Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Burning more Jet-A to get less people around the world faster has got to be the most tone deaf idea this decade. I'm a pilot, I just attended Airventure, and I love the history around SR-71, Concorde and the other incredible high speed planes we've built. But this is an idea that had its time and aviation has moved on to high bypass turbofan engines, reliability, safety, fuel efficiency and reducing our environmental impact.

There is so much opportunity for innovation in areas of aviation where we desperately need to innovate: Getting rid leaded avgas, moving away from fossil fuels altogether which includes fields like energy storage and electric propulsion, developing an efficient trainer to replace the piston lead-gasoline burning C172 that is so ubiquitous and makes up much of the 1500 required hours for an ATP license. So many opportunities.

Aviation is ripe for innovation. This ain't it.

View on HN

Just want to reply to my own post here to add that most people don't realize that the Cirrus SR22 is the world's best selling single engine piston aircraft and has been for the past 20 years. And it's wholly owned by the Chinese government. I'm aware this is a different market, but I want to illustrate how we're losing our lead in some critical areas, while we focus on creating solutions looking for a problem.

Incidentally, Boom is 5 minutes from my office here in Centennial, Colorado and where I fly out of KAPA. I'd like to see innovative US aerospace companies succeed, but I feel like these guys are chasing the wrong idea.

TIL Cirrus was owned by CAIGA - looks like they're also building some light bizjets for Cessna...

Neat. Love to watch traffic at KAPA - saw a Walton plane land there the other day an hour or so before Condi was named part owner of the Broncos.

Third busiest regional in the nation. Super fun to fly in and out of and tower and ground do a spectacular job!

> I want to illustrate how we're losing our lead in some critical areas

How is single-engine piston aircraft a critical area?

edit: I do note that according to 2019 report, North American companies had >60% global marketshare in both turboprops and business jets in terms of units shipped

> How is single-engine piston aircraft a critical area?

Where do you think airline pilots come from? New pilots learn to fly in single-engine piston planes. And then again as flight instructors and commercial (non-ATP) pilots while building time to get their ATP rating and move onto the airlines. The continual slow death of GA is only going to worse an increasingly dire pilot shortage.

The pilot shortage (if there really is one) is almost entirely the fault of short-sighted airlines and their unions; it has little to do with GA manufacturers. If airlines really wanted a larger supply of ATP ratings then they could simply hire pilot candidates with little or no flight time, then pay them to go through training. Some large foreign airlines already recruit pilots this way.

I did not say the shortage was created by GA manufacturers, I said that GA in general is the start of the career progression for airline pilots in the US hence it serves a critical function for society. I too thought the pilot shortage was a myth until this past summer when it became abundantly clear there were not enough pilots in the world to deal with the resurgence of travel.

You could also argue that US pilots have superior training due to their GA experience as well. The over-reliance on automation and lack of stick and rudder skills is becoming a liability in those foreign airlines that train pilots exclusively in simulators and then throw them into the right seat of airliners where they're essentially computer operators instead of pilots.

The inability to for an airline pilot to land without autopilot is a very real thing: https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/16/russian-jet-crashed-captain-c...

Or the ability to fly in IMC conditions without an autopilot: https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/experienced-crew-struggl...

Those are separate issues. Even if airlines pay for pilot training, they could still have most of the syllabus done in actual airplanes rather than simulators. The FAA generally only allows up to 100 hours of simulator time to count towards ATP requirements. The major airlines are large enough that they could just buy their own trainer aircraft.

So you're right back to flying single engine pistons then. I don't understand the point here.

1500 hours per ATP certified pilot.

This isn't going to be applicable to 95+% of aviation, but for something like a flight between the US and Australia, e.g. LAX to SYD?

Going from a 15h to 8h flight will be huge -- that's 30h to 15h round-trip.

I'm American and visited Australia once, and realized I probably never would again, it's just too far. An Australian friend of mine here in the US only went home to see his family every few years. It just takes sooo long, stuck in an economy-class seat.

Supersonic makes a lot of sense not as general-purpose, but for long-haul flights between hemispheres. At least until there's an economy-price "sleeper car" equivalent accomodation where you can actually sleep on flights.

You don't need to go everywhere, really. Especially not halfway round the world for a vacation.

The number of reasons people want to move around the worl are almost innumerable. Just because you don’t value it doesn’t mean others can’t.

The reason for op was getting to his vacation place faster, so I guess we were discussing 1 reason.

This reasoning can be used to also say you don’t need to go anywhere outside of your living area.

Without removing freedom of mobility, the only way we have to mitigate environmental costs is through price pressures which could be used to fund net neutral technologies.

The difference between not traveling and a 15 hour flight is huge (especially if you have a family those 15 hours away). But the difference between 15 hour flight and 8 hour flight is marginal in that context. And this is compounded by the fact that there are some regions which are geographically closer then Australia, but take significantly longer to travel to because they lack the infrastructure for fast and convenient travel. So honestly 15 hours is not that bad.

Yes, strictly you don’t need to travel anywhere, but we should allow people to travel in the most economical way feasible. Supersonic jet travel is not that.

If 15 hours in an economy class is too much for you, but you can afford a supersonic flight ticket, perhaps you should consider upgrading to a business class. Or if you don’t like that, consider braking the flight up in 2 or 3 parts sleeping at a nice hotel in between. This is a much more climate friendly option then a supersonic flight that only saves a few hours of your time.

If you have everything you need in your living area then you don't need to go anywhere else, yeah. In most places you can get everything you need within a 200km radius of where you live, unless you have very particular needs.

I'm glad you considered all possible ways to mitigate the environmental costs of flying. Seems like wasteful supersonic jets aren't one of them?

I completely agree that right now, this is the right mindset. We need to reduce our footprints a lot until we are in better shape as a planet. However, I hope that one day we'll be able to travel as much as we want in a sustainable way. It is a great thing.

Would be cool, sure.

The Boom Overture lacks the range to fly non-stop LAX to SYD. It would have to make at least two refueling stops (something like LAX-HNL-NAN-SYD), so it wouldn't save any time. The crew would also need to be changed at least once due to working time limits, and it's too small to accommodate crew rest facilities.

This airliner is primarily targeted at shorter Atlantic routes; if they succeed in that market then they might build a larger successor model with the range for Pacific routes.

Agreed. Boom claims they will be "sustainable" because they are going to invent some kind of synthetic biofuel.

Wait, it looks like I either misremembered that claim, or they have backed away from it:

> "Overture’s fleet will be able to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuels."

https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability

Color me skeptical. Making existing aviation more climate-friendly would be a much more worthy goal than this ridiculous supersonic vanity project.

Meanwhile, my data center has been fully prepared to run on electricity supplied from cold fusion reactors for years!

It's legit. Take a look at Prometheus Fuels. More details:

https://www.science.org/content/article/former-playwright-ai...

The world is a big place, it can handle 100 or so of these fluffing around.

And there actually may be realistic optimization scenarios.

People don't want to have sympathy for 'world leaders' for example, but often physical presence is an important thing. And they waste so much time.

I don't like my own PM but I'd rather they spent a little more to cut his travel time down; his time is extremely expensive.

And this sounds ridiculous at first glance: but even if he could literally get reasonable sleep more often. His decisions are so impactful, the leverage so much, it matters. And I don't even like the guy at all.

That aside the secondary advantages from it might be positive, we need R&D that's ahead of the curve.

I'm fine with this as long as everyone isn't flying it all the time.

Tone-deaf to many people who care about climate, sure. But what about to the executive types who believe they are so important that they need to be there in-person, and they get to expense these tickets to the corporate account? I think the same executives who are trying to kill work-from-home and have an inflated view of the benefits of in-person meetings will buy these tickets up.

In the GA segment, the Pipistrel Panthera is really interesting.

With the currently available conventional engine, it vastly outperforms the Cessnas and Cirruses, AFAICT.

So with the hybrid and pure electric options in development (these were planned from the start, so the plane is designed for them), it is still competitive.

https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/general-aviation...

(Not affiliated or associated in any way, just a fan of aviation innovation)

Pipistrel is now owned (as is Cessna) by Textron.

That was my first thought as well. We are in a climate emergency, and currently airlines are not paying for the damage they are systematically adding to the catastrophe. I don’t see a future where this just continues. Either we really mess up the climate with all the societal collapse that entails, or we make these polluters pay for their damage. In either case there is hardly a future for this “innovation”.

> Getting rid leaded avgas

I was shocked to hear that leaded gasoline is still around, so I did a quick search. Turns out most (all?) piston-engine driven airplanes still run on leaded gas. Jet airliners don't, so I'm not sure if the overall impact is significant, but nonetheless shocking to hear that we're still spraying lead into the air we breathe.

Some of the new piston planes I believe are rated to use unleaded but the problem has been legislation and the FAA regarding getting unleaded approved to make it legal and ubiquitous

The FAA has been dragging their feet on this issue for over 20 years now. At first the excuse was that there wasn't a viable alternative, but now there is and they are still slow rolling it. The administration has a almost pathological fear of change.

Yes, 100LL still has lead in it. And despite what it may seem based on skewed figures from those who want to see local airports closed so they can build more strip malls and condos, there has been a 99.99% reduction of lead pollution from gasoline overall since the phase out of automotive leaded gas. We're working on getting unleaded avgas, you can blame the FAA for it taking so darn long, but it's hardly an environmental emergency.

> Turns out most (all?) piston-engine driven airplanes still run on leaded gas

Not technically all. There is unleaded avgas although it's not yet common and some piston planes are diesel.

There's a flip side to reconsidering aviation--the choices we make as consumers. Since leaving the aircraft manufacturing industry over 20 years ago, I have flown on 3 flights at approximately 5000 miles total, all 3 of which I wish I could have avoided. I'm not saying everyone could live this way, or that I'm particularly environmentally responsible in general, but it is possible. My life during those 20 years was rewarding and interesting, for the record.

The pandemic was terrible for the most part, but it did give us an opportunity to rethink how we live and work, including how to lessen future pandemics and enviromental degradation with our choices on transportation.

Feels like there is a business case for people willing to pay to reduce trip times for trans continental flights.

The problem is that the greenhouse gas impact will be higher for a supersonic trip compared to a subsonic one. This is on top of the issue that we don't really have a good low carbon alternative for longer range air travel (batteries don't have anywhere near enough specific energy). The best option we have is synthetic jet fuel produced from green electricity. Producing jet fuel that way is many times more expensive than fossil fuel jet fuel.

It's not like tickets on these planes are going to be cheap anyway. You could double the fuel cost and I doubt that would double the ticket cost.

> to get less people around the world faster

What does “less people” mean? You mean Boom is targeting only the ultra-rich? That’s not their aim. They aim to make supersonic flight both possible and affordable.

According to their propaganda, they are going to make jet transport cheaper AND faster AND greener.

I see no evidence that this is at all realistic, and a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Do they even have a story explaining how their new supersonic jet could possibly reduce costs?

Cheaper than the current options for transporting 80 people via supersonic aircraft.

Hmm, yeah. I mean with modern technology it should be feasible to create a more cost-effective / greener supersonic airliner than Concorde.

But basic physics dictates that supersonic flight requires a lot of power, as well as low bypass turbofans. So competitive with modern "normal" airliners in terms of cost or emissions per seat-km, nope, not gonna happen.

Synthetic jet fuel is a good idea that deserves R&D money (if we're gonna keep flying long distance in a carbon constrained world I think something like that is going to be necessary), but is orthogonal to a supersonic airliner. Unsure why they think that bundling synthetic jet fuel (itself a high-risk R&D project) with their supersonic jet (another high risk R&D project) will do anything but increase the risk of failure of the entire project. Well, the uncharitable explanation why they're doing it is of course greenwashing.

In theory, a faster airplane is more productive (fly passengers farther in the same amount of time). So crew and capex costs are lower per mile. Maybe a crew can fly New York-London and then fly back, vs a subsonic airliner with a crew that flies one way, stays a day for crew rest, then flies back.

Concorde had a cruising speed that was 2.31 times higher than Boeing 747, and a lift-to-drag ratio that was almost the same times lower (2.36). So, every second Concorde had to burn about 2.36 times more fuel per ton of aircraft compared to 747, but it reaches the destination 2.31 times faster. All in all, the fuel consumption during the cruising phase of the flight was comparable. Well, Concorde had a horrible fuel economy during takeoff, so overall it was pretty bad compared with the 747.

But 50 years have passed since the Concorde was designed. Both computational fluid dynamics algorithms and computing power have made tremendous progress. It's quite likely Ouverture will have a much better fuel economy than Concorde, if only for the fact that it will use turbofan rather than turbojet.

No, they're explicitly targeting the business segment, basically replacing today's business class on traditional airliners with a similarly sized, similarly priced, faster alternative.

> Getting rid leaded avgas

Isn't that more chemical engineering? Boom sounds mostly mechanical.

> moving away from fossil fuels altogether which includes fields like energy storage and electric propulsion

Isn't this mostly battery tech? Seems like a stretch for these experts to be working on that.

> developing an efficient trainer to replace the piston lead-gasoline burning C172 that is so ubiquitous and makes up much of the 1500 required hours for an ATP license.

At least this sounds like something in their wheelhouse, but needless to say, there's no money in that.

Boom is developing a plane that has demand. Simple as that. Not everyone needs to try to save the world.

GP is criticizing a company just doing something for the money without concern for the environment, which is a very reasonable criticism.

The idea is to move princelings around the world faster than lesser princelings. So long as they have the money they will suck up status symbols like a supersonic private jet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com