Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video] | Hacker News Reader

Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

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713 pointsrayhaanj525 comments

Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286

I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :)

Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.

I’ve been one of the skeptical commenters (under another username), not because I think it’s technically impossible, or because I hate innovation or bold bets, but because I don’t think the economics make sense, and their original timelines and cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude, at least. Aviation is littered with startups that burned through hundreds of millions over the course of a decade or two and then disappeared.

And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel, and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they’ve only accomplished the easiest part of what they need to accomplish in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights. Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before they’re going to reach the finish line.

Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards.

And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.

I guess the target market is those who feel about the opportunity cost of another $5,000 the way you and I do about another $5.00

For companies with executives that travel a lot (visiting different offices or store locations or lots of in-person client visits across the country) it might be literally saving them money. And even if it doesn't save them money, the prestige and the fact that the people who approve the purchase are the same people who get to use it help justify the cost

Lots of companies have execs who do those things that still don't fly private jets today and may not even have execs who always fly business class unless they have the status to routinely get upgraded. Certainly no company I've ever worked for and I've worked for some pretty large ones.

Honestly if that is all they are hoping for, I sincerely hope they fail spectacularly. The world is unequal as it is and I certainly don’t want the rich flexing their wealth with vanity like this, especially not considering the climate cost of all this, and the fact that we are already in a climate catastrophe that is disproportionately caused by the rich while harming the poor.

Even if (a big if) Boom can come out with a supersonic passenger jet that is economically viable, you can be pretty certain it will be for people who routinely buy business/first tickets (or fly Netjets/other private) today.

Or $50 anyway. I have used miles to upgrade trans-Pacific and reluctantly even paid a few hundred $ co-pay out-of-pocket if I couldn't expense it. But I agree with your basic point. I'm almost certainly not going pay a few thousand extra even for a long flight out of pocket. I could but my money is limited and there are a lot better experiences I could purchase with $5K.

This is a long way from a supersonic passenger flight, isn't it?

Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.

Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them).

If anything the pessimists are being proven right.

Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.

Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number.

The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.

> There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.

Exactly, and we know for sure that Boom are definitely NOT in that place, how?

Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed.

It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.

"Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.

Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted.

Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison.

LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...

The regulation exists because of the sonic boom sound

How about non-judgmental, down to earth pragmatism?

There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance.

Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison.

Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.

I don't think you fully appreciate the number of obstacles in the way of new entrants building commerically-operable airplanes. Flying a supersonic prototype is amazing. But it is a depressingly-small amount of the overall work necessary to simply start taking passengers, much less make something economical, and even less to make something succeed.

Yes, I'm fully aware the market for building commercial jets is probably one of the most locked-down on the planet.

But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail.

Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?

I hope they succeed! It’s not throwing rocks at them to point out the obscene numbers of and size of obstacles they need to overcome to others on the sidelines who seem to think that this is anything more than a very, very early step along the way of a still-unlikely future product.

It's not pessimism to correctly describe reality.

There is no such thing as correctly describing reality, the way you describe your reality affects your reality. Reality is mostly perspective.

When people say stuff like this I like to test the claim by kicking them in the shin.

Yes! Where did enthusiasm go in this world? It's easy to be a critic but when blanket pessimism is the default answer its very tiresome reading the comments.

It’s a good start but I wouldn’t say the critics are proven wrong already.

Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it.

I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.

Basically, the critics: "unless you build a 100B company, we are not wrong"

I mean, yeah, sure.

It’s hard to argue a startup succeed until profits > investment.

if your only measure of success is monetary profit, then sure. i think that shouldn't be the only metric, and in fact, the focus on that so completely is a big part of the problem with what people term "late-stage capitalism"

Start a social club/co-op/non-profit/religion or whatever and the metrics are different.

However, when you’re asking for investments your goal better be profit or you’ve just committed fraud.

I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either.

(I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)

This is only true from the point of capital - if a startup changes the world in a way you like it can be a success to you. Profitability brings a certain approval and sustainability, but don't confuse that with your goals in what you are working on.

It’s fine to have multiple aims, but asking for investments without trying to be profitable is fraud.

I think that depends on what you say to the investors!

Sort of. There's a class of startups that's not meant to be profitable, except maybe by happy accident. Many (most?) tech startups are like that now. After all, the investors don't care about creating profitable companies - they just want to make money, which they're positioned to do in many ways. One of them is to help create profitable companies. Another is to help grow companies to be sold to other companies and/or to the public for maximum value, giving the investors back a large multiple of initial investments, after which... they don't care anymore.

It's like with modern husbandry: you can make money selling milk, eggs and meat by sustainably raising animals living comfortable lives, but you can make more money by sticking them in cages, pumping them up with antibiotics and optimized fodder, to maximize production rates and minimize costs. The two approaches are inherently incompatible with each other. And I dare to say, modern startup ecosystem kind of entered the era of "factory farming" some time ago now.

Aiming to build a company to be bought by Microsoft or whoever is still aiming to be profitable, the product is simply the company’s assets (IP, customer list, etc).

It’s unsustainable in that the profit is a one time event, but that doesn’t mean you’re not to turn cash into something worth more than what you spent and then sell that thing.

That’s… not true at all.

Cooking books and falsifying projections is fraud.

Asking for investments with a clear disclaimer that the goal is a social good that won’t be profitable? If that’s fraud, then every major arts institution everywhere is guilty.

If you want money to provide a social good without the expectation that the money will be paid back, you're asking for a donation. You can also ask for money as a loan, fee for service, etc.

But an actual investment isn’t “investing in our community” it’s asking for money in exchange for to potential to gain more money etc.

There is a reason we usually use the word donation in that context. And don’t call it investments. As those tend to be associated with an expectation to be paid back times x.

In what way do you think building a new but still-uneconomic supersonic plane is going to change the world for the better?

Uber and Lyft are largely still unprofitable, but they definitely have changed the landscape, as many would argue, to the better.

The cost of putting a single car and driver-for-hire on the streets is a handful of dollars, so it's easy to do many of them at a loss. The cost of putting a single instance of a new airplane design of this scale into the air with even a single paying passenger is in the range of billions if not tens-of-billions of dollars.

This is not even remotely comparable.

But just for comparison, Aérospatiale and BAC actually built a real supersonic plane (Concorde) and managed to fly and operate that plane for decades. It's hard to find much measurable impact on the world at all. What do you propose would be different here, given that the discussion is already presuming a world in which they haven't succeeded economically?

Uber is not unprofitable, there are so many people that got rich off it, they just max out salaries and compensations.

Success should be measured against the stated objectives, the promises made to investors, or general positive influence on society. In this case the objective was "supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly." [0]

> Basically, the critics

You're being uncharitable and hyperbolizing the criticism to more easily dismiss it. Would you hyperbolize any praise as "identifying another way this won't work is also a success in itself"?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286

My metric for success is simply making more money than they spent.

Supersonic planes are already proven technology. We made the Concorde and the Tu-144 in the 70s, and have plenty of supersonic military planes in active service. The assumption was simply that you can't make a profit by selling them as civil aviation planes. That's the assumption Boom is challenging, and to be proven correct they have to turn a profit. And not just an operating profit by selling planes for more than they cost to make but make back the research and development costs as well

Neither of those planes made more money than they cost.

The Tu-144 was famously not reasonable at all.

Hence why everyone thinks supersonic passenger planes are a bad idea. Lots of profitable military supersonic planes, but every existing example of a civilian supersonic plane is only justified as a Cold War dick-measuring contest.

How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

Taxpayers willing to pay for it, and at a cost that's inclusive of the profit for the builders.

Wouldn’t that make the Tu-144 a success? And make every government purchase ever, successful?

Could we at least limit it to choices made by elected governments?

> And make every government purchase ever, successful?

yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.

That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.

> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.

I assume that’s the source of the doubs about Boom.

Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.

Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.

With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.

SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.

What cargo would justify a supersonic flight?

Anything high value and perishable, like sushi grade fish for example. Or did you mean morally justifiable?

Flying fish that are increasingly not sustainably harvested on insanely fuel in-efficient supersonic planes is exactly humanity deserves to go extinct.

They often flew mail on it as their cargo. But the plane was more a matter of national pride than something that made sense.

    > Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

This overlooks development costs. Wiki says:

    > Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023).

That is an astonishing price for 20 aeroplanes!

£16 billion in inflation-adjusted development costs is peanuts.

You should look at the costs of the F-35 :)

But of the F-35 there are >1000 planes to amortise the costs over. Which is two orders of magnitude larger than the concorde

F35s are now selling for $81m on average per plane - https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35-program-office-lockhe...

And yes, the program is expensive but there will be thousands of F35s by the end of it all (1000+ already)

I didn't overlook development costs, I SPECIFICALLY excluded them, and SAID that I was doing so.

But you can't just exclude them. They are part of the cost.

Of course you can exclude them, to determine whether the aircraft themselves are a viable commercial proposition for the people who bought them (the airlines) -- which they were, just as other aircraft such as the A380 today are. The people who bought A380s are happy, and will be using them for decades. Emirates would still like to buy more (and may end up buying used ones from less successful airlines)

The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.

There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.

If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.

If the claim is „we’re going to make supersonic transport available to everyone“, that’s what they chose.

It only needs to be economically viable for billionaires bored with collecting yachts and $100 millionaires who want to flex with charter flights. Scheduled commercial service is a pipe dream but not a requirement for success.

Please keep building yachts jets and rockets then. Otherwise they may get into politics.

Concord was actually a cash cow for all airlines who had them. The only reason why airlines stopped using Concord was because of the crash and the inherent safety issues that were found. But the actual business model worked - limited in scope but it was highly profitable.

“That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the concept of the Concorde might not have been a worldwide hit, it was certainly a good market fit for these two airlines at the time.”

Overall it was obviously a money looser because of the high development costs (paid for by the governments).

It worked because not just the development costs were paid for by the government, but acquisition costs were, too. Planes were given to the airlines for free, completely paid for by the states.

Also, only be BA made good profit on it and only after mid-1980s. Air France could barely break even.

If not the PR effect that put those airlines above all others as the only ones flying supersonically, they'd never make any sense to either of them.

These days, they'd certainly not be viable as private planes are now much more available and much cheaper than they used to be back in the day and these save a lot more time than supersonic flights. BA fare for LHR-JFK roundtrip was 10K pounds back in 2000, $15.2K at the average exchange rate, that's $28K inflation adjusted! Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?

Not taking away from your point, just for comparison:

A British Airways first class LHR-JFK roundtrip is $10K today for an 8h flight. Supersonic would be 3h.

Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so.

Their website says:

    > Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7

Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC<->LON are currently 7 hours.

Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR<->JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip. I am surprised that it is so cheap. I guess that route is very competitive.

I don't understand the excitement on HN about Boom. The market is tiny. This is a terrible investment. What is the global demand for this aeroplane (if they ever build it)? Maybe... max 200. Look at the order book from the 1960s when the Concorde first flew. Less than 100 total orders. Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Also, it is terrible for the environment. The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.

(Various edits.)

They claim they have sonic boom solved by modifying the airframe shape. Otherwise, i agree with you. It will be a thing of no real consequence just like the original Concorde.

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom?

Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder.

> The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.

5-7 times as much.

My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.

Also, sonic booms are awesome. I don’t know that I want to hear them every 15 minutes, but they are cool.

> My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.

Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.

Yup, military fighters.

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde.

Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy?

Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure. But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.

Now the world's only supersonic passenger plane is being made in America, you might find Congress is much less worried about sonic booms.

Sure, being a domestic enterprise might help here, but you will have to deal with regulations abroad, too (and Concorde had arguably the edge there because it had both London and continental Europe as home court).

I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).

This isn't true. The backlash to sonic booms grew well before Concorde and was part of why the US government canceled its support of the SST program. Boeing canceled their part of the 2707 because of the (extremely) unexpected success of the 747 program (a larger plane slower addressed a larger market) and the 737 success.

Sources:

Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet

Thomas Petzinger, Hard Landing

>But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.

You are wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests

This was done to prepare people and gauge the reaction to BOEING sonic booms, for the SST. Everything about a supersonic future was scuttled when it became obvious that people clearly suffered when planes flew supersonic above them.

Keep in mind that the US Air Force still does not go supersonic over populated areas except when absolutely necessary, like during 9/11.

This study mind you was done with SCHEDULED sonic booms. Now imagine, instead of being able to set your clock to a loud, disruptive noise and plan around it, you must deal with completely unpredictable and variable EXPLOSION of sharp noise (130ish decibels is standing 100m from a jumbo jet as it spools up or a trumpet being blasted directly into your ear from a couple feet away)

People already hate the noise of cities when that noise is an occasional quiet siren heard from a mile away a few times a day. Imagine instead if the noise was completely unpredictable explosions. Also imagine you can't move out of the city to get away from it, because the sound blankets an entire flight corridor.

Unless NASA finds a way to magically evaporate all the energy in a sonic boom such that it makes almost no noise at ground level, we would have to literally depopulate mile wide corridors of the US just so a bunch of stupidly rich people can get from NY to LA in an hour? Nah

> Concorde flew NYC<->LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours.

I feel that you're getting diminishing returns at the point of reducing 4 hours to 3h30, given that flight time is just a part of the whole "door to door" time, there are several hours at least that aren't flight time, and that the expensive tickets all come with an hour or three in an airport lounge.

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom?

One of the unique selling points of their proposed aircraft is that it won't be so loud:

> Boom says Overture will be a lot quieter than Concorde and the supersonic military aircraft that were flying at the time the FAA ban

https://www.freethink.com/energy/boom-supersonic-flight

That's a claim without evidence. A sonic boom is a direct outcome of moving through the air faster than the air can move through itself.

How have they demonstrated that they know how to cause quieter sonic booms?

Firstly, my claim that they say this is evidenced by the link. I did not assert it as historic fact that this thing works, just that this is what they say. The words "Selling point" and "proposed" are in that sentence for a reason: it's not actual yet. But if you think it's a deliberate fraud, then say so.

Secondly: Although the final proof of it is in the full scale aircraft for sure, a lot can be done with software modelling (1) and wind tunnels these days. And with the scale model that just flew, to be followed by "checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly." (2)

Thirdly, I point you to other "quieter supersonic" aircraft work in progress, the X-59. Some of their evidence-gathering process is detailed at the Wikipedia link, "development" section. (3)

It will be interesting to see how these work out; but if they do not, then it's a failure of modelling and design, not because they missed the directly obvious. But if you are an aerospace engineer and know more about this subfield, then say so.

1) "Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel"."

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/28/travel/boom-supersonic-fi...

2) https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/boom-supe...

3) https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/x-59-quiet-sup...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst

A sonic boom is not necessary when moving faster than sound, the Busemann biplane resolves that completely.

There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.

Revisiting this, does this count as evidence? I see it as at least 1 data point

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999735

https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise

The one new factor is the route fragmentation that occurred over the Atlantic with the 757 and 767 and the fragmentation that occurred over the Pacific with the 777 and 787. These changed from a model where only hub to hub flights where every seat had to be sold to be viable from a financial point of view to enabling many city pairs to work, and airlines still to make a profit, even if the business class seats are not fully sold. This led to a much larger market, which plenty of room for 3-10k "business class" tickets on these flights.

If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA <-> Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.

You should write more about this on a blog or something, it's interesting and you seem knowledgeable.

I think the real advantage would be for transpacific flights. San Francisco to Tokyo is currently about 11.5 hours, assuming a similar ratio (maybe slightly better due to flying supersonic for longer), Boom’s time would be around 6.5 to 7 hours. Savings would be more significant for East Coast flights, ATL-HND would go from 14.5 hours to under 8.5.

East Coast US to Japan supersonic? This is the stuff of fantasy. With the insanely high fuel burn and very small aeroplane body size, where are you going to put all the fuel for a trans-Pacific flight? NYC<->LON was already nearly the limit for the Concorde. As I understand, they had high priority when landing due to low fuel.

Interesting, I hadn’t realized the range was so short. I guess if they did trans-Pacific it would mostly be limited to Seattle to Tokyo, or routes with a stopover in Hawaii.

> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?

Government people. I remember Kissinger flying on it.

A first class ticket on the Titanic would be $50,000 today.

The problem with $50,000 tickets is a higher price means fewer customers, and at a certain point that means less money coming in overall, worse economies of scale, and less ability to cover your upfront engineering costs.

The Toyota Camry is a $30,000 car that sells 300,000 units per year. The Lamborghini Huracan is a $300,000 car that sells 600 units per year. Much easier to cover the costs of developing a reliable electrical system, or a new hybrid drivetrain, when you're Toyota.

Concorde couldn't repay its development costs for the same reason.

In fairness, there's little practical benefit (and, in fact, a lot of downsides) to a supercar whereas a plane that does trans-oceanic in half the time is useful--of course, if you can build it, and sell tickets economically for maybe today's business class prices--keeping in mind that a lot of people flying business are doing so on upgrades/miles.

...and yet, despite your lamentations, Lamborghini operates a profitable business.

I used to work for a big 6 accountancy and audit firm. their senior partners used to fly concorde, wheras us underlings flew virgin upper class (like first class on other carriers).

> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?

People willing to throw money at connecting with others who do the same thing. That was the main value proposition back then I think, getting from continent to continent in a short time has never been more than a tangential benefit. Of course this type of business only really works when everybody involved claims the opposite.

Today these people hang out at private jet FBOs.

> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?

Nobody. That's part of Boom's plan: they want to make the Overture jet cheap enough to fly that tickets will cost about what business class costs on regular intercontinental flights. They're keeping the problems of the Concorde in mind as part of the design process.

I don't disagree that it's proof they will succeed, it is however proof that they can build a supersonic aircraft. That is no small thing.

Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.

In terms of 'risk stacking'[1] they are definitely a big step closer to being in successful.

[1] Risk Stacking is the set of risks a company faces between the current time and being operational. Technology risk is always level 1 (can they build what they say they can build), after that comes market risk (will people buy it with enough margin for both continued operation of the company as well as further development), and the third is execution risk (can they operate efficiently enough to create a net positive economic product.)

Is risk stacking a commonly used term? I couldn’t find anything relevant on google and I’d love to learn other similar concepts.

It is in the venture capitol / startup world, not sure how much it is used outside of that which was why I took time to explain it. A VC looking at a pitch is trying to understand the risks (a VC investment is basically pricing that risk) and each kind of risk has a different method of evaluation.

Thank you!

I think Mark Andreeson popularized it, crediting Andy Rachleff

https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1850205733440413970

> Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.

Not only that, but the XB-1 uses "stock" engines, while for the full-scale Overture they want to develop (and build) an all-new supersonic-capable engine. So one more challenge to put on the stack...

If that's the case, what was the point of the test flight anyway? What were they exactly testing?

They were testing (at a different scale, with a different powerplant) their air intakes for the engine which are designed to enable conventional turbofan engines to operate at supersonic speed, plus some control systems. And no doubt demonstrating to investors that they could fly something at supersonic speed before they ask for the funds to design and build a new powerplant and airliner-scale airframe...

It was originally envisaged as a maiden flight that would happen within a couple of years of founding, but aerospace is hard.

When taking another look at the Wikipedia articles for the XB-1 and the Overture, I also noticed that both of them mention the fact that the XB-1 still uses the original trijet engine configuration planned for the Overture, which has however since been changed to a quad-jet (https://airinsight.com/boom-supersonic-radically-changes-ove...). So the XB-1 is even less representative of the full-scale Overture than I thought...

they're early enough in their program to switch the Overture again to twinjets :) (only half joking, if it turns out that adjacent engines in the quadjet configuration have a negative impact on their intake technology, a twinjet would work more similarly to the trijet...)

You also have to make it environmentally sustainable like they did when they talked about a partnership with Prometheus fuels back in 2019, even then what's the point compared to regular planes if these "are likely to burn between 4.5 and 7.5X more fuel than subsonic aircraft in 2035." [0]

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/rutherdan.bsky.social/post/3lgstwvv... -> 2021 NASA assessment https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205009400

You don’t “have to” make it environmentally sustainable…

The next generation will love your idealism.

Aerospace is hard, one step at a time. Every generation knows that.

I'm so glad that buried deep in the HN commments in an individual who cares about the environment. In the other conversations I've seen about this no one mentions or thinks about fuel consumption. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes. It's like "Yay! We figured out another way to accelerate the disastrous consequences of climate change. Go us!"

I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.

It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.

You think there’s now a 50% chance of boom bringing access to supersonic air travel to everyone? I’ll give them 10%.

Probably optimism talking, but I'd put Boom's chances of bringing to market an airliner capable of supersonic travel at equal-to-first-class-ticket-prices at 60%.

Now I'd put their wilder hopes of eventually taking over the subsonic economy market at considerably below 1%.

But I'm hopeful for that $5-10k ticket to London within the next twenty years.

This is one of the precious little gifts of living in the future. You get to see what (some) people want to achieve and a few actually make this. It's literally people turning their time and resources into magic. Sure, most of the time they fail and you never hear of them again, but the few that can make something that seems virtually impossible happen are a living standard.

To me, life is a sand box. And my dream is that it would be the reality for everyone.

I have been very critical because the environmental impact of possibly affordable supersonic flight is very concerning. The fuel usage per airplane should be much higher than conventional flights (due to extra drag and extra km flown per day), and they want to have 1000 airpalnes of those one day.

Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight.

Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering.

Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad.

Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland.

[1] https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SS...

Taken from the first doubtful comment I found in the post you linked.

"Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety."

Many of the comments related to Boom about them not being able to do what they say are about the timeframes they give. I know I've commented on their unrealistic dates before and likely will again. In 2016 they said they would be flying it in 2017-2018. And they did in fact completely fail to do that as the above commenter predicted. Unless you are saying being off about your schedule by 7 years is achieving your goal?

They say they will be flying their passenger aircraft in 2030. I invite anyone that reads this to check back then and see how they're doing. I can tell you right now though, you are not going to be able to buy a ticket.

> you are not going to be able to buy a ticket

You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years.

Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.

Boom’s real challenge isn’t just showing they can go supersonic—it’s designing an engine and airframe combo that can operate at scale, hit reasonable ticket prices, and address stricter environmental policies than Concorde ever faced. The XB-1 proves they’re capable of building a small supersonic jet, but the gap between a funded prototype and a viable passenger fleet is enormous. Unless they can tackle those regulatory hurdles (especially around overland noise), keep operating costs competitive, and deliver a new engine that supports their performance claims, we’re still not much closer to a reliable Mach-plus commercial service than we were in the 1970s. It’s progress, but we shouldn’t confuse a cool proof-of-concept with a profitable flight network.

Any case - truly impressed by their persistance. Pushing something for such a long time despite being so far from any commercial traction feels insance to me.

> Pushing something for such a long time despite being so far from any commercial traction feels insance to me.

They must have something that you ain't got...

Extremely generous investors?

I think they were going for "the right stuff"

>hit reasonable ticket prices

There's much more to this. Their biggest competition may be cheaper Meta headsets paired via Starlink. Why travel as fast as possible when you can simply be there instantly for a fraction of the cost?

I really don't think that will be competition at all. People like to travel and the demand is there for faster international flights. For business travel, people either prefer to go in person or have to be in person. Also with time zone differences, virtual meetings require one party to often have to meet at odd times. The ticket price probably will be higher than what most people want to spend for vacation, but there will still be plenty of people willing to pay.

> paired via Starlink

What advantage does Starlink provide here? Isn't it a higher-latency, slower connection than most people have access to at home?

Their new goal is just 20ms.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-tries-again-to-reduce-star...

I still don't see the advantage for most people to choose a broadband provider that costs more for less bandwidth and higher latency. Seems like most people would only choose Starlink if they are in an area underserved by fixed broadband.

Scott Manley posted an interesting video including some interviews and technical details on XB-1 (as well as some time in the XB-1 simulator near the end of the video).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITGgRhjcHAM

> Boom revealed the final production design of Overture, which is slated to roll out in 2025 and carry its first passengers by 2029.

How is Boom tracking to their timelines?

https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2022/American-Airlines...

They haven't updated those predictions publicly in a little while. Definitely a huge setback from Rolls-Royce dropping out, and putting together the coalition that's developing the Symphony engine. Latest I've seen on Twitter is Blake Scholl stating the first full-size engine core should be making thrust by end of 2025.

I'm guessing rollout realistically is more like 2029-2030... but even that is a tall order. Unless, of course, they're a lot farther ahead on Overture development generally than they've revealed.

The plane looks so small on the runway, I thought how could it possibly hold 64-80 passengers.

Hint: it's because the XB-1 is a one-third scale model of their fully fledged Overture.

So it’s a jet for ants?

Until they make it at least three times bigger, yes.

Why would you want ants 3X bigger?!

It would be horrible!

Jesus, that's a lot of ants.

It's kind of cute when it takes off.

I haven't seen anyone directly address it in the comments here (or in the video): was an audible sonic boom noticeable on the ground during today's test flight?

Noticeable is certainly a way of putting it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests

>However, in the first 14 weeks, 147 windows in the city's two tallest buildings, the First National Bank and Liberty National Bank, were broken.

If a sonic boom is "noticeable", that's one thing. But the problem is that even from cruising altitude they're shockingly loud. If the sonic boom is merely bearable, that's quite an improvement.

Right, and making an improvement is a big part of Boom's marketing. (It's in their name?!) I'm surprised I didn't hear them make any comments about it in the video during the flight as they crossed the sound barrier each time. Unless I missed it?

It's not something they probably want to draw attention to (despite the name), because it is a barrier to allowing these kinds of flights over land.

No, it's the whole point of Boom. They won't be able to keep the sonic boom a secret. They whole company's future hangs on making that sonic boom minor enough that supersonic flights will be allowed with few restrictions. Therefore asking what the boom was is perfectly fair.

Now, Boom might say (have they? I'm not following them) that the XB-1 is a demonstrator that they can do supersonic flight, and that the sonic boom reduction work will follow on. In that case asking what today's boom was is not that interesting.

The chase planes also went supersonic, so they would have contributed to the sonic boom, which might complicate that analysis (well, there would be at most 3 pairs of sonic booms, and it should be possible to tell which ones correspond to which planes).

I'm not criticizing anyone for asking how loud the boom was. I'm telling you why they didn't provide that answer unprompted.

GP was asking about this flight's sonic boom. That's the whole point of Boom: to make supersonic airplanes with small sonic booms.

First confirmation I've found so far on this exact question: "XB-1 is supersonic! (No boom audible here, as expected)" - Jon Ostrower https://bsky.app/profile/jonostrower.com/post/3lgsvea6zbs2x

Raises more questions though, because there were two other chase planes. Did the other planes stay below the sound barrier at all times?

Edit to add: Was no audible boom expected because of the planes themselves or because of where the people were watching from?

With planes being long enough away from the demonstrator, and speed of sound relatively low (about 330 m/s), the booms of all three planes should be separate enough, e.g. a good 100 ms away from one another, even if all three went supersonic and were dragging their respective shock waves.

The distance between the planes appeared to be around 30-50 m at the supersonic transition time, as much as I can estimate the size of the planes. A sound recording made under the flight path should allow to measure how many dB was the demonstrator's boom.

I don't see the problem? I was just saying that "not noticeable" is a really high bar to set for a supersonic flight.

But your first sentence reads like a direct answer to the question:

> Was the sonic boom noticeable?

> Noticeable is certainly a way of putting it.

As in, "Yes it was noticeable, and then some." At least, that's how I read it.

That's not even close to what I intended.

This doesn't say anything about today's flight though?

this plane doesn't look like it was made to produce a low boom. It has a very distinct von Karman ogive [1] fuselage and typical delta wings. I would guess that it's shape is primarily optimized for fuel efficiency at 1.5 mach or above.

If you take a look at NASA's low boom demonstrator [2], you can see that it's much skinnier and the nose is crazy elongated. This is intended to break up the bow shock into multiple parts, thereby decreasing the amount of energy each one has.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_cone_design#Von_K%C3%A1rm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst

Silly question, but would it be feasible to just equip a plan with a telescoping nose merely for this effect that could be deployed prior to supersonic flight?

Weight would kill the economics. It's not a fighter jet. But maybe it will be fine for drones. You should apply to YC.

Given that they were only authorized to fly in the "Bell X-1 supersonic corridor", I'd wager that sonic booms are fairly commonplace there. I doubt there are any residents around.

https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2003098938/

There are residents for sure in that corridor, but the residents are on Edwards AFB, and are fairly used to sonic booms. When I was on Edwards, there was still the last operating SR-71, and that boomed any time it flew.

It's nice, but it's basically Scaled Composites, Rutan's old company, building a supersonic fighter plane sized aircraft. That's what Scaled Composites does - build little airplanes as test vehicles. Not always little; they built Stratolaunch.

There have been many supersonic bizjet projects.[1] Spike [2] seems to be the only one other than Boom still alive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_business_jet

[2] https://www.spikeaerospace.com/

This is fascinating. Do you have more info about the Rutan connection?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan

Pretty exiting times in aerospace these days. Seeing spacex doing awesome innovation with starship and boom making good progress bringing back supersonic air travel

Can someone innovate general aviation

There's a company called Airhart that's trying to bring Fly-By-Wire to GA. But (at least in the US) I think innovation would be better focused on regulations - looking at you aeromedical specifically.

Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.

For a vivid example, look at the multi-year certification torture that even a minor new engine design (DeltaHawk https://www.deltahawk.com/ ) must endure, or hell, the comical marathon of low-lead avgas adoption, or even a basic 12V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22K-XdV7e-0 lithium battery.

GA is a hell of a fun hobby, but not a market conducive to venture capital timelines or returns.

> Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.

Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.

Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.

I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.

We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,

Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.

Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?

I'm not saying repeal it all or exempt GA but the current approach is clearly the worst of both worlds and ought to be changed.

> I know that we like to circle jerk about "written in blood" around here but your take is asinine.

Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic).

> We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,

> Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.

If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of reasons. For a quick example, TCAS (a system that will warn you if you're going to crash into another plane) isn't mandatory for planes with less than 30 seats or with takeoff weight less than 33,000lbs.

And as for why there are still regulations for GA, it's quite easy - those planes fly in the same airspace, and them falling down on population centres or crashing into other planes can kill people just as much as a civilian airliner. You really really have to try to kill someone if your Zodiac fails.

> Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?

Boeing aren't subjected to less rules. They're lucky to be in a country that doesn't care that much for rules because they're the national champion and must be protected. But the rules still are being enforced for them - they're at a very low production cap because they shat the bed so badly so many times.

I'm not saying the regulatory environment is wrong. I'm saying the market it creates (aside from avionics) is not a good fit for innovation stemming from venture capital due to venture capital's expected return magnitudes and timelines.

I cited three technologies (ICE engine redesign, low-lead gasoline, and lithium batteries) where those timelines for market adoption (outside of GA) were orders of magnitude (decades) shorter.

My comments were solely targeted at GA. Commercial aviation is an entirely different ball game.

Does Boom have a public roadmap? How much of a jump is it between building a fighter jet clone and building a passenger sized aircraft? I suspect it’s a massive jump. How much of the technology and testing is transferable? I also suspect not much. They’re going to spend an immense amount of money testing this aircraft, will it get them closer to passenger service as a result?

In the Q&A at the end of the video the CEO said:

- Symphony engine being produced by EOY '25

- 3 years to have first full size Overture roll off the line

- About 4 years to have it in the air for first time.

There's zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year, when zero of the market leaders want their business.

Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation.

Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about building and iterating new engines hundreds of times until you've made enough iterations that things stop melting in corner cases. It's about finding out, the hard way, every single way your assembly could possibly fail, melt, explode, wear too fast, or otherwise fail.

Understand that making modern engines often requires significant innovation in non-destructive testing to ensure the actual parts you are buying/making are up to spec.

Understand that Russia has a portion of decades of experience building, designing, and INNOVATING in jet engines and still struggles to build modern jet engines.

Understand that China struggles to produce economical modern jet engines despite massive funding, huge incentive, and literal national security concerns. The C19 jetliner currently uses an American engine.

Empirically, building modern jet engines seems HARDER than building modern rocket engines! It seems to require maintaining literal decades of raw engineering experience and patience, and now scale all that effort to a company that in 9 years has been told by all existing engine manufacturers "Nope, we won't make a profit on this plan", and has instead spent their time building a single demo plane that does not demonstrate any experience in building engines.

> zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year

Not one year. "produced by EOY '25" means they're almost certainly already very far along in the development process. There's no way they'd have a target date that early if they hadn't even started yet.

Looks like this article from last year says they were already doing hardware testing back then: https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/boom-supersonic-accelerates...

That said, as with any other aerospace project, I expect delays.

Its not between a fighter jet and a passenger jet. Its between those two AND building a new engine. Massive is a huge understatement.

If you're rich and can travel faster, why not? I hope they make a coupe version

Perhaps for Jared Issacman type of billionaire .

Rich people prefer the Rolls or Bentley when being a passenger, Sport/ performance vehicles are only fun if you are driving, I would expect the G650/800 style jets would be the preferred plane even if it is slower when you can travel in style and with your entourage.

Also range would be a consideration to this type of jet for passenger travel. Travel times makes difference only for long distance over the ocean flights, these jets tend to be quite short ranged.

XB-1 is only designed for 1000nm at 2.2 Mach compared to the 7000nm of G650 with cruise speed of 0.92 Mach. Basically XB-1 can fly for 40minutes at a time at its cruise(top?) speed of 2.2Mach

On the road, you have to go the speed limit whether you're in a rolls or a lambo. You might prefer a lambo if it could get there twice as fast

Lambo (all sport cars) owners tend to take speed limits as suggestions, it might actually be going twice as fast if not legally, still people being driven around, would prefer a Rolls.

Rolls and Bentley are normally driven slower than even regular cars like high end sedans, they are big and unwieldy, and their passengers really care about ride quality, the scene from parasite about coffee cup comes to mind.

If you had the money to own either car, you are rich enough that whenever you reach the destination is on time, other people work on your schedule, then speed becomes less important.

For those wanting to jump to where it goes supersonic, it happens a little after minute 11 on the flight time. The camera shots are clearer during subsonic flight, then it gets fairly blurry. The takeoff and climb were interesting to see; also before it goes supersonic the shots from the air are remarkably clear.

1:01:29

To be built in Greensboro, NC / North Carolina ... https://boomsupersonic.com/superfactory

Wow, as a Winston Salem native this is interesting news. Thanks for sharing.

I'm in WS myself now, going on 12 years.

The angle of attack at both takeoff and touch down is pretty wild!

I can't let go of the suspicion that this could become some kind of military (drone or not) airframe.

The military has had supersonic aircraft since the 1950s, why would they care about this?

If it's cheap to produce.

The F16 is already cheap, proven, integrated with everything, and available in great numbers. The Air Force also has a super sonic bomber in the B1 lancer, and a mass produced supersonic stealth fighter/bomber in the F35, which is actually pretty cost effective despite its public perception. Maybe there's a place for a large supersonic transport but the Air Force also has a lot of very heavy logistics aircraft already.

F-16 is a beauty, but it can't do Mach 2 for a prolonged time; it actually can't even do Mach 1.1 for a prolonged time.

F-22 is a marvel, and can fly supersonic for much longer, but its cost is exorbitant, and it's not even produced any more.

F-35 is more economical but it literally can fly supersonic for a minute or two with the currently installed engines.

Also the last B-1 was produced in 1988. The US hasn't had a long range super sonic bomber in production for 36 years.

You should be asking yourself why the US would buy a supersonic military aircraft when they've spent the last 70 years moving AWAY from higher speeds because it doesn't provide any value.

Why would you spend a single dollar on making your launch platform go a little bit faster when the thing you are launching goes faster than Mach 4? And that was true in the 80s.

Power output is important but top speed is not a priority. The B1 Program was cut partially because you could just buy 100 stealthy cruise missiles for the price of one B1 bomber which the Air Force did not think was more survivable than a B52. In the 80s.

Every country has built slower planes entirely because higher sustained top speed just means a more expensive engine, more fuel usage, and more frequent maintenance.

Boom insists they will somehow magically overcome all of those problems.

I'm not saying that supersonic aircraft is particularly useful. I'm saying that it's not widely presented in the USAF.

I'd say that manned military aircraft should generally be on decline, and manned fighter aircraft, tenfold so. The future belongs to drones that can withstand 30G, and have the "brain" more evenly distributed within the craft to increase survivability, and which can carry extra 1000 lb of payload because they have no human + cockpit + ejector seat + life support system on board.

If Boom succeeds in making a supercruise engine that can stay supersonic without needing afterburners, then the military may be interested because that will be cheaper than their current engines that need afterburners and use more fuel.

How is that special? The military already has the F-22 which can supercruise just fine. Or the Eurofighter if your military isn’t the USAF.

And also, fuel cost is probably the last concern of an Air Force. Maybe logistics of supplying fuel in an actual war is important, but I think the money for buying the fuel itself is basically zero compared to maintenance and getting the plane in the first place.

F22 isn't produced and fuel is more about range than cost.

The point is they know how to do it and they have the designs. Supercruise is also more about the design of the whole system and not just the engines.

Thank you, I did not know that.

The military has never had an operational supersonic transport aircraft. It's not a high enough priority for them to fund development of one from scratch, but if it's available on the civilian market then they'll probably buy a few. There are a few potential missions such as dignitary transport or rapid delivery of special operations teams.

Good argument.

I can't think of a single aerospace company that is not dual-use. I doubt Boom is building with that in mind but if they're around in 50 years, I'd be shocked if they did not have a thriving defense business.

(which I think is good but ymmv)

> I can't think of a single aerospace company that is not dual-use

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are pretty squarely military only.

> Lockheed Martin

Government contractor would be closer i think.

Lockheed Martin Space employs quarter of their total workforce and does both, they built the Hubble, and now working on Orion and so on. Key components of Hubble did come from "dual-use" technology i.e. spy satellites.

Is there a shortage of those?

They have some interest in a "special mission" version, a common aerospace euphemism for militarized.

They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.

That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...

Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.

Reminded me of a goose landing on a lake.

Previous thread in sequence:

Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077 - Jan 2025 (99 comments)

So cool to see this.

I have forever been jealous of a colleague in the 90s that got bumped off a business flight, put on the next available Concorde flight a couple of hours later, and still arrived earlier than his original flight.

How cool is that, hopefully will pressure Airbus into developing one too. So far they did silly concept vides only.

I'm also quite worried about Airbus after winning against Boeing becoming complacent since Chinese or Russians are not even close.

How do you make this profitable?

> How do you make this profitable?

Selling it for more than it costs to build.

Computer-based modelling, advances in our understanding of supersonic flight and sonic booms and a mature civil (and private) aviation industry make the profit case much more compelling than it was for the Concorde. (The real test will be in their engine.)

I assume the question was about the questionable economics of running a super-sonic airplane profitably.

The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money.

Maybe the premium aspect will be enough, given that we have a bigger and bigger chasm between rich and poor, or maybe the economics of running it won't compete against sub-sonic, lower fuel consumption planes.

I'm skeptical. Trans-Pacific would be interesting for some because that's a long time in a plane even with lie-flat seating. But then you need a lot of range because once you have to refuel you've cut into your time advantage.

NYC to London or Paris? Sure.

But now you still need to find people willing and able to spend $5K+ each way. I'd like to do it but realistically I'm not going to.

First class NY to Paris in a couple of weeks, one way, is ~$6k "best overall", with $10k for "fastest" (checked a random flight on Skyscanner).

> First class NY to Paris in a couple of weeks, one way, is ~$6k "best overall", with $10k for "fastest"

La Première will regularly go for $20k one way.

And how many people are booking that for that price? Is that enough to build a dedicated service on?

I wouldn't know, tho I am sure there's a McKinsey deck somewhere that calculated this :)

European airfares from the US can be really funky. I'm doing a trip in a couple months with a roundtrip for Heathrow and I'm actually taking the Eurostar back to London because returning directly from Paris was going to be so expensive. Open jaws in particular can be fairly OK or can be really expensive (as in my case).

I'd expect for trans-oceanic, you'd have people scheduling their travel around limited flights, given the unique offering.

I.e. you aren't trying to figure out "How do I 100% capacity a 8:17am daily flight?" (traditional subsonic carriers) but rather "How much demand is there per week/month?" (Boom)

If the flight is Wednesdays-only, then folks line their travel up on Wednesday. Because the alternative is a much longer flight.

There are usually at least daily flights on most routes. Business travelers, in particular, aren't going to wait a few days to take a flight that's a few hours faster. Absolutely no one is heading out 5 days early to shave 3 or 4 hours off their flight time.

Even for tourism, I wouldn't.

Especially at 2-3x the cost

I suspect a lot of people here get really excited at the idea of supersonic flight but would never pay the business class+ premium themselves.

Yes, I think many people would at most do it once so they have flown supersonic, and then never do it again.

Depends where Boom's ticket prices fall.

If they go for the low-rich market, their target customer moves schedules around themselves. If a CEO can't be in Europe until Wednesday, then the meeting happens Wednesday.

And the key thing Boom will be selling is literally unique: fewer hours on a plane.

To some, that's a nice to have. To people who hate being on a plane, it's worth a lot.

And even lie-flat first class sucks... it's nice, but you're still crammed into a dehydrating box.

Color me skeptical. I don't think CEOs have as much schedule flexibility as you think they do. A lot of the time they're traveling to meet with customers, analysts/media, investors, and so forth. And they have a lot of timing constraints. Senior execs tend to travel a lot. It's part of the job description basically along with early morning and late night conference calls and, generally, often grueling hours although some maintain better balance than others.

And trans-Atlantic flights just aren't all that long. I'd pay some premium to avoid a red-eye but not likely $5K-$10K even if I could. That's probably about what I'm paying for a whole 3 week trip today.

I'm seeing you jump back-and-forth from business travel to your own personal travel and conflating the decisions into one skeptical argument.

You don't buy first class, or even business class seats, as far as I can tell from this comment. You have to set aside your own reactions because you aren't in the target market.

"People scheduling their travel around limited flights" drove extra operational complexity and expenditure for Concorde; it's not a hassle-free business case.

BA and Air France understood that people paid extra to be able to quickly travel transatlantic[0]. That premium value proposition depends heavily on passengers' expectation that the flight WILL go at the scheduled time. The airlines had to invest significant extra resources in spare parts, additional staffing, and standby airframes to ensure on-time performance.

If the Concorde were to ever develop a reputation for six-hour departure delays or days of cancellations in a row, no one among their premium customer base would bother paying extra for it.

British Airways and Air France did profit from them prior to the 9/11 hijackings and the flight 4590 crash, so it's not an impossible hurdle to clear for Boom. But the value proposition for a new SST is going to be vulnerable to operational concerns that don't affect the rest of an airline's fleet.

[0] https://omegataupodcast.net/166-flying-the-concorde/ - "Every now and then they'd have a survey amongst the regular passengers [...] 'What do you think you paid for your Concorde flight today?' These people haven't got a clue what they paid for their Concorde flight today. They just tell their secretary, 'book me on tomorrow's Concorde, I need to get to New York in a hurry!'"

$10k transatlantic return hop. Add expedited immigration. Does not sound insane. First class tickets London-NY can be already in this price range. Not for everyone of course (certainly way out of my price range).

There's a market, just not sure how big. Business class works mostly because there's a big plane full of people paying for Economy (and maybe Economy Premium) and I suspect a lot of business is upgrades for flyers with a lot of status or mostly using miles. With e-entry (not sure how it will work with ETA now), I haven't waited long in London for immigration in ages.

British Airways business class-only flights from the City airport have been off and on. Don't know their current status. I could afford business but it seems like a poor value relative to other things I could do other than maybe a co-pay with miles trans-Pacific.

It's the other way around. Economy works because business subsidizes them.

The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money.

I see this stated all the time on HN, yet there's a whole section at the top of this very comments thread where people are talking about how very profitable the Concorde was.

One person quoted the line "There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits."

The key point is that the seven aircraft (two of which they paid £1 for!) spent very few hours per week in the air, because whilst it was profitable on one transatlantic route at very high prices, it would have lost money on just about any other route or with more frequent operation. And to have a profitable airframe programme you need your customers to be able to operate more than a couple of routes.

(the 40% figure is more an indication of BA's sometimes thin margins than massive unfulfilled potential)

My understanding is that it was profitable if you got the aircraft for free and already had pilots capable of flying them.

If the Concorde had been an actual financial success they would have developed it further and made a successor. And if BA and Air France had thought that the Concorde would continue making them money they wouldn't have retired it after one tragic accident in 30 years of operation. The 737 Max is still being made after much worse.

If I recall correctly, that's one of the well documented places where I had understood the fact that the concorde wasn't profitable, and would more or less never by in its current context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBvPue70l8

Which isn't to say Boom may not succeed.

By understanding that it'll take over a decade, maybe multiple decades, to break even (because it's not a tech company) and planning accordingly.

Could this thing take a polar route from New York to Hong Kong?

That's over 8,000 miles. An aircraft with that kind of unrefueuled range could go pretty much anywhere from New York, except Australia, SE Asia, or the tips of Africa and India.

Planned range for the Boom Overture is 4900 miles, so only a little better than the 4500 miles of Concorde, which occasionally had to make a refueling stop going westward over the Atlantic. So it won't have the capability for transpolar or Trans-Pacific flights.

Seattle to Tokyo is under 4800. If they serve that route I will never fly anything else.

Airbus won't do anything until someone proves the economics of it make sense.

Won't do things like A380?

More of the same but bigger? While it is a feat of engineering to make an aircraft the size of an A380 it is essentially the same design as every other commercial airliner, not revolutionary.

Super impressive, but I agree with this, it was an easier project to plot on a spreadsheet and forecast a path to profitability.

Using current technology and looking back at the Concorde to make any predictions on supersonic passenger travel generates a spreadsheet with a lot of red on it.

If somebody wants to burn their time and money trying I am totally cool with it. If they succeed in their vision they will be handsomely rewarded and transport gets faster. If they fail they still tried to make the future more amazing.

Hell yea brother

Without A380 there would be no A350 XWB.

Why is that? (These are my favourite planes to fly on, curious how the A350 is derivative given the apparent difference in packaging.)

That's kind of a ridiculous statement. With the money spend on A380 they could have developed a whole lot of different things.

Probably not again given what a commercial failure it was

Boeing proved "Big Plane" was profitable with the 747.

Unfortunately for Airbus, it also stopped being profitable before they finished the A380.

They won't do supersonic jets in particular, but they already have a ton of moonshots to try make sustainable aviation possible and with economics that make sense. Stuff like hydrogen propulsion, hydrogen electric, and battery electric designs, with a variety of weird shapes and forms. They're the only big aircraft manufacturer with such a wide array of potentially groundbreaking (if they make it) research. And theirs is drastically more important than Boom - time and time again, it has been proven that mass aviation is all about economics, not speed. Soon it will be economics + sustainability, speed being a niche which might not even be profitable (Concorde, Convair and many others have tried differentiating themselves on speed and failed).

https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hydro...

This is slightly off topic, but why cant we start rebuilding Concorde?

Wouldn't it be much easier to rebuild using modern technology? And try to get Mach 3 over the Atlantic so London to New York could hopefully be under 3 hours including take off and landing.

For Concorde the entire supply chain is long gone. A clean sheet design based around currently available parts would be cheaper than trying to resurrect an old design.

As for speed, Mach 3 is really tough because of extreme airframe heating. Mach 2 is about the highest sustained speed an airplane can manage without using really exotic materials or active cooling.

You are contradicting yourself.

You can either a) rebuild the Concord or b) use modern technology.

If you use modern technology, its not a Concord anymore.

And you can't magically go Mach 3 just because you say its 'modern'. What existing engine can do that? And even if you had an engine, a Concord will not do that anyway.

So really you are talking about developing a whole new plane. And that's gone cost 10-20 billion $ and including the engine like quite a bit more.

I think Boom is doing exactly what you propose. What you propose just doesn't look like you expect it to look.

I know nothing about Boom. Why is this impressive? We've achieved supersonic for passengers before. Are we meant to be interested just because someone is taking up the mantle again, or is there some new design that makes it impressive?

there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.

> there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation

There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.

This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part

i don't disagree with any of that, i'm extremely skeptical that they will ever scale this up

however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.

"Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy.

The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.

This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though.

Still impressively cool.

"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment.

Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.

as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time

today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."

there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.

i just think the little plane is neat.

I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross the Pacific would be incredible.

The work to minimize or delete sonic boom - that's an important one. And it's a NASA project.

> Not only do people not need hypersonic flight,

We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.

At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".

The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.

Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?

I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.

The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.

> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes

I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.

You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...

Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials.

I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.

There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment

The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction

If there’s no direct flight now it seems unlikely there’s enough demand to justify a supersonic flight.

I can take one subsonic leg to the nearest hub (Amsterdam, London, Paris) and fly from there. It’s that second leg that kills the joy of travelling.

Do none of the private jets like G6s or whatever fly supersonic?

nope.

commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9

i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:

- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.

- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.

it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.

And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.

There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.

West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.

Yes, the question is how many thousand dollars out of your own pocket great which would be the situation with most people.

It’s not about most people, it’s about the 1500 in C/F

I'm not sure the people who pay full-boat fares for business and first today is a sufficient market for a new supersonic plane and a viable set of airline routes (within the range of the plane which probably doesn't include trans-Pacific).

> going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify

Worse: drag in the transonic regime is generally worse than subsonic or supersonic.

Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke basically all records. Why would there be less case for faster flights?

Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.

Would you pay $5k to fly basic economy?

Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.

Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?

Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).

There are thousands of business and first class seats sold between London and New York every day, most in the 5k plus per leg range.

Would they pay that much to fly economy, for a flight half as long? I'm skeptical. (Comparable first-class tickets would be $20k - $50k.)

the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet.

people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.

at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.

i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.

i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.

> the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet

Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)

In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.

The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.

Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights, airline competition and a consolidation amongst manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on other people's schedules between airports they dont want to travel to/from.

No, you can kinda tell by the planes shape how fast it can go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule

Certainly they're fast, wikipedia says the the G650 can get to mach 0.9, but it's called the sound barrier for a reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_barrier

That makes sense. I've known that private jets fly faster than typical commercial jets as well as flying at higher altitude.

We've already been to the moon before, but I for one would be excited to see it happen again.

The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.

Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.

This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.

Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.

And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).

And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.

Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.

So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...

As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...

> I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right

OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil aircraft going supersonic.

Fair enough...

You are right - (And it's not a civil aircraft just because it's painted white.)

Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)

I still prefer shorter flight time. I rather spend those hours in hotel bed or eating at restaurant than sit/lie in the airline seat.

All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.

If you solve the boom component, can you just keep going West? London, NYC, LA, Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, London?

Concorde holds the world record in both directions actually.

F-BTSD did it:

- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)

- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde_histories_and_aircraf...

> they have the technology

Having the tech sounds funny. In some abstract way maybe. Actually being able to build a supersonic airframe and everything connected.

There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.

And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.

Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.

Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small.

Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.

> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.

They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.

Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.

Previously Boom's CEO said this:

“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]

Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...

Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.

Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly Overture won't be capable of that.

Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.

Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing

Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.

The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)

Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept (though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)

No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.

ICPM! That's a new acronym you just coined!

> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.

The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.

Once you get out of the atmosphere, lift is ~0 too.

If you're going fast enough, you don't need lift.

But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.

"Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though. Suborbital range is very short on the lower end, and increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can boost to 2km/s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing really useful in between.

GP is not talking about a ballistic trajectory though.

One possibility is a trajectory that's a series of skips.

There actually is still significant lift. We define the edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't fly conventionally in space but lift might still be generating a force which is significant compared to your craft's weight.

Well the assumption was that there is no drag because the air density is so low. You can’t just say there’s no drag but still assume that you get lift. Your lift/drag ratio won’t go up infinitely just because you’re flying higher.

GP's assumption was travelling through space to avoid drag which doesn't necessarily imply generating lift in space.

My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.

The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude, while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km, where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital depreciation, insurance, etc.

> Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable

Most likely it's aspirational, something to market to investors and potential employees.

> something to market to investors and potential employees

Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:

  > The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...

Yes, and self driving cars are right around the corner!

I don't get the analogy. The Boom CEO explicitly stated that $100 tickets are not around the corner. Two or three generations down the line means four decades at a minimum, if we think one generation takes 20 years. Lots of things can happen in 4 decades, like: significant advances in ramjet engines, rotation detonation engines become mainstream, people get comfortable with windowless aircraft (so there's no need for drooping nose Concorde-style), airports could start being equipped with arresting wires, like aircraft carriers today, airplanes without the vertical tail fin become common place, stronger and lighter composites become available, and, who knows, maybe even some jets will start running on hydrogen rather than jet fuel (hydrogen having about 3 times more energy density per unit of mass). I have to admit the even with all these things, $100 per ticket to any place in the world still seems like a stretch, but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn

You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.

Oops, good catch, thank you. I got too sloppy with the napkin math.

New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.

> New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring

LA to Sydney is $10k on a good day for lie flat. You could probably charge $15 even 20k a seat and (a) turn a profit (b) filling the plane.

Did you miss the part you quoted that said "$100 in 4 hours"? It does not say $100k.

> It does not say $100k

>> You could probably charge $15 even 20k a seat

Neither do I.

That’s overstating it. I literally did this flight in Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I’d say tickets from LA are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to Sydney next week in that range.

> which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks

That's while my tesla robotaxi is making that 100 bucks driving leprechauns to their golden pots!

Totally not vaporware guys.

Seems like they want to bring back supersonic commercial flights similar to the trans-Atlantic Concorde flights. But with more destinations.

Per their site - https://boomsupersonic.com/overture

The same could be said about those who watched SpaceX since the Falcon 1.

I hadn't made that connection but it's really apt. People watching Falcon 1 flight 4 get to orbit probably said "It's 165 kg payload, so what? We've been sending satellites to orbit for 50 years. ULA just sent (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1538) a 2000 kg payload to orbit 3 weeks ago!" It really is significant what Boom did in the time frame and budget they had.

The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel. It also could not go supersonic over land because its sonic booms were too loud. This mean that flights could only go over the ocean, and they were expensive due to fuel costs. Boom's goal is to reduce the sound of their sonic booms 30x and eliminate the need of afterburners.

No. I don't think that's correct. The Concorde used its afterburners during take off and to get through the transonic region, where the drag is very heavy. Once you've gone past that the drag drops. At that point the Concorde can turn off the after burners.

Source: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-engine-re-heats

That's right, the Concorde had engines capable of supercruise - long distance supersonic flight without afterburners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...

This is correct, reheat / afterburner was used from Mach 0.9 something to 1.7, after which they'd were off. So yes, Concorde could supercruise.

IIRC Concorde could super cruise a Mach 2 which is unmatched. It would also flight supersonic for most of its journey which is also presented unprecedented difficulties.

It was really an unique plane.

Legend says the Tu-144 used afterburners the whole time while supersonic, but, then, it seems five units have engines without afterburners (RD-36-51's replacing the Kuznetsov NK-144 used in most of the fleet).

I wonder what was the noise level in those late models.

WHAT ?!?

"The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight..."

"The Concorde used its afterburners ... to get through the transonic region..."

Am I missing something, or is there no difference between these sentences?

Boom also requires afterburners, at least for now.

You can watch them kick in on the telemetry (which goes from "100%" to "A/B" for all three engines) at the bottom of the video around the 58:35 mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/-qisIViAHwI?feature=shared&t=35...

The engine in XB-1 test plane is not the same that’s going in the production plane.

When the production engine exists in physical form, we can absolutely discuss its capabilities. The XB-1 demonstrator is, using afterburner to get to speed, demonstrating other design features intended to keep the noise down.

The original plan was a commercial partner for the engines, but the big three - Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric - turned them down. It's one of the biggest remaining question marks in the entire project.

s/When/If/

> The engine in XB-1 test plane is not the same that’s going in the production plane.

There IS no production plane, nor can there be. The last company they wanted to use for engines dropped them as a client years ago (others did earlier): https://english.alarabiya.net/business/aviation-and-transpor...

Boom is not currently flying their intended engines, the Symphony, which does not exist yet. (1) The XB-1 is flying with J85's just like a T-38 has, and just like a T-38 it can go supersonic with afterburners. If the Symphony is able to meet its design goals, it will not need afterburners for any part of flight. How much they will be able to deliver on that remains the biggest open technical question for Boom. (2)

1: Well, their Plan B intended engines. Their Plan A was that one of the Big 3- RR, PW, GE- would make engines for them, but none were interested in taking the risk that a difficult engine could be designed and built in enough volume to make the investment back.

2: Their biggest legal question is over-land supersonic regulations. Their biggest economics question- and probably the biggest and most important of all of them- is how much will people pay for civil supersonic?

> how much will people pay for civil supersonic?

Do we know how much more it's likely to cost? I could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x.

Anything beyond 2x I imagine would start to price out the average person and anything beyond 5x would probably price out the vast majority of potential customers.

Their business model for a long time has theorized that they can deliver an operating cost that would allow airlines to offer tickets at roughly current business class ticket costs, which would be a fraction of Concorde ticket prices expressed in current dollars.

I don't know if those theorized efficiencies will be delivered (a lot depends on that engine) or if airlines will price tickets at that level. But it's the theory so far.

> could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x

People pay more than that for domestic first class, which doesn’t even have lay-flat seats. $2,500 or even $5k for a New York <> San Francisco 2-hour flight would absolutely sell.

A number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at least some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights. UA has over a half dozen Dreamliners flying back and forth daily, all with Polaris cabins. I know AA and Delta have routes with them, too. I agree, a two-hour flight time would be better!

> number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at least some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights

They're limited. And I regularly see them going for $4k+.

With the amount of billionaires increasing, I'd think more people than Concorde had pay for civil supersonic.

    > The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel.

Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise

    > Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner.

    > Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic

Real question: How many in-production/operation engines in world can fly supersonic without afterburners? I think it is only a handful, all insanely expensive and backed with squillions of dollars of gov't/military money. And, the maintenance cycle must be out of this world expensive.

There are some interesting technological developments around fuel efficiency and minimizing the "sonic boom" that's felt on the ground. Neither of those killed Concorde though, because the entire idea of Concorde turned out to be incredibly faulty. MOST people weren't in such a hurry to get from point A to point B that they'd pay 5x-10x a normal business/first class ticket to cut a trip down by 50% or so. The intended 100+ units to be built and sold turned out to be a fantasy, airlines weren't interested.

Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new, airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID FLIGHT. Today that's routine.

So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?

tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a technological one, and the economics haven't changed.

On the live cast the presenter mentioned Boom have already secured ~130 pre-orders, including United Airlines. Not bad considering the Concorde anticipated 100+ orders but only manufactured a fraction of that.

Well Concorde showed pre-orders don't mean much... :-D

Pre-orders are just wind until they're actually delivering product. It doesn't cost the carriers much to make the pre-orders. The calculation is that if it somehow pans out then they won't miss the boat, if the company fails then they aren't really out anything.

To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't think they would get this far. I still don't think they are going to build full scale production models and actually sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going. Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too though.

My take is it's not even an economic problem. Unless you fly really fast (like Mach 3++), flying east sucks.

Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.

If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.

With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.

But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).

Concorde did that in 3 hours FYI.

> Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?

Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.

I suppose the question is whether you feel like spending 3-5 times as much for the same flight, to save a bit of that time. Perhaps you would be, but I think you can understand how most wouldn't, even if they could. That is of course assuming that unlike Concorde, this can do single-hop journeys longer than a trans-Atlantic flight.

> whether you feel like spending 3-5 times as much for the same flight, to save a bit of that time

Plenty of people do for comfort. And these seats don’t look horrendous.

You have a good point, maybe they'll find the sweet spot between price and utility.

I keep seeing you using this $10k figure, where is that coming from? I’m fortunate to fly intl biz class a lot, and I rarely see prices that high. In September I flew SG from NYC to Singapore in biz class for $4k RT.

I spend more than that in premium economy with no Saturday stay and last minute like many business travellers.

So how much would you be willing to pay additionally to get from a 10 hour flight to a 5 hour flight? More than 5k?

If it's already going to be expensive and exclusive they can easily design a program where all the passengers have to be some kind of TSA++ pre-approved ahead of time and perhaps have a special terminal and/or security screening line.

The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.

There were enough passengers, and flying the Concorde actually became profitable for the airlines once they figured out they just needed to charge through the nose for it. This was despite prodigious fuel consumption and that fuel becoming much more expensive after the oil crisis.

The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.

I still don't see this being something large airlines would be overly interested in, but I wonder if there's a private market. If you're Taylor Swift maybe being able to fly from NYC to LA in half the time is well worth it.

Last time I flew from Heathrow it was 45 minutes from car to take off, and that was with a 20 minute door close.

It doesn’t take 2 hours to go through security , certainly not in the first class section in any case.

Ah yes, let's use the timeline for a first class passenger as the average for how long it takes to go from check-in to take off.

That is the correct benchmark for potential Boom customers.

I fly a couple times a year from Portland, OR.

The line at security is typically 0-20 minutes. Add in walking time, and I'm getting from car to gate in 10-30 minutes.

But I still feel like I need to get to the airport at least 90 minutes, if not 2 hours early, just in case I end up flying on a day where 1 of the 2 security checkpoints is entirely closed and every traveler is now forced to go through a single checkpoint and it's going to take over an hour.

They're betting that they can make supersonic travel sustainable and profitable with a new aircraft and engine design. The Concord wasn't either of those.

The business case is apparently solid enough that several airlines are partnering with them during development.

This is the first actual demonstration that they can achieve supersonic flight in their demonstrator aircraft, so it is a significant milestone but they are years away from their full-scale aircraft.

I suspect it'll only ever be a toy for billionaires.

For the rest of us, isn't air travel supposed to be something we're giving up/ramping down due to climate change?

What if this ends up being more efficient for long flights over oceans due to the ability to fly in thinner air?

Probably not, and for sure the company is not expecting to be more efficient than subsonic.

It's the first supersonic plane from a YC startup or any startup for that matter. Also they are hoping to do profitable passenger travel which hasn't really been done - concorde had ups and downs but mostly lost money.

Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds. The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the production model capable of supercruise.

Concorde used supercruise for most of the flight - afterburners were only used for departure and for transonic acceleration.

> The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde

I would think that is not very hard to accomplish. Their first flight is almost half a century after Concorde’s. Technology has progressed.

As an (imperfect) comparison, in subsonic flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Past):

“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”

Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.

While true, the catch is that very little technology relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that’s about it. Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints it was built for and those constraints haven’t really changed - airport parking docks remain the same size, runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the same distance apart, people don’t want to hear sonic booms, and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer to turn a profit.

> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.

Why is this interesting?

Because once things are paid by consumers things get better, more responsible, efficient, and so on, compared to free money granted by states to a few at the cost of many?

There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html

"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..

$200 million in North Carolina for production:

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/nc-...

$60 million from the US Air Force for development:

https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/flight-te...

$2 million SBIR grant for development:

https://www.sbir.gov/awards/187787

The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.

And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?

Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.

It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.

It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.

I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.

And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.

Just talking about the "$200M" number.

Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..

> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "

Concorde didn’t use afterburner during cruise. There’s a lot of discussion from pilots and engineers in a long thread https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question-7.h... describing the actual flight profile.

It's not a huge deal for humanity, but it's exciting for aviation enthusiasts and those studying the air travel space.

To my layman's eye, they've built a civilian version of a trainer/fighter jet, now all they have to do is scale it up to airliner size :) Long way to go but you have to start somewhere.

Arguably more impressive than deepseek.

“Currently, all civil aircraft flights are prohibited from operating above Mach one speeds over land in the United States.” [1]

Mike Bannister’s excellent book Concorde talks at length about how “handsomely profitable” the BA service was (as opposed to the Air France one) from 1984 until the 2000 crash and subsequent grounding put them in to a spiral where keeping enough people certified was too expensive.

One part of this profitable change in 1984 was surveying their customers (who typically did not book their own tickets) to see what they thought the price was. About $5000 was the perception. It was actually $3000, so they quickly raised the price to the perceived one.

https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...

Started reading the book again :). The $5k fares were the transatlantic ones. They made a lot of money doing day trips to Venice, Helsinki, Cairo, etc - places only Concorde could do in a day.

“Lord King’s edict that the aircraft had to be profitable within two-and-a-half years had been realised. There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits”.

LA to New York or San Francisco to Honolulu in 2 to 3 hours would be a game changer. You could probably fill a plane at least once a day on those routes for a handsome profit.

NYC to LA in 3 hours would be an 8 AM flight which would land at 8 AM, same day.

Just mind boggling to think of, no trouble finding 100 people daily who want to do a day-trip to California.

I had a similar experience flying from Dublin to Seattle a couple of years ago. Take off around 16:00, land at 17:00.

In that "hour" I'd watched (IIRC) Fellowship of the Ring, Sunset Boulevard, and—out of a morbid sense of curiosity that I regret—Moonfall.

Once I flew north-west at the time of sunset. I had the view of the most beautiful big red sun right at the edge a sea of snow white clouds for more than an hour.

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGvYKtiwHlA

I suspect if Concorde had been made by an American company the “overland” issue would have been solved.

That doesn’t fit with my understanding about the cancelation of the Boeing SST project.

I suspect many more Americans could potentially sue the airline for the noise than English or French, due to the structure of the respective legal systems. So the financial risk of overland operations over the US, even with the ban lifted, could be too high still.

As a pilot, Americans are incredibly sensitive to aircraft noise. And regulators do all sorts of stuff to route planes around noise sensitive areas.

It breaks noise regs to fly most subsonic 1960s eras jets with their original engines these days, you have to modify them with hush kits, etc.

They forced a lot of these very American jets to be quiet for the sake of just the landing and takeoff phases. I have a hard time seeing that they would/will find a way to make sonic booms acceptable to the general public.

> I have a hard time seeing that they would/will find a way to make sonic booms acceptable to the general public.

NASA has a research craft aiming to make the noise profile more of a "thump" than "boom": https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-lockheed-martin-revea...

No chance, far too loud, and I doubt Boom will get approval either

I thought about Hawaii also. Rich cities in Northeast Asia might also be a good target: Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing to Hawaii might be good targets for weekly (or charter) flights. The tricky part (except Tokyo) would be negotiating supersonic flyover rights. I cannot imagine that Japan would be excited to have regular supersonic flights over their main island from Seoul or Beijing.

Regarding LA<->NYC, I think you could make a dent in that market with an all business class flight that flies slightly less than Mach 1 (0.95 or whatever) and has special security screening and baggage handling. People might be willing to pay 30-50% more compared to business class on a regular flight.

Last: Is there a video game like Theme Park or Railroad Tycoon that allows for the simulation of an airline market? That could be fun.

Concorde experiences one fatal crash in 27 years: entire product line gets cancelled.

Meanwhile, Boeing 737 MAX... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thus is the might of the “Industrial” part of the Military-industrial Complex, of which Boeing is a significant part and which Concorde was not.

The product line was effectively cancelled by the oil crisis of 1973 and severe economic issues in the mid 70s. It had nothing to do with a crash (of an airplane; there was a market crash involved).

I still feel like it was on the path to repopularization when it crashed, and wasn't given a second chance.

The manufacturer withdrew support for Concorde so the airlines couldn’t it anymore

Because the 737 Max had type commonality with the old 737s, and because of how behind Boeing was on deliveries, the pilots could still fly on the old 737s and that stemmed some of the loss of money.

Concorde was a very unique plane, the pilots were specially trained for it, and having them sit around was expensive.

You don't know what you are talking about. The product line was cancelled many decades before the crash due to lack of sales. After the crash, the Concorde fleet was modified, returned to service and remained in service for another 3 years before it was removed from service and retired due to the high cost of operation.

The Concorde manufacturing was cancelled in the 1970s. The crash was in 2000. The last flight was in 2003.

They didn't stop flying due to a crash. It was the money.

That and airbus didn’t want to keep supporting Concorde. And they held the type certificate

My understanding was that, even for BA, the Concord was profitable on a cash accounting basis (as in, the tickets more than covered the cost of fuel, salaries, etc.) but not when accounting for a) the depreciation costs of the plane, which were much higher than for an ordinary Boeing or Airbus passenger jet since it was a one-off limited run and there were few spare parts and b) as you said, training new people to fly it, since it was an antiquated plane without a glass cockpit and the skills did not transfer to other planes. That's why it got harder and harder to justify over time until it was shuttered after the fatal crash during the general post-9/11 aviation downturn.

Yeah of course there was always going to be an end date. However, there are people saying it was not profitable at all and that is not really the truth.

Bannister knows probably more than anyone about the topic and tells the story well. Thoroughly recommend the book. His tale of a guy called Bill being invited into the cockpit and discreetly given the controls to fly supersonic was awesome. Of course, later over a beer Bill (Weaver) talked of his times flying the Blackbird at twice the speed, and of the time it disintegrated around him.

It also had a three person crew, and post 9/11 was the start of structurally higher oil prices, both of which were a death knell.

The true nail in the coffin was the development of the lie flat business seat, which meant that you could cross the Atlantic in three hours in a plush but cramped seat, or spend less money to sleep for six on a redeye and arrive well rested. At that point three hours was not a compelling enough time savings, but the Concorde also didn't fly far enough to do routes where the speed resulted in more significant time savings, like on transpacific routes.

London doesn't even require a red-eye from NYC--or actually from Boston/Washington although it's a very early star--on a conventional jet. I've done it pretty regularly. Not pleasant but I can get to London in time for a late dinner.

BA has one daily morning flight from Boston to Heathrow. The only non-red eye transatlantic out of Logan that I’m aware of.

Always quite busy, and personally I’d much rather not try to get a good night’s sleep on a barely 6 hour flight.

You can fly to EWR and then onto LHR on United which is what I usually do. It's a very early AM pickup but it works.

> and post 9/11 ...

Two-thirds of BA's Concorde regular passengers died on 9/11. The service never recovered financially from that loss.

Thats a very interesting observation. Do you have a link with more details?

I can see 2/3 quit flying, but died? Seems unlikely.

Also, my understanding is that AF was not profitable on Concord even ignoring those accounting costs. So AF wanted to shutter the plane after the accident, and changing the costs of shared maintenance equipment from 50/50 to 100/0 made BA's numbers go into the red too, because it wasn't very much profit.

Mike Bannister was also one of the commentators on this live stream.

If Airforce One presidential plane is assigned to a sound-breaker, people will love the sound that comes from it. “Look the president is flying above us” people will say in excitement.

Air force one is always a safe proven design.

Just awesome. Congrats to everyone who worked on this! Excited to see what's next from you all.

Watched it live, and it was amazing. Beautiful aircraft.

These guys were in my S16 batch. I have worked Aerospace the last 6 years, and it is AWESOME to see this accomplishment! Surpassing Mach is a massive challenge for a crewed aircraft. Big win for the team, congratulations

So funny how everything is live streamed now I like it, transparency is good

Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077

I didn't see any data on the loudness of the sonic boom. Isn't an important part of the idea here to diminish that significantly?

I think you are confusing Boom with NASA’s QUESST project. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/quesst/

The GP isn’t, a major part of Boom’s initial PR was that they’d enable domestic supersonic by solving the sonic boom issue through technology. Over the years aviation watchers have suggested they might have failed at that and are looking to solve it through spending VC money on lobbyists to allow noisy supersonic overflights.

Is the goal to be able to supercruise, or are they just going to be to waste tons of fuel on afterburning like the Concorde?

I had the same question. From their FAQ (https://boomsupersonic.com/faq):

> Will Overture use afterburners like Concorde?

> No. Overture will fly without the use of afterburners, meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes. The airliner will be powered by the Symphony propulsion system. Symphony will be a medium-bypass turbofan engine designed and optimized for environmentally and economically sustainable supersonic flight.

> ... meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes

Extremely dishonest: as far as I can tell (CFR title 14, B36.5) there are no specific noise level regulations for subsonic cruise flight (i.e. not take-off and landing) because you can't hear subsonic aircraft at cruise altitude. On the other hand, however, you will be able to hear sonic booms.

I think that statement is saying it will meet those noise levels for takeoff and landing, not during cruise which will be over the ocean.

It's intentionally misleading, they are technically saying they will meet the takeoff and landing requirements (which they are required to meet by law) but implying that the plane is going to be quiet at cruise (which they want to perform over the continental United States, not just over the ocean).

Moreover, their statement falsely suggests that Concorde does not "[meet] the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes" but 36.301 says that Concorde also has to meet the same standards as subsonic planes (standards which exclude operation at cruise which didn't matter for Concorde because it was over the Atlantic).

I'm far from an expert, but at least as it pertains to the SR-71, that craft was designed to use its afterburners most (all?) of the time[1].

Edit: Of course, the Blackbird had the benefit of refuelling mid-air.

[1] https://youtu.be/gkyVZxtsubM

The SR-71 engine is a weird beast operating like both a ramjet and turbojet due shaping the flow and injecting fuel in the air stream.

A ramjet [1] stays efficient at high speeds even though it on the outside kind of looks like an afterburner.

  It was a conventional afterburning turbojet for take-off and acceleration to Mach 2 and then used permanent compressor bleed to the afterburner above Mach 2. The way the engine worked at cruise led it to be described as "acting like a turboramjet".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

The afterburner on the SR-71's engine is being fed super-compressed bypass air from the intake. It can ignite the exhaust with comparatively minuscule amounts of fuel when compared to a regular turbojet.

At speeds beyond Mach 3, you don't even need fuel to ignite the oxygen. The simple friction and drag of the airframe is enough to ignite the oxygen around it and surround the aircraft with superheated plasma.

The Concorde was in fact able to supercruise. (As someone else pointed out)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...

So why is this happening but SST got pilloried due to noise, vibration, moisture in the stratosphere, ozone layer, etc. Did these issues get solved with the Boom aircraft, or is the solution to route around them via marketing and hope no one opens a history book?

Any idea why there was a "knock it off" call on the 2nd supersonic pass?

Probably getting close to the boundary of the allowed area

They had just started the run right after a positioning turn.

There were rumors in the early 2000s of a QSP jet being shopped around by LM SkunkWorks to Wall Street. Also really strong rumors that Cessna was working on a similar jet. These projects probably died.

They worked extremely hard on one problem for 10 years straight. Incredibly impressed. That's what it takes to create great things. Congrats Blake!

So apparently the successor to the XB-1 test plane, Overture, is planned to be mainly a luxury airplane, similar to Concorde, just somewhat smaller.

I don't see a reason to be excited about this. Their CEO compared their test flight to the Falcon 1 rocket, the Falcon 9 precursor. But a better comparison would be Blue Origin's New Shepard, or Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne, because they also mainly offer luxury services. By contrast, the Falcon 9 rockets have real (non luxury) commercial and scientific value.

Watched the livestream. Haven’t gotten that excited over a performance test since the early days of SpaceX, before the dark times.

Wishing them all the best! Beautiful aircraft, beautiful demonstration, and hopefully more beautiful datasets that exceed their expectations.

Just don’t Milkshake Duck this.

Great milestone, but still pretty far away from taking passengers as this is a scale technology demonstrator.

A wonderful achievement, but the camera operator really should know how to focus for the money shot.

I was expecting to see something Concorde scale, but I guess a private jet is a start.

Cool! It's always fun to see the model at the Wings over the Rockies museum.

Is the word aircraft feminine? They keep saying “she” and it sounds weird.

It's a thing. You can selectively gender a creation or just a highly praised piece of property (e.g. boats). It implies fondness, respect and pride.

It's from when the English language had gendered nouns, which of course predates aircraft; I think aircraft being female was a carry-over from boats and ships being female

I wonder if they have cameras to show the pilot everything they can't see when taking off/landing, since it looks like it has the same forward-visibility issues as the Concorde (without the Concorde's moveable nose -- I think?).

Pretty cool though! It was disappointing that the Concorde (along with commercial supersonic flight in general) was retired around the time I was becoming an adult and could begin to contemplate maybe taking a trip on it someday.

They do, yes. Visible in Scott Manley's video.

Mach 1.1! *Xoldplay's 'speed of sound' song starts*

Can't wait to live the good life of the 80/90s again with that our parents enjoyed with 5 hours flights to New York.

More technology advances please so we can break through this zeitgeist of human pessimism and introspection.

Onwards and upwards!

My parents certainly never did that. Very few parents did, the tickets were way out of the price range of the typical passenger. It's like pining for the days when people traveled in the opulant lounges of ocean going steamer ships, forgetting that the bulk of the people were crammed into tiny cabins with few amenities for the long journey.

Nor did my parents, but I guess I should have clarified better. They at least had the option to be able to do this. It was taken away when Concorde was grounded, but now we have an opportunity for supersonic flight for people, of course with a price tag.

That's a good thing in my books.

Is it okay/usual for the test pilot to partake in a glass of champagne so soon after landing?

On a side note: Channing Tatum is a shoe-in for playing the pilot, Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg, if this ever gets made into a movie.

It's certainly better than before landing!

For context, my father who's a commercial pilot for Air New Zealand says this wouldn't be condoned. Take that as you will.

'Partake in' - you mean drink? What's the issue?

Why are some camera shots so dull? Is that a HDR problem?

Long tele lens - lots of air between it and the plane, I'd say.

It was actually fine for the air-to-air shots but all shots from the ground/drones were very washed out.

Likely LOG settings in the cameras, a color profile aimed at color correction. If LOG footage is not color corrected it looks like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ap8k564N_w

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_profile

Somebody must have forgotten to load a LUT into the camera!

Yes I noticed this for a lot of the ground shots - looks like they've made a mistake and we're seeing the uncorrected log curve output of the camera, and they've forgotten to load (or enable) a LUT (look up table) for the conversion to linear.

It's basically just missing half of the image processing, normally you'd only output to that to a recorder if you were going to apply all the grading later in post production (which obviously they're not doing here).

See this random article for a bit of a rundown - https://pixflow.net/blog/difference-between-raw-log-and-rec-...

The camera also lost focus on the jet during the record where it went transonic for the first time ever (around 1:01). It looks like they struggled for a while to recover focus against the featureless sky because I would guess they had their lens set to auto focus, which uses a spot or grid of consensus edge detectors. There's no circular polarizer filter equipped because you can see window glare, and that momentarily caused the AF grid to choose the window as the subject because there wasn't (any?) a good enough stabilizer. For a relatively stationary subject like this, it's more reliable to pull focus manually because the camera can be jostled without confusing an AF algorithm. Even better to periodically use spot auto-focus to acquire the sharpest focal plane, then flip it to manual.

seems too small. where do the passengers go?

The plane they used in this test is a 1/3 scale version of the final product.

Good achievement. Also really good PR from them. If this was a team from say Switzerland it wouldn't be on every front page.

They claim this was the first 100% civil aircraft to go supersonic.

The Concorde wasn't a civil aircraft?

Also in the 60s a DC-8 was made to go faster than Mach 1

Remember that the biggest technical challenge to passenger supersonic flight is hacking Congress. People really don't like plutocrats in private jets cracking their windows and scaring their dog.

Over land, sure, but over the ocean, I don't really see the problem? Just wait until you're clear enough of the coast and then floor it.

That's been the status quo since Concorde. The problem is it's hard to make a supersonic jet that has decent subsonic performance, you kind of have to pick one flight regime or the other to optimize for. And the market for business jets that you can only really fly transoceanic is small.

Successful supersonic test! Amazing what humans can achieve.

Congrats to Boom, but also r/killthecameraman

Seems like there is 0 harm to have a 5 minute delay on the whole broadcast in exchange for a more polished production. Me, the viewer, will never know. I know SpaceX is doing it, its trendy to 'watch us make history in realtime', but SpaceX has a couple orders of magnitude more cash to work with.

I was more disappointed that the shot went out of focus as the plane crossed the barrier. I did find it rather amusing that as soon as they started lauding starlink, the feed dropped, which is what you are talking about I think

Growing pains for their camera crew

For those wondering, it is in flight right now

Watching it. :-)

BMW

For anyone else who finds the opening music infuriating, it stops at 35:50.

If anyone from Boom is reading this, please never do that again. Or at least pick better music.

Nothing I’ve read or heard has made me believe there’s a market for supersonic airliner. This is very cool for sure but I don’t know how they’ll ever sell a full size passenger jet. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.

Here's a quick validation of how well you're estimating the market: Without looking it up, how many commercial planes do you think are in the air right now?

Over the US during the day at any moment I'd say at least 5,000. Probably not more than 10? Not sure about the rest of the world. For Europe I'd guess probably half of that. Not sure about Asia, SA, and Africa though.

I wonder how many routes there are that would actually be well served by supersonic aircraft.

You're about right - 10k worldwide. So you've got at least 1000 business class seats full at any given time around the world.

In terms of routes that Boom's proposed plane can serve, you've got at bare minimum New York to London and Seattle to Tokyo, and lots of connections between Asian capitals where there's much less noise regulation and lots of money. I think their point is that if they can keep noise down, they will be successful operating long haul routes within NA, like LA to New York, San Francisco to New York, Seattle to New York, probably New York to Miami, LA to Toronto. My guess is that they end up with maintenance in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.

holy wow!!

This thread:

https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...

which covers over a decade, contains many hundreds of entries from Concorde pilots, crew, flight engineers, cabin crew, maintenance personnel, and air traffic control recounting anecdotes and amazing things about the plane and events surrounding it. I started reading it and spent about three absorbing hours fascinated and amazed, unable to stop until it was time to go to bed.

I'm going to resume when I have a few more hours, it's gold.

Someone linked this a few days ago on another post and I've been reading it scene. It's been a very interesting read. I do recommend.

probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42835622?

Yes!

Do you think SpaceX or similar would be attacking this problem space if there was a business to be had here? Seems like a fun pet project that will lose money indefinitely, but love seeing small teams do big things!

I haven't looked into Boom's business plan but I assume they wouldn't have gotten this amount of money for this long without a plan to make money that at least looks plausible to investors.

Products or technologies that launch new markets often look like 'bad ideas' until someone figures out a way to make it work profitably. Otherwise we'd already be doing them. Paul Graham wrote a good essay on this, saying basically a startup entrepreneur's job isn't just finding a good idea that hasn't been done, because anything that looks like a good idea is probably already being done. It's finding something that looks like a bad idea (so isn't being done) and figuring out it's not bad if you just do it a different way or add a certain innovation. Of course, most things which look like bad ideas are actually bad ideas but searching the edges for exceptions is the valuable thing entrepreneurs do (along with creating new jobs).

Also, you might be surprised there are several companies selling high-end transcontinental private jets. One of the newer features of the latest generation is that they can fly at .9 to .95 mach instead of .8 to .85 mach. That shaves more than an hour off a flight. It's a relatively small market but this new generation has a waiting list of those lining up to pay ~$20M more to save a few hours per round-trip. Sure, it's a small market but it's profitable. Note: I have no idea if Boost's plan involves that market but paying more to go faster, and especially having the fastest option, is usually of interest to someone.

This is literally a company designed to separate investors from money so aerospace engineers can have fun, which I guess is better than many startups. At the end of the day though there is no way they are designing, prototyping, getting FAA approval for, and going to manufacturing on a plane and engine by 2030. It's not unlikely, it's just not feasible which literally anyone who bothers to look at the FAA website would be able to tell.

https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certific...

"By comparison, the certification of a new aircraft type can take between 5 and 9 years."

And that is just for the plane, engine certification is its own process and just as arduous.

Wait until they pull out their Trump card

Yup. Moreso when you realise this scaled down prototype has basically nothing in common with their larger variant.

So it's testing/validating nothing actually.

Only makes sense as a gimmick to get the next funding round.

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