Not all of us dream of a future where the ultra-rich get to shatter everyone else's windows with their sky toys.
But there will never be a future where private jets are economical for the masses (even private cars aren't really economical for the long term for everyone globally), and I doubt the tech Boom are developing will make it into widely used commercial planes, but perhaps it will.
When it comes to transport: Partially; air travel has become fairly accessible for a lot of people now compared to a hundred years ago. Cars are also pretty common now - although driving is still quite expensive.
But I don't see how we can ever have personal airplanes be as affordable and accessible as cars. Not going to happen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
This first demonstrator is a two-seater. The next jet they are designing is the Overture, designed for the ~50 seater business jet segment. And as the name hints, they don't intend to stop there.
Sibling comment already addressed that Boom isn't "personal airplanes".
However: why not?
I mean, apart from the current fact that not enough people want this.
Let's look at a Cessna. It masses around 800kg empty, so lighter than many modern cars, and that's not due to exotic, expensive materials, and without that, cost tends to be roughly proportional to weight.
The engine is a four cylinder with 180hp. My car gets 200hp out of 2l with a turbocharger, but aviation tends to use very old-school engine tech for reliability, so it's got huge displacement, almost 6 liters. So there's some room for improvement there, particularly once we go electric, because electric motors are so much more reliable.
Fully electric is already viable for flight-training and other short-range needs, and unbeatably cheap for those missions. (A friend and I had this idea of getting a used Antonov An 2 and stuffing it with electric bus batteries for a south-/west- to east-bay commute... The numbers worked quite well).
Hybrid electric could mean getting to use much smaller, cheaper, common, efficient engines and use the electric engine and some batteries for safety.
Avionics? Yup, somewhat complex and expensive, but really not for too many intrinsic reasons. The gold standard for GA today is (still?) the Garmin 1000. An iPad has most of the same sensors (as does my Apple Watch), and the compute power is nothing to write home about.
More importantly most of those things don't inconvenience the people around me. If I use my computer or my kitchen-aid (high-price items in the past), it doesn't disturb my neighbors (or would have in the past when they were still in their infancy).
Ship travel was already something most people in developed countries could afford. What’s the use of getting around faster and higher off the ground?
It's hardly the same thing with a supersonic airliner, which just reduces the time in roughly half.
http://www.century-of-flight.freeola.com/new%20site/commerci...
My bet is somewhere like $4000 roundtrip trans-Atlantic ticket or $3000 cross-country ticket in U.S. is about the maximum the market will bear.
Boom won't be flying over any country. They will only travel over oceans, to prevent issues / complaints that Concorde had.
The reality we live in today was created through the use of wealth that employed people and produced better and better goods to meet more and more people's needs.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm for yet another fight between privatized gains at the cost of socialized harms.
> Supersonic operations over land must be conducted above 30,000 feet or, when below 30,000 feet, in specially designated areas approved by Headquarters United States Air Force, Washington, D.C., and the Federal Aviation Administration.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
and
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/17661/can-a-son...
Boom won't burn bunker fuel, nor will it dump munitions or nuclear waste, so how is this relevant? Some of those are real problems, but none of them will be made worse by Boom.
Those are permanent, globally occuring, chemical phenomena. A sonic boom is a very temporary, very local, mechanical phenomenon. You cannot draw any conclusions from one to the other.
> tiny sonar noises a few hundred kilometers away
Sonar originates from within water, while sonic booms originate in the air. Most of the boom's acoustic energy will probably be reflected by the transition from one medium to the other.
I think marine life will most likely be a lot less disturbed by sonic booms than by naturally occuring storms.
And flying a few execs from New York to London in 3-4 hours with renewable fuels isn't going to quite achieve that.
You seem proud of our current predicament.
There have been huge technical advances. Incredible progress.
But equally huge destruction and incredible externalities.
You seem to enjoy fireworks.
Pessimists have been historically wrong. I consciously choose to be an (prudent) optimist.
I'm a frustrated optimist, if that helps.
>The world, a couple hundred years ago: Our world is everlasting.
No one ever said that...not even the bible ;)
>There have been huge technical advances. Incredible progress.
>But equally huge destruction and incredible externalities.
That like saing Aircraft's are incredible but they make pollution...it says absolutely nothing.
>You seem to enjoy fireworks.
An you seem enjoying wasting energy for nothing...not even a beautiful firework.
Except to describe the entire history of the last, maybe 150-300 years, and the dilemma of the next 150-300 years.
And, anyway, I enjoy a good firework, but I never said I wanted our world to be one.
The issues with inequality of wealth are real, and separate.
Holy shit, it's 2020. Look around.
I don't think it's as clear cut as you want to believe. Technological progress is almost exclusively fueled by economical gain, economical gain rarely aligns with long term progress.
Was leaded gas a progress ? Freon ? Asbestos ? Privacy invading social networks ? I guess it depends on the scale you look at it but it's more "is technological progress always desirable ?" rather than "tech is always good, always trust the tech, always praise the tech"
It may not have been worth the cost in lives, but the benefits we've had since from that technology are still benefits.
IIRC, southern fried chicken in the US descends from cooking styles that only the aristocrats of western England could afford. Which their 2nd sons (or rather, their 2nd son's cooks) brought along to Virginia.
https://www.mashed.com/220283/the-strange-story-of-ice-cream...
https://qz.com/1320584/ice-cream-in-cuba-reveals-the-growing...