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I wish companies like this would come out and say what they are: an acqui-hire project. A single brand new passenger jet costs more than $33 million, and that's

I wish companies like this would come out and say what they are: an acqui-hire project. A single brand new passenger jet costs more than $33 million, and that's with decades of development costs being amortized. Development costs for Boeing's new 787, a conventional aircraft, came to over $30 billion. I will be amazed if they actually even get a working prototype aircraft flying with this amount of money.

cstross 10y ago
Note that the 787 development costs included building multiple full-sized prototypes of a wide-body (read: price on the order of $225M per aircraft) and a moving vehicle production line — you can tour the Boeing plant at Everett and see fourteen Dreamliners lined up nose-to-tail at various stages of production, like 200 ton automobiles in a car plant. They also built a global supply chain, with over 50% of the components manufactured outside the USA (for WTO trade rules compliance — a side-effect of Boeing's ongoing trade war with Airbus; Airbus have had to do the same). With over 1200 orders to date (over 500 delivered) the 787 has only been available for 13 years: typical product life of a Boeing/Airbus airliner is 30 years, so they're looking at amortizing that $30Bn over roughly 2500-3000 airframes, and you should consider it as covering most of the manufacturing costs. So the $30Bn sticker for the Dreamliner gets you not only a new wide-body airliner, but a whole new global airliner manufacturing supply chain (you bet they'll use it — or a development thereof — for the next airliner they design, too), and the capacity to punch them out like pick-up trucks. This $33M funding round is to build a one-third scale flight demonstrator. Not an actual Boom airliner, or a Concorde equivalent, but something like like the HP.115 — a research aircraft with similar flight properties in some parts of the flight regime of the planned final aircraft, for test purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 (Significant difference: the HP.115 was used to investigate low speed stability and handling of delta wings. The Boom XB-1 is to investigate supersonic low noise flight.) It also lets them build up their engineering team to the point where they're actually able to get a full grasp of the magnitude of the problems they're facing. But a real Boom supersonic transport? That's going to cost at a minimum multiple single-digit billions (even if they don't go all-out and budget for a production line and supply chain for 2000 units) to develop.
- yread 10y ago
  Then again Boeing had the benefit of already having most of the expertise in house from building planes for decades. I'm sure if I started a company I would need a lot more than $30B to develop 787.
  - cstross 10y ago
    You might think that, but Airbus developed the A350XWB — a direct competitor for the 787 — on a budget of €11Bn. Even taking into account exchange rate issues, that's less than half the cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB (On the other hand, Airbus already had a lot of experience with composites in airliners, so the A350 was an evolutionary development, not a revolution: and they'd been working with international airliner component supply chains for decades already — it's what they do — so they didn't have to start from scratch.) My point is, the $30Bn sticker on the 787 is misleading because it covers not only a new wide-body airliner type but also a whole new supply chain management approach and a (for Boeing) revolutionary change in materials technology (from mostly-Al to mostly-carbon fiber composites).
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > You might think that, but Airbus developed the A350XWB — a direct competitor for the 787 — on a budget of €11Bn. Even taking into account exchange rate issues, that's less than half the cost. Airbus also had the same kind of experience and expertise in house already built up. So, that doesn't challenge the GPs contention that for someone without that, the cost would be substantially more.
onion2k 10y ago
I will be amazed if they actually even get a working prototype aircraft flying with this amount of money. That's not the point of this funding round. When you work on insanely ambitious projects you have to do things incrementally. This is their 3rd round - the first was $120k, the second was $2.1m. Each round enables them to do enough of the tasks that demonstrate to investors that they're capable of doing the next set of tasks. I have no clue how you design a plane but I would guess the first round was entirely spent on modelling the financials and market research to see if there's even a business opportunity. The next round would be something like the really broad brush ideas for how you'd make a plane like this. This round will be spent digging in to the technology itself, figuring out what capabilities you need to have in an electric plane, and finding which parts you can buy off the shelf. If Boom are successful at that then there'll be future rounds that are spent on actual design and manufacturing. By the time anything real takes off from a runway they'll probably need to have raised billions. No one thinks you can design and build a plane for $120k+$2.1m+$33m.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  I don't see them addressing the first and main challenge to supersonic flight: regulation
  - onion2k 10y ago
    This is pure speculation on my part, but isn't most supersonic flight regulation essentially anti-competitive behaviour by the US government because Concorde wasn't an American-made aircraft? Even if that isn't true I think the main problem was the ludicrous sound levels from the engines, which an electric plane wouldn't suffer from (as much). If Boom demonstrate that they can make a working plane I imagine a lot of the red tape would just disappear.
    - ealexhudson 10y ago
      The engines don't create the ludicrous sound; the force of an object moving through the air faster than the speed of sound creates the sonic boom. While some designs can mitigate this it doesn't seem that Boom has an answer here except for keeping the aircraft small.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> I wish companies like this would come out and say what they are: an acqui-hire project. That would be, well, most of the regular startups too. The problem is, you can't tell everyone you're aiming for an exit, because exit == fucking over your existing customers, and you need those customers to be able to exit. So, startups lie about how they care about the users and their product. That's why nowadays I assume by default that a startup is just done for exit, unless proven otherwise.
masklinn 10y ago
Also of interest, the unit price of Concorde adjusted for inflation was about $160m around the end of the production run.
mrfusion 10y ago
Going by first principles it doesn't seem like it should cost that much. Can't computers do a lot of design work and simulations?

cstross 10y ago

Note that the 787 development costs included building multiple full-sized prototypes of a wide-body (read: price on the order of $225M per aircraft) and a moving vehicle production line — you can tour the Boeing plant at Everett and see fourteen Dreamliners lined up nose-to-tail at various stages of production, like 200 ton automobiles in a car plant. They also built a global supply chain, with over 50% of the components manufactured outside the USA (for WTO trade rules compliance — a side-effect of Boeing's ongoing trade war with Airbus; Airbus have had to do the same). With over 1200 orders to date (over 500 delivered) the 787 has only been available for 13 years: typical product life of a Boeing/Airbus airliner is 30 years, so they're looking at amortizing that $30Bn over roughly 2500-3000 airframes, and you should consider it as covering most of the manufacturing costs. So the $30Bn sticker for the Dreamliner gets you not only a new wide-body airliner, but a whole new global airliner manufacturing supply chain (you bet they'll use it — or a development thereof — for the next airliner they design, too), and the capacity to punch them out like pick-up trucks. This $33M funding round is to build a one-third scale flight demonstrator. Not an actual Boom airliner, or a Concorde equivalent, but something like like the HP.115 — a research aircraft with similar flight properties in some parts of the flight regime of the planned final aircraft, for test purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 (Significant difference: the HP.115 was used to investigate low speed stability and handling of delta wings. The Boom XB-1 is to investigate supersonic low noise flight.) It also lets them build up their engineering team to the point where they're actually able to get a full grasp of the magnitude of the problems they're facing. But a real Boom supersonic transport? That's going to cost at a minimum multiple single-digit billions (even if they don't go all-out and budget for a production line and supply chain for 2000 units) to develop.

yread 10y ago
Then again Boeing had the benefit of already having most of the expertise in house from building planes for decades. I'm sure if I started a company I would need a lot more than $30B to develop 787.
- cstross 10y ago
  You might think that, but Airbus developed the A350XWB — a direct competitor for the 787 — on a budget of €11Bn. Even taking into account exchange rate issues, that's less than half the cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB (On the other hand, Airbus already had a lot of experience with composites in airliners, so the A350 was an evolutionary development, not a revolution: and they'd been working with international airliner component supply chains for decades already — it's what they do — so they didn't have to start from scratch.) My point is, the $30Bn sticker on the 787 is misleading because it covers not only a new wide-body airliner type but also a whole new supply chain management approach and a (for Boeing) revolutionary change in materials technology (from mostly-Al to mostly-carbon fiber composites).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > You might think that, but Airbus developed the A350XWB — a direct competitor for the 787 — on a budget of €11Bn. Even taking into account exchange rate issues, that's less than half the cost. Airbus also had the same kind of experience and expertise in house already built up. So, that doesn't challenge the GPs contention that for someone without that, the cost would be substantially more.

onion2k 10y ago

I will be amazed if they actually even get a working prototype aircraft flying with this amount of money. That's not the point of this funding round. When you work on insanely ambitious projects you have to do things incrementally. This is their 3rd round - the first was $120k, the second was $2.1m. Each round enables them to do enough of the tasks that demonstrate to investors that they're capable of doing the next set of tasks. I have no clue how you design a plane but I would guess the first round was entirely spent on modelling the financials and market research to see if there's even a business opportunity. The next round would be something like the really broad brush ideas for how you'd make a plane like this. This round will be spent digging in to the technology itself, figuring out what capabilities you need to have in an electric plane, and finding which parts you can buy off the shelf. If Boom are successful at that then there'll be future rounds that are spent on actual design and manufacturing. By the time anything real takes off from a runway they'll probably need to have raised billions. No one thinks you can design and build a plane for $120k+$2.1m+$33m.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
I don't see them addressing the first and main challenge to supersonic flight: regulation
- onion2k 10y ago
  This is pure speculation on my part, but isn't most supersonic flight regulation essentially anti-competitive behaviour by the US government because Concorde wasn't an American-made aircraft? Even if that isn't true I think the main problem was the ludicrous sound levels from the engines, which an electric plane wouldn't suffer from (as much). If Boom demonstrate that they can make a working plane I imagine a lot of the red tape would just disappear.
  - ealexhudson 10y ago
    The engines don't create the ludicrous sound; the force of an object moving through the air faster than the speed of sound creates the sonic boom. While some designs can mitigate this it doesn't seem that Boom has an answer here except for keeping the aircraft small.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> I wish companies like this would come out and say what they are: an acqui-hire project. That would be, well, most of the regular startups too. The problem is, you can't tell everyone you're aiming for an exit, because exit == fucking over your existing customers, and you need those customers to be able to exit. So, startups lie about how they care about the users and their product. That's why nowadays I assume by default that a startup is just done for exit, unless proven otherwise.

masklinn 10y ago

Also of interest, the unit price of Concorde adjusted for inflation was about $160m around the end of the production run.

mrfusion 10y ago

Going by first principles it doesn't seem like it should cost that much. Can't computers do a lot of design work and simulations?