7 ms·

Supersonic commercial service is interesting, but it was a small niche that the pandemic made even smaller. Constraints on the customer base: - Absolutely mus

by runako 4y ago

Supersonic commercial service is interesting, but it was a small niche that the pandemic made even smaller. Constraints on the customer base: - Absolutely must have face-to-face meetings on another continent - Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights - Can't do any productive work on a normal flight, so important to reduce flight time - Not staying for a long visit, so cutting a couple of hours from the flight is important (Edit: added this item) - Not rich enough to fly charter That's a tough set of criteria, especially with CFOs looking to cut unnecessary business travel. Zoom is a lot cheaper than business-class travel.

oblak 4y ago
Yeah but doing important drug deals on zoom is a major no-no. Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche
- nemo1618 4y ago
  Curve25519, ChaCha20, and plenty of other cryptographic primitives haven't been comprised (and there's a good chance they never will be). You can absolutely communicate over the internet without others reading your messages. Metadata though... that's another story.
- markdestouches 4y ago
  It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more. Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal
- cma 4y ago
  SpaceX announced the plan for cross-world rocket flights cheaper than a business class ticket in 2018, by 2028, and Musk doubled down on the timeframe in an interview in 2020. Boom doesnt have a chance of earning back its investment if it will only be able to operate for a few years before Musk comes through on his aggressive timeline. Passengers will need to be fitted for spacesuits and there is no launch abort system.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    Musk’s service will never fly, it’s pure fantasy. There’s no way that governments are going to allow an ICBM through their airspace just because some businessman is willing to risk his life to get to a meeting on time. To say nothing of the environmental costs.
ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. People are obviously getting back to face-to-face meetings. But I'd at least like to think that jetting from NYC to London just to sign some documents or to shake hands on a deal over lunch is something we'll see less of. If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  You save more time by flying a 'private plane' (with checking/security lines + it will fly at your preferred time) than flying a commercial supersonic jet
  - ISL 4y ago
    I bet early Boom clients would get luxurious treatment and priority. Speed is obviously important to them -- they are willing to pay for it.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I assume the airlines that buy supersonic planes also have solutions to get the ~50 passengers/plane through check-in and security in no time at all.
    - runako 4y ago
      Oh this is absolutely another problem for supersonic time savings. Supersonic flight over the continents is problematic, but not everyone lives on a coast. So many customers will have to take slow planes to aggregation hubs, which can easily add hours to an itinerary. Edit: And the aggregation hubs may not all serve the same destinations. Could easily see SF residents having to fly commercial to NYC to catch a Boom to London, even though there might be a Boom that flies SF-Tokyo. Once you add up the fixed time costs of getting to the airport, security, flying to a supersonic hub, the percentage of time that can potentially be shaved off the itinerary dwindles.
      - 4y ago
skrebbel 4y ago
Hmm I’m not so sure. My sister used to be a project manager at an Enterprise software company. She lives in NL and was put on a project in Prague at some point. Think 10-20 engineers setting up some product at the customer site, ie it was worth tens of millions (licenses + consultancy fees). After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project. Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights. I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.
- WJW 4y ago
  Honestly that sounds exactly like the type of "small niche" of customers that GP talks about. There can't be too many megacorps willing to do this and I bet most project managers wouldn't go for it either. Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
  - skrebbel 4y ago
    She’d live in the hotel 3-4 nights a week and, well, she did like the project itself.
- runako 4y ago
  This is a dying niche (source: have worked in Enterprise software for 20 years, used to live on a plane like your sister) that is largely moving to cloud deployments run by remote teams (those teams may themselves be co-located). The other prevalent model is opening a satellite office on the customer's continent, so that staff can be semi-local with shorter commutes. And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche. > if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes. Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)
rishav_sharan 4y ago
I am not sure if you travel cross continent a lot. I live in India and for me to travel to the US for work takes 24 hours of continuous travel over multiple flights. If I can cut it down to 12 hrs, that would be a game changer for me.
- runako 4y ago
  This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours. Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    One example of this is Los Angeles-Delhi. Probably possible with existing planes but would require cargo or passenger limits, which would make the route not profitable. No American airline is interested, given the connections available elsewhere, and Air India's (they've expressed interest in this pair before) habit of running routes at big losses will probably start to reduce now that they're privately owned. Airlines are perfectly happy to add more hops to your trip. If there was a supersonic LAX-Singapore (I doubt India would allow supersonic planes), at least the longest leg of the trip is mostly over ocean, supersonic, and the Singapore-DEL flight is just a normal one.
    - runako 4y ago
      Looks like United was running flights from SFO nonstop to Delhi until Russia closed their airspace to US flights. Looking at the list of longest nonstops, a hypothetical LA-Delhi, assuming usage of Russian airspace, flight would fit within the range of a couple of aircraft. The JFK-Singapore direct would still be hundreds of km longer.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.
thetinguy 4y ago
The Concorde made money for both Air France and British Airways.
- sushid 4y ago
  At the cost of billions incurred by France and UK though. The economics never looked good for Boom.
- runako 4y ago
  The Concord practically defines "small niche." Entirely possible it made money, but less money than could be made charging Concorde fares for First Class seats on normal flights.
- mandevil 4y ago
  When you buy a plane for 1 pound/franc, and don't have to worry about paying any development or manufacturing costs, you should be able to make money. If you can't, it's a serious problem! And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
> Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.
stult 4y ago
> Not rich enough to fly charter The growing backlash against the environmental impact of private jets may change this calculation a bit.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  The backlash only matters if you get caught. Low key charter is a luxury good. I've never done it, but I know a lot of younger co-workers who have "splurged" on chartering for destination vacations/weddings/etc. at $10k each or whatever. That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.
foobiekr 4y ago
Even if there was a business here, it is not a good _startup business_. Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result. There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  By this token, we should never see fission and fusion startups. Yet NuScale is quite successful. They are now a publicly listed company (ticker SMR) with a market cap of more than half a billion dollars. Not quite a unicorn yet, but then they did not ship any reactor either. Once they do, their market cap will shoot up. Helion is the startup that Sam Altman is so happy to talk about (e.g. [1]). Maybe it will not succeed. Scratch that, most likely it will not succeed. But if it has a 1% chance to succeed, then Sam will see his investment go up by a factor of 10000, so in expected value it is a winner. Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion https://blog.samaltman.com/helion
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    You had it right at the first sentence. Becoming publicly listed at a time when total garbage was getting on the market via SPACs (which is what NuScale did) is not validation of anything. Boom has a 99.999% chance of failing. Without an engine lined up, they aren't even in the business they're claiming they are, and haven't been for years.
UltraViolence 4y ago
A private jet (either owned, leased or rented) is a much better option for executive and VIP's than a supersonic one.
spaceywilly 4y ago
Even if there was a business case, the bigger issue with Concorde was the sonic boom. This seriously limits the number of routes for any supersonic plane, essentially limiting it to NYC-London. Building a plane for one route is never going to make any sense. Boom never had any real plans that I know of to fix the… boom
ericbarrett 4y ago
Boom hasn't solved the shockwave issue, have they? The Concorde didn't do overland routes over populated areas because of this. For example the NYC <-> Mexico City route overflew Florida for a time, and it would slow down to subsonic speeds over land. So even if Boom launches you likely wouldn't get cross-Europe routes.

by runako 4y ago

oblak 4y ago

Yeah but doing important drug deals on zoom is a major no-no. Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche

nemo1618 4y ago
Curve25519, ChaCha20, and plenty of other cryptographic primitives haven't been comprised (and there's a good chance they never will be). You can absolutely communicate over the internet without others reading your messages. Metadata though... that's another story.
markdestouches 4y ago
It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more. Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal
cma 4y ago
SpaceX announced the plan for cross-world rocket flights cheaper than a business class ticket in 2018, by 2028, and Musk doubled down on the timeframe in an interview in 2020. Boom doesnt have a chance of earning back its investment if it will only be able to operate for a few years before Musk comes through on his aggressive timeline. Passengers will need to be fitted for spacesuits and there is no launch abort system.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Musk’s service will never fly, it’s pure fantasy. There’s no way that governments are going to allow an ICBM through their airspace just because some businessman is willing to risk his life to get to a meeting on time. To say nothing of the environmental costs.

ghaff 4y ago

Yeah. People are obviously getting back to face-to-face meetings. But I'd at least like to think that jetting from NYC to London just to sign some documents or to shake hands on a deal over lunch is something we'll see less of. If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.

raverbashing 4y ago
You save more time by flying a 'private plane' (with checking/security lines + it will fly at your preferred time) than flying a commercial supersonic jet
- ISL 4y ago
  I bet early Boom clients would get luxurious treatment and priority. Speed is obviously important to them -- they are willing to pay for it.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I assume the airlines that buy supersonic planes also have solutions to get the ~50 passengers/plane through check-in and security in no time at all.
  - runako 4y ago
    Oh this is absolutely another problem for supersonic time savings. Supersonic flight over the continents is problematic, but not everyone lives on a coast. So many customers will have to take slow planes to aggregation hubs, which can easily add hours to an itinerary. Edit: And the aggregation hubs may not all serve the same destinations. Could easily see SF residents having to fly commercial to NYC to catch a Boom to London, even though there might be a Boom that flies SF-Tokyo. Once you add up the fixed time costs of getting to the airport, security, flying to a supersonic hub, the percentage of time that can potentially be shaved off the itinerary dwindles.
    - 4y ago

skrebbel 4y ago

Hmm I’m not so sure. My sister used to be a project manager at an Enterprise software company. She lives in NL and was put on a project in Prague at some point. Think 10-20 engineers setting up some product at the customer site, ie it was worth tens of millions (licenses + consultancy fees). After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project. Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights. I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.

WJW 4y ago
Honestly that sounds exactly like the type of "small niche" of customers that GP talks about. There can't be too many megacorps willing to do this and I bet most project managers wouldn't go for it either. Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
- skrebbel 4y ago
  She’d live in the hotel 3-4 nights a week and, well, she did like the project itself.
runako 4y ago
This is a dying niche (source: have worked in Enterprise software for 20 years, used to live on a plane like your sister) that is largely moving to cloud deployments run by remote teams (those teams may themselves be co-located). The other prevalent model is opening a satellite office on the customer's continent, so that staff can be semi-local with shorter commutes. And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche. > if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes. Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)

rishav_sharan 4y ago

I am not sure if you travel cross continent a lot. I live in India and for me to travel to the US for work takes 24 hours of continuous travel over multiple flights. If I can cut it down to 12 hrs, that would be a game changer for me.

runako 4y ago
This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours. Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  One example of this is Los Angeles-Delhi. Probably possible with existing planes but would require cargo or passenger limits, which would make the route not profitable. No American airline is interested, given the connections available elsewhere, and Air India's (they've expressed interest in this pair before) habit of running routes at big losses will probably start to reduce now that they're privately owned. Airlines are perfectly happy to add more hops to your trip. If there was a supersonic LAX-Singapore (I doubt India would allow supersonic planes), at least the longest leg of the trip is mostly over ocean, supersonic, and the Singapore-DEL flight is just a normal one.
  - runako 4y ago
    Looks like United was running flights from SFO nonstop to Delhi until Russia closed their airspace to US flights. Looking at the list of longest nonstops, a hypothetical LA-Delhi, assuming usage of Russian airspace, flight would fit within the range of a couple of aircraft. The JFK-Singapore direct would still be hundreds of km longer.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.

thetinguy 4y ago

The Concorde made money for both Air France and British Airways.

sushid 4y ago
At the cost of billions incurred by France and UK though. The economics never looked good for Boom.
runako 4y ago
The Concord practically defines "small niche." Entirely possible it made money, but less money than could be made charging Concorde fares for First Class seats on normal flights.
mandevil 4y ago
When you buy a plane for 1 pound/franc, and don't have to worry about paying any development or manufacturing costs, you should be able to make money. If you can't, it's a serious problem! And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

> Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.

stult 4y ago

> Not rich enough to fly charter The growing backlash against the environmental impact of private jets may change this calculation a bit.

foobiekr 4y ago
The backlash only matters if you get caught. Low key charter is a luxury good. I've never done it, but I know a lot of younger co-workers who have "splurged" on chartering for destination vacations/weddings/etc. at $10k each or whatever. That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.

foobiekr 4y ago

Even if there was a business here, it is not a good _startup business_. Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result. There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.

credit_guy 4y ago
By this token, we should never see fission and fusion startups. Yet NuScale is quite successful. They are now a publicly listed company (ticker SMR) with a market cap of more than half a billion dollars. Not quite a unicorn yet, but then they did not ship any reactor either. Once they do, their market cap will shoot up. Helion is the startup that Sam Altman is so happy to talk about (e.g. [1]). Maybe it will not succeed. Scratch that, most likely it will not succeed. But if it has a 1% chance to succeed, then Sam will see his investment go up by a factor of 10000, so in expected value it is a winner. Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion https://blog.samaltman.com/helion
- foobiekr 4y ago
  You had it right at the first sentence. Becoming publicly listed at a time when total garbage was getting on the market via SPACs (which is what NuScale did) is not validation of anything. Boom has a 99.999% chance of failing. Without an engine lined up, they aren't even in the business they're claiming they are, and haven't been for years.

UltraViolence 4y ago

A private jet (either owned, leased or rented) is a much better option for executive and VIP's than a supersonic one.

spaceywilly 4y ago

Even if there was a business case, the bigger issue with Concorde was the sonic boom. This seriously limits the number of routes for any supersonic plane, essentially limiting it to NYC-London. Building a plane for one route is never going to make any sense. Boom never had any real plans that I know of to fix the… boom

ericbarrett 4y ago

Boom hasn't solved the shockwave issue, have they? The Concorde didn't do overland routes over populated areas because of this. For example the NYC <-> Mexico City route overflew Florida for a time, and it would slow down to subsonic speeds over land. So even if Boom launches you likely wouldn't get cross-Europe routes.