> Boom - It'll fly you from Tokyo to San Francisco in less than six hours.
Yes, but that's one of the only routes it will fly. With the Concorde, we discovered that flying supersonic jets around population centers is a big deal-breaker because of the supersonic boom.
Given how few of these routes you can actually fly, I expect Boom will come to the same realization that the airline industry did 20+ years ago; you can't make money on supersonic.
Concorde had several major issues that Boom might not face [1]:
- Boom. Boom supposedly targeted a 10x noise reduction for its sonic boom compared to Concorde, but whether or not it can convince the FAA remains to be seen.
- Lack of bodies that could reliably fill seats at the ticket prices. Boom is targeting current business class ticket prices, and the plane is half as big as the Concorde; 55 seats is around the size of a current premium class cabin.
- The wrong ocean. Flights across the Atlantic are not that long; six hours is a reasonable night's sleep from NY-London. On the other hand, the Pacific is massive; even Seattle-Tokyo is 12 hours. When Concorde was built, Asia wasn't rich and they could only convince Air France and BA to buy them; today JAL is investing in Boom, and there are probably people willing to pay a premium to halve 12+ hour flight times from the West Coast to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc.
The way you say it, it sounds like Concorde was unsafe, and by extension, all supersonic planes are.
Almost every plane out there has had at least one bad accident. And every single time measures are taken so that type of accident doesn't happen again.
Yeah, but when I think "supersonic jet", I think of the extremely vivid image of a the flaming Concorde crash[1] - it was the cover of every major paper. I think lots of people who remember that era still do, and it'll make me extremely unlikely to ever step into a Boom (the name doesn't help either), even though I do want them to succeed.
The Concorde crash was caused by bits of titanium engine cowling on the runway shredding a tyre and damaging a wing tank. The largest piece was an 18" long, 1" wide strip of metal that tore 10lb chunks out of the tyre.
Do you associate DC10's the same way? (The debris were from a DC10).
Apart from being a chain of events vanishingly unlikely to repeat, I doubt all other aircraft would come away from the same scenario fatality free.
There was also, I believe, a fairly effective lobbying campaign against Concorde by Boeing after it became clear that the 2707 wasn't happening. 2707 was cancelled round about the time Concorde prototypes had their first flights.
US west coast <-> East Asia, and US east coast <-> Western Europe (especially London/Paris) already covers a sizeable fraction of business travel, doesn't it?
Those are basically the four major global economic centers. And among those four, the only link that this service can't provide is Europe <-> East Asia.
US west coast <-> East Asia, and US east coast <-> Western Europe (especially London/Paris) already covers a sizeable fraction of business travel, doesn't it?
Not necessarily.
For example, Southwest Airlines got its start by moving businesspeople around Texas. It only started leaning on tourists later.
I'm still taking everything I hear about Boom with a grain of salt. Maybe they'll make an airplane and actually get someone to offer routes with it, but there are a lot of hurdles that have to be overcome first. Concorde only happened because of national pride in the UK and France. It would be so easy for these guys to finish their first planes just as oil prices spike again, assuming they ever finish those first planes.
It looks like they are hoping to make money by having a more efficient, slightly faster and smaller aircraft than Concorde. It also has more range which they hope will open up transpacific routes which Concorde could not do. Their goal is to make it profitable for airlines to charge about the same as they do for a business class ticket.
They also suggest that their aircraft will make a much smaller sonic boom. Possibly quiet enough to be tolerable over land routes. That would obviously be a huge game changer.
Their still building their technology demonstrator, so I'd take all their claims with a big grain of salt. They want to fly their XB-1 in 2019, so hopefully we'll have a much better idea of how well this work next year.
I thought the boom only occurred when the plane breaks the sound barrier but not during supersonic travel. Why couldn't the plane go over the ocean, accelerate to supersonic and then start flying to the other coast?
Well, a lot of the flights from US East Coast to Europe or from US West Coast to Asia fly over water or unpopulated areas for substantial periods of time.
Do you know a good way to check, for a particular flight route, how much of it would be eligible for supersonic flights?
Well, that isn't a straight-forward problem. Take Atlanta to Zurich, for example (a Delta flight I have been on). Conventionally, the plane flies up the East coast until it clears Nova Scotia, in part because that is approximately the great circle route, but also because pilot training 101 tells you that your flight plan must include nearest emergency landing point for every inch of your route.
So for super-sonic flight, that path might be modified to be off-shore enough to keep sonic boom over the ocean, but follow the East coast closely enough that an airport capable of accommodating the plane for an emergency landing is always within a reasonable distance. (Bonus points for being able to fuel up and take off again.) It isn't simply a problem in spherical geometry.
East to west US coast doesn't fly over unpopulated for substantial periods. Despite popular belief, people still live in the middle of the US.
The only places in between with enough space to get up to supersonic and subsequently drop out in time for population are a few chunks of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Look at a night time satellite picture of the US to see how infeasible flying over most of the eastern US is.
if it's only the transition _to_ a supersonic regime that generates a shockwave, then it wouldn't be out of character for carriers to get a variance allowing for "acceleration zones" which could be within 20 minutes flight time of most hub airports. If your plane leaves JFK and goes out over the Atlantic to go supersonic before heading to Seattle it would still be quicker...
It's not. The shock wave is present as long as the plane is in super-sonic flight.
I grew up in fly-over land, and military training flights based out of the Dakotas used to go overhead; we would get the occasional boom.
(Also, once in a while doing my farm-kid chores driving a noisy piece of machinery across a hay field I would get buzzed by a jet sneaking up from behind me flying at a very low altitude. It was always startling because I never heard them coming over the noise of the tractor. I'm sure I made a pretty good surrogate for an enemy tank...)
Yes, but that's one of the only routes it will fly. With the Concorde, we discovered that flying supersonic jets around population centers is a big deal-breaker because of the supersonic boom.
Given how few of these routes you can actually fly, I expect Boom will come to the same realization that the airline industry did 20+ years ago; you can't make money on supersonic.