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Boom Supersonic's XB-1 prototype aces 2nd test flight
- melling 2y agoMaybe we’ll have commercial supersonic flight in our lifetimes.
- jonwachob91 2y agoWe've already had commercial supersonic flight in our lifetimes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoYes but there are now adults who were born after the last flight…
- fragmede 2y agoThey can legally drink (in the US) but I don't know that we would all agree that they can be called adults quite yet.
- frankfrank13 2y agoRetired in '03, seems likely that at least some HN readers could say "not in my lifetime"
- RedShift1 2y agoWhy is the future in the past? :-(
- Ekaros 2y agoEfficiency... Supersonic is even less green than air travel in general. Efficiency is quite a big issue always when flying is involved. Not that you can't use gliders, but those are not practical for general transport.
- jandrese 2y agoIt's not even the environment, just the cost of fuel made supersonic travel uneconomical. Saving 3 hours off of a flight isn't worth thousands of dollars to enough people. Boom's innovation is to target billionaires with supersonic bizjets. Personally I think their business model is risky, but not necessarily impossible.
- fortran77 2y agoI've already had them in my lifetime!
- fpoling 2y agoSpace tourism is commercial and very supersonic.
- melling 2y agoWhat routes do they fly? Cost?
- toomuchtodo 2y agoCongrats to the Boom team!
- ctippett 2y agoI'm enthusiastic about what Boom are setting out to achieve, but it's my understanding that the technological/engineering challenges to supersonic flight is just one hurdle – the other being the geopolitical issues that arise from negotiating flight paths over various country's air space. The economics of the Concorde were significantly impacted when India prohibited Singapore Airlines / British Airways from flying over Indian airspace[1]. [1] https://www.heritageconcorde.com/singapore-airlines-concorde-operations https://www.heritageconcorde.com/singapore-airlines-concorde...
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoGood thing the oceans don’t care. The most viable routes are mostly oceanic. LA-Singapore could be done mostly supersonic and then slowed down once closer.
- ctippett 2y agoNot that I disagree with you, but I'd argue the most viable route would be one the Concorde already served: New York to London over the North Atlantic.
- dmix 2y agoMarket enviornments change though. There's probably a lot more people with disposable income in the higher end and plane travel has exploded since then. But gov controls and red tape on this sort of thing probably tripled, especially around environment/airport development+nimby politics/aircraft regulations, so it's probably 50/50 vs the 1970s-80s.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoI eagerly awaiting saving 500,000 Amex points and having a chance to fly supersonic.
- onion2k 2y agoThat's less true now than it was in the 1980s.
- crowcroft 2y agoI imagine the odds are that Boom will most likely fail, but if wealthy investors want to pump money into supersonic flight R&D knowing that the risk is high, then I'm all for it. If nothing else it's very cool.
- HPsquared 2y ago"Because it's cool" is an underappreciated basis for investment.
- lispisok 2y agoBetter than investing in blockchain or another openai wrapper company
- lenerdenator 2y agoIf they spin a defense product at some point they could make a very good case that they're a necessary company given Boeing's utter incompetence here of late.
- newsclues 2y agoThe technology is dual use. There is value in war, unfortunately.
- lenerdenator 2y agoFerengi Rule of Acquisition 34: War is good for business. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 35: Peace is good for business.
- crowcroft 2y agoIf they can succeed in making anything that is good enough to be approved by the FAA or to be used in anything then honestly I would say that as a massive win for them.
- gangstead 2y agoI get a lot more enjoyment out of billionaires spending their money on rockets and super sonic planes than buying land in Hawaii and kicking native people off of it.
- m4rtink 2y agoSilent supersonic cruise missiles!
- modeless 2y agoDoesn't seem like it would be important for a supersonic missile to be silent since you wouldn't hear it before it hits you regardless.
- ceejayoz 2y agoWhen attacking things the size of country, sensors near the borders can detect the sound of supersonic aircraft and transmit that information at the speed of light to waiting air defense systems. Silence still has some value.
- lupusreal 2y agoDoesn't really make sense to me. For one, it's not silent, just quieter than you'd normally expect from a supersonic aircraft. It's not stealthy; radar will see it. It can't fly low and still be fast, so it can't hide from radar behind terrain. It's much slower than ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, etc.
- ceejayoz 2y agoQuiet is good. The B-2 is engineered to be low observability not just in radar cross section, but in infrared, visual, and auditory. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a24484/b-2-stealth-bomber-flyby/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a24484/b-... A high-flying stealth subsonic cruise missile can be as silent as the airliners you see everyday flying silently overhead at 30k feet. Sonic booms are dramatically less stealthy.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf it had a very small radar cross section then it could be an interesting cruise missile, and if it had a robust pressure hull it could be a submarine. It doesn't. This conversation is stupid.
- frankfrank13 2y agoI still can't really wrap my head around this company: 1. How did a SWE start and raise funds for this company 2. How did he/they recruit the kind of talent you'd need to actually build a test plane 3. How much is left to do before a real commercial flight, and can they really do it? A few months ago the conversation was "if they depend on next-gen engines and next-gen fuel this entire company is hindering on tech that isn't even available yet" so as a very non-aviation person, what does this test flight prove? It's not the air frame, its not the engines, its not even the full control suite.
- Neywiny 2y agoUnsure on funding, but this is a proof of concept. It'll show that the modeling, design practices, manufacturing, etc are working. The "meta" of the plane. For example, while as you point out the air frame of the final production model isn't being tested, they are testing the ability to model the stresses and strains an airframe would undergo throughout the speed envelope. And that's huge
- throwaway48476 2y agoSupersonics are limited by regulation so it's also an attempt to overturn the ban.
- bpodgursky 2y agoThe US is not the only country in the world, you can always sell internationally in countries with more flexibility.
- thefounder 2y agoI think this is really tough especially since the US is a big market and usually airlines don’t like to buy planes that only fly in specific countries.
- mandevil 2y agoIt seems unlikely that airlines are going to lead the way here, just due to economics I think it's going to be the bizjet market leading the way(1). So the obvious choice for domestic flights would be Russia: rich oligarchs, huge country, loose enforcement of laws. Unfortunately for the world that is impossible for the foreseeable future. The next best target is going to be transpac- IFF they can get sufficient range. So wealthy businessmen who have to do a lot of travel between Asia and North America is a reasonable market, so long as they can do supersonic the entire way. If you have to stop and refuel I suspect that the numbers don't work so well. If they can only do a translant without refueling the market is going to be people who want the prestige of having the coolest toys, and Boom is stuck trying to compete with Gulfstream G650 on prestige. 1: R.E.G. Davies explained it best, the problem with commercial supersonic is that the earth is rotating. For commercial airlines, the killer app for selling "expensive but gets you there faster" flights is the ability to get someone to a meeting the same day versus having to travel the day before. If you can save an executive a day that is hugely valuable and worth the company paying a premium for. If you can't, paying extra for a faster flight just isn't worth that much. As a thought experiment, let's say that everything else is exactly the same, but at the end of the runway a Star Trek transporter beams the plane directly to the runway at the destination. So the executive wakes up in NYC at 5:30AM, is out of the house by 6AM, takes an hour to get to the airport, that's 7AM. It's an international flight so they need to go through extra checks, it's 8AM when their flight leaves for Paris. It is beamed directly to CDG, thanks to time zones it's now 2PM. Then it takes another hour to get through passport control etc. and it's 3PM, and another hour for ground travel in Paris and even without the flight taking any time at all it's already 4PM after waking up at 5:30AM. That's tough to make meetings work. (Obviously the return trip can achieve this meeting on day 1 effect, but a commercial airline you can only charge good prices for on half of its legs is going to be tricky to earn its money back.)
- ARandomerDude 2y agoMany have questioned the sanity of those investing in Boom, and from a commercial standpoint I agree. Every time I see the XB-1 I think the real hope is a military purchase, given the XB-1's design choices. Thus far it looks similar to an upgraded T-38 to me. The XB-1 and T-38 are similar (ish) sizes, have roughly the same takeoff weight, both use the very old/proven J85 engines, etc. If Boom can pull off the Mach 2+ supercruise concept for this demonstrator, they might well secure a spot as a low cost 5th gen fighter trainer with good export potential as a cheap fighter/recon platform.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> the real hope is a military purchase This has been explicit for at least 2 years [1]. It’s why I think their idea of an airliner (and in-house dry super-cruise engine) isn’t just vapourware. [1] https://aviationweek.com/shownews/farnborough-airshow/boom-unveils-new-look-overture-northrop-grumman-partnership https://aviationweek.com/shownews/farnborough-airshow/boom-u...
- foobarqux 2y agoIt isn't just vapor-ware because the company is going to get acquired by the military? Or the military is going to place an order for jets? Why does that help make it not vapor-ware?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> company is going to get acquired by the military? When has the U.S. military ever acquired a contractor? > Why does that help make it not vapor-ware? The military has money. There is obvious strategic value in a second supercruise turbofan, particularly one optimised for high thrust and efficiency.
- pie420 2y agoSpaceX, Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed are all owned by the US government. The government just allows the american public to invest in these companies.
- pogopop77 2y agoI hope Boom can make supersonic travel commercially viable. Would be nice to have a faster option for long-distance travel, even though the cost will probably be too high for most. I'd sooner spend money on that vs. edge-of-space tourism (a la Virgin Galactic/SpaceX).
- snozolli 2y agoDoes anyone have any insight as to how much modern simulation software helps the process? From what little I remember of reading about the first attempts at supersonic flight, there were a lot of unknowns and somewhat counter-intuitive factors, and it was being calculated on slide rules. Can modern engineering and simulation software reasonably predict the effects of supersonic flight on a model?
- andrewla 2y agoBlogspam for https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/xb-1-completes-second-flight https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/xb-1-completes-second-fligh..., with more details and pictures (including a credit for the test pilot)
- akamaka 2y agoI counted 63 display ads on this site, whereas the article contains 9 sentences. That's 7 ads per sentence of content.
- pajeets 2y agoMy question is, why aren't existing airplane manufacturers and airlines doing supersonic? Why is it a startup without the same engineerforce or airline experience? Is the goal to sell another dream after dream to enough whales to be able to cash out on secondary like Uber and WeWorks? Seems like the most successful startups isn't actually finishing a product or providing forever jobs but sell enough of the half baked dream to enough investors to discover liquidity. That doesn't seem like a very good thing for the economy in the long run. Money and resources are spent with the sole purpose of producing a few billionaires who will park their money outside the economy and pay little to no taxes and have it insured by bailouts by the people who made it happen.
- kwhitefoot 2y ago> why aren't existing airplane manufacturers and airlines doing supersonic? In my opinion it's because it's been tried already and no one, including Boom, has managed to figure out how to make it part of mass market air travel. Boom Overture will be slower than Concorde, carry only 80 passengers, and will only be allowed to be supersonic away from land. The range is 4 250 nautical mile which is a little further than Concorde's 3 900. Perhaps that might be enough to tip the balance and make it profitable but it seems unlikely to me. Concorde carried between 90 and 120 passengers. An Airbus A340-500 has a range of 9 000 nautical miles and carries at least 270 passengers so it carries three times as many passengers the same distance in only twice the time. Which surely makes it more economical. But in can also carry them twice as far before refuelling. So it looks like Boom is only competing directly with Concorde and it's only selling points will be reduced fuel consumption and more comfort. I dare say I've missed something because a lot of smart people seem to think it will work.
- panick21_ 2y ago> My question is, why aren't existing airplane manufacturers and airlines doing supersonic? Because for the most part their costumers aren't asking for it. And therefore the market is very uncertain. You need to sell a large number of planes, to make this work. Projects like the A220 have been selling 100s of planes and aren't jet profitable. And even beyond that, they have plenty to do. They have huge existing backlogs, and they need their engineering talent to develop next generation planes that can pass future legal restrictions for noise and pollution. I will believe Boom will actually make money when they actually do.
- Animats 2y agoAnother impressive aircraft by Scaled Composites. Nice. Being acquired by Northrop Grumman after Rutan retired hasn't stopped them.