to bring an aircraft to market, during which time an incumbent could introduce a competing aircraft or simply leverage their existing product lines and sales channels to compete with suboptimal aircraft.
So less wonderful than you'd hope: the Pacific is darned big.
Perhaps the supersonic range issue is just a really tough nut to crack?
Almost certainly.
You're right that trans-Pacific would be more compelling. Even with decent food, nice drink, and lie-flat seating, a trans-Pacific flight is still a long time to stay mostly sitting. (Though airlines could have lounges like the old first class lounge in the hump of 747s; people just don't want to pay for the space.)
Honestly, transatlantic is really not a big deal. Very few people are interested in flying back and forth in a day. And if you're going to stay overnight, NY to London, say, is really not a bad trip in business and you don't even need to do it as a red-eye.
I'd add that, if it weren't already the case relative to when the Concorde flew, I suspect that this period will permanently damp flying across the ocean just to sign a deal or do a quick meet and greet. (Which was certainly part of the market for Concordes).
If the noise issue is solved you could meet private, and high-end commercial flight demands. Where the customer isn't concerned with an order of magnitude increase in flight costs. If you can make a big dent in the former using new materials, improved aerodynamics, or higher altitude flight then there is an opportunity to chase commercial customers.
Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first, and then as economies of scale and efficiency improve, it can become the norm.
There's a reason why the term "jet-setters" came about in the 50s-60s to mean wealthy people. Nowadays flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up.
What?
Jets carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of payload - a 747 can carry nearly 250,000lbs of payload.
Rockets carry payloads in the range of thousands pounds at most. Simply making your rocket bigger isn't an easy solution, and you start burning a ton more fuel for marginal payload gains.
It also doesn't cost $90 Million to fly a 747 every time it takes off...
$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].
Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.
For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".
There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
[2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....
[1]https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-...
For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.
Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.
Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.
It's just not a realistic option.
A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.
The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.
How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?
How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.
The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.
And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?
This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.
That was the theory behind Concorde half a century ago.
Flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up because the industry learned from the lack of demand for Concorde and optimised for fuel efficiency instead of speed
2. But more modern and fuel-efficient
3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s
4. As it's made by an American company, they hope to avoid the US protectionism Concorde was subject to.
It remains to be seen whether post-COVID wealthy travellers will subsidise BOOM development costs as opposed to not flying or continuing with smaller private jets as at present. Although Boom is “designing Overture to be the first post-pandemic airplane", they will need a massive investment to scale from the single-seat prototype (still to fly) to an operationally profitable vehicle.
Concorde failed because there wasn't enough of these people.
Eventually you run out of people willing to pay $10k a seat for this type of travel. Which is what happened to Concorde - after the novelty wore off, all you had was an extremely expensive seat.
I think British Airways could have kept the Concorde flying longer than they did if it were not for this incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
which happened at a lower passenger*mile count than the 737 MAX accidents and would have required a Space Shuttle style shutdown-and-reform phase. Concorde's avionics and cockpit were completely out of date and fixing that would have been expensive.
People sometimes took the Concorde London->NYC to attend meetings and then returned to London the same day. I've done London->Dulles for meetings and then back on a regular boring jet, but it was exhausting and if there had been options to halve that flight time it'd have been fantastic.
At least a couple business class-only airlines didn't last long. The only current route I'm aware of is the BA London City to NYC route. Though there may well be others in the Middle East, etc.
The Concorde demonstrated the failure of the Mach 2 class airliner, not just because of "high fuel consumption" but because it could not do multiple trips across the Atlantic in a day thanks to takeoff and landing restrictions. Originally people thought the SST would crush all other airliners economically because they could fly twice as many flights in the same time ("half the capital cost") but that was not realized. (People in London and NYC have to sleep once in a while)
The Mach 3 class typified by military projects such as the SR-71 and XB-70 might be successful at both problems.
Believe it or not supersonic cruise at Mach 3 is about the optimum fuel economy for supersonic flight and it might be fast enough to do more flights and lower the capital cost.
One gap between the Mach 2 and the Mach 3 classes is that at Mach 3 you have to give up on aluminum as a structural material and switch to Iron, Titanium, or something else. The SR-71 squared some of the design circles by taking off with a minimum fuel load and refueling mid-air -- airliners would have worse problems in terms of wing design.
There is no commercial airliner in the Mach 1 class, the economics are certainly worse than Concorde. The Mach 1 business jet might just work if somebody values the time over the economics.
Also - not sure what you call Mach 1 class but the business jet market has a lot of planes which will cruise at eg Mach 0.93 or so - ie faster than airliners - and speed is valued in that market. If noise issues over land can be navigated successfully then I would expect there is a good market for supersonic business jets.
Surprised no one has made the crossover argument wrt supersonic travel.
I'd be curious what research exists for the viability of Mach 3 and hypersonic commercial aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707
which came across as a bit too ambitious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause
This is why "American Airlines" flights to smaller cities are flown by "Piedmont Airlines" or some other subsidiary. (eg. "United Airlines" runs ads and is concerned about their brand, they get people who work for their subsidiary to actually punch you in the face.)
If a company was trying to get the most of the E195 or A220 they'd probably replace some E145/CRJ200 flights with it and some B737/A320 flights but to do that the conflict between the real airline and the fake airline gets harder to reconcile.
Just as the B787 and B777 replaced the bigger B747 the E195/A220 should have been replacing the 737 in the last decade but the "scope clause" is a brick wall against that.
I can't think of many examples of 737/A320s being replaced by regional jets anywhere, even in countries with no scope clauses?
Southwest is still flying the 737 (they expect to be doing that in 2120) but JetBlue looks like an E series airline today.
One might argue that US labor laws are broken in that they encourage companies to agree to clauses like this, but one might also argue that the airlines blew it and should not have signed the contract.
(It does seem to me that the US has a lot of examples of deeply broken union contracts. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, the US government ought to do about that.)
But I'd also be far more thrilled by a truly next gen regional. Unfortunately the physical barriers for making regional aircraft significantly more economical are actually harder than for throwing more fuel at the problem of going faster. Between supersonic and next gen regional, they are not only taking on the more glamorous problem, it's also the easier one.
There's a lot of room for more efficiency. With carbon wing spars you can have whatever aspect ratio is practical for operations with not much weight penalty. In the last decades, the wind power industry has pushed forward methods for large composite structures mass produced cheaply.
Boom can always pivot. From Concorde came Airbus as well.