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Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 I remember seeing

Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :) Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.

itsoktocry 2y ago
This is a long way from a supersonic passenger flight, isn't it?
- pembrook 2y ago
  Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.
  - OnlineGladiator 2y ago
    Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them). If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
    - kaonwarb 2y ago
      Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.
      - OnlineGladiator 2y ago
        Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number. The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
        noisy_boy 2y ago
        > There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done. Exactly, and we know for sure that Boom are definitely NOT in that place, how?
        OnlineGladiator 2y ago
        Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed. It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
    - jimjimjim 2y ago
      "Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.
    - pembrook 2y ago
      Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted. Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison. LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
      - beeflet 2y ago
        The regulation exists because of the sonic boom sound
        Judgmentality 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - yard2010 2y ago
      How about non-judgmental, down to earth pragmatism?
      - pembrook 2y ago
        There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance. Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison. Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
  - stouset 2y ago
    I don't think you fully appreciate the number of obstacles in the way of new entrants building commerically-operable airplanes. Flying a supersonic prototype is amazing. But it is a depressingly-small amount of the overall work necessary to simply start taking passengers, much less make something economical, and even less to make something succeed.
    - pembrook 2y ago
      Yes, I'm fully aware the market for building commercial jets is probably one of the most locked-down on the planet. But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail. Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?
      - stouset 2y ago
        I hope they succeed! It’s not throwing rocks at them to point out the obscene numbers of and size of obstacles they need to overcome to others on the sidelines who seem to think that this is anything more than a very, very early step along the way of a still-unlikely future product.
  - idlewords 2y ago
    It's not pessimism to correctly describe reality.
    - yard2010 2y ago
      There is no such thing as correctly describing reality, the way you describe your reality affects your reality. Reality is mostly perspective.
      - idlewords 2y ago
        When people say stuff like this I like to test the claim by kicking them in the shin.
  - jimjimjim 2y ago
    Yes! Where did enthusiasm go in this world? It's easy to be a critic but when blanket pessimism is the default answer its very tiresome reading the comments.
senordevnyc 2y ago
I’ve been one of the skeptical commenters (under another username), not because I think it’s technically impossible, or because I hate innovation or bold bets, but because I don’t think the economics make sense, and their original timelines and cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude, at least. Aviation is littered with startups that burned through hundreds of millions over the course of a decade or two and then disappeared. And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel, and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they’ve only accomplished the easiest part of what they need to accomplish in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights. Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before they’re going to reach the finish line.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards. And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    I guess the target market is those who feel about the opportunity cost of another $5,000 the way you and I do about another $5.00
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      For companies with executives that travel a lot (visiting different offices or store locations or lots of in-person client visits across the country) it might be literally saving them money. And even if it doesn't save them money, the prestige and the fact that the people who approve the purchase are the same people who get to use it help justify the cost
echoangle 2y ago
It’s a good start but I wouldn’t say the critics are proven wrong already. Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it. I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.
- ergocoder 2y ago
  Basically, the critics: "unless you build a 100B company, we are not wrong" I mean, yeah, sure.
  - Retric 2y ago
    It’s hard to argue a startup succeed until profits > investment.
    - rsanek 2y ago
      if your only measure of success is monetary profit, then sure. i think that shouldn't be the only metric, and in fact, the focus on that so completely is a big part of the problem with what people term "late-stage capitalism"
      - Retric 2y ago
        Start a social club/co-op/non-profit/religion or whatever and the metrics are different. However, when you’re asking for investments your goal better be profit or you’ve just committed fraud.
      - scrumper 2y ago
        I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either. (I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)
yard2010 2y ago
This is one of the precious little gifts of living in the future. You get to see what (some) people want to achieve and a few actually make this. It's literally people turning their time and resources into magic. Sure, most of the time they fail and you never hear of them again, but the few that can make something that seems virtually impossible happen are a living standard. To me, life is a sand box. And my dream is that it would be the reality for everyone.
ant6n 2y ago
I have been very critical because the environmental impact of possibly affordable supersonic flight is very concerning. The fuel usage per airplane should be much higher than conventional flights (due to extra drag and extra km flown per day), and they want to have 1000 airpalnes of those one day. Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight. Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering. Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad. Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland. [1] https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SST_FuelConsumption.pdf https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SS...
class3shock 2y ago
Taken from the first doubtful comment I found in the post you linked. "Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety." Many of the comments related to Boom about them not being able to do what they say are about the timeframes they give. I know I've commented on their unrealistic dates before and likely will again. In 2016 they said they would be flying it in 2017-2018. And they did in fact completely fail to do that as the above commenter predicted. Unless you are saying being off about your schedule by 7 years is achieving your goal? They say they will be flying their passenger aircraft in 2030. I invite anyone that reads this to check back then and see how they're doing. I can tell you right now though, you are not going to be able to buy a ticket.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- manquer 2y ago
  > you are not going to be able to buy a ticket You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years. Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.

itsoktocry 2y ago

This is a long way from a supersonic passenger flight, isn't it?

pembrook 2y ago
Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.
- OnlineGladiator 2y ago
  Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them). If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
  - kaonwarb 2y ago
    Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.
    - OnlineGladiator 2y ago
      Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number. The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
      - noisy_boy 2y ago
        > There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done. Exactly, and we know for sure that Boom are definitely NOT in that place, how?
        OnlineGladiator 2y ago
        Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed. It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
  - jimjimjim 2y ago
    "Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted. Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison. LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
    - beeflet 2y ago
      The regulation exists because of the sonic boom sound
      - Judgmentality 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - yard2010 2y ago
    How about non-judgmental, down to earth pragmatism?
    - pembrook 2y ago
      There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance. Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison. Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
- stouset 2y ago
  I don't think you fully appreciate the number of obstacles in the way of new entrants building commerically-operable airplanes. Flying a supersonic prototype is amazing. But it is a depressingly-small amount of the overall work necessary to simply start taking passengers, much less make something economical, and even less to make something succeed.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Yes, I'm fully aware the market for building commercial jets is probably one of the most locked-down on the planet. But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail. Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?
    - stouset 2y ago
      I hope they succeed! It’s not throwing rocks at them to point out the obscene numbers of and size of obstacles they need to overcome to others on the sidelines who seem to think that this is anything more than a very, very early step along the way of a still-unlikely future product.
- idlewords 2y ago
  It's not pessimism to correctly describe reality.
  - yard2010 2y ago
    There is no such thing as correctly describing reality, the way you describe your reality affects your reality. Reality is mostly perspective.
    - idlewords 2y ago
      When people say stuff like this I like to test the claim by kicking them in the shin.
- jimjimjim 2y ago
  Yes! Where did enthusiasm go in this world? It's easy to be a critic but when blanket pessimism is the default answer its very tiresome reading the comments.

senordevnyc 2y ago

I’ve been one of the skeptical commenters (under another username), not because I think it’s technically impossible, or because I hate innovation or bold bets, but because I don’t think the economics make sense, and their original timelines and cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude, at least. Aviation is littered with startups that burned through hundreds of millions over the course of a decade or two and then disappeared. And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel, and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they’ve only accomplished the easiest part of what they need to accomplish in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights. Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before they’re going to reach the finish line.

ghaff 2y ago
Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards. And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  I guess the target market is those who feel about the opportunity cost of another $5,000 the way you and I do about another $5.00
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    For companies with executives that travel a lot (visiting different offices or store locations or lots of in-person client visits across the country) it might be literally saving them money. And even if it doesn't save them money, the prestige and the fact that the people who approve the purchase are the same people who get to use it help justify the cost

echoangle 2y ago

It’s a good start but I wouldn’t say the critics are proven wrong already. Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it. I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.

ergocoder 2y ago
Basically, the critics: "unless you build a 100B company, we are not wrong" I mean, yeah, sure.
- Retric 2y ago
  It’s hard to argue a startup succeed until profits > investment.
  - rsanek 2y ago
    if your only measure of success is monetary profit, then sure. i think that shouldn't be the only metric, and in fact, the focus on that so completely is a big part of the problem with what people term "late-stage capitalism"
    - Retric 2y ago
      Start a social club/co-op/non-profit/religion or whatever and the metrics are different. However, when you’re asking for investments your goal better be profit or you’ve just committed fraud.
    - scrumper 2y ago
      I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either. (I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)

yard2010 2y ago

This is one of the precious little gifts of living in the future. You get to see what (some) people want to achieve and a few actually make this. It's literally people turning their time and resources into magic. Sure, most of the time they fail and you never hear of them again, but the few that can make something that seems virtually impossible happen are a living standard. To me, life is a sand box. And my dream is that it would be the reality for everyone.

ant6n 2y ago

I have been very critical because the environmental impact of possibly affordable supersonic flight is very concerning. The fuel usage per airplane should be much higher than conventional flights (due to extra drag and extra km flown per day), and they want to have 1000 airpalnes of those one day. Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight. Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering. Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad. Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland. [1] https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SST_FuelConsumption.pdf https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SS...

class3shock 2y ago

Taken from the first doubtful comment I found in the post you linked. "Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety." Many of the comments related to Boom about them not being able to do what they say are about the timeframes they give. I know I've commented on their unrealistic dates before and likely will again. In 2016 they said they would be flying it in 2017-2018. And they did in fact completely fail to do that as the above commenter predicted. Unless you are saying being off about your schedule by 7 years is achieving your goal? They say they will be flying their passenger aircraft in 2030. I invite anyone that reads this to check back then and see how they're doing. I can tell you right now though, you are not going to be able to buy a ticket.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
manquer 2y ago
> you are not going to be able to buy a ticket You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years. Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.