17 ms·

So I was interested in how well Boom was doing in keeping to its timeline, and found an article from two years ago: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/sup

So I was interested in how well Boom was doing in keeping to its timeline, and found an article from two years ago: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/supersonic-passenger-jet-firm-raises-100-million-aims-for-2019-test-flights/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/supersonic-passenger... Some side-by-side comparisons: 2019 article: "Boom envisions its Overture airliner traveling at Mach 2.2." 2021 article: "a plane that could fly at Mach 1.7" 2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s". 2021 article: "It is targeting the start of passenger service in 2029." The 2019 article also says that Boom is constructing a 1/3rd scale version of Overture that could be making test flights later in 2019. This article from October 2020 says that the 1/3rd scale vehicle was "rolled out" in 2020 and could be ready for test flights in Q3 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/26/boom-supersonics-one-third-scale-prototype-is-as-much-investment-vehicle-as-test-vehicle/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/10/26/boom-supe...

kspacewalk2 5y ago
Well, in this way at least, they are quite like Elon Musk's startups.
qayxc 5y ago
That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted. The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1]. I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years. [1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-travel-2018/ https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...
- aliswe 5y ago
  > press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it. Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up. If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others). Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold" And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit. And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on. That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility. And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed) In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines". just my 2 cents, whatever that means.
- Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago
  Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?
  - shakezula 5y ago
    In my experience, it's usually the C suite who's pushing these type of overly-optimistic PR pieces.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
      - shakezula 5y ago
        For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
  - landemva 5y ago
    United Airlines press release for woke jetsetters: carbon neutral, carbon capture, soybean oil fuel.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying. We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
  - lumost 5y ago
    The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
  - theptip 5y ago
    2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
    - rjzzleep 5y ago
      Boom supersonic isn't travel industry. It's silicon valley engineering.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        No it's actual real engineering. They're located in Denver.
      - theptip 5y ago
        The title of TFA is "United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic". I would describe United Airlines as in the travel industry.
  - cglace 5y ago
    What do you propose “we” do?
- agumonkey 5y ago
  should we buy BOOM stock ? :)
- the8472 5y ago
  If they take too long they might have to compete with suborbital rocket flights.
- chubot 5y ago
  Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
  - burlesona 5y ago
    You’re correct that there isn’t a lot of competition.
    - njarboe 5y ago
      SpaceX's Starship could be.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        Starship isn’t going to compete with aerial flight nor is it even trying to...
        chromaton 5y ago
        SpaceX has said otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minutes-spacexs-goal-for-point-to-point-travel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minute...
        hef19898 5y ago
        Will it compete in the air taxi market as well?
        edgyquant 5y ago
        Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.
- xkjkls 5y ago
  > That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
- jandrese 5y ago
  To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise. That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Didn't a competitor just go bist despite having 29 jets in the order book?
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      Aerion closed in March. I pasted a link in this thread earlier.
- dfsegoat 5y ago
  Meanwhile, USAF just fully designed and tested a 6th generation fighter [1] in record time [during 2020]: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-... They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia. Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
      - MaxDPS 5y ago
        That’s true, though given this success, hopefully they can name it the norm going forward.
        justapassenger 5y ago
        I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >(remember 2020? me neither) I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
- ksec 5y ago
  >That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
  - andromeduck 5y ago
    mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1 Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
    - ksec 5y ago
      My fault. In that case those statement are perfectly fine in my book. Thanks for pointing it out.
- avereveard 5y ago
  > That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
This is amazing progress for a company that needs to get type certified by the FAA before it can fly anything. The FAA requirements are soooooo painful, and often illogical and sometimes even mutually contradictory.
- jcims 5y ago
  It’s probably a function of human nature to be conservative there. It seems that the FAA is trying to optimize for the fewest unknown unknowns, and until the 737 MAX it would be hard to argue that entirely new airframes, propulsion and control systems operating in flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation would achieve that objective better than incremental changes. The associated bureaucracy bloat can be a feature because it’s harder to sustain a ruse over time. That said, it really does impede development of arguably safer systems.
  - grkvlt 5y ago
    > flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation TIL the Tu-144 was designed, built and then operated commercially entirely by accident...
    - jcims 5y ago
      Touché :)
- nradov 5y ago
  Which specific FAA requirements are illogical or mutually contradictory?
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s" This one is the most egregious. It’s hard to imagine a good-faith scenario where the company actually thought they would ship a commercial airplane in a couple years when they didn’t even have their scale model working.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  Mid 2020s, not mid-2020. That is, 2025ish, not 2020.5ish.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Even then. It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787. And that is a bog standard subsonic airliner design with the most notable feature being the composite construction. Boom seems like vaporware.
    - iab 5y ago
      I take your point here, but bristle a little bit on the "bog-standard", given the truly amazing engineering that goes into modern airliners
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        I agree, airliners are marvels of modern engineering. I am grateful that we can be flippant and call them bog-standard because we have (collectively) become so good at making them.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787. This is a bit like saying SpaceX's Starship isn't possible because Boeing's SLS is costly and delayed. "If Boeing can't do it, it must be tough" is no longer the same statement it would've been in the 1960s.
sandworm101 5y ago
Delays happen. That is normal. I am more worried about the slip in speeds. "Traveling at Mach 2.2" becomes "could fly at Mach 1.7". That is a radical loss of performance. It is more than just 0.5. It is a switch from traveling at a speed to "could fly", a theoretical top speed for the same aircraft. I think they are facing solid engineering challenges and are having to reduce expectations. FYI, most airliners already fly at or above 0.85 Mach. 1.7 is faster than 0.85 but operationally it will only be only an incremental decrease in total travel time.
- dannyw 5y ago
  A halving in speed sound amazing!
  - twic 5y ago
    A halving in speed would be surprising, at least.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Even if we say doubling instead of halving, I assume that the total portion of a transatlantic flight that it could travel at top speed would be pretty small, so the total time might still be more than half.
    - nopzor 5y ago
      other than lower speeds during approach and departure around controlled airspace with speed restrictions, the overwhelming majority of a transatlantic flight will be at full speed. of course, there are exceptions with congestion, hold patterns, excessive vectoring, etc, but this is generally true. another thing to keep in mind is headwinds/jetstream. when going west across the atlantic; they can often be 100+mph. so the delta between boom and eg. a 787 becomes even more pronounced in this situation.
      - ginko 5y ago
        It’s not like the 787 can’t also make use of the jetstream.
barnabee 5y ago
It makes sense to always communicate the best case, not the most likely expected case. If you allow worse-than-best-case to become the plan/expectation, you'll fill the time and often exceed it. As an engineer, this feels strange, because you might expect to be trying to be as close to correct as possible when you give a date. But that's not the goal. The goal is to create a narrative and sense of purpose that gets you there as quickly as possible. Finishing something 6 months behind schedule in 18 months is still better than doing it "only" 1 month behind schedule in 19 months. Of course, you also need a risk analysis of the worst case, and to understand the financials and be able to survive a reasonable range of potential delays.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  Gotta say you're completely ignoring the negative toll this takes on morale. I hate unrealistic timelines, and I've been on almost every side of the table (engineer, engineering manager, product manager, program manager, even CEO for a tiny startup). Internally, only the most junior engineers tend to believe the timelines for these ambitious R&D projects. And it leads to senior engineers just getting tired of endless politicking around hype instead of actually focusing on building the thing and being honest about when it will be ready. To be a little less professional - the timelines are usually fucking bullshit. I've quit before because of this very reason. You're allowed to disagree with me obviously, but I don't want to work with you if you honestly believe this is a good policy.
  - barnabee 5y ago
    The negative toll comes when timelines become deadlines or there’s too much pressure to hit them. Those are not good ways to manage or motivate a team. It is essential to create teams that are aware of and talk about the most optimistic timelines, but where everyone knows the people on the front lines doing the work are in control and set the pace. This is very achievable if the starting point is empowering people, removing roadblocks, and increasing the team’s capabilities and leverage, rather than trying to impose timelines.
  - hedora 5y ago
samstave 5y ago
Additionally - what is the project timeline impact for any major endeavor such as this with respect to supply and labor chain interruptions due to pandemic, Suez-tipation, other economic factors... I recall reading that major construction, mfrg project timelines were automatically setback by a large number of months due to the Evergreen thing... (JIT construction required a precise delivery of components and even a few week hiccup in that caused a downstream of ++months) OBV Boom isnt affected by such - but the labor version locally in the US (Colorado) could still have slowed... The other non-tangible impact of something like this is the loss of intellectual momentum that a team may have had aggressively going after a timeline when suddenly all the eng team gets to go spend more time with family... Just some factors to be considered.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Well, in 2019 the pandemic hadn't given a big blow to the aviation industry so that slower start could be blamed on that. Not a good time asking for investment into a high-risk expensive niche product meant for a market that's in deep crisis. Not the speed thing though :) But the faster you go the more energy it costs for the same distance so that would make sense.
DevKoala 5y ago
I also had tons of plans for 2020 but then a global pandemic happened.
thesausageking 5y ago
The market rewards bold predictions. In 2016, Elon Musk said customers would be able from LA to NYC with no human intervention by the end of 2017. He's now the richest person on Earth.
Milkman128 5y ago
i mean tesla taught me deadlines dont matter. also making big moves is complicated, attention spans are short, and peoples judgement of time is crap.

kspacewalk2 5y ago

Well, in this way at least, they are quite like Elon Musk's startups.

qayxc 5y ago

That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted. The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1]. I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years. [1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-travel-2018/ https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...

aliswe 5y ago
> press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it. Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up. If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others). Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold" And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit. And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on. That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility. And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed) In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines". just my 2 cents, whatever that means.
Opt_Out_Fed_IRS 5y ago
Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?
- shakezula 5y ago
  In my experience, it's usually the C suite who's pushing these type of overly-optimistic PR pieces.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
    - shakezula 5y ago
      For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
- landemva 5y ago
  United Airlines press release for woke jetsetters: carbon neutral, carbon capture, soybean oil fuel.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying. We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
- lumost 5y ago
  The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
- theptip 5y ago
  2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Boom supersonic isn't travel industry. It's silicon valley engineering.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      No it's actual real engineering. They're located in Denver.
    - theptip 5y ago
      The title of TFA is "United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic". I would describe United Airlines as in the travel industry.
- cglace 5y ago
  What do you propose “we” do?
agumonkey 5y ago
should we buy BOOM stock ? :)
the8472 5y ago
If they take too long they might have to compete with suborbital rocket flights.
chubot 5y ago
Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
- burlesona 5y ago
  You’re correct that there isn’t a lot of competition.
  - njarboe 5y ago
    SpaceX's Starship could be.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Starship isn’t going to compete with aerial flight nor is it even trying to...
      - chromaton 5y ago
        SpaceX has said otherwise: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minutes-spacexs-goal-for-point-to-point-travel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/nyc-to-shanghai-in-40-minute...
        hef19898 5y ago
        Will it compete in the air taxi market as well?
        edgyquant 5y ago
        Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.
xkjkls 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
jandrese 5y ago
To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise. That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Didn't a competitor just go bist despite having 29 jets in the order book?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Aerion closed in March. I pasted a link in this thread earlier.
dfsegoat 5y ago
Meanwhile, USAF just fully designed and tested a 6th generation fighter [1] in record time [during 2020]: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/ https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-... They say the key to the record time was an 'all virtual' prototype design and test process. I found that pretty fascinating. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation_fighter
- hef19898 5y ago
  Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia. Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
    - MaxDPS 5y ago
      That’s true, though given this success, hopefully they can name it the norm going forward.
      - justapassenger 5y ago
        I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.
dylan604 5y ago
>(remember 2020? me neither) I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
ksec 5y ago
>That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
- andromeduck 5y ago
  mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > mid-2020s should probably be read as more ~2025 +/- 1 Estimating mid-2020s on a start-up’s new platform and landing it in 2028 is a massive win and far from B.S.
  - ksec 5y ago
    My fault. In that case those statement are perfectly fine in my book. Thanks for pointing it out.
avereveard 5y ago
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines. we've just coming out from a years of travel restrictions, makes sense to reduce rd spending to extend the runway

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

This is amazing progress for a company that needs to get type certified by the FAA before it can fly anything. The FAA requirements are soooooo painful, and often illogical and sometimes even mutually contradictory.

jcims 5y ago
It’s probably a function of human nature to be conservative there. It seems that the FAA is trying to optimize for the fewest unknown unknowns, and until the 737 MAX it would be hard to argue that entirely new airframes, propulsion and control systems operating in flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation would achieve that objective better than incremental changes. The associated bureaucracy bloat can be a feature because it’s harder to sustain a ruse over time. That said, it really does impede development of arguably safer systems.
- grkvlt 5y ago
  > flight regimes that have only been done one other time (intentionally anyway) in commercial aviation TIL the Tu-144 was designed, built and then operated commercially entirely by accident...
  - jcims 5y ago
    Touché :)
nradov 5y ago
Which specific FAA requirements are illogical or mutually contradictory?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> 2019 article: "Its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s" This one is the most egregious. It’s hard to imagine a good-faith scenario where the company actually thought they would ship a commercial airplane in a couple years when they didn’t even have their scale model working.

sjwalter 5y ago
Mid 2020s, not mid-2020. That is, 2025ish, not 2020.5ish.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Even then. It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787. And that is a bog standard subsonic airliner design with the most notable feature being the composite construction. Boom seems like vaporware.
  - iab 5y ago
    I take your point here, but bristle a little bit on the "bog-standard", given the truly amazing engineering that goes into modern airliners
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I agree, airliners are marvels of modern engineering. I am grateful that we can be flippant and call them bog-standard because we have (collectively) become so good at making them.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > It took Boeing, a company with vast amounts of experience developing airplanes, close to ten years to create the 787. This is a bit like saying SpaceX's Starship isn't possible because Boeing's SLS is costly and delayed. "If Boeing can't do it, it must be tough" is no longer the same statement it would've been in the 1960s.

sandworm101 5y ago

Delays happen. That is normal. I am more worried about the slip in speeds. "Traveling at Mach 2.2" becomes "could fly at Mach 1.7". That is a radical loss of performance. It is more than just 0.5. It is a switch from traveling at a speed to "could fly", a theoretical top speed for the same aircraft. I think they are facing solid engineering challenges and are having to reduce expectations. FYI, most airliners already fly at or above 0.85 Mach. 1.7 is faster than 0.85 but operationally it will only be only an incremental decrease in total travel time.

dannyw 5y ago
A halving in speed sound amazing!
- twic 5y ago
  A halving in speed would be surprising, at least.
- SamBam 5y ago
  Even if we say doubling instead of halving, I assume that the total portion of a transatlantic flight that it could travel at top speed would be pretty small, so the total time might still be more than half.
  - nopzor 5y ago
    other than lower speeds during approach and departure around controlled airspace with speed restrictions, the overwhelming majority of a transatlantic flight will be at full speed. of course, there are exceptions with congestion, hold patterns, excessive vectoring, etc, but this is generally true. another thing to keep in mind is headwinds/jetstream. when going west across the atlantic; they can often be 100+mph. so the delta between boom and eg. a 787 becomes even more pronounced in this situation.
    - ginko 5y ago
      It’s not like the 787 can’t also make use of the jetstream.

barnabee 5y ago

It makes sense to always communicate the best case, not the most likely expected case. If you allow worse-than-best-case to become the plan/expectation, you'll fill the time and often exceed it. As an engineer, this feels strange, because you might expect to be trying to be as close to correct as possible when you give a date. But that's not the goal. The goal is to create a narrative and sense of purpose that gets you there as quickly as possible. Finishing something 6 months behind schedule in 18 months is still better than doing it "only" 1 month behind schedule in 19 months. Of course, you also need a risk analysis of the worst case, and to understand the financials and be able to survive a reasonable range of potential delays.

Judgmentality 5y ago
Gotta say you're completely ignoring the negative toll this takes on morale. I hate unrealistic timelines, and I've been on almost every side of the table (engineer, engineering manager, product manager, program manager, even CEO for a tiny startup). Internally, only the most junior engineers tend to believe the timelines for these ambitious R&D projects. And it leads to senior engineers just getting tired of endless politicking around hype instead of actually focusing on building the thing and being honest about when it will be ready. To be a little less professional - the timelines are usually fucking bullshit. I've quit before because of this very reason. You're allowed to disagree with me obviously, but I don't want to work with you if you honestly believe this is a good policy.
- barnabee 5y ago
  The negative toll comes when timelines become deadlines or there’s too much pressure to hit them. Those are not good ways to manage or motivate a team. It is essential to create teams that are aware of and talk about the most optimistic timelines, but where everyone knows the people on the front lines doing the work are in control and set the pace. This is very achievable if the starting point is empowering people, removing roadblocks, and increasing the team’s capabilities and leverage, rather than trying to impose timelines.
- hedora 5y ago

samstave 5y ago

Additionally - what is the project timeline impact for any major endeavor such as this with respect to supply and labor chain interruptions due to pandemic, Suez-tipation, other economic factors... I recall reading that major construction, mfrg project timelines were automatically setback by a large number of months due to the Evergreen thing... (JIT construction required a precise delivery of components and even a few week hiccup in that caused a downstream of ++months) OBV Boom isnt affected by such - but the labor version locally in the US (Colorado) could still have slowed... The other non-tangible impact of something like this is the loss of intellectual momentum that a team may have had aggressively going after a timeline when suddenly all the eng team gets to go spend more time with family... Just some factors to be considered.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Well, in 2019 the pandemic hadn't given a big blow to the aviation industry so that slower start could be blamed on that. Not a good time asking for investment into a high-risk expensive niche product meant for a market that's in deep crisis. Not the speed thing though :) But the faster you go the more energy it costs for the same distance so that would make sense.

DevKoala 5y ago

I also had tons of plans for 2020 but then a global pandemic happened.

thesausageking 5y ago

The market rewards bold predictions. In 2016, Elon Musk said customers would be able from LA to NYC with no human intervention by the end of 2017. He's now the richest person on Earth.

Milkman128 5y ago

i mean tesla taught me deadlines dont matter. also making big moves is complicated, attention spans are short, and peoples judgement of time is crap.