This is one of my favorite YC companies and I'm really rooting for them. The aviation industry really needs a shakeup and more competition. Boeing has really lost their way.
Boeing has not only lost their way (i.e. 737 MAX), but was actively malicious in its use of the federal government to impose tariffs against Bombardier in a huge deal to Delta airlines.
End result is that Bombardier suffered a huge loss, had to sell IP to airbus (joint venture deal), prices to end consumer are higher, and aviation manufacturing competition is stiffed.
Boeing did not abuse the tariff system; they used it exactly as designed. The tariff system encourages reports by competitors, and awards a portion of the collections to the competitors.
I am a free-trader, and think all tariffs are bad, but Boeing acted in the spirit of that law.
Bombardier's aspirations were stymied by an incredibly expensive certification process, which they underestimated.
I'm still puzzled by the Canadian government's decision not to help Bombardier when that happened. I mean the tariffs were eventually waived.
The A220 has something like 600+ firm orders from what I recall. It's going to be hugely profitable and Airbus is basically making all the profits. Was it politically motivated? Why wouldn't Canada want an aerospace sector?
Bombardier has its own problems and is viewed as a corrupt Quebec company by much of English Canada (that is, the rest of us). So the other comments on the political appetite to bail them out again are mostly correct.
So Canadians would rather have Europe or the US take the lead (and make the profits) rather than Canada because the company is from Quebec? To me that makes no sense.
Bombardier was not really a sure bet and maybe Canada didn't want to risk tax payer's money? Just because Airbus succeeded with A220 doesn't mean Bombardier would have done the same.
It already had more orders than required to break even. Development on the aircraft was also completed (and it was FAA/EASA certified) when Airbus took over.
I agree but why supersonic passenger jet (a product category with a high profile failure) versus starting with a next-gen regional jet? Or a luxury private jet?
Supersonic passenger jets are currently an untapped market with zero competition. The traditional players have decided it's not a useful market to chase. The technology of a supersonic is also sufficiently different from a sub-sonic jet that it will be tough to chase them once they bring a product to market.
Regional jets have been optimized over the better part of a century, are heavily regulated and have heavy competition from incumbent players. Based on the historic gains in commuter flight performance we're likely within 10-20% of the optimum plane configuration for any given market. A new entrant would take ~10 years to bring an aircraft to market, during which time an incumbent could introduce a competing aircraft or simply leverage their existing product lines and sales channels to compete with suboptimal aircraft.
Regional jet technology has been ahead of the planes you've likely been flying on for 20 years. The E195 is smaller than the B737 but feels like riding in a B767, it is like Buck Roger's spaceship but Airbus and Boeing kept it at bay; Canada developed a B787-level technology competitor for it, and Airbus bought it after Boeing and Airbus colluded to keep it off the market. The E195-2 is almost as nice as the A220. If they can just shut down the 737 line and change the labor laws in the US that discourage E195-sized planes, life could be much better for fliers.
The Concorde demonstrated the failure of the Mach 2 class airliner, not just because of "high fuel consumption" but because it could not do multiple trips across the Atlantic in a day thanks to takeoff and landing restrictions. Originally people thought the SST would crush all other airliners economically because they could fly twice as many flights in the same time ("half the capital cost") but that was not realized. (People in London and NYC have to sleep once in a while)
The Mach 3 class typified by military projects such as the SR-71 and XB-70 might be successful at both problems.
Believe it or not supersonic cruise at Mach 3 is about the optimum fuel economy for supersonic flight and it might be fast enough to do more flights and lower the capital cost.
One gap between the Mach 2 and the Mach 3 classes is that at Mach 3 you have to give up on aluminum as a structural material and switch to Iron, Titanium, or something else. The SR-71 squared some of the design circles by taking off with a minimum fuel load and refueling mid-air -- airliners would have worse problems in terms of wing design.
There is no commercial airliner in the Mach 1 class, the economics are certainly worse than Concorde. The Mach 1 business jet might just work if somebody values the time over the economics.
What are the labor laws that discourage E-195's in the US? Construction is different than use, I don't see how there could be labor laws affecting that. It's just a jet? There were complicated tariffs and counter tariffs. Even washington state couldn't resist giving boeing a big tax cut, & during all this Boeing asked the state to cancel it so they would be able to claim Embraer was the only one getting one (and the state did cancel it).
This is why "American Airlines" flights to smaller cities are flown by "Piedmont Airlines" or some other subsidiary. (eg. "United Airlines" runs ads and is concerned about their brand, they get people who work for their subsidiary to actually punch you in the face.)
If a company was trying to get the most of the E195 or A220 they'd probably replace some E145/CRJ200 flights with it and some B737/A320 flights but to do that the conflict between the real airline and the fake airline gets harder to reconcile.
Just as the B787 and B777 replaced the bigger B747 the E195/A220 should have been replacing the 737 in the last decade but the "scope clause" is a brick wall against that.
From the linked article, the “scope clause” appears to be a ill-conceived contract provision, not a law.
One might argue that US labor laws are broken in that they encourage companies to agree to clauses like this, but one might also argue that the airlines blew it and should not have signed the contract.
(It does seem to me that the US has a lot of examples of deeply broken union contracts. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, the US government ought to do about that.)
> Just as the B787 and B777 replaced the bigger B747 the E195/A220 should have been replacing the 737 in the last decade but the "scope clause" is a brick wall against that.
I can't think of many examples of 737/A320s being replaced by regional jets anywhere, even in countries with no scope clauses?
I can't say it is scientific, but I have seen fewer 737 class airplanes and more E195s over upstate new york with add-on since the second wave pandemic hit the US.
Southwest is still flying the 737 (they expect to be doing that in 2120) but JetBlue looks like an E series airline today.
At least in the SAS and Finnair cases they haven't been replacing larger aircraft, though, which was the claim above? Unquestionably plenty of European airlines fly regional aircraft, but I don't see them replacing A320/737s.
I assume of course they are replacing. Finnair (like SAS) had a bunch of DC-9s and derivatives, then when replacing those, instead of going full Airbus A32x, they also got Embraer 190:s, and now are probably looking at A220:s.
The big problem with Concorde was that it wasn't allowed to fly supersonically over most land due to noise restrictions. Thus eg transcontinental US, where the time gain might have been quite attractive, was ruled out. The same issue combined with limited range also ruled out nonstop London-far east (Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo) or London-West Coast US. Are these issues likely to be any different now?
Also - not sure what you call Mach 1 class but the business jet market has a lot of planes which will cruise at eg Mach 0.93 or so - ie faster than airliners - and speed is valued in that market. If noise issues over land can be navigated successfully then I would expect there is a good market for supersonic business jets.
London to Tokyo great circle looks like it doesn’t cover much human habituated areas, especially if you modified it a bit to go around Norway. I think if fueling allows, you could come up with routes like this for many potential trips.
Norway may be scarcely populated but if you piss out the few people living there they will make pressure to their government which will forbid flyovers. I don't think it will be hard for them to argue that entitled business people having to quickly travel the other part of the world have no right negatively affecting their quality of life.
As I recall Mach 3+ aircraft development stalled with the pivot to stealth technologies in military aviation, and not necessarily due to technical limits.
I'd be curious what research exists for the viability of Mach 3 and hypersonic commercial aircraft.
Who is the market for supersonic travel not already served by military aircraft that can go supersonic and space vehicles that go suborbital? I’m not saying such a market doesn’t exist, but show me these folks with their wallet open for this civil speed.
The route schedule needs to be routine, constant and predicable to be of any use for the types of people requiring 4 hour trans-oceanic flights. That means having at least one flight to London each day, and one flight back to NY.
Eventually you run out of people willing to pay $10k a seat for this type of travel. Which is what happened to Concorde - after the novelty wore off, all you had was an extremely expensive seat.
which happened at a lower passenger*mile count than the 737 MAX accidents and would have required a Space Shuttle style shutdown-and-reform phase. Concorde's avionics and cockpit were completely out of date and fixing that would have been expensive.
> 3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s
It remains to be seen whether post-COVID wealthy travellers will subsidise BOOM development costs as opposed to not flying or continuing with smaller private jets as at present. Although Boom is “designing Overture to be the first post-pandemic airplane", they will need a massive investment to scale from the single-seat prototype (still to fly) to an operationally profitable vehicle.
It's interesting to speculate about what a ticket might cost and what would be worth it to you. Instead of a non-stop almost 10 hour flight to west coast to London at $1,000 (9:20 hours), where my company gives me an extra $500 for an upgrade in class because it's so long, I'd pay an extra $500 of my own money for a 4 or 5 hour trip probably. But I'm not paying $5k more for that quicker trip.
Barring the availability of commercial point-point sub-orbital travel ( which comes with its own set of noise and technical problems ). There is considerable casual interest in shorter flight times. The three main challenges for this have always been fuel consumption, wear and tear on the aircraft, and noise issues while overflying cities/towns.
If the noise issue is solved you could meet private, and high-end commercial flight demands. Where the customer isn't concerned with an order of magnitude increase in flight costs. If you can make a big dent in the former using new materials, improved aerodynamics, or higher altitude flight then there is an opportunity to chase commercial customers.
They suggest "business class prices". There are a growing number of routes where there are all-business class flights, where getting people there twice as fast would be a major competitive advantage.
People sometimes took the Concorde London->NYC to attend meetings and then returned to London the same day. I've done London->Dulles for meetings and then back on a regular boring jet, but it was exhausting and if there had been options to halve that flight time it'd have been fantastic.
Which routes are growing? I recall around the time that OpenSkies died the number of routes with business class-only planes appeared to be shrinking quite a bit. I don’t doubt your claim per se but would like to see some support for it.
In general, it's hard to fill a plane full of paying business class customers. (In a typical business class compartment, a lot of those seats are being filled with upgrades of one sort or another.)
At least a couple business class-only airlines didn't last long. The only current route I'm aware of is the BA London City to NYC route. Though there may well be others in the Middle East, etc.
I know Swiss and Singapore used to have them but I think both may have since been eliminated. I don’t think any US carriers do unless United has one and I’m pretty sure BA doesn’t anymore now that OpenSkies is gone, so that doesn’t leave many obvious contenders. Thai? LH?
The projected range for the Overture craft is 8300km. That would just barely get you from San Francisco to Tokyo (shades of Concorde, which on days with contrary winds had to stop to refuel on the New York - London/Paris runs), but not from Los Angeles. Australia and NZ are far too far. With a refueling stop in Hawaii then Auckland is ok, though Sydney is still marginal.
So less wonderful than you'd hope: the Pacific is darned big.
Didn't realize. Pacific crossings seem like the ideal place to capitalize on high speed, and it seems silly not to make that the primary and expand from there.
Perhaps the supersonic range issue is just a really tough nut to crack?
>Perhaps the supersonic range issue is just a really tough nut to crack?
Almost certainly.
You're right that trans-Pacific would be more compelling. Even with decent food, nice drink, and lie-flat seating, a trans-Pacific flight is still a long time to stay mostly sitting. (Though airlines could have lounges like the old first class lounge in the hump of 747s; people just don't want to pay for the space.)
Honestly, transatlantic is really not a big deal. Very few people are interested in flying back and forth in a day. And if you're going to stay overnight, NY to London, say, is really not a bad trip in business and you don't even need to do it as a red-eye.
I'd add that, if it weren't already the case relative to when the Concorde flew, I suspect that this period will permanently damp flying across the ocean just to sign a deal or do a quick meet and greet. (Which was certainly part of the market for Concordes).
Anyone who wants to travel to/from the US to Europe in 3.5 hours instead of 7-8 hours, and other similar length trips.
Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first, and then as economies of scale and efficiency improve, it can become the norm.
There's a reason why the term "jet-setters" came about in the 50s-60s to mean wealthy people. Nowadays flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up.
> Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first
That was the theory behind Concorde half a century ago.
Flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up because the industry learned from the lack of demand for Concorde and optimised for fuel efficiency instead of speed
I think supersonic flight will never become the norm. Boom Overture would, if Boom succeeds, be more fuel efficient than the Concorde but definitely not more fuel efficient than a modern subsonic airliner. And subsonic jets are 'fast enough' for most people who don't have cash burning a hole in their pocket.
It really depends on the price, if it's 2 x subsonic-econ then I think they have a real winner (I would personally pay that, its like doing premium economy), but if its 5x or 10x maybe not
I am afraid the ordinary people are hitting on physical realities though. The jet fuel required will never be cheap enough for them to fly supersonic jets. Maybe rocket travel
yes, though, because you can scale that way more than the jet.
> Maybe rocket travel yes, though, because you can scale that way more than the jet.
What?
Jets carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of payload - a 747 can carry nearly 250,000lbs of payload.
Rockets carry payloads in the range of thousands pounds at most. Simply making your rocket bigger isn't an easy solution, and you start burning a ton more fuel for marginal payload gains.
It also doesn't cost $90 Million to fly a 747 every time it takes off...
Spacex-Starship with a booster below it could put that weight suborbital to the other side of the world and should only cost a few million per flight since the hardware is reused each time
$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].
Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.
For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".
There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.
Rockets might not be cheaper but it could be close and they will beat the airplane by far on speed and views. Elon Musk is thinking/hoping that the cost for SpaceX to launch a 100 passenger Starship will be around $2 million[1] considering fuel and operational costs. The rockets will be fully reusable like airplanes and cost about the same to make. And, for long flights fuel use is similar. Hope it happens. Making rockets reusable was the key and SpaceX has been doing well with advancing that concept so far.
That's a whole lot of magical hand-waving right there.
For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.
Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.
Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.
Can't really know until you try. The physics does not prevent the possibility. Elon and the people at SpaceX are not just hand waving but actually working hard on making it a reality. Hope they do it.
A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.
The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.
How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?
How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.
The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.
And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
The first steam engines spontaneously exploded. The first internal combustion engines spontaneously exploded. I'm sure the first helicopters did also. Nobody has really tried to advance rocket technology since the early 1970's. That's only 25 years after Sputnik and 40 years after the V2. 1970 is 50 years ago.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?
This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.
Many international companies already pay for business class flights for their employees going between US <-> Europe. There's plenty of market there. It just depends on whether Boom can get their costs down to be comparable to an existing business class flight. If it cost, say, 50% more but took half the time for a flight from San Francisco to London, I think that would be pretty compelling for the people currently taking business class.
Doesn't matter if it would be compelling to the people. What matters is if it would be compelling to their companies. Many business travelers are not on such a strict schedule that saving 6 hours or whatever is a particular business benefit. By and large, although paying for business class is framed as a justified expense because the employee will be more rested, it's really mostly a perk.
After the pandemic is over, there will still be some people that need to travel from the US to Europe or US to Japan semifrequently and want a much shorter trip and can pay (business trips). Of course everyone wants shorter trips on the really long flights (to NZ or whatever) but that depends on cost.
Well, they are starting with a single seater prototype, that's a bit closer to a luxury private than to a liner.
But I'd also be far more thrilled by a truly next gen regional. Unfortunately the physical barriers for making regional aircraft significantly more economical are actually harder than for throwing more fuel at the problem of going faster. Between supersonic and next gen regional, they are not only taking on the more glamorous problem, it's also the easier one.
A modern regional turboprop could really kill it ten years from now. If emissions really start making a difference to the ticket costs. Sweden and Finland are already introducing such measures.
There's a lot of room for more efficiency. With carbon wing spars you can have whatever aspect ratio is practical for operations with not much weight penalty. In the last decades, the wind power industry has pushed forward methods for large composite structures mass produced cheaply.
Boom can always pivot. From Concorde came Airbus as well.
Also why start a new company rather than buying out or partnering some existing manufacturer? After looking at Mitsubishi spectacularly failing to deliver MRJ, I wonder if it’s a wise choice.
They put together an agile flying plane, but they didn’t do any of paperworks beforehand, so couldn’t get it certified or make it maintainable due to complete lack of understanding for commercial aviation market
Nobody seems to be talking about the sonic boom issue. People often assume that the sonic boom is a single event that happens when the plain exceeds the speed of sound, but rather its a continuous event that happens at supersonic speed which is why the Concord was used only for transatlantic service. A supersonic plane would not be practical for any overland route.
The premise of Boom Technologies is that the intensity of the sonic boom can be managed by creating an aircraft with a sufficiently clever shape. I don't know exactly how that's meant to work, but it's this premise that they hope to demonstrate with the small-scale XB-1 in 2021.
The key thing is that the absolute pressure rise through the shock wave isn't very high - it's just perceived as a loud boom when it is reached in a very short time.
The pressure wave is ultimately caused by displacement because of the volume of the aircraft, lift, and engines. We cannot really get rid of any of these. Given enough time, a strong enough pressure pulse will steepen into the double-shock 'N-wave' (because the pressure signal is N-shaped) the sonic boom.
Sonic boom mitigation then means to prevent the pressure waves from steepening into a boom before it hits the ground, e.g. by a long nose, lift distribution over a large part of the aircraft length, putting the engines on top so that their pressure wave radiates upwards, etc.
Uninformed speculation: I wonder if you could mitigate via a precisely out-of-phase second boom which destructively interfered with the first one? Kind of like noise cancelling headphones. Schlieren photography shows us that there are actually multiple waves being produced over the body based on where the geometry experiences sharp changes, so maybe if those were designed juuust right?
Unfortunately, it turns out that (for ideal gases, such as our atmosphere) a 'negative shock', i.e. a rarefaction shock, is impossible. It would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics!
And if you have multiple, subsequent shocks (one at the aircraft tip, another at the engine inlet, another at the wing, etc), the later ones will eventually catch up to the first one, resulting in the N wave we would want to avoid.
I don't think they're going to be a commercial success, but I don't really have a reason to doubt the possibility of new supersonic aircraft being quieter than older ones. Is there some particular reason to doubt this aspect of Boom's proposal?
The supersonic boom basically comess from the medium and nobody has been able to get rid of it. So the boom is not an engineering problem but a physics problem. Startups can solve engineering problems but rarely invent new physics (which might exist, mind you).
So this new product will be limited to the same routes as concorde (plus pacific if they manage extra long haul).
The supersonic boom comes from the interactions between the aircraft and the medium, not from the medium itself. I think it stands to reason that the properties of the boom can be manipulated by manipulating the properties of the aircraft's shape. It's not even controversial that some aircraft design elements can reduce the intensity of sonic booms, the only question is whether Boom has enough know-how to achieve the house levels they promise.
Almost all of the research on sonic booms and their effect on residential noise levels was done in the 1950s.
Our knowledge of transonic aerodynamics and aircraft design have improved considerably sense then and much of the "common" knowledge that sonic booms will shatter windows and disrupt everyday life as a plane flies overhead at cruising altitude are very much outdated.
Concorde didn't fly over London at supersonic speeds, and I doubt it often flew over London a cruise altitudes.
The problem with Concorde on approach/departure was largely a function of its engines, rather than speed. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1973-07-18/debates/427... shows it was comparable to slightly older aircraft at the time of introduction (VC10, B707, DC8) but notably louder than what was arguably its biggest competitor (747-200). In later years, continued improvements in aircraft noise pollution meant the margin between Concorde and other aircraft operating out of LHR just grew larger and larger.
The Overture is smaller than the Concorde, so that a lower level of noise is expected. There has been some developments in aerodynamics for minimizing the shock by spreading it over a larger area, but, as you point out, they don't mention it.
Another difference between the proposed Overture and the Concorde is the engines. Concorde used turbojets with afterburners during takeoff, while Boom proposes a turbofan design without afterburners, which should in theory make it quieter for communities adjacent to airports. However the XB-1 small scale version will use turbojets according to Wikipedia.
I saw Concorde taking off a few times up close at air shows when it was still in service. It was significantly louder than any other aircraft I've ever been near (it had 4 enormous engines with afterburners - not that surprising I guess). Takeoff noise really was a big issue.
It used to fly over my house when I was a teenager. I lived an hour or two (drive) from Dulles Airport and when it (rarely) passed overhead, it was still fairly loud. Nothing like you'd hear at an air show, but we always knew to look up if we heard it when we were out in the yard.
It was pretty cool because it was close enough to takeoff that you could easily make out the distinct shape of the plane.
Note the proposed Concorde B that never actually reached production due to cancelled orders of the A variant went without the afterburners.
I don't recall it being significantly louder than any other aircraft I've been near, but the vast majority of aircraft that were any where close were military aircraft!
I think you're right, though take-off noise was also the subject of many complaints about the Concorde, not just the sonic boom. Reducing take-off noise was already one of the design considerations of the Concorde, and supposedly the Concorde was better in this regard than the Russian Concordeski (Tu-144.)
im not sure if they will be commercially successful but the technology sure seems like it is much more valuable than actually building a plane and run operations
>In the late 1950s when supersonic transport (SST) designs were being actively pursued, it was thought that although the boom would be very large, the problems could be avoided by flying higher. This assumption was proven false when the North American XB-70 Valkyrie started flying, and it was found that the boom was a problem even at 70,000 feet (21,000 m). It was during these tests that the N-wave was first characterized.
Have they actually solved the (non-noise) environmental concerns of SST? From a NYT article a few years ago:
"According to a 1999 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, introducing 1,000 commercial SSTs more advanced than the Concorde could make the climate impact of airlines balloon by 40 percent by midcentury. That’s on top of the tripling of emissions already expected as more travelers take to the sky."
You know what's better than being carbon neutral? Being carbon negative. I'd rather Prometheus pull carbon out of the air to help cover existing fuel needs than to just offset a huge increase in jet fuel usage.
I fail to see how building yet another luxury transport service will meaningfully help the world compared to tackling some of the bigger problems in energy and environment. Especially since there's no possibility that Boom is more efficient than existing modes of travel.
Would this even be carbon neutral? It will require a lot of power to process carbon out of the air, and will go back in the air when they burn the fuel. Not to mention the logistics and manufacturing of everything involved.
Well, they're not changing much. It's a ~4 hour savings, max, on a transatlantic flight.
Perhaps a passenger ICBM? That would really cut down "across-the-planet" travel time down to a total of ~30 minutes. Why not? the Fantastic Four had one in their Manhattan laboratory (https://www.tumblr.com/search/passenger%20icbm#).
There's a bookie in the UK called "Ladbrokes". It isn't an externality, but it's thematically similar -- a commonly associated negative consequence of the business model.
How do venture backed economics for a supersonic jet company work?
My understanding of watching VC over the past decade is that it's great for hyper-scaling software companies, tenuous at best for hybrid tech/real world companies, and ruinous for companies that don't enjoy the zero marginal cost benefits of a software company at scale.
My assumption is that Boom's pitch relied on a relatively quick tech exit, e.g. Boeing or Airbus picking them up once boom reaches a point where either company can scale a proof of concept.
If the demonstrator proves itself next year, that's when to expect an exit. I don't see Boom independently competing with either of the mainstream manufacturers here; they're likely only a vehicle for proving that the concept works, and then the whole package — patents, tooling, team, and all — is sold to a firm that can scale it.
Would be interesting to see if any non-commercial firms e.g. Lockheed use Boom as a way to make inroads into the commercial sector, though. My money is on a buy-out in 2021-2022, and for bonus points, I'll include unexpected buyers who want to make inroads in the commercial space, e.g. if Lockheed wants to add commercial airliners to its portfolio and also see whether any of Boom's supersonic tech makes sense in their non-commercial projects or if Rolls Royce wants to transition away from being just an enginemaker (for Boom and others).
If Boeing buys Boom, it's a lost cause and the tech will likely just end up being mothballed by bean counters for being too slow to scale.
Boom's pitch did not rely on a quick exit, it was much more along the lines of "This will take a very long time to come to fruition. We're up-front about that. But, it has the potential to be billions of dollars, if you can be patient." VCs are often more interested in that than the quick flip....
VC can also be interested in a company as a quick flip opportunity when the pitch never mentions that possibility. Particularly early stage investors who buy in low enough to still win if the eventual exit is considerably below a meanwhile heavily inflated nominal valuation.
> tenuous at best for hybrid tech/real world companies
Worked just fine with Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, Sun, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Nvidia, Network Appliance, Juniper Networks, Ciena and numerous other prominent tech / real world companies. There is a long list of successful hardware companies that took venture capital spanning many decades.
A certain amount of margin is ideal if you're going to deal with VC, however it's not strictly necessary. You can also compensate with high top line growth and lower margins - Amazon was a low margin retail business for the first 12 years and produced an epic return for its early investors from 1994-2006.
Supersonic flight is easy. Efficient supersonic flight is hard. Aerodynamics, aerostructure, propulsion all of them are trying to break you. Controlling all of them would definitely be an achievement.
Supposedly Concorde used more fuel taxiing from the stand to line up on the runway than a 737 flying London-Paris, but the fuel consumption PPM was comparable with a 747 once the plane was at super cruise. The problem is an building an engine that is efficient throughout the entire flight envelope. Engine efficiency improvements have come from gradually increasing the bypass ratio while solving some tricky problems with the tips of the blades approaching supersonic speeds, but, as I understand it, you can't use high bypass engines at supersonic speeds, so it will be interesting to see what technological advancements Rolls Royce have made over the original Olympus engines that powered the Concorde.
> Supposedly Concorde used more fuel taxiing from the stand to line up on the runway than a 737 flying London-Paris
This sounded ludicrous to me, so I tried to check it. Still not entirely convinced.
The closest source I could find was a Vice article [1]:
> A Concorde’s taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737’s flight from London to Amsterdam.
The article links to a now-defunct 2012 story on "scotsman.com", which I found on the Wayback Machine [2]. This story interviews Jim O'Sullivan, the former general manager and chief engineer of British Airways' supersonic fleet, but does not explicitly attribute this taxi fuel consumption claim to him or anyone else.
A simulation-based fuel calculator I found says that the 737-800 would use 94,000 lb of fuel flying LHR-AMS [3]. The Concorde's fuel capacity was 211,000 lb [4].
Could any aviation nerds weigh in on how plausible it is to claim that the Concorde would somehow burn through HALF of its entire fuel load just by taxiing? Maybe "taxiing" here includes takeoff?
You are correct in your common sense test, the article is not correct.
Check out the Concorde wiki[1] It states ~4.4K lbs for taxi which passes the common sense test. Taxi time is generaly planned as 15 minutes, so ~10K lbs/hr which is more than what a Boeing 767 burns at cruise - quite a lot! For comparison Concorde super sonic cruise fuel burn was 40K-55K lbs/hr.
For another reference Boeing 767s typically plan to burn 2K lbs of fuel for start-up/taxi/takeoff run.
Thank you for doing the research to find the numbers for this.
I think it's worth adding, as is reflected by your B767 ground movement figure that all jet engines are very inefficient at low power outputs, not just the Concorde's/supersonic aircraft. This is as a large amount of energy is needed to create sufficient compression to allow them to function.
Finding ways to minimize the amount of time spent in these states has been the industry's approach to date.
Thanks, I read it in a newspaper article once and I should probably have checked but I was lazy and I knew someone else would do it for me! So I just wrote 'supposedly' and waited...
The afterburners were only used for taxiing and going supersonic. The Olympus engines actually generated so much thrust at idle that only the outboard pair were used for taxiing, and still apparently it was tricky to control.
I have seen various proposals for having some form of external taxi for aircraft, but nothing close to being adopted which I have put down to jet fuel still being cheap and the capital & operational costs being quite high for a lot of tractors with qualified drivers.
If fuel were that costly and if a plane expended a significant enough amount of it taxiing that the its range is affected, then a taxi that takes the aircraft to its takeoff position would be a no-brainer.
A jet-turbine can use a bypass to exchange some of the speed of its exhaust for a greater mass of exhaust moving at a slower speed. This is desirable as matching speed of the exhaust to the airspeed increases propulsive efficiency. A modern jetliner flies relatively slowly to its (un-bypassed) jet exhaust speed, therefore it will slow it down a lot and move a large mass of air - this is a high-bypass turbofan. A jet flying at supersonic speeds obviously has less need to slow down the exhaust, therefore such a high bypass ratio would actually be counterproductive.
Despite having zero bypass the Olympus engines in the Concorde were the most efficient heat engine of their day, achieving 43% efficiency [0]. Their propulsive efficiency was in the 50%s (compared to the 60%s for a B747-100) [1]. Despite this going at supersonic speeds does require an awful lot of energy over subsonic speeds so even with its high efficiencies it burnt a lot more fuel than an equivalent subsonic flight.
Even if Boom could produce the most efficient engines seen, it would still require a lot more energy for the total flight, and therefore would have worse total fuel consumption.
As far as I know efficiency is what has kept civilian supersonic flight from being a thing. Even military aircraft tend to only go supersonic when needed because it guzzles fuel.
My biggest skepticism about Boom is that I don't see them even talking about this issue much. If they can't get big efficiency improvements I see this being a niche toy for the super rich rather than a mainstream transport option.
I'm not an expert, but I wonder: can you get large efficiency improvements by going to really extreme altitude where the air is thinner? Maybe that's the long term plan. But as far as I know that may require a novel engine design or the adaptation of military engines, and the latter is a minefield if classification and ITAR regulations. Extreme altitude also means you're dead if you get a major hull breach, but the increased risk there may be statistically mitigated by decreased overall flight time... and it's still going to be safer than driving a car.
> Even military aircraft tend to only go supersonic when needed because it guzzles fuel.
Yep. In fact, this is one of many things that makes the Concorde so special: being able to cruise for a long time at Mach 2+. Supercruise has only come to fighter jets fairly recently, and there it is usually in the Mach 1.4-1.6 range. This means that if the Concorde has even a small head-start, it can outrun most fighter jets that might want to intercept it. The SR-71 could keep it company but is unarmed. Maybe the Mig-31, although its range also diminishes rapidly with increased velocity.
> efficiency is what has kept civilian supersonic flight from being a thing
This was an issue, but less than you might suspect, for example it didn't actually burn that much more than its contemporaries. The planned Concorde B [1] was to have more efficient engines that would have allowed the same performance without afterburners. Along with having larger fuel tanks, this would have led to a dramatic increase in range and therefore in the possible routes.
Alas, the US effectively killed Concorde before that could happen by not allowing overflight, due to noise, particularly the sonic boom, and one suspects also the fact the the US SSTs weren't making much progress. And of course the oil price shock.
Concorde tickets were actually quite a bit cheaper than the public expected, BA (and AF, presumably) later raised prices to match public perception, with a nice boost to profitability.
> extreme altitude where the air is thinner
Jets in general (~35K feet) and Concorde in particular (~60K feet) already do this. IIRC, jet engines are actually not very efficient, but they continue to operate well at high altitudes where the air is so much thinner that the plane becomes more efficient overall, whereas both piston engines and the propellers they drive become significantly less efficient at altitude.
> and one suspects also the fact the the US SSTs weren't making much progress.
I also can't quite avoid that suspicion. The Concorde was noisy, but not that noisy and Concorde B should be quieter from the aerodynamic improvements.
Extreme altitude also means there's less air to hold the plane up which seems to require a lot of power for level flight. I'm not sure about ballistic flight paths - a lot of fuel to get up there and then none for a while.
Apparently re Musk's old Telas that he launched towards Mars:
>It has achieved a fuel economy of 9,886.9 miles per gallon (4,203.4 km/liter, 0.02379 liters/100 km), assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel. https://www.whereisroadster.com/
But it's not on a very popular flight route. Should be kinda near Mars Oct 7th.
> Extreme altitude also means there's less air to hold the plane up which seems to require a lot of power for level flight.
There is also less drag, and both lift and drag are calculated using the same formula: Cl * A * .5 * r * V^2
- Cl (Cx for drag, Cz for lift) is a coefficient depending on the wing shape, among other factors
- A is the area (thickness for drag, wing surface for lift)
- r is the air density
- V is velocity
If you divide the air density by 4 by going higher, you get the same lift and drag by going twice as fast. Which is great, and a good reason for fast planes to fly high.
The reason it is so great is that in order to fly level, lift cancel gravity and thrust cancel drag. Because by going higher, we managed to keep the same lift and drag with higher speed, it means we got faster using the same amount of thrust.
There are certainly complications somewhere. For example at supersonic speeds you get shock drag but suffice to say, high altitude is good for speed.
Still there is a good reason why planes don't just get higher to get speed for free. And that's because planes are not rocket powered. Air breathing engines lose efficiency the faster you get, they are also designed to operate at specific speed ranges.
Concorde already flew at 60,000ft. Go much higher than that and you're going to need to put the passengers in space suits, as any cabin depressurization would be...really bad.
Would it really? Subsonic airliners already fly high-enough to kill passengers if they depressurized. The oxygen masks that drop are only a stop-gap to give the pilot time to drop down to a safer altitude (and the pilots have an independent, superior, source of bottled oxygen.) Humans can survive a hard vacuum briefly, if they're repressurized promptly.
Perhaps putting the pilots in pressure suits would be sufficient. I think it's a matter of how quickly pilots could descend with the plane, which is probably a complicated question for aviation engineers to solve. This all said, only pilots getting pressure suits probably wouldn't inspire passenger confidence.
Also unlike Concorde today it is quite possible to make the plane fly itself if the pilots and crew all pass out.
If all the meat sacks pass out, drop out of mach and drop down in altitude, send SOS, find somewhere to land. At this point ground control could start commanding the plane remotely too.
We are not quite ready for pilotless passenger planes, but pilotless as a fallback is viable.
At the 60k ft the Concorde flew at, a loss of pressure results in loss of consciousness in 10 seconds (or less). They already had unusual emergency procedures.
You can't just mindlessly descend because that would overstress/overspeed the airframe.
The passengers don't strictly need to stay conscious, though the pilots certainly do need to. I do wonder how likely a total and rapid loss of pressurization is to coincide with the plane remaining airworthy at all though. I'm guessing most survivable scenarios involve a less than immediate depressurization, which would buy the pilots more time to save the passengers. And of course I doubt the pilots would be doing anything mindlessly, let alone responding to an emergency..
In any event, I think the Concorde proves that operating at that altitude is feasible. It's not like 60,000 feet at supersonic speeds is survivable. The pilots would have minutes to get down before passengers were brain damaged. The chemical oxygen generators giving oxygen to the passengers don't last long, not nearly as long as the oxygen bottles for the pilot/crew, and that's assuming the passengers can get the masks on.
You're right, apparently Concorde used bottled oxygen for the passengers and cabin crew too. I didn't find any information about how long that was meant to last though.
My friend is an aerospace engineer and described the efficiency problem to me in detail.
He said it's impossible to commercialize supersonic flight without breaking some laws of physics. I confess to not understanding the reasoning that got him there. It's not a controversial opinion in physics, though.
I suspect Boom may end up being the uBeam of aviation.
I don't think the issue is whether a supersonic jet can be funded, built, and operated. It's whether demand can pay for the resulting costs.
Part of the calculation is that supersonic flight is so energy-intensive that we'd need a major breakthrough in fuel extraction/storage/efficiency. More fuel weighs more, whether stored as a liquid hydrocarbon or as a battery.
Right now we are in the middle of a large transformation of the passenger flight industry. If the number of passengers falls dramatically, smaller long-range passenger planes may be a better option. COVID will eventually go away, but wouldn't you pay some extra money to be locked in a pressurized can with fewer, sparsely spaced, people for a shorter time?
> but wouldn't you pay some extra money to be locked in a pressurized can with fewer, sparsely spaced, people for a shorter time?
I wouldn't. Some people would, but considering that Spirit is the fastest-growing airline in the US (or was), I think low prices are more important than any other feature of a plane ride.
I think Boom and its competitors are targeting people who would otherwise use a private jet and can afford $30k tickets. If they're targeting typical consumers, I think they're already doomed.
Sure, but it looks like according to Wikipedia, Concorde's flights cost 30x an equivalent economy class flight. Would you want to pay 30x the price for the perks you listed?
I was going to save for a Concorde flight for the novelty, but $12,000 was not really in my price range for routine use. OTOH, I can see that it was only 50% more than the $8,000 rate for BAL First Class. It’s also well within the cost of long range business jet flights. If that’s your expectation, those flights are for you.
Concorde was a multibillion dollar government research programme which built hardly any aircraft and still had to give away some of them for £1 due to absence of commercial demand. Noise, lack of range and cost meant that even after 14 aircraft had been effectively given away, they spent most of the time on the ground because of the difficulty of finding more than a couple of viable routes.
Sure, some people paid for tickets, but it's a stretch to call that 'commercialization' in the context of the impossibility of ever recovering the programme's losses.
Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions. It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit.
"Laws" that can be broken hardly seem to qualify as "laws of physics".
An increase in maintenance costs due to the planes being very old and out of production also doesn't qualify:
British Airways and Air France were able to operate Concorde at a profit, in spite of very high maintenance costs, because the aircraft was able to sustain a high ticket price.
Its estimated operating costs were $3,800 per block hour in 1972, compared to actual 1971 operating costs of $1,835 for a 707 and $3,500 for a 747; for a 3,050 nmi London–New York sector, a 707 cost $13,750 or 3.04c per seat/nmi, a 747 $26,200 or 2.4c per seat/nmi and the Concorde $14,250 or 4.5c per seat/nmi.
So 50% more expensive per seat/mile than a 707 and twice as expensive as a 747.
If it were truly profitable it would still be in operation. The evidence doesn't even need to be explained, unless you believe the airline industry willingly abandoned a profitable product.
There's been a lot of speculation as to why it was ultimately cancelled and whether it was or wasn't profitable. BA certainly claimed it was profitable at the time of withdrawal which was blamed on the airworthiness certificate being withdrawn by Airbus (who bought Aerospatiale) who refused to supply more spare parts. The speculation is more that it wasn't as profitable for BA as first class on a B747-400. It may well not have been profitable for Air France by the end though.
My understanding is Airbus hadn't really wanted to keep dealing with it for a while, and once Air France pulled out Airbus took that as a reason to step away. I believe it had been losing money for Air France, and the cost to retrofit aircraft to avoid another incident inevitably worsened that.
It's simply that the thrust required scales as the airspeed cubed. So twice as fast requires an 8x fuel burn rate for half as long, so ~25% efficiency vs. subsonic travel.
I'm curious to hear more about their carbon neutral/alternative fuel source plan. What sorts of fuels can they use instead of regular jet fuel? Lowering that eco impact would get rid of a big part of the concern people have with these planes (assuming as well that the types of people to fly business/first class aren't price sensitive and wouldn't care about more expensive tickets, which seems reasonable)
In a decade or so Boom might be competing with SpaceX, who are planning on using suborbital versions of their Starship rocket for long distance hypersonic passenger transport. Starship runs on methane, which is the easiest hydrocarbon to generate in a carbon neutral format. Methanation is a leading candidate for carbon capture for carbon intensive industries like cement production.
They don't have a modern supersonic-capable engine as of yet, which is basically a requirement for making progress in supersonic passenger transportation. They have an agreement with Rolls-Royce, but if it doesn't pan out the whole venture might flop, because we basically only have GE and RR as the keepers of the institutional knowledge about cutting-edge engine tech.
Also, with the way our culture currently develops, producing tons of excess CO2 for your slightly faster than ordinary business jet or first class business trip might become a very sinful, frowned upon, bad PR thing to do. If anything I see money in making business jets more economical.
What engine will they use for testing then, what are its limitations? BC they are going > than mach 1.
Edit: reread the article, I guess it's not 100% clear if they will go that fast but it's doable with existing jet engines of course, separate from new potential efficient engines.
If I’m right, turbine jet engines won’t hold up against supersonic airflow anyway, so intakes has to be cleverly designed so as to feed them with subsonic air of sufficient volume at all speeds. So there might be some wiggle room between engines with sufficient TWR and durability?
But note, this is just the small almost single-person sized prototype that's planned to fly. It is a huge leap to get to the next step, the commercial transport sized plane...
Don't get me wrong, supersonic planes VERY COOL and I want that for our world, but the tone of the article is a little annoying:
"Why let a handful of people cross the Atlantic in a couple of hours when the jumbo jets (that were developed concurrently) can do the same at far lower cost?"
Why indeed? Maybe because people want it and it's a better idea? That being said, I really hope I get to fly supersonic sometime
Why should we use jumbo jets, instead of sail ships?
There is a cost function associated with time. For most people, there is a threshold after which further gains become insignificant per hour saved, so a Jumbo jet is not much better than a super sonic plane.
But the world has also changed since the Concorde, and maybe now there's a bigger market for people for whom getting something or someone across the Atlantic in a few hours is important: Let's say, for example, that a loved one is severely ill, and you need to get there fast to say your goodbyes.
The aviation industry did something worse? Nope. It invented the high bypass turbofan engine which is quieter, more fuel efficient, and enabled affordable mass air transport.
Concorde was incredibly noisy, unsafe (do the numbers) and only available for a tiny number of elite travelers.
Most of the folks commenting here have never heard Concord take off or land. It rattled the entire city.
Google it, there has been much reporting on the numbers. Aircraft accidents are a cascade of failures. The debris was part of a chain which ended with concord.
Question, so this has on paper the goal of being capable of Mach 2.2. What are the Mach speed restrictions for civ aircraft over land, if any and what impact of any on viability?
In general, the mach restrictions are based on sound complaints only. Demonstrate you can make something that doesn't deafen millions of people, and you'll be granted approval to fly over land, however fast it goes.
If anything, I'd see the current state of the air industry being in favour of what Boom promise - the [im?]practical concerns of the super-rich are vastly different to those of the rest of us.
Yeah, even if a private jet (whether owned or chartered) may not be as fast as this, it's going to be way less in terms of overall travel time in most cases, especially if it means you can fly out of non-busy regional airports closer to your origin and destination points.
I doubt it will still be a big issue in 5 years, and I expect it to take longer for them to develop a real passenger plane, test it, and clear all the regulatory and performance hurdles.
This is obviously a nitpick, but when I head the word "boom" in relation to planes, a sonic boom isn't the first thing that pops into my head. Is it just me?
> In the righter-wing decades that followed its birth, we simply decided to walk back from the future.
Odd statement for an otherwise interesting subject. Pretty sure there were many reasons the concorde was retired and political stripes weren’t one of them.
Business travel is lucrative but only like 12% of the air travel market. It seems the market opportunity is a modern Zeppelin, not the next Concorde. An airship that is environmentally efficient, fun to travel on, has plenty of passenger space, and is perceived as safe. Airships could have far more landing sites than traditional aircraft, let alone a plane with a sonic boom. Also the future may feature SpaceX rockets for super fast global transport.
I'm guessing the problem with airships is that they're too slow. When they were popular (okay, 100 years ago, some things may have changed) it took multiple days to cross the Atlantic ocean.
But who knows, if it's cheap and more comfortable than flying, maybe people will see the trip as part of the experience.
Once your journey gets long enough comfort starts to trump speed for a lot of people, especially if you're taking a vacation. For me that's somewhere in the region of 10+ hours of travel. After that I'll consider it a full day and I'd be very happy to trade 10hrs for 36hrs if I got a lot more comfort.
Something more akin to a recliner that I could actually sleep in, enough legroom, a place to put a laptop that wasn't hunched over and awkward and maybe enough room to get up and stretch for more than 3-5min at a time.
I don't know if it would be feasible to make a really wide, fat winged lifting body dirigible that you can put a huge amount of solar cells on top of but if you could do that and also make it somehow go ~150mph you're getting pretty close to 1/3 the speed of an airliner with the added advantage that you might not need anywhere near as much fuel.
I go from Texas to Florida semi-regularly There's 2-4 hours of pre and post flying travel and sitting around plus about 2-2.5 hours of travel for a total of 4-6 hours of total travel time. If the flying time went to more like 6 hours and you kept the pre and post travel flying times the same it wouldn't make a huge impact on me. I might actually ask if they could slow the "plane" down so that I could make it an overnighter and hopefully get enough sleep!
Airships used to follow 'pressure routing' which sought out air pressure gradients to slingshot them around adverse weather. Meteorology and radio broadcast of data were just sufficient in the 1920s, today it could be automated.
If they could do say 1500km at 100km/h, that would offer a great many overnight destinations - get on board, dinner on board, retire to bed, wake up, breakfast over the alps, disembark right into the resort. Certainly beats flying.
