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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

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?

cwhiz 6y ago
Publicity. We're here talking about it because it's supersonic. Same reason Tesla started with the Roadster. Regional jets are boring.
lumost 6y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  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.
  - Misdicorl 6y ago
    Crossing the Pacific ocean in five hours instead of twelve with be a pretty huge improvement for a lot of people with deep pockets
    - thombat 6y ago
      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.
      - Misdicorl 6y ago
        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?
        ghaff 6y ago
        >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).
  - nick_kline 6y ago
    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.
  - lumost 6y ago
    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.
  - KoftaBob 6y ago
    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.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      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.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        > 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...
        justaguy88 6y ago
        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
        Alupis 6y ago
        A few million? $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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft-operating-expenses/#:~:text=More%20engines%20lead%20to%20higher,%2415%2C374%20in%20fuel%20per%20hour https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....
  - michaelt 6y ago
    1. The people who used to fly on Concorde. 2. But more modern and fuel-efficient 3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s 4. As it's made by an American company, they hope to avoid the US protectionism Concorde was subject to.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > 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.
      - nick_kline 6y ago
        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.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      > 1. The people who used to fly on Concorde. Concorde failed because there wasn't enough of these people.
      - nixass 6y ago
        British Airways actually made money on Concorde travels.
        Alupis 6y ago
        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.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    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.
    - staticautomatic 6y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        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.
        staticautomatic 6y ago
        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?
  - lacker 6y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      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.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  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.
  - tomatocracy 6y ago
    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.
usrusr 6y ago
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.
numpad0 6y ago
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.
- nick_kline 6y ago
  Wow, I hadn't heard about that. If they were 1 or 2 years quicker they might have been out in the market before the pandemic presumably killed them?
  - numpad0 6y ago
    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
Gravityloss 6y ago
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.

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?

cwhiz 6y ago

Publicity. We're here talking about it because it's supersonic. Same reason Tesla started with the Roadster. Regional jets are boring.

lumost 6y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
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.
- Misdicorl 6y ago
  Crossing the Pacific ocean in five hours instead of twelve with be a pretty huge improvement for a lot of people with deep pockets
  - thombat 6y ago
    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.
    - Misdicorl 6y ago
      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?
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >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).
- nick_kline 6y ago
  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.
- lumost 6y ago
  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.
- KoftaBob 6y ago
  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.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    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.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      > 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...
      - justaguy88 6y ago
        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
        Alupis 6y ago
        A few million? $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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft-operating-expenses/#:~:text=More%20engines%20lead%20to%20higher,%2415%2C374%20in%20fuel%20per%20hour https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....
- michaelt 6y ago
  1. The people who used to fly on Concorde. 2. But more modern and fuel-efficient 3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s 4. As it's made by an American company, they hope to avoid the US protectionism Concorde was subject to.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > 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.
    - nick_kline 6y ago
      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.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    > 1. The people who used to fly on Concorde. Concorde failed because there wasn't enough of these people.
    - nixass 6y ago
      British Airways actually made money on Concorde travels.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        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.
- vidarh 6y ago
  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.
  - staticautomatic 6y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      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.
      - staticautomatic 6y ago
        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?
- lacker 6y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    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.
PaulHoule 6y ago
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.
- tomatocracy 6y ago
  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.

usrusr 6y ago

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.

numpad0 6y ago

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.

nick_kline 6y ago
Wow, I hadn't heard about that. If they were 1 or 2 years quicker they might have been out in the market before the pandemic presumably killed them?
- numpad0 6y ago
  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

Gravityloss 6y ago

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.