or they could come here to Toulouse to work for Airbus ^^
"American dynamism" is hot right now and there should be ample funding available. Lots of the old dinosaurs are being nipped at by nimble upstarts like Anduril.
It's very natural that any company be subject to scrutiny – this doesn't mean that you shouldn't set up a company or that the environment for setting up a company isn't favourable.
Supersonic travel is expensive and environmentally unfriendly, and it will probably always be, because it requires more energy, because physics. All that for the minor advantage of saving a couple of hours on select flights. What it means is that it is a privilege for the wealthy (because it is expensive for what you get), at the expense of everyone else (because of the environment). So of course it is going to be unpopular, except to the wealthy in question.
It doesn't mean Boom can't be successful because the public opinion is negative, if the rich can pay. I am still not convinced though, after all, Concorde didn't fail technically (and it still flew after that one accident), it failed commercially. Boom is not taking the easy path here, since it is a technically hard problem with a dubious market.
If it's only for the rich then the prices will be high. Meaning the capitalist mechanism of resource distribution will be even higher (more paid by the rich received as income by the non-rich). It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else. It also employs people. It also drives technology forward. And ultimately it does let people travel in less time, and why wouldn't we want that? To some extent emissions are not as bad as you'd think since they are being emitted over less time in the course of a shorter journey. Success in this category will also drive competition in every metric and work to bring cleaner, shorter flights to everyone over time.
There is a lot to love about the idea of supersonic flight.
That's not how airline economics work. The first class passengers (the ones who could afford to leave for supersonic) subsidize the economy seats[1]. If they left you would probably see worse prices, worse amenities or both.
There are airlines that don't have business or first class seats (e.g. Spirit), and they're generally a terrible experience.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-class-vs-coach-a-game-of-...
If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with things beginning to approach JSX's (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.
Emissions are usually compared in amounts per passenger-kilometer.
If you are not, then you are probably not making the right comparison. Supersonic travel will absolutely not be for those who are flying economy right now and complaining about reclining, legroom, and crying babies. The kind of things that make flights feel very long, and yet, that's how most people fly despite much superior alternatives, because it is cheaper.
Judging by how much it cost to fly on Concorde, it is reasonable to assume that a supersonic ticket will be equivalent in price to first class, or at least a very good business class.
It means a seat that can recline 180°, good enough to sleep on, an internet connection suitable for remote work, as I expect it to become standard in the near future, a decent meal and some privacy. In these conditions, saving a few hours may not be as desirable as it is in economy class. Knowing that in order to shorten your trip, you will be sacrificing some of that comfort, or pay even more, maybe getting close to private jet territory.
I have always traveled coach, and should I fly first class, I would definitely want my flight to last as long as possible, for the experience, but I guess the novelty wears out.
But 500 flights is crazy, one flight every 10 days for 15 years... I certainly understand why you would want to fly supersonic. But now I am curious... why would someone fly that much with the remote communication abilities we have now? I heard that in order to do business in Japan, it is important to be there, so I guess that if you want to come back home sometimes, it is hard to avoid, but still, that's a lot of time flying.
1. The remote calls have gotten better but 15+ years ago not so much. 2. Timezone and remote calls are hard. 3. Face to face is very important to be able to build understanding and also judgement (you need to read the room, which you cannot do over a call). 4. Building relationships requires time not in a meeting, dinner or drinks with a client. 5. Having a relationship with your local team requires the same. 6. In Asia the foreigner flying moves the needle. It is a sign of respect for the customers that you value and will support them. 7. Languages. Unless you are fluent in the local language remote meetings are difficult. 8. Nature of the company. Im my case all 3 companies were startups. They are a risk for the customer. Your willingness to be there helps them feel more comfortable with the risk.
Durning the pandemic there was no flying of course and it was great to be home. I now have a new startup and we just started doing business in Japan at the start of this year. I have hired the same local team that I have worked with at 3 companies. They are amazing! However by the end of this year I will have visited 6 times. Reestablishing the connections lost durning the pandemic has already moved the needle enough that it will materially affect the success of my startup. To be fair, come next year I do not feel I will need to visit every month, but once a quarter is going to be required.
For me cutting flights times in 1/2 is a major win.
As to first class, yes the novelty goes away. It is just another segment of a very long day.
Don't know where this so-called efficiency should come from, but this is a statement that doesn't seem to be based in reality.
Except for the techno-bro startup take that the incumbents are so imbued with themselves that they dropped the ball, which rational explanations are put forward to explain how the current manufacturers are doing a bad job?
To fly at Mach 2 (or 1.8 as boom now seems to be targeting once they realised the difficulty of the task ahead) you still have immutable laws of physics you need to overcome, and that's going to cost an unreasonable amount of fuel.
That's international flight in general.
If Boom wants respect, they should merge with Sergey Brin's LTA Research.
Supersonic airships are the future's future.
I'm just curious how much inflation there is in those schedules because I'm sure it's not zero.
But you make a good point that these long runways are because the overarching tradeoff is one that prefers taking as long as it takes.
So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the org.
https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...
Clearly not in Bezos’s case.
There is no magic involved here, some people have the skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling of innovative hardware, others don’t.
For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on countless analyses and few actual tests, like the incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating. Musk knows what innovative design truly requires.
What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old fashion way.
When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious.
The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches.
The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.
Nadella didn't arrive until a full 10 years later.
I appreciate the value Nadella brought to the company (as I own some MSFT), but have pivoted away from Windows to Linux for development work. I remain with Windows 7 for other uses, so much so I bought a complete set of spare parts for my Win7 box for when it inevitably fails.
The (almost successful) EEE strategy with Internet Explorer was the only part of Gates's internet strategy that survived the 90s.
This also explains why Ballmer went full in on Windows: there had been no pivot to speak of.
See my other comment just below. PayPal wasn't Musk's idea, it was already created when Musk's company merged with them.
Musk was CEO for FOUR MONTHS only. Before being fired by the board, on his honeymoon. Since then, he had no operational input into PayPal whatsoever.
Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.
Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.
The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.
Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.
Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
It’s not a terrible idea, but also not a simple panacea to aligning interests in a business where payoffs happen decades in the future.
Bombardier thought so, and did so! They developed and introduced the C-series aircraft to compete with smaller 737s and A320/A319. After introduction, Boeing fucked them over so hard that they sold the aircraft program after introduction to Airbus for a token sum. Airbus now builds and sells the C-series as the A220.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...
About 20 years for a fully-certified new commercial airliner design. They could have experimental prototypes flying much sooner of course. Even in China, their state-owned effort to develop a new narrow-body airliner took about 15 years and that's very likely with the CCP greasing the skids for them as much as they could. They are still not certified in Europe or North America.
And some of the problems we've seen with Boeing have nothing to do with engineering, but problems with subcontractors, materials, and assembly.
The tricky part is designing the massive manufacturing apparatus around it that can produce them in volume (ask Elon how easy building cars is), satisfying the varying demands of hundreds of different airlines, many from developing nations, helping them set up financing, supporting the design in the field for 30-50 years, AND turning a profit. Each widget produced has an MSRP of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ask yourself why Lockheed permanently exited the commercial aircraft business 40 years ago, despite having what was regarded as the most technologically advanced design of the era, ahead of its time. Douglas went bankrupt and got bought out, Convair and everyone else failed and closed up shop.
You can't throw some engineers - they could be the smartest on the planet - into rented office space and become the next airplane company. There's more to it than designing the next WiFi-enabled food processor and slapping it together in Shenzhen.
They could also join some of the small aircraft startups that are trying to gain a foothold. Maybe a cadre of experienced aircraft engineers would help them raise money and get a product to market faster.
Maybe that’s just the way to live and lead the company and market and I just should stop dreaming about quality.
Engineers like Musk, Zuck, Gates are outliers than the norm. If you are a Boeing Engineer and had above average risk-appetite, you wouldn't be stuck in Boeing for 10+ years.
Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.
I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!".
That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking presence, you better interact in English.
Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like Portland, NYC, or Chicago.
No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of countries where English is almost as good as native. But obviously that's not the common case across the world, and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting people to know the local language.
That has not been my experience. I'm not arguing it should be this way, but for better or worse I've gotten by very well with english virtually anywhere with tourists and most places without. I lived in east ukraine for two years and learned russian - enough people spoke english there that at times it could be hard to get practice time in russian. This was with a younger student crowd, most non-students and older people did not speak english, but the point stands that you can find english speaking people and get by in most situations.
If I make money in Toulouse then I had better really love Europe, since I will have limited resources to relocate elsewhere if I ever change my mind.
Tl;dr one advantage of getting paid in money over services is that money is much more portable.
If you are making $250k/year, you are already getting health insurance, and even if you weren't, it doesn't cost $170k.
- There are several state programs in the US that make attending an in-state public university very affordable. For example, in GA I attended university for $0 in tuition (only paying for room and board + a couple hundred bucks a semester on bs “fees”). The requirement for that grant is getting a 3.0 or higher high school GPA.
- Not sure how cheap Toulouse is, but at least in the US you’re probably better off making 200k+ in HCOL than 100k in LCOL. At that level of income, you don’t have to spend much of your income on essentials even in an extremely HCOL area like SF ($3000 a month gets you a nice apartment).
But judging by the current policies and laws (or lack of them) in the US, seemingly "high salary" goes above all of those things for most people.