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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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).

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 :)

> 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.

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).

$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.

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.

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.

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.

"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!'"

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?

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.

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.

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