- 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
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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. ;)
- 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.
> - 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.