11 ms·

Uh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of.

Uh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?

zokier 8y ago
> So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess? Power of 50 years of technological development. That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year. Considering that supersonic flight overall was still fairly new thing when Concorde was designed and CAD was non-existent back then, order of magnitude improvement does not sound completely implausible.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Not every technology advances at the same rate as electronics. An order of magnitude improvement in supercruise efficiency over Concorde--which is one of the biggest bottlenecks--would be a significant innovation alone.
- brandmeyer 8y ago
  > That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year The aerospace industry isn't advancing anywhere near that fast. Most of the low-hanging fruit was picked over 50 years ago. Case in point: The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G is a geared turbofan engine. From demonstrated prototype (1993), to flight testing (2008) to production (2016), it took _23_years_ to develop this engine. Efficiency improvement over baseline: 15-18%. That's quite a bit less than 1% y/y improvement.
  - Scramblejams 8y ago
    I worked on an aircraft which flies with the GTF. Just FYI, that’s a poor example to cite in support of your point. The GTF was set aside for many years due to expected higher fuel costs not materializing for a good while. It took some major impetus to get the program going again.
    - CaptainZapp 8y ago
      Just out of curiosity: Bombardier C-Series? For what it's worth. As a passenger it's my preferred ride on short and medium distances.
      - samat 8y ago
        It is the best passenger airplane I ever flew as a passenger.
      - Scramblejams 8y ago
        Yep, I did stress analysis on the nacelle. Glad you like it!
  - sjm-lbm 8y ago
    And even though PW1000G has been in "production" for two years, it's had constant problems. Someone else here probabally knows for sure, but I think they finally fixed all their issues and hope to start producing in volume sometime soon. IIRC, they are still trying to get all the existing engines swapped out with fixed builds.
jedberg 8y ago
The Concorde flew over 40 years ago. Technology has improved just a bit since then.
neuronexmachina 8y ago
It doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance. For recurring costs, I assume the two primary drivers are fuel and maintenance. There's been a lot of advances in fuel efficiency and maintenance costs since the 1960s.
BinaryIdiot 8y ago
To be fair it has been over 40 years since the Concorde was designed and built. While I'm pretty skeptical that a start-up is going to somehow design, build and deliver a supersonic plane I don't think such improvements necessarily have to be "magic". Plain ole iterative improvements over 40 years could probably handle much of that.
elidourado 8y ago
The Concorde entered service in 1976, and program launch was in the Kennedy administration. It would be surprising if technology didn't advance enough to bring huge improvements over that time period. There are broadly three enabling technologies, plus a couple of economic factors. Technologies: 1. Carbon fiber. With the 787, we finally have a transport-category aircraft with significant amounts of carbon fiber that has gone through full FAA certification, which significantly lowers the barrier to us using it. Carbon fiber does a lot for us. It is lighter and stronger than aluminum, but it is also more thermally stable. Concorde grew about 15 inches in flight as its temperature rose in flight. Our leading edges will reach over 300ºF at Mach 2.2, and our plane will grow less than an inch in flight. That is a significant maintenance cost reducer. Carbon fiber also enables more complex geometries without expensive tooling costs. Our plane won't have a straight line on it. We can take better advantage of area ruling to improve aerodynamics. In contrast, Concorde's fuselage was a cylindrical tube. 2. Engines. There is a (much slower) Moore's law for engine cores; they get better at a rate of around 1 percent a year. Move 50+ years forward from when Concorde's engines were designed and you have a real improvement. Concorde used 4 turbojets (i.e, zero bypass ratio) and we have 3 medium-bypass turbofans. Plus no afterburners are needed. When Concorde used afterburners to punch through the transonic regime, they had a 78% increase in fuel flow for a 17% increase in thrust. 3. Computational fluid dynamics. Concorde is all the more impressive for the fact that it was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Wind tunnel tests are expensive, taking six months and costing millions of dollars. We can do virtual wind tunnel tests in software in about 30 minutes. We still use tunnels to closely test harder aspects of the design (e.g., low-speed handling qualities), but we have much more rapid design iteration than Concorde could have hoped for. On the economics, we are right-sizing the aircraft. Concorde had 100 seats, but it usually flew with a very low load factor (half-empty). Our design has 55 seats, which is similar to the premium cabin on today's widebody subsonic airliner. What this means is that any route that can sustain widebody subsonic service today will basically work supersonically. We expect much higher load factors, which are helped by business class fares and a lower number of seats to fill relative to Concorde. This leads to economies of scale. Whereas Concorde really only was profitable between New York and London, Boom flights make economic sense on hundreds of global routes. Which means we'll sell more planes and drive maintenance costs down further. Only 14 Concorde units ever saw commercial service. Ultimately, when Concorde shut down, it was because Airbus stopped making spare parts. In contrast, one public report by the Boyd Group estimated supersonic demand at 1300 planes. With almost two orders of magnitude of planes in service, we'll achieve much better scale on maintenance. Hope this answers your question about the magic.
vamin 8y ago
If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane, which halves your amortized capital cost per flight. That doesn't get you all the way there, but it's a significant cost reduction, which combined with others, could conceivably get you there.
- coolspot 8y ago
  However super-sonic aircraft require more maintenance than regular airplanes due to higher stress on all systems.
- TylerE 8y ago
  Twice as many flights means twice as much fuel, twice as many landing fees...
  - nothrabannosir 8y ago
    Those are marginal costs. Parent comment was talking about amortised costs, i.e. fixed costs. Such as the airplane, itself (depreciation per mile of flight aside, but that’s another point). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost_of_capital https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost_of_capital
- ptaipale 8y ago
  > If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane Certainly not. Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. Some of these activities happen at the same time with each other, but many of them not.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. The turnaround time -- time needed for everything that happens from when the plane arrives at the gate to when it departs again -- is only comparable to flying time for smaller aircraft doing shorter domestic hops. For aircraft doing the kinds of inter-continental segments a supersonic airliner is targeting, there's no real comparison. And airlines most certainly do optimize for time spent in the air; a plane on the ground is a plane making no money. So you see a single aircraft bounce around among a bunch of hubs all in one day, for example, or larger, longer-range aircraft doing rotations of where they fly to (like having the same aircraft do a flight from the US to South America and back, then off to Asia and back, to optimize for arrival/departure times and minimize time spent not flying)
Apes 8y ago
Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency. If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost, you need to use 1/10th the fuel, have 1/10th the maintenance overhead, and have 1/10th the staffing cost all at the same time. You can't go over 100% efficiency in any area, so to see 1/10th the cost you would need the entire aircraft industry in the 1970s to be operating at under 10% efficiency, a low bar I am highly skeptical of. It's not like Aeronautics engineers or the Airline industries were gorillas banging rocks together with no understanding of what they were doing, and I find it hard to believe there is enough room for a 10x increase in efficiency from the 1970s even with a perfectly efficient aircraft and airline behind it. But hey, if you really believe it's possible, invest in Boom because they must have designed a cold fusion reactor running on tap water to power their jet and everyone who invests will probably become a trillionaire overnight once they reveal it.
- gaius 8y ago
  If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost And remember that both BA and Air France got their Concordes “for free”
- keymone 8y ago
  In 50s cars were 15mpg in average. Today’s top tier mpg cars are over 120mpg. Order of magnitude. They are also safer, quieter, faster, cheaper in maintenance, etc. Technology does enable 10x improvements over half a century sometimes.
  - brandmeyer 8y ago
    You just compared fleet average in one time period to an extreme outlier in another time period. In reality, fleet average fuel economy has been nearly flat for four decades, with the biggest periods of movement being driven by brief excursions in the price of crude oil. Those efficiency excursions were in turn driven not by technological improvement, but by changes in the makeup of the vehicle fleets themselves (lighter cars, smaller engines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
knappador 8y ago
Did not eat the 1/3lb hamburger at A&W. Knows math.

Uh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?

zokier 8y ago

> So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess? Power of 50 years of technological development. That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year. Considering that supersonic flight overall was still fairly new thing when Concorde was designed and CAD was non-existent back then, order of magnitude improvement does not sound completely implausible.

philwelch 8y ago
Not every technology advances at the same rate as electronics. An order of magnitude improvement in supercruise efficiency over Concorde--which is one of the biggest bottlenecks--would be a significant innovation alone.
brandmeyer 8y ago
> That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year The aerospace industry isn't advancing anywhere near that fast. Most of the low-hanging fruit was picked over 50 years ago. Case in point: The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G is a geared turbofan engine. From demonstrated prototype (1993), to flight testing (2008) to production (2016), it took _23_years_ to develop this engine. Efficiency improvement over baseline: 15-18%. That's quite a bit less than 1% y/y improvement.
- Scramblejams 8y ago
  I worked on an aircraft which flies with the GTF. Just FYI, that’s a poor example to cite in support of your point. The GTF was set aside for many years due to expected higher fuel costs not materializing for a good while. It took some major impetus to get the program going again.
  - CaptainZapp 8y ago
    Just out of curiosity: Bombardier C-Series? For what it's worth. As a passenger it's my preferred ride on short and medium distances.
    - samat 8y ago
      It is the best passenger airplane I ever flew as a passenger.
    - Scramblejams 8y ago
      Yep, I did stress analysis on the nacelle. Glad you like it!
- sjm-lbm 8y ago
  And even though PW1000G has been in "production" for two years, it's had constant problems. Someone else here probabally knows for sure, but I think they finally fixed all their issues and hope to start producing in volume sometime soon. IIRC, they are still trying to get all the existing engines swapped out with fixed builds.

jedberg 8y ago

The Concorde flew over 40 years ago. Technology has improved just a bit since then.

neuronexmachina 8y ago

It doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance. For recurring costs, I assume the two primary drivers are fuel and maintenance. There's been a lot of advances in fuel efficiency and maintenance costs since the 1960s.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago

To be fair it has been over 40 years since the Concorde was designed and built. While I'm pretty skeptical that a start-up is going to somehow design, build and deliver a supersonic plane I don't think such improvements necessarily have to be "magic". Plain ole iterative improvements over 40 years could probably handle much of that.

elidourado 8y ago

The Concorde entered service in 1976, and program launch was in the Kennedy administration. It would be surprising if technology didn't advance enough to bring huge improvements over that time period. There are broadly three enabling technologies, plus a couple of economic factors. Technologies: 1. Carbon fiber. With the 787, we finally have a transport-category aircraft with significant amounts of carbon fiber that has gone through full FAA certification, which significantly lowers the barrier to us using it. Carbon fiber does a lot for us. It is lighter and stronger than aluminum, but it is also more thermally stable. Concorde grew about 15 inches in flight as its temperature rose in flight. Our leading edges will reach over 300ºF at Mach 2.2, and our plane will grow less than an inch in flight. That is a significant maintenance cost reducer. Carbon fiber also enables more complex geometries without expensive tooling costs. Our plane won't have a straight line on it. We can take better advantage of area ruling to improve aerodynamics. In contrast, Concorde's fuselage was a cylindrical tube. 2. Engines. There is a (much slower) Moore's law for engine cores; they get better at a rate of around 1 percent a year. Move 50+ years forward from when Concorde's engines were designed and you have a real improvement. Concorde used 4 turbojets (i.e, zero bypass ratio) and we have 3 medium-bypass turbofans. Plus no afterburners are needed. When Concorde used afterburners to punch through the transonic regime, they had a 78% increase in fuel flow for a 17% increase in thrust. 3. Computational fluid dynamics. Concorde is all the more impressive for the fact that it was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Wind tunnel tests are expensive, taking six months and costing millions of dollars. We can do virtual wind tunnel tests in software in about 30 minutes. We still use tunnels to closely test harder aspects of the design (e.g., low-speed handling qualities), but we have much more rapid design iteration than Concorde could have hoped for. On the economics, we are right-sizing the aircraft. Concorde had 100 seats, but it usually flew with a very low load factor (half-empty). Our design has 55 seats, which is similar to the premium cabin on today's widebody subsonic airliner. What this means is that any route that can sustain widebody subsonic service today will basically work supersonically. We expect much higher load factors, which are helped by business class fares and a lower number of seats to fill relative to Concorde. This leads to economies of scale. Whereas Concorde really only was profitable between New York and London, Boom flights make economic sense on hundreds of global routes. Which means we'll sell more planes and drive maintenance costs down further. Only 14 Concorde units ever saw commercial service. Ultimately, when Concorde shut down, it was because Airbus stopped making spare parts. In contrast, one public report by the Boyd Group estimated supersonic demand at 1300 planes. With almost two orders of magnitude of planes in service, we'll achieve much better scale on maintenance. Hope this answers your question about the magic.

vamin 8y ago

If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane, which halves your amortized capital cost per flight. That doesn't get you all the way there, but it's a significant cost reduction, which combined with others, could conceivably get you there.

coolspot 8y ago
However super-sonic aircraft require more maintenance than regular airplanes due to higher stress on all systems.
TylerE 8y ago
Twice as many flights means twice as much fuel, twice as many landing fees...
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  Those are marginal costs. Parent comment was talking about amortised costs, i.e. fixed costs. Such as the airplane, itself (depreciation per mile of flight aside, but that’s another point). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost_of_capital https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost_of_capital
ptaipale 8y ago
> If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane Certainly not. Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. Some of these activities happen at the same time with each other, but many of them not.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. The turnaround time -- time needed for everything that happens from when the plane arrives at the gate to when it departs again -- is only comparable to flying time for smaller aircraft doing shorter domestic hops. For aircraft doing the kinds of inter-continental segments a supersonic airliner is targeting, there's no real comparison. And airlines most certainly do optimize for time spent in the air; a plane on the ground is a plane making no money. So you see a single aircraft bounce around among a bunch of hubs all in one day, for example, or larger, longer-range aircraft doing rotations of where they fly to (like having the same aircraft do a flight from the US to South America and back, then off to Asia and back, to optimize for arrival/departure times and minimize time spent not flying)

Apes 8y ago

Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency. If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost, you need to use 1/10th the fuel, have 1/10th the maintenance overhead, and have 1/10th the staffing cost all at the same time. You can't go over 100% efficiency in any area, so to see 1/10th the cost you would need the entire aircraft industry in the 1970s to be operating at under 10% efficiency, a low bar I am highly skeptical of. It's not like Aeronautics engineers or the Airline industries were gorillas banging rocks together with no understanding of what they were doing, and I find it hard to believe there is enough room for a 10x increase in efficiency from the 1970s even with a perfectly efficient aircraft and airline behind it. But hey, if you really believe it's possible, invest in Boom because they must have designed a cold fusion reactor running on tap water to power their jet and everyone who invests will probably become a trillionaire overnight once they reveal it.

gaius 8y ago
If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost And remember that both BA and Air France got their Concordes “for free”
keymone 8y ago
In 50s cars were 15mpg in average. Today’s top tier mpg cars are over 120mpg. Order of magnitude. They are also safer, quieter, faster, cheaper in maintenance, etc. Technology does enable 10x improvements over half a century sometimes.
- brandmeyer 8y ago
  You just compared fleet average in one time period to an extreme outlier in another time period. In reality, fleet average fuel economy has been nearly flat for four decades, with the biggest periods of movement being driven by brief excursions in the price of crude oil. Those efficiency excursions were in turn driven not by technological improvement, but by changes in the makeup of the vehicle fleets themselves (lighter cars, smaller engines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

knappador 8y ago

Did not eat the 1/3lb hamburger at A&W. Knows math.