United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/supersonic-passenger...
Some side-by-side comparisons:
2019 article: "Boom envisions its Overture airliner traveling at Mach 2.2." 2021 article: "a plane that could fly at Mach 1.7"
2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s". 2021 article: "It is targeting the start of passenger service in 2029."
The 2019 article also says that Boom is constructing a 1/3rd scale version of Overture that could be making test flights later in 2019. This article from October 2020 says that the 1/3rd scale vehicle was "rolled out" in 2020 and could be ready for test flights in Q3 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/26/boom-supe...
After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted.
The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1].
I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years.
[1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...
No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying.
We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
Hm. Significant delays and missed timelines aren't normal you say? Let's see (aerospace only):
• all SpaceX projects so far (USA)
• Virgin Galactic's space tourism plans (USA)
• Boeing's 787 and 777X (USA)
• HAL's Sukhoi-30-, Jaguar Darin III-, and Tejas LCA projects and production (India)
• BAE Systems Plc/TAI TF-X project (UK/Turkey)
• EADS's MRH-90, Tiger, and A400M (EU)
• Airbus A380 (EU)
• Comac’s C919 project (China)
• ...
TBH, it'd be easier to list projects that actually finished on schedule and didn't face significant delays, such as the Airbus A350XWB.
And most of the companies listed aren't even money-starved start-ups that required investor attention and media hype. It's almost as if developing, testing, and certifying cutting edge aerospace projects is kind of hard and just as easy to predict and schedule as large software projects...
Boom Supersonic is obviously overly optimistic in their deadlines, but they at least aren't pretending that they're meeting them when they aren't.
They are a lot more similar that you like to admit though. Both of their hype descriptions are to support the hype culture that powers the environment they live in, namely silicon valley(even if they're not physically there).
It's just that at some point Theranos decide to resort to lying to keep the whole thing going. The scope that Theranos promised was actually physically infeasible, some subsection of it might have been possible. Boom will hopefully not do that.
But in terms of engineering, Boom also has yet to produce even a prototype of their plane. A test version is scheduled to testflight in 2021. We'll see about that, I don't think it will happen. Although 7 years for a supersonic jet from scratch would have been quite impressive.
Theranos could have chosen to build a bigger machine with a more limited amount of tests once they realized it's not possible, but they decided to tackle too many problems at once and double down on them. But what we conveniently like to ignore is that investors, politicians and media perpetuated the whole lie. It wasn't just Holmes, it was an entire culture of VC's and politicians that had a vested interest in perpetuating the lie and to some extent helped silence critics.
Besides the obvious scammy and blatant lies that Theranos leadership did(down the line). There was also the aspect of feature creep (i.e. 200 tests per tiny blood vial) and ignoring both leadership and biochemical specialists(i.e. sample size and machine size).
In the case of Boom I like to think that at least Josh Wilding seeing that he has been an Aerospace engineer for 20 years has mentioned the issues with the timeline, and was overruled probably by either his peers or VCs, but we won't really know for sure. But if the engineering cofounder is already not involved at this point, let's hope that other issues won't follow.
It's amazing that there are so many people willing to lie in order to make honestly good ideas viable, instead of everybody just being like Theranos.
Don't forget the KC-46 tanker. Even though they had a working KC-767 to start from.
It was authorized by the board in 2005, first flight was planned for 2008, entry into service was planned in 2010. First flight was 2013, it entered in service in 2018 (January, but still).
When you want to sell, you should be overly optimistic in your presentation.
When you have sold, you can now explain the real picture and explain that actually... everything will take 3 times longer than when you were trying to sell.
I hate super positve PR propaganda too, and a skeptical eye should always be applied. Fraud is still used when talking about Tesla, yet they clearly have developed products. Yes deadlines were missed. I'm willing to give Boom a bit of leeway.
Say I'm looking for a bike. Person A is selling one I like and promises to deliver after two weeks. Person B is selling one I like a bit less, but promises to deliver after one week. I might now choose to buy from person B, even if I like the bike a bit less.
If I buy from person B and they deliver after three weeks, there's a problem. Why did it take three times as long? Did they ever intend to deliver after one week? Should they have known they wouldn't be able deliver after one week? They got the order based on a feature they didn't deliver. If that was intentional, that's fraud.
You don't have to. It it not a government project. The only pass that matters is their ivestor's. And most of the time as long as the progress is made and the outcome overweights the delay, everyone will be happy to wait.
Same with cures and vaccines. Who cares if they are delayed? It is not on purpose. Would you rather have it delayed or never?
Which relies on the company's public statements being honest. Normalising unrealistic timeline announcements hurts everyone.
Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...
They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating.
Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
For comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of $30bn in modern money.
Tons of people are getting rich off that, and tons of people are being elected for the office. Military spending is one of the biggest government welfare programs in USA.
While its definitely good that NGAD has produced a flying prototype so quickly, it isn't proof that they have achieved the goal of faster development.
The primary hinderance has been and still is the software. The defense industry has been slow to adopt modern coding practices. Sometimes that's a good thing. But on the balance its bad. F-35's software development has all of the hallmarks of a project saddled with a great deal of technical debt combined with outdated practices and overburdened with compliance.
Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think. There are compression and twisting forces on the fuselage and flight surfaces which have no analog in conventional airliners.
And you can't just take the flight characteristics of one shape/size of aircraft and tweak them a little for your new design.
Just because they are a huge company with big spending power does not make it impossible for their codebases to be a pile of hot steaming garbage that even the best engineers struggle with.
And every supersonic aircraft also has to fly subsonic. So you really need two sets of software in a supersonic aircraft. Or more accurately three, because the transonic regime is weird enough to be its own thing.
Is there such a thing as a “working airframe” for modern combat aircraft? Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability, I have the understanding that, for modern combat aircraft, you can’t consider the airframe to be separate from the software.
As a side note: Early relaxed stability planes had no software. It was implemented with analog computers
If you have normal wings and the right size horizontal and vertical stabiliser the basic design of an aircraft is self stabilising. Especially with the wings sloping upwards (as all airliners have) because that wing shape also contributes to stability.
Obviously heavily pro-military just by the title, as if the military is only used in a defensive manner.
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy–maneuverability_theory
"the first Air Force aircraft to be built using the 'holy trinity' of digital engineering, agile software development and open architecture"
I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway
I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it.
Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up.
If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others).
Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold"
And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit.
And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on.
That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility.
And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed)
In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines".
just my 2 cents, whatever that means.
The FAA requirements are soooooo painful, and often illogical and sometimes even mutually contradictory.
It seems that the FAA is trying to optimize for the fewest unknown unknowns, and until the 737 MAX it would be hard to argue that entirely new airframes, propulsion and control systems operating in flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation would achieve that objective better than incremental changes.
The associated bureaucracy bloat can be a feature because it’s harder to sustain a ruse over time.
That said, it really does impede development of arguably safer systems.
TIL the Tu-144 was designed, built and then operated commercially entirely by accident...
This one is the most egregious. It’s hard to imagine a good-faith scenario where the company actually thought they would ship a commercial airplane in a couple years when they didn’t even have their scale model working.
Boom seems like vaporware.
This is a bit like saying SpaceX's Starship isn't possible because Boeing's SLS is costly and delayed. "If Boeing can't do it, it must be tough" is no longer the same statement it would've been in the 1960s.
Boom hasn't even finished the scale prototype they've been promising for a while, much less started development on an actual full size plane. If they ever fly the plane, it will be more than a decade from now.
SpaceX also says they'll have operational cross-earth passenger service for less than business class ticket by the end of 2028. I'd gladly take a bet against that.
So would I. It sounds like the kind of dreamy claim Elon likes to make for Tesla that he routinely misses.
But in any case, it looks like Airbus has a similar development timeline for new planes that Boeing does. I suspect that is broadly applicable to other manufacturers as well. As a sanity check, I looked at the development of the smaller airliner from Bombardier (now Airbus A220) and it was January 2007 for industrial start, to September 2013 for maiden flight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
The 747 is a descendant of the 707, which took 3 years.
It’s based on the 367-80 prototype which took less than 2 years (they only built one 367-80).
The 787 isn’t really representative of a reasonable timeframe for an experienced company to design + build an airliner.
it's also a regression in skills, culture, accountability, and urgency.
This means around 2025.
FYI, most airliners already fly at or above 0.85 Mach. 1.7 is faster than 0.85 but operationally it will only be only an incremental decrease in total travel time.
of course, there are exceptions with congestion, hold patterns, excessive vectoring, etc, but this is generally true.
another thing to keep in mind is headwinds/jetstream. when going west across the atlantic; they can often be 100+mph. so the delta between boom and eg. a 787 becomes even more pronounced in this situation.
Whether that's enough travel time reduction to make these aircraft worthwhile is definitely a valid question. The low-boom technology that NASA is pursuing is for sub-Mach 2 aircraft (I don't believe Boom is pursuing a low-boom design, but I haven't followed closely as I don't consider them a credible organization either).
As an engineer, this feels strange, because you might expect to be trying to be as close to correct as possible when you give a date. But that's not the goal. The goal is to create a narrative and sense of purpose that gets you there as quickly as possible.
Finishing something 6 months behind schedule in 18 months is still better than doing it "only" 1 month behind schedule in 19 months. Of course, you also need a risk analysis of the worst case, and to understand the financials and be able to survive a reasonable range of potential delays.
I've quit before because of this very reason. You're allowed to disagree with me obviously, but I don't want to work with you if you honestly believe this is a good policy.
In my experience, engineer B usually gets to take charge of the project, and inevitably takes 3-4 years before the project ends, having failed to deliver anything that works.
Bonus points if the project is then declared a success by the pointy haired boss that bet on engineer B.
If you hand out ownership/status/power/money based on unsubstantiated project estimates, I’m not sure you can ever expect very good or happy results.
It’d be much better if all of the characters in that example sat down and decided what the most realistic best case with a solid plan looks like, and took responsibility for communicating it together, and you find a different way to decide who gets to own it.
It is essential to create teams that are aware of and talk about the most optimistic timelines, but where everyone knows the people on the front lines doing the work are in control and set the pace.
This is very achievable if the starting point is empowering people, removing roadblocks, and increasing the team’s capabilities and leverage, rather than trying to impose timelines.
I recall reading that major construction, mfrg project timelines were automatically setback by a large number of months due to the Evergreen thing... (JIT construction required a precise delivery of components and even a few week hiccup in that caused a downstream of ++months)
OBV Boom isnt affected by such - but the labor version locally in the US (Colorado) could still have slowed...
The other non-tangible impact of something like this is the loss of intellectual momentum that a team may have had aggressively going after a timeline when suddenly all the eng team gets to go spend more time with family...
Just some factors to be considered.
Not the speed thing though :) But the faster you go the more energy it costs for the same distance so that would make sense.
also making big moves is complicated, attention spans are short, and peoples judgement of time is crap.
I'm super interested to see how quiet their planes are at subsonic. If you ever saw the Concorde flying subsonic, it was unbelievably loud. Nothing to do with being supersonic - their engines were just obnoxiously loud. Came into Cape Town a long time ago and made the whole town rumble on final.
In this blog post: https://blog.boomsupersonic.com/booms-principles-of-sustaina...
..Boom says: "Today’s subsonic commercial aircraft are 80% more fuel efficient than those of the 1960s, and noise footprints have shrunk up to 90% in the last 50 years. This technological progress has fueled Boom’s efforts to design a supersonic airliner that makes economic sense for airlines and their customers. "
However, the innovation that enabled this is high bypass turbofan engines. Turns out if you move more air slower, it's way quieter and more fuel efficient because physics. Boom can't take advantage of this - at least directly, because they have to go supersonic. A high bypass turbofan engine is huge, by it's very nature. At supersonic speeds this presents a lot of drag. That's why I'm super curious how they plan to be quiet and fuel efficient while also being supersonic.
Here's an example: https://www.silentium.com/technology-2/quiet-at-the-source/
For power/intensity ratio, 10dB is 10x; for amplitude ratio, 20dB is 10x.
Loudness is typically measured by "sound pressure level" (dB SPL), which uses the latter (amplitude ratio).
Also, it's worth pointing out that while sound perception (like almost all the perceptions people have, Stevens's power law [1]) is logarithmic, its base isn't exactly 10 or 100. [2] claims that every 20dB (10x) in SPL, the perceived loudness is 4x.
I would imagine drag increases linearly or exponentially with speed - not as a step function once you cross the sound barrier.
Or are you saying because it's going to be flying twice as fast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number#:~....
[Increasing Mach Number] can cause the drag coefficient to rise to more than ten times its low-speed value.
I only know this because of a number of fluid-dynamics courses that are only required for Mechanical and Aeronautical engineering majors. Barely anyone else is expected to know this information. Mach numbers represent fluid-flow discontinuities. If there is fluid flow in a varying inner-diameter tube and there is a Mach number change from <1 -> >1 at any point in the tube, as long as the Mach discontinuity is there, fluid flow characteristics before and after the discontinuity are decoupled from each other, they no longer influence each other if the Mach discontinuity is present.
The sonic boom really isn't an issue as long as you can fly that part of the route over the sea. Concorde often took longer routes to avoid flying over land, and it was still quicker than a more direct subsonic flight. Or you just fly supersonic over countries you don't care about - flights from London to Bahrain would fly supersonic from the Adriatic Sea crossing the Middle East over land to Bahrain.
The Bahrain route is interesting, as today it is 5.5 hours and Concorde was 4 hours, so not that much difference. I'd rather spend an extra hour and a half on a much more comfortable and bigger aircraft. They also tried routes to Singapore (stopping in Bahrain to refuel), the total flight time was 9 hours, compared to non-stop flights today which are 13 hours. I wonder if developments in reducing the time subsonic aircraft take to reach and descend from cruising altitude could narrow that gap even further.
I’m curious if either shielding the engines, or having a scramjet (like a turbofan but without the blades) could have a similar effect.
- Noise means you can't do US domestic
- Concorde didn't have the range for Pacific
- Costs didn't work for Atlantic routes
- And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
Which ones has Boom solved?
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1400425028022308874
> Won’t the sonic boom be loud?
> Overture flights will focus on 500+ primarily transoceanic routes that benefit from supersonic speeds—such as New York to London or San Francisco to Tokyo. Overture won't generate a sonic boom over land cruising at subsonic speeds.
Airlines are likely expecting that business trips flying coach are going to radically diminish. Offering a super-premium fast flight for the remaining business travelers who must travel but have a reduced tolerance for it is a smart move.
What you’re suggesting about “super-premium” flights doesn’t map to what’s being publicly said about Boom or the fundamental principles of commercial flying. As a matter of fact, the Concorde ultimately failed for those very same niche-economy reasons.
What’s your source for saying that business trips flying coach will diminish?
That's an unsourced opinion based on personal experience. Zoom has become a much more common method of connecting with remote teams. I don't see a compelling reason to travel for non-critical business functions, and if the travel is that business critical then I can probably get my company to pay the expense of a premium ticket.
There are probably 2 travel occasions per year where the business travel is more of a "fun" activity such as conferences etc. I'll still fly coach for those.
Also the Concorde was not that much of a premium over first class on, say, a 747. I'm remembering +30% or +50%. Of course, that first class ticket was very expensive if you inflate it to today's money.
Even a month away I can't see a direct flight for less than $8k return leaving JFK evening of Jul 11th and returning July 16th.
The flights are pretty much empty at the moment, but they would be at any price. Doesn't mean that VS/DL will sell for $7k (undercutting BA/AA's $8k), it's effectively a cartel.
The Concorde was a premium over sub-sonic first class but it wasn't anything like double.
The reasons that they stopped flying were different. It cost a lot, and was a lot more cramped than first class or private... the competition. Meanwhile, the time you spend in airports diluted the time you save by flying faster. If these could fly from LCA to a similarly small US port, speed makes a lot more sense.
That said, this will probably fail. Most air travel stuff fails. I'm hoping it won't. Progress is fun.
https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-cabin--passenger-e...
Not sure why you'd use it from Cyprus (LCA is Larnaca). If it could operate on a short runway though, London City to JFK or LaGuardia ala the BA airbus would be interesting, although the stop for Shannon has never appealed.
- No charging network, can't drive away from home
- Battery tech not there, no realistic range
- Too expensive, no one will pay that much for a car they can't drive anywhere
- Everyone wants an SUV or an affordable sedan, not some niche vehicle. Who's going go buy it?
Which ones has Tesla solved?
Moving an industry takes time. Will Boom do it? Who knows. But this line of thinking is kind of short sighted and defeatist, don't you think?
It might be interesting to see Benedict’s comments on Tesla circa 2005 to see how they compare to Boom today.
Boom is selling a tiny handful of planes.
So they have to solve these problems, largely when they launch.
Airlines are not going to run at a loss for a decade while things tune up.
In the end the product was nothing like the Elise. But intermediate products were like the Elise, and could be driven and test manufactured and could inform revisions. A half complete scratch design could not have been.
... after he bought out the founder(s).
It's the same as some people who say "next startup, I'll go straight to insert scalable architecture". That doesn't work. You need your flexibility to experiment and find what really works in the beginning.
People wanted to buy them because they were 'buying a dream' - and helping to move the ball forward.
There was a huge amount of 'good faith' in the process by early customers and supporters. Even to this day.
Tesla is an aspirational brand and people are paying an aspirational premium.
Boom will definitely be that as well. Execs will humble brag about their Boom flights, everyone will talk about - it's super exciting, super cool.
The issue I'm pointing to is scale ... will those smaller tranche of buyers be able to support all of the operational overhead of the airline and the ongoing R&D of the company ... is the question.
edit: I say this as someone having little to no real knowledge of the aerospace industry :)
Are you planning on refueling the boom mid-air at supersonic speeds?
Tesla also took an approach that analysts who clearly weren't "car guys" weren't expecting: mainly creating something with massive HP and TQ. Previous electric cars had yawn-inducing performance. Someone buying a 5-series probably at least partially bought it for the performance, when they got behind the wheel of a model S it was like getting behind the wheel of a modified M5.
Boom isn't bringing anything new to the table to solve the issues people have listed. Tesla had a plan to solve those issues from the get-go.
- Charging network: don’t they have their own network? I’m sure it’s not widespread enough to meet everyone’s needs, but it’s not nothing and helped get the ball rolling.
- Battery tech: has been gradually improving, range is now in the hundreds of miles which is enough for many uses.
- Too expensive / everybody wants an SUV: starting with luxury and sports models and gradually following up with mass-market models addresses both of these.
So I think the analogous questions for Boom are good and valid questions. Tesla had decent answers and Boom should too.
I still think the questions are perfectly reasonable. But maybe it just needs to be phrased as “how do they plan to address these?” rather than “which ones have they solved?”
That then turned out to become increasingly false over time. Buying the early stage product is a risky bet, you hope it will take off like that, but it might not. They do need a plan to address them, and to be trustworthy.
So I would say they have made at least solid progress on three of them.
You also gave up a lot of comfort to ride the Concorde. That would be even more true today with excellent business-class options on most airlines and many world-class first-class products like the Etihad A380 “Apartments”. Are high end business flyers or rich tourists really going to trade that to save 4 hours between New York and London in high enough numbers to sustain a regular route?
There is also the exclusivity factor, but that is already highly served by private jets. Then finally, just the experience. But is that enough to fill the seats every day?
Supersonic flight is a really cool idea but the reality involves a lot of tradeoffs. When it comes down to people actually buying tickets and looking at the customer base, I just don’t see it as some slam dunk product.
With CEO salaries and more generally inequalities having exploded in the last couple decades I think the business model might have become viable.
I’m sure some CEOs will pay whatever it costs to boost their own egos but IMO that would push them towards private jets, not a supersonic flight with United. I find the actual arguments for faster flights less persuasive than they were in the 70s.
The connectivity probably does make a difference for some. Personally, I appreciate the disconnect time.
And taking 6 hours total out of your flying time means you have 6 more hours to enjoy your destination. Unless I was a celebrity that would get hounded by the public, I'd rather do TSA Pre-check + first class supersonic than a private jet.
The caveat for me is that I wouldn't trust a startup that is behind its timelines to create a safe aircraft without further information.
Plus I imagine many of the ultrarich that you are talking about would prefer to fly private even if it is slower than flying commercial. Flying private also cuts into the time saving benefit of supersonic flight. You save time pre-flight as you can basically drive up to the plane, get in, and be immediately ready for takeoff rather than needing to arrive an hour or two early. And private flights operate on your personal schedule which is obviously much more convenient than organizing your schedule around someone else's timing.
Part of that was also political. It's petty and I wish it weren't true, but a domestic-made plane making noise will be better accepted than a foreign-made plane making noise.
Heppenheimer's The Space Shuttle Decision has a chapter where this is discussed in detail.
When iPod came out there were numerous successful portable music players already on the market. The iPod skeptics were not skeptical that there was a market for a portable music player--they were skeptical that the iPod's particular combination of features and limitations would do well.
With supersonic passenger service no one has demonstrated that there is actually a viable market for it. The two prior attempts were both heavily subsidized by government (Russia for the Tu-144, France and the UK for the Concorde).
It is quite different to ask "why do you think this product will do well against a bunch of established, viable competitors?" and to ask "why do you think this product can succeed in a market that everyone who has tried before has failed in?".
It was a sustainable business for BA because they got several aircraft at giveaway prices (the minister who sold them conceded it may have been the worst deal ever negotiated by a government!) which they could charge extortionate rates to fly on, but they still weren't flying more than one of them at a time very often.
So it solves 2,3, and 4. Can do Pacific. Cheaper to operate. Can be used on all overseas routes.
The Concorde was capable of supercruise.
There aren't a lot of supercruise aircraft out there. The F22, for instance, can supercruise effectively, but the F35 cannot.
Still, we have had a few years of engine technology improvements since then.
Wiki says: The overall thermal efficiency of the engine in supersonic cruising flight (supercruise) was about 43%, which at the time was the highest figure recorded for any normal thermodynamic machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
The SR-71 was not exactly manoeuvrable or efficient at low speeds, its efficiency range was above M3.
The Concorde only needed afterburners to get to speed and altitude. They did not use afterburners for supersonic flight at altitude.
According to someone on the talk page, the Concord's engines acted as ramjets at high altitude.
Wiki again: Forces from the internal airflow on the intake structure are rearwards (drag) on the initial converging section, where the supersonic deceleration takes place, and forwards on the diverging duct where subsonic deceleration takes place up to the engine entry. The sum of the 2 forces at cruise gave the 63% thrust contribution from the intake part of the propulsion system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
I remember reading a book by an engineer from the Concorde program (he's from the UK) who got invited by the Americans working on the B-1 bomber (which was initially supposed to be a M2.2 thing).
They wanted to exchange about air intakes problems such as efficiency, surges, and all. The author was not impressed at all by what had been developed and tested on the B-1. And he thought what they had on Concorde was so much more advanced (he might have been totally biased of course).
Because as people say, Concorde was not tested, it was developed (hence the many prototypes, pre-production and first production models) because a lot of the technology had to be created and if it didn't, it had to be modified to be usable on a civilian aircraft.
A classic example is pulling the throttle all the way back while at full speed: on most fighter jets of the era, you'd completely trash the turbine if you did that. So they had to create a plane which did the right thing for pilots who weren't trained like fighter pilots...
It was also a case of doing all the wrong thing in terms of management. Like assembling two of the same things on each side of the Channel to please respective governments...
The companies working on supersonic jets are in process of lobbying hard to get FAA approval for exemptions from noise regulations. [1]
> - Concorde didn't have the range for Pacific
Not their target market, they want to be a successful niche.
> - Costs didn't work for Atlantic routes
They claim improvements in fuel efficiency and their unique selling point (apart from the speed advantage) is the use of "green" fuels (whatever that implies). Also, see previous point: they don't want to be mainstream anyway.
> - And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
Not a problem they want to solve. Niche and all.
While the economics are indeed questionable, these products cannot be compared to flagship products like Concorde. The jets are significantly smaller (50 PAX vs. 92-128 PAX), benefit from 50 years of progress in aviation technology, manufacturing, and operations and they have a very specific use case in mind.
Concorde was the result of a technological dick-waving contest between Western Europe and the US w.r.t. civil aviation technology. Its purpose was as much of a political nature as it was an attempt at testing/demonstrating the practicality of supersonic passenger jets.
It ultimately failed, but that doesn't mean contemporary attempts have to due to the differences in scope, technology and potentially regulatory environment.
I remain sceptical, but I wouldn't want to write it off as a failure from the get-go.
[1] https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/flight-te...
I assume the military can decide to be exempt from the law if they want
Link to the wiki page if you are curious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
Here are some highlights
- The US Airforce performed ~8 booms per day between 7am and the afternoon
- In the first 14 weeks, 147 windows in the city's two tallest buildings were broken
- An attempt to lodge an injunction against the tests was denied by a district court judge, who said that the plaintiffs could not establish that they suffered any mental or physical harm and that the tests were a vital national need
- Testing was paused for a time when activist groups sought a restraining order against the testing
- The Saturday Review published an article titled The Era of Supersonic Morality, which criticized the manner in which the FAA had targeted a city without consulting local government
- All this public pressure ended the testing early
- There were 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
That doesn’t seem much money. Even with inflation which makes it $110,600ish it seems very reasonable. I can imagine one difficult window install making up this much.
I grew up in Germany, and whatever the laws said (probably sonic booms were illegal), they didn't apply for the allied troups (mostly British and American in my region). So jet fighters going supersonic pretty close to the ground were a rather common thing, you might hear one once a week or so.
(Technically, Germany became only with the 2+4 treaty in 1990 a fully souvereign nation, formally ending the occupied state after WW2)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/boom-noise-r...
1. https://www.edwards.af.mil/Portals/50/R-2508%20User%27s%20Ha... 2. https://www.edwards.af.mil/About/R-2508/
It was mind numbingly loud and obnoxious-the entire house would shake and rattle and you couldn't hear anything but the rumbling.
Agreed.
I grew up near[1] the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and I have a very distinct childhood memory of some cadet breaking the sound barrier over our town.
I was (figuratively) knocked out of my bed. It was unbelievably loud. I thought the world was ending.
To be fair, this was probably a very low altitude flight so it was probably much worse than a "normal" sonic boom.
Still...
[1] Canon City, CO
> In the airline industry’s current tube-and-wings model, shock waves largely roll off and then meld into a sonic boom. The aerodynamic X-plane, however, is designed to scatter multiple shock waves and minimize their cumulative effect, producing only a rumble or soft thump. [1]
> Acoustic engineers have developed a system for measuring sonic booms, called perceived levels of decibels, or PLdB. A decibel (dB) is a measure of pressure; PLdB is what people actually hear. When the Concorde airliner went supersonic, its window-rattling booms scored a PLdB rating of 102, equivalent, for a split second, to the high whine of a fighter engine just feet away. Those are the booms that inspired the original FAA ban. The X-59 has been designed to achieve a PLdB of 75, similar to what might be heard when standing next to a heavily trafficked road. (The numeric drop is larger than it might seem; the decibel scale is logarithmic.) In more conventional units, the Concorde’s supersonic sound waves carried a powerful maximum atmospheric overpressure of two pounds per square foot. By contrast, the X-59’s would exert 0.3 pounds per square foot on the eardrum. [2]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/aero/nasa-prepares-to-go-public-with-qu... [2] https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/lower-the-boom-1809...
That seems a logistical issue to me. Airport fueling services have Jet A/A1. So airlines buying Boom will have to arrange contracts to supply these "green" fuels at service destinations?
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/06/18/187048...
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/09/20200916-prometheus...
Note that Boom _isn't_ focusing on noise currently, unlike the other companies (which are much more focused on bizjets), knowing this will limit the routes they can fly on even with any regulatory changes.
They're content to start with just the oceanic routes (and notably they're aiming for longer range than Concorde, and able to fly at least some trans-Pacific routes non-stop); presumably future iterations when it's known whether there will be regulatory changes (and what they'll be) could aim for lower noise and overland flight.
Concorde had a bit of bad timing. It was released during the worst crisis of aviation (until 9/11), and there was already a second version planned with increased fuel efficiency, but that came never to be with all orders being cancelled. And those cancellations also meant that all economies of scale advantages were gone.
It doesn't feel like Boom has the timing on its side either. Feels like we're still in a massive aviation crisis and I'm not sure how long it's gonna take before things look good for the industry.
The main profit center for commercial air travel was businessmen going places, not too concerned how much flights would cost.
Now business meetings happen by video conference. Flying round the world for a 3 hour meeting will never be big again.
You're not really offering any evidence, just speculation. The actions of the major airlines suggest an expansion, not a retraction.
Now we know how to leverage video conferencing for meetings, and we are convinced more than ever of the limitations given current technology.
(Of course they stopped supplying them in 2003 when the service was retired after the crash).
Commercial aviation tends to be a cyclical industry so there will always be a crisis somewhere on the horizon. Airlines like United are trying to broaden their offerings so that they can better maintain margins in a downturn. Some "Time is Money" expense account travelers will always have money to spend on a premium product like getting there twice as fast.
Plenty of time for this deal to go south.
Flight of the New Concordes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZLykryZLFk
Supersonic Planes are Coming Back (And This Time, They Might Work) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p0fRlCHYyg
Supersonic Flight - What Does The Future Hold? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3K04wgf_ZQ
And the other issue in your case is flying supersonic over land but I hear you.
Of course, some people are less sensitive to these things than others - and jobs with a lot of travel probably select for people who find the experience of flying tolerable.
So while "just" flying East might be less attractive, very brief return flights will be attractive even if one of the legs doesn't seem very beneficial.
There are plenty of scenarios cutting hours off will improve. Whether there are enough of them to make Boom profitable is another matter.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/how-nasa-wil...
Boom's page on why their aircraft won't have the same fate as the Concorde focuses purely on (fuel and route) economics, not noise [1].
1: https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/post/will-boom-supersonics-...
- much lower noise than Concorde (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). Ironically, they reduce the "boom".
- Pacific crossings. 4,900 miles range ( https://onemileatatime.com/boom-supersonic/ ) Tokyo - Seattle is about the furthest within that, at 4,777 miles. California to Hawaii is easily in range, USA to Australia is far out of range, but Brisbane to Hawaii is in range.
- Article talks about 15 planes not one.
Have they solved those yet? They're not flying yet, so no. But that's what they're aiming at.
There's about the shortest viable route I can imagine. I could see refueling stops being a thing, though. SFO-SIN is a pretty long flight, so an hour to refuel in Tokyo wouldn't be so bad.
Right, this (Tokyo - Seattle) seems like a minimum viable Pacific crossing.
San Francisco to Tokyo is 5,133 miles, so it is out of range.
How about San Francisco to Hawaii, Hawaii to Tokyo, and Tokyo to Singapore. ;)
Boom's aircraft uses a modern design that reduces the loudness of the sonic boom.
Interesting follow-up -- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom, the angle of the shockwave cone decreases (i.e. gets narrower) as the plane's velocity goes up. I'm wondering at what Mach number would the cone be tight enough that it doesn't intersect land?
Haven't engines improved a lot since 1967?
No idea about cost, but currently oil is cheap and abundant, compared to 1970s, and the U.S. has a large domestic supply.
Regarding identical planes, I suppose first Boom's supersonic planes are going to be mostly identical. But even standard airliners get small changes with every dozen planes built.
Significantly cutting travel time should also enable higher utilization. E.g. cutting LA-Sydney route in half (15hrs to 7hrs) theoretically enables fitting in a roundtrip in the timespan of a one-way.
Also, far higher climate impacts, which is what concerns me the most. Lets just be happy with crossing an entire ocean in 6 hours.
And frankly, I'm hoping for failure. Some of these new super-sonic companies are trying to get approval for continental routes, saying that the boom is only as loud a car door. Like a car door slamming shut for 3000 miles is no big deal. The super-wealthy have enough toys to inconvenience the rest of us and destroy the climate; they can keep hanging out in first class, or on their private, subsonic jets.
And the environmental aspect won't feel too bad actually: if you are traveling first you produce x times as much CO2 for your trip as others (how many more could they take aboard if that are was as densely packed as regular?), only because you are, well, too soft to sit out a few hours. But if the CO2 happens because supersonic, you get something very real in return. Time! Who could blame you?
> - And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
On both of those, the passengers are kings. If enough people decide they want to pay a lot to cross the ocean quickly, those things will not be a problem.
Common misconception. The Concorde was absolutely quite profitable throughout, and massively so after they adjusted the prices down at the very end when it was already being shut down due to safety reasons.
The Concorde was the safest plane ever. It flew for 27 years with just 1 accident. And that accident wasn't Concorde's fault. Another plane dropped metal on the runway, and Concorde ran over the metal and got damaged right before takeoff.
Considering it was a complete novelty designed in the 1970s it did OK, but I don't think there are many airframes its safety record compares favourably with.
- Noise means you can't do US domestic
They don't seem to be targeting this.
- Concorde didn't have the range for Pacific
They do seem to be attempting Pacific range.
- Costs didn't work for Atlantic routes
They are trying to bring down costs considerably.
- And airlines want lots of identical planes, not one special one for one route
This will certainly be a drawback, although if they could take e.g. 50% of premium transoceanic it won't be so specialized.
Supersonic planes are incredibly cool, but I can't help the feeling that it's an unnecessary and harmful luxury at this point. Although, that goes for a lot of other things used by the ultra-wealthy. Maybe ban yachts first?
Grounding old planes will also result in a greater cost of air travel. With increasing nationalism around the globe, that may not be a good thing.
Aviation uses incredible amounts of fuel, and commercial planes are in the air more often than they are on the ground. My guess is that the embodied energy to operating energy ratio is lower for planes than for any other vehicle.
And yes, a carbon tax would indeed result in "a greater cost of air travel". That's sort of the whole point.
Maybe ban population growth that consumes planet’s resources like mold?
Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago?
Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts.
> Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago? lt Yes. In fact some of the smartest economists and intellectual at the time were panicking about things like 'peak-coal'. Sound familiar? Go actually read Jevons. Others were panicked about over-population, go read Malthus and the Population trap.
There was a massive popular movement in the US predicting imminent over-population and resource exhaustion in the 60s. Read things like The Population Bomb.
And it always end up with the same fallacy and terrible dangerous zero sum ideas. Jevons was so afraid of 'peak coal' he suggested the government should roll back technological progress so the coal would be available for longer.
Paul R. Ehrlich and his ilk suggested that the US should not lend of food aid to India and said it was preferable for them to starve now in small numbers rather then millions later.
Not to mention the horrible, discussing suggestion they had about other forcible population control measures and not just for India, but they also want such policies in the US (This is literal professor from Standford, suggesting forced sterilization as a solution).
Of course 'peak oil' that nobody cares about now, was a huge thing in the early 1990-2000s. In the 2010 people thought rare-earth were gone run out. And yet not a single non-renewable resource has actually ever seriously run out. Ironically renewable resources like whales are far easier to exhaust then non renewable resources.
> Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts. People obsessed with this id
This is again wrong. This is the exact zero sum fallacy that has lead to all the fallicy explained above and actually even worse the the much, much worse outcome of WW1 and WW2. Read some of the text of some of the German High Command before WW1 and all the suggestion they made. Read Hitler nonsense about 'Lebensraum'. Its all the same idea.
The idea that because if the total resource base is fixed, if there are Slaves who are consuming them, it means less for the Germans. There is simple logical conclusions that can be drawn for that, and they did.
The opposite is actually true. More humans, consistently has lead to more resources being available. Not just in the absolute but also on a per-human bases. The total amount of farm land needed has actually decreased in the US. There are far more forests in Europe now then there were in 1200.
You can today get 1kg of almost any material cheaper then in 1900 and you can get it in higher quality and of course you can also get tons of materials that simply didn't exist in 1900. Aluminum started out worth more then gold and now is not much more expensive then dirt.
Our total energy reserves now are larger then they have ever been. The discovery of uranium/thorium alone provides 10000x more energy then all forest that existed the world in 1500. The discovery of photovoltaic alone means we can take gigantic amounts of energy from a huge fusion reactor in the sky.
More humans consistently has meant the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. Read 'The Ultimate Resource' by Simons that was a direct response to the 'Population Bomb' people.
The difference between a bunch of dirt, a bunch of stone or a bunch of dirty sand is technology. Technology, human knowledge and productivity, is what turns utterly worthless stuff into resources. The Nevada desert for example has been without resources, and now it might turn out that it is the single biggest lithium resource in the US. What is and is not a resource depends on human knowledge and technology.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The bronze age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. The iron age didn't end because we ran out of iron. The oil age isn't ending because we are running out of oil.
Urbanization actually means we can have far, far more people using less space then ever before and people even do it voluntary. There are huge parts of the US that are basically uninhabited and actually are consistently less inhabited over time.
We are not even anywhere remotely close to potential maximum efficiency of farm land. Our methods have been improving year over year for 200+ years. And farming now still doesn't look that different compered to 200 years ago. We are not close to max productivity. In terms of productivity per labor hour farming has improved even more then when we simply looking at land productivity.
Using actual simple fact, a marginal increasing in human population has actually increase to resource availability/consumption by any one human.
Some of the smartest people and intellectuals in history who have not understood this effect and it has to be relearned and proven wrong over and over. Doesn't matter if its Malthus in 1700s or Elon Musk in 1990s. There are good and bad things that come out of this, some of these people look at this situation and simply do something about it themselves, Norman Borlaug or Musk. More often however it lead to people who wanted to limit population, take resources by force or prevent technological progress.
If we if ignore population size/growth as a factor, we will ignore possible solutions related to that variable.
Reducing the world's population doesn't have to some dystopian horror show, with forced sterilization and mass cullings.
Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
> Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
Exactly. And we do that by more technology development into superior technologies that don't suffer the inefficiencies of carbon sources. And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.
Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
I also believe that the effects are not gone be as bad as some people predict, as was the case with most of the 'this is gone kill us all predictions'. Slow adjustment over decades is gone mitigate most of the issues.
I thought you were arguing against forcibly shrinking the population (which I don't think anyone was advocating btw), but are you actually arguing to grow the population as a way to improve things environmentally?
Having more people in the world does not lead to "more people are working on these issues". Well, maybe it could, but it would be one of the least efficient (and most indirect) ways to make it happen.
> Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
Problem: We've got a problem with too many humans being ineffecient.
Answer: increase the population to get more ubanization, which brings some efficiencies.
I'll just ignore the decrease in quality of life for everyone, and just say that this doesn't seem like an elegant solution.
The way the people in the thread react to the attempt to resurge a technology associated with huge emissions is worrying in this context. I guess a bit of handwaving around sustainability is enough to make people ignore the issue, while the aviation industry in real life has made close to zero progress in replacing fossil fuels.
United, as part of their announcement on Twitter, suggested that a weekend trip from sf to Tokyo would be possible with this. Even if the emissions per km weren’t higher (which is a stretch at best), it’s still trying to encourage people to burn through a huge chunk of their personal lifetime carbon budget in a single weekend for fun.
Are you speaking in terms of gross emissions overall? Because a wide variety of things have individually cut emissions substantially.
Depending on the type of renewable energy used in the production of the fuels, there might be some land use issues, but this is about as close as possible to the least impactful transportation option ever designed. Speed is always going to decrease fuel economy, but we're not going to tackle climate change by taking things away from people. Tech improvements like these are exactly what we need to move forward.
What are the expected numbers for the Boom plane? The Concorde was a little over 1/3 as efficient per passenger-mile compared to a contemporary 747. I seem to recall that the planned successor to the Concorde was considerably more fuel efficient.
I imagine it would still be more thirsty than a typical subsonic airliner, but I am curious to know how it actually pencils out.
> Supersonic Planes are Coming Back (And This Time, They Might Work)
I also suspect we also all watch Technology Connections, Techmoan, LGR, Map Men, HAI, and Periscope Films...
This seems like something that could only come out of tone deaf and climate denying America. The rest of the industry is trying to improve their climate targets and innovate, this is going straight in the opposite direction. I would sign a petition to ban these planes in a heartbeat.
We shape the future through investments, an investment in one thing takes potential away from another. Over a hundred years of fossil fuel investments have starved investments into for example batteries and the electrical grid, not to mention the whole thing was subsidized by the hidden cost of climate change. We as societies have failed hard to provide subsidizes and funding for these technologies, and a carbon tax at least at last reflects the real cost of fossil fuels, and creates innovation that is going to at least be useful in the future.
I'd image United pays some portion upfront in exchange for a discount and being amung the first to have the plane. Boom gets some cash flow without dilution and validation from an airline.
If United is paying a portion upfront, is there risk factored in if Boom can't deliver?
United had pulled out of JFK in 2015, but just recently came back, because it turned out JFK's "prestige" factor impacted their business. EWR is a major United hub, but the idea of EWR being blessed with the "prestige" of supersonic flight is a bit funny.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if it gets moved to JFK as United rebuilds their operation there. A lot can happen in 8 years.
I don't know what Boom's expected runway requirements are, but if they're anything like the Concorde's (>11000ft), there's no way they'll actually be able to take off from LGA.
Edit: At least one source says that Boom's plane requires no less than 10000ft[1].
[1]: https://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/11/13/aerion-boom-taking-...
A plane like Boom that doesn't use afterburners could take off from any airport as long as they stay subsonic over populated areas.
I think NotBoom might be better.
Not just for the "Boom" catastrophic-explosion aspect but also for the very-loud "Boom" sound created as the supersonic speed barrier is crossed.
i used to despair at YC just churning out more and more b2b software bc that is understandably the problem they know well (i think a YC partner famously said "you can get to series B just selling to YC alums").
But to actually do this in the world of atoms and get market validation... bravo. lets hope they keep a pristine safety record, of course.
https://www.flightglobal.com/business-aviation/dubai-boom-to...
What's the market for this? The Concorde was extremely expensive to operate and extremely expensive to fly on. Are they predicting lots of wealthy people looking for fast international travel between North America and East Asia?
> “The world’s first purchase agreement for net-zero carbon supersonic aircraft marks a significant step toward our mission to create a more accessible world,” Scholl said in a statement.
> Part of what made buying supersonic jets appealing to United is Boom’s plan to power the planes with engines that will run on sustainable aviation fuel.
How does a net-zero carbon aircraft work? What is "sustainable" in this context? Carbon credits?
If the boom plane or similar is a success and airlines started lobbying for change then maybe something could happen.
Presumably the Casual Transcontinental Supersonic travel market implies leaving a long tunnel of sonic boom shockwave sound across the entire ocean for each and every supersonic flight.
If there's a supersonic boom in the forest but no human to hear it, might it be an issue for anything else in the forest?
Boom Supersonic don't plan to use low sonic boom technologies. They just rely on ICAO and FAA lowering the noise standards to allow supersonic flight.
So "just" flying at super sonic speeds over oceans seems like it could be a disaster for marine life. The disruption to whales from noise pollution comes to mind
But not transferring from the air to the ocean, the phase transition attenuates sound a great deal.
It's things like propeller noise and sonar which are causing problems. A sonic boom over the ocean is not going to ruin any whale's day, short of perhaps alarming them when they come up for air.
But if it's significantly more, then no.
- You're confining the noise to the takeoff zone rather than the entire flight path.
- You're in a vacuum (mostly in LEO) which massively reduces drag and is way more fuel efficient.
- Reentry and landing require no fuel with good planning. Space Shuttle was a glider.
Down sides:
- Atmospheric reentry dissipates a LOT of energy over a short time which introduces risk and complexity.
- You expend a lot of energy getting into orbit or your trajectory which also introduces risk and complexity
- Vacuum has far greater depressurization risks than 35,000ft
Ten minutes at multiple G and an hour in free-fall sounds... fun, kinda? But it also sounds like the kind of thing most people wouldn't tolerate very well.
Especially the sort of older folks who could afford it.
Is there a regulatory reason preventing this?
You may have hard time to sell planes to concurrent companies so you cannot scale like Boeing or Airbus.
You would be tied to this manufacturer for life and if you start to manufacture defective planes, you are on the highway to bankrupt and selling your plane manufacturer wouldn't even save you because nobody wants a defective airplane manufacturer.
Sounds like a lot of risks.
But those are just my thoughts, i'm far from being an expert.
A point was most of the design was done done and verified by computer. The Concorde and many of the early military supersonics were designed by sliderule and wind tunnel models, just like Apollo spacecraft.
Advertising revenue is well proven and arrives quick, while as you mentioned this endeavor has high costs, high risks, and is not likely to be profitable for a long time, decreasing present value.
Maybe the next vehicle manufacturer will call themselves “Crash”
Say what you want about SpaceX but they developed their own engines and brought real innovation to the table. I'm a lot more skeptical about a company that seems to just wants to buy some engine.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703574604574500...
It's left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to make biofuels net zero.
A lot of fluff but I would guess a good place to start to learn more
Seriously. Did any of you think "explosion" before "sonic boom" when hearing of this company for the first time? If so, would that actually influence your perception of the safety of their planes?
("Smucker's" sounds like the Yiddish "schmuck", derived from the German word for "ornament" or "jewelry". It's a slang term for male genitalia)
Any route that could pay for supersonic travel would also take a suborbital Starship hop.
How is UA going to monetize this if Concorde isn't even (re)flying?
Here's a list of things that could work:
- Hydrogen has been used as rocket fuel and e.g. Airbus is working on adapting jet engines to burn it. Green hydrogen generated from wind/solar would be zero carbon and sustainable. It probably would not be that cheap though. It might also be interesting in combination with fuel cells. Airbus is working on that as well. Late 2030s are apparently what they are shooting for for this.
- Methane, also used as a rocket fuel (e.g. SpaceX). There have been multiple attempts to use liquid gas as aviation fuel and if you use e.g. bio gas or synthesize it, it could be sustainable. I don't think there are a lot of companies working on this for aviation but it has definitely worked in the past as a fuel. Of course fossil supplies of methane are plentiful but not very sustainable. Synthesizing it would be similarly expensive as other synthetic fuels.
- Ethanol (what boom is apparently proposing to use) is also suitable as a fuel. Corn based ethanol is of course controversial (i.e. only sustainable if you don't look at the production process with too much scrutiny) but there may also be ways to synthesize it in different ways as well. Currently mixing a portion of ethanol in fuels is a popular way for oil companies to green wash their business. Therefore, there's good reason to be wary of companies promoting its use.
- Kerosene could feasibly be synthesized long term (just like a lot of other carbohydrates). Technology for that exists but there are a lot of scaling issues to solve. E.g. Shell is working on that. This would obviously be great for powering legacy planes for the foreseeable future. Planes produced today could fly well into the 2050s or beyond. So there is an obvious economic incentive to make that work.
IMHO hydrogen is the most obvious path as there is a growing momentum to use it in many other applications and some serious effort to product it in sustainable ways. E.g. Airbus bringing planes to production in the late 2030s could inspire a lot of airports to start investing in related infrastructure. Relative to kerosene, it would be lot less polluting. Co2 is not the only issue associated with burning kerosene. Synthetic Kerosene might be a good second option. Everything else could work but seems less obvious right now.