- "And it is built specifically for use with Sustainable Aviation Fuel, a cleaner alternative to ordinary jet fuel — albeit one that costs several times more right now."
I've been thinking about this for a while, in the context of multiple different startups. There's this (anti)pattern I see repeatedly: a startup says they're doing something that's an obviously an overwhelmingly bad idea from a business sense, but that creates positive PR in the short term. "We're limiting ourselves to exotic jet fuel multiple times more expensive than our competitors'" is such an example. I've seen so many others, I'm beginning to wonder what's going on.
Is it bait-and-switch? Start out by promising something you don't plan to deliver, to garner goodwill and investment in the near term? And then switch to the "correct" mode later.
Is it unseriousness? Are they not 100% focused on doing everything to get the startup to succeed? Imposing artificial limits on your company isn't the action of a success-at-all-costs mindset. Do they expect to fail and are just coasting?
I'm overlooking something obvious and reasonable. Most founders are smart (?); there has to be a sensible business explanation for this.
(edit: Not that carbon-neutral jet fuel isn't a great idea for a startup. But this is a supersonic airplane company, not a jet fuel company. If your startup's success requires succeeding at two different extremely difficult novel things at the same time, your success probability goes from "epsilon" to "epsilon squared").
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is a type of fuel that is ostensibly sustainable (however you define it), but fulfills all the requirements in the Jet A-1 specification. The idea being that they are completely interchangeable.
So it's just a marketing trick. They could just as well market it as "runs on standard jet fuel available at any airport worldwide". Ultimately it's up to the customer to decide what fuel they use.
Perhaps they are trying to attract investment from people who put wishful thinking (sustainable AND supersonic) ahead of common engineering sense.
You are missing the point entirely. Boom builds planes, they don't operate them and they do not build the engines (Kratos does). Their capacity to make the plane use "clean" jet fuel is almost zero. The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.
This is a pure PR move. They get some nice comments, but their effort to make this true is almost zero. They aren't saying the plane will not work with regular fuels, it definitely will. This is not a bad idea, simply because it basically isn't an idea at all.
According to the PR, Kratos (or more specifically FTT) does not build the engines, it (supposedly) will design them.
> The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.
I mean, the manufacturer usually cares in the sense that the manufacturing and operating costs inform the purchase.
Though obviously the plane would need to exist first for operators to even evaluate it.
Kratos will at least build some. I have no idea whether Boom plans to then take over production themselves (I can not imagine that actually happening).
>I mean, the manufacturer usually cares in the sense that the manufacturing and operating costs inform the purchase.
Sure, but Boom never promised what exactly their partners will be doing. Unless they are pushing some serious requirements on Kratos, beyond "the renewable fuel should also work", Kratos doesn't need to really care.
It says "built specifically for use with", not "only works with". Is there anything that says it cannot work with other sources of fuel, either natively or at least with some adaptation?
I've seen plenty of products whose marketing says "built specifically for use with (our other product)"; that doesn't mean it only works with that.
If you're building something that won't get deployed for a while, you want to take the design constraints into account that you're going to need to work with, not just those valid today. It's not unreasonable, if you think your design will both take a while and need to stay in service for a while to pay off, to include future-proofing.
I was clicking through the partner pages on their website, and noticed a disclaimer "... subject to availability". So I assume the implication is that, while it's designed for use with SAF, it can run on conventional aviation fuels as well.
What fuel to put in it will presumably be up to the airline, not Boom, so Boom can get the "credit" for building something "intended for" SAF, but the airline will get the flak if the end up not using it.
Building for SAF is actually one of the plus points I see in this.
It's generally purer than old-fashioned stuff, and the wider industry has already committed to switching to it on all the legacy machines, so there is likely some benefits at the design stage to assuming this better quality fuel is available, which it almost certainly will be.
At this stage, they're still selling ideas for funding. So the question is what claims lead to optimal cost of funding?
There are all kinds of people throwing private and government money at sustainable energy, with the expectation that it will only moderately succeed. Witness this weeks' "ignition" announcement, brought to you by nuclear weapons(!)
Even Death, destroyer of Worlds, needs a sustainable energy angle to justify their funding to Congress.
Every aircraft manufacturer outsources their engines to other manufacturers. This is normal in the aerospace industry. Even rockets have motors made by different companies most of the time.
As far as this particular project goes though, I would have a hard time expecting it to succeed. They have a great number of hurdles to overcome, and the engine design has to be the biggest one. Designing an engine that can work efficiently in both subsonic and supersonic regimes without an afterburner is very very difficult.
I don’t See them as a serious business. When the four major engine producers are all not on board there just isn’t anything technologically advanced out there. Engine development is very expensive.
> The Symphony engine will be designed from scratch by Boom’s partners: Florida Turbine Technologies (a subsidiary of Kratos) will do the engine design proper, GE Additive will consult on manufacturing, and StandardAero will be on maintenance duty. (FTA)
They're (Boom) not the ones designing it. Kratos Turbine Technologies has made turbopumps for liquid rockets so they're well placed to do this work.
The hard part is making the rotors which I bet is why GE is involved.
> Kratos Turbine Technologies has made turbopumps for liquid rockets so they're well placed to do this work.
Liquid rocket turbopumps and jet engines are completely different things.
And FTT was a designer of missile and UAV engines, according to Kratos' website they're developing 300lb thrust turbojets and 900lb thrust turbofans: https://www.kratosdefense.com/products/uav/air/turbines. Their KTT is 200lbf, targeted towards "cheap cruise missiles" and "attritable" (aka expendable) UAVs, and was developed in 18 months.
But apparently they'll be able to develop an airliner engine with 175 times more thrust (without afterburner), in 2 years?
Hell, the linked page boasts of their newly commissioned "X-58 test facility", able to accomodate engines "up to 3000-lb thrust".
I'm not panning KTT here, I don't know if they were even involved in the press release, but things don't really make any sense.
And remember, this is a project Rolls-Royce fucked away from 3 months ago, after two years of collaboration. So in 3 months Boom has supposedly found a company which is able to design an engine type which has basically never existed from scratch with no experience.
Interestingly, it's not GE Aviation (the GE division who make engines) but GE Additive, a division of GE who specialise in Additive manufacturing (aka 3D printing) metal parts.
So it's going to have 3d printed rotors and probally other , which is super cool.
GE Additive have previously made 3d printed turbine parts for GE Aviation[1], so they do have some experience. Also, this appears to be Kratos' second jet engine [2]
Turbine blades are the bits that whizz around really fast and are subject to extremes of temperature and force. Established engine manufacturers go to interesting lengths to make turbine blades made of interesting materials like single crystal metal alloys just so that they can cope with the conditions. In a jet engine, a small increase in working temperature gives a significant improvement in efficiency and performance. I can't see how 3D-printed turbine blades could possibly be a good idea.
It doesn’t look like they printed the rotors. It’s hard to find real concrete info but it looks like they added cavities to other parts of the engine for active cooling and/or increased strength to weight, which is more of a well explored topic (I remember watching a rocket engine test in Mojave with a hollow cryocooled aluminum nozzle in the late 2000s).
The rotors are still made using those fancy 5-axis CNCs - I think either Boeing or GE still have a shop in LA that makes them.
That conceptual render is so laughably bad that it reeks of a designer copying a turbine schematic from Wikipedia, but they don’t even know how an axial turbine works or what a stator is. The schematic is similar to a turbine engine in the same way Fred Flintstone’s car resembles a modern automobile. This is looking theranos bad.
I am even wondering if it's an AI-generated picture?
- Look at the top of the last two stages of the "low-pressure compressor", you can see like some "phantom" blade airfoils? And yeah, no stators at all...
- The "high-pressure compressor" is even more bizarre: each stage seems to have a slightly different, random chord length, the first stages' airfoils have alternating pitch/curvature resembling rotor-stator stages but in the last ones they forget about this...
- In the turbine casing they have included some grooves that resemble cooling channels or labyrinth seals but the shapes seem random?
- The primary and secondary dilution air holes in the combustion chamber are huge, like those of small RC gas turbine? No fuel injectors at all?
It's built specifically for an alternative consumable, the largest expensive of a flight right?, that cost SEVERAL TIMES what the standard consumable costs right now?
SAF is generally made to be compatible with regular jet fuel so I would expect it should work with either, even if it’s optimised for a particular type of SAF.
It's very disappointing to see how skeptical HN has become about new technology.
Making aircrafts is hard, making supersonic aircraft even harder and making a new supersonic aircraft company hardest of all. That there's progress by Boom should be encouraged. Otherwise we are just saying that aircrafts will continue to be the domain of Airbus and Boeing only who don't have much incentive to innovate.
The point is that there isn’t progress on the most critical part of a viable aircraft - the engine.
Some of us who weren’t born yesterday have seen this rodeo
before, and when a startup aircraft manufacturer switches engines it tends to indicate their concept isn’t viable. The fact that Boom are proposing to build their own engine, rather than partnering with an established engine manufacturer, tends to suggest that the engine manufacturers don’t think it’s doable either.
Sometimes the establishment gets it wrong, but jet engine manufacture is a very mature field, and Boom isn’t proposing to do some radical new engine design. That makes me pretty suspicious.
Ok I will bite. Commercial engine manufacturers are also an oligopoly so they also have very little incentive to innovate like aircraft manufacturers. The only way to incentivize them is to bring a big pot of gold. I remember Boom tried but one of the engine manufacturers initially signed on then withdrew.
>Commercial engine manufacturers are also an oligopoly so they also have very little incentive to innovate like aircraft manufacturers.
Commercial airlines and military customers are so competitive that they will use single digit percentage gains in efficiency or performance to switch suppliers.
So turbofan manufacturers spend more on R&D that almost every other non-biotech sector.
General Electric doesn't break down their R&D spending by sector but they're always in the to 50 or so US spenders on research and development and they have to compete with the massive pharmaceutical and software (which is, understandably, mainly R&D) industries in the US to get on the list.
Sure they have an incentive to innovate, namely taking market share from their competitors.
The reason why they want a big pot of gold is that developing a new competitive jet engine is frighteningly expensive. The established vendors, with decades of in-house knowhow, will spend a decade and billions of dollars on a new from scratch engine. It's just not a game where a VC-funded startup with a very limited runway can expect to be successful.
But sure, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Not holding my breath waiting though.
Both, aircrafy OEMs and engine OEMs, do innovate all the time. Their innovation is of the evolutionary instead of disruptive nature so.
And hey, Airbus and Boeing are flying their existings jets with SAF for quite a while now, Airbus did so with the A400M and the A330.
No idea why Boom thinks they can be an aircraft and an engine OEM at the same time when already one of things tends on the impossible side of things to begin with.
The technology was already solved decades ago, we had the Concorde. Supersonic flight is well understood. The hard part is to make a supersonic aircraft that's commercially viable.
Personally, I'm very skeptical when they say things like "zero carbon" or "anywhere in the world for $100", very difficult to believe them. The only progress they made for now is building a single seat supersonic plane that maybe will fly. We have lots of those already.
Innovation doesn't stop once you manage to make something fly. Aerodynamics simulations, science of materials, engine design or manufacturing innovation like metal 3D printing are some of the areas that can completely revolutionize how we look at previous problems.
Are they doing something like that? If true, how will this solve the main problems of supersonic commercial flights, that being cost, noise and pollution?
Cost is mainly due to fuel consumption. Concorde was extremely efficient in cruise mode, but horrible during the takeoff phase. And unfortunately, at takeoff it was also the heaviest, having full tanks, so the problem was compounded.
If a new design can solve the takeoff problem, then you actually solve four problems: overall fuel consumption (so lower cost), less pollution (because you burn less fuel) are two. The other two come from the ability to efficiently fly subsonic, which is what Boom claim to be able to do (when they'll be able to fly, obviously). You don't have noise, and you have access to some routes that are partially overland. For example, you could fly from NYC to various cities in Europe other than London and Paris. Maybe Frankfurt, or Berlin, or Madrid, or Rome. 90% of the flight will still be over water, but you can have 10% over land without producing the sonic boom.
Concorde used afterburners for take-off and while transitioning to supersonic, then it cruised at Mach 2 without afterburners.
The thing with Boom is that they are saying "we are doing this new great thing", and it's not new, Concorde did it. How are they specifically going to be better than Concorde? Just not using afterburners during taking off? Are they going to be cheaper? How? Just by saying they will?
That's why I understand that people don't care about this technology, because it's nothing new, and there's no proof Boom is doing something radically different that will solve the main problems of supersonic travel.
On top of that nobody needs it. The issue is that supersonic jets are really anachronistic, it's the most wasteful way of flying and it doesn't even buy you much time for most distances because you have to fly subsonic over land.
It feels like Boom is a product of the zero interest rate frothy market, where there was lots of money chasing “disruptive” technologies, which breeds not-so-good ideas. In particular, Boom seems to have attracted investment because it purports to solve a classic rich guy problem: how to fly overseas a bit faster, but at a price premium. They still have some momentum from the zero-interest rate environment, but how long can that last?
this is a really funny comment if you think about it. Instead of simply presenting the evidence, you demand that he prove there is none. Quite a bold demand. got to respect that on some level. If you disagree, prove there isn't any evidence that Im right.
Not so. He is the one who made the original statement. The onus of proof is on him to show what is "completely made up". It's a fairly extreme statement after all.
Sorry, but that wasn't his statement. It's quite clear that he states that what is presented as new technology is completely made up nonsense. He may be right, but he needs to show what in the article is completely made up nonsense so that we know if he is.
It was my statement, and it was a reply to the previous unsupported assertion which I quoted here.
> It's quite clear that he states that what is presented as new technology is completely made up nonsense.
Yes.
> He may be right, but he needs to show what in the article is completely made up nonsense so that we know if he is.
There is jack shit in the article supporting the existence or likelihood of "new technology". It's window dressing, a PR release with no meat or bones promising a bright and spotless future out of essentially nothing. It has as much technological content as Blindsight, Altered Carbon, or I, Robot. Possibly less.
It really is. I've actually argued with people (multiple times in multiple companies) about the press release containing false information, and they told me "that's just what we do."
What do you think PR is if not making something up to present a positive story? There isn't even a law that says it has to be truthful, so long as you aren't soliciting something. I can make a claim that I developed a working nuclear fusion reactor and put out a press release for it. Anyone with a brain would know it's bullshit but it's still PR. It's completely legal and standard practice.
No offense, but I think you should educate yourself further.
Hmm, all of these things are hard; they are also fairly easy compared to building your own jet engine. There are a handful of jet engine makers in the world, 2 or 3 that can build passenger-grade engines and 2-3 (small overlap) that can build supersonic jet engines.
The physics within a jet engine are basically unknowable. The material science is the hardest we have. The tolerances and margins for error are insane. I wanted Boom to succeed and even believed some of their hype, but this basically means they are dead.
And Kratos is currently a minor manufacturer of engines for missiles and expendable drones ("attritable UAVs" in their own words), not a manufacturer of airliner engines, or even bizjet engines.
Yeah, apparently actual large scale manufacturers, GE, Honeywell, Safran, etc. have no interest in producing supersonic engines.
Gotta take what you can get I guess. Honesty I don't think you are wrong with the scepticism, if some actual large engine company took up the challenge I also would be more confident.
Rolls Royce, the only company that ever made civilian super-sonic jet engines, for the Concorde, dumped Boom in September. So, it is not tha Boom doesn't have an engine OEM partner. They had, and that partner was not interessted beyond some initial research.
The aerospace industry of the USSR is something, isn't it? Fun fact, they used the metric system for everything, including flight controls. Was, aparently, quite a problem for all countries that continued to use Soviet aircraft after they joined NATO.
There are random commenters (like me!) saying various things all the time. But there is kind of the weight of the mass of commenters. That's how we got to the semi-consensus (except for the crypto partisans) that web3/crypto seemed to be in a massive bubble with no clear use case and lots of likely fraud. Notice that for the AI boom going on right now this is not going the same was way as web3.
I mean, that’s just engineering in general. We’re all mostly pessimistic opportunists. Skeptical of any new technology but get impressed only when they actually deliver. Ideas are cheap (not easy though). Execution is where most ideas die.
The challenge with supersonic flight is that you not only have to build engines that are capable of pushing your aircraft to the maximum limits of speed, but also it has to be able to carry a proportionate amount of fuel for it to be viable for flight. Supersonic aircraft consume fuel at a much higher rate than normal aircraft, hence you are forced to make a tradeoff between higher aircraft capacity and higher fuel capacity. This is not a problem for current military applications of supersonic flight, but for commercial purposes, it makes it financially unviable. You can only sell a limited number of tickets, which makes the proposition unattractive for large carriers. Thus your market would be limited to niche carriers/charters who cater to carrying a few UNHWs and execs, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a large enough market to recoup your investment.
Not to mention, Boom hasn't innovated in any way to solve the two key issues here - they aren't using a significantly lighter fuel to compensate for the tradeoff, nor have they radically changed the engine design to consume less fuel at supersonic speeds. If they did, they would be touting that instead rather than hiding behind a proprietary "superfuel".
And making an aircraft that doesn't emit outrageous amounts of CO2 with equal access to everyone, irrespective of the size of their wallet, is the hardestest. Boom doesn't solve this, so why should we praise it ?
A technological progress isn't progress if it's a social or environmental regression.
Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine.
We should be super skeptical these days. Too many promises and not enough deliveries. Also, just because something is hard, doesn't mean it shouldn't deserve criticism.
> Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine.
A supersonic no-afterburner 35000 lbf mid-bypass (whatever they mean by that) turbofan, cheap enough (to build and maintain) for civil variation, designed in two years would be a pretty impressive thing tho. If it existed. Especially from a company whose biggest previous offering is a 900lbf turbofan.
The F-35's F135 "only" has 28000lbf dry thrust, and the plane tops out at 1.6, while Overture is supposed to reach 1.7 (and supercruise, which the F-35 can not do).
Although in fairness the Tu-144D had engines specced at 54 and (like Concorde) cruised at M2.
On the other hand, it was even less efficient and economically justifiable than Concorde, and the entire thing was shuttered in 1983, after only 6 years, and regular groundings (Tu-144 only flew scheduled 103 times before the programme was cancelled, BA alone flew Concorde near 50000 times, and the class logged more than a million flight hours.)
I think NH would laugh out a startup saying we are going to build up and conquer entire world with our new processor architecture or operating system. Not based on existing one such as ARM or Unix.
Is it progress? I don't think the time required to fly over an ocean is really a major problem. Time-sensitive clients can simply book an overnight flight during time they would be sleeping, and those who would be rich enough to afford supersonic flights can already afford comfortable accommodations on such flights. The benefits would be minimal and would be overwhelmed by the environmental damage and/or waste caused by the high fuel burn.
Yeah it seems a bit of a downer, but it’s mostly just noise. How many of us would actually invest money in Boom right now? Basically none. How many of us would short it if we could? Basically none.
The fact that Boom exists at all suggests sufficient optimism about new technology is out there somewhere.
Here's the link to Airmade SAF [1]. The company making the "net zero" fuel that Boom wants / hopes customers will use for net zero flights. Tons of marketing hype, but at least it's not a carbon offset bait and switch.
Anybody know how much this fuel is supposed to cost relative to fossil jet fuel?
Boom says they have a deal with Airmade for 5M gallons of SAF per year. [2]
There is a procedure that allows supersonic operation under certain conditions granted on an individual basis. In addition, any new aircraft would need to meet current airworthiness and noise certification requirements.
> Currently, U.S. law prohibits flight in excess of Mach 1 over land unless specifically authorized by the FAA for purposes stated in the regulations. The two supersonic rulemaking activities would not rescind the prohibition of flight in excess of Mach 1 over land.
Air speed is an important aspect in this conversation. The air going into a 747's engines isn't travelling at supersonic speeds. For reference, the Concorde's Rolls Royce Olympus 593 engines did 35,190 lpf and it had four.
Mostly. Ironically the most popular civilian fighter jet is a Soviet era Czech design (the aforementioned L39).
Even in the US though, they are relatively limited in where they can fly and require an experimental aircraft authorization. It’s relatively impractical in most of Europe because they’re not allowed to fly above populated areas except to take off and land (at least in the US)
You don't actually have to worry about any of this stuff, if you have the money to buy one of these you also have the money to register it in a third country.
>It’s relatively impractical in most of Europe because they’re not allowed to fly above populated areas except to take off and land (at least in the US)
Or quite a bit more for a more equitable comparison, the F135 reaches 43 with afterburners, but it "only" reaches 28 dry.
According to TFA, this fantasy doesn't have afterburners (although the Tu-144D didn't either though, and the RD-36-51 is documented at a pretty incredible 54000 lbf, then again the 144 was not exactly a cheap and efficient plane).
Interesting you say that, I look at a company like Arrival and think fantasy company, they don't show any of their manufacturing processes, instead doing robot dances. However, boom looks to be taking a modern but practical approach to their manufacturing and have a test plane almost ready to fly. Timelines are aggressive but if contend that wouldn't put it in fantasy land.
How much time was wasted in meetings to come up with "symphony" for the name of their engine.
Who gives a crap what the engine is called? Just give it a serial number and be done with.
Edit: By serial number I mean some insignificant labelling instead of a marketing campaign. Sell me the supersonic trip not the engines that you have to build to make it work.
I've been thinking about this for a while, in the context of multiple different startups. There's this (anti)pattern I see repeatedly: a startup says they're doing something that's an obviously an overwhelmingly bad idea from a business sense, but that creates positive PR in the short term. "We're limiting ourselves to exotic jet fuel multiple times more expensive than our competitors'" is such an example. I've seen so many others, I'm beginning to wonder what's going on.
Is it bait-and-switch? Start out by promising something you don't plan to deliver, to garner goodwill and investment in the near term? And then switch to the "correct" mode later.
Is it unseriousness? Are they not 100% focused on doing everything to get the startup to succeed? Imposing artificial limits on your company isn't the action of a success-at-all-costs mindset. Do they expect to fail and are just coasting?
I'm overlooking something obvious and reasonable. Most founders are smart (?); there has to be a sensible business explanation for this.
(edit: Not that carbon-neutral jet fuel isn't a great idea for a startup. But this is a supersonic airplane company, not a jet fuel company. If your startup's success requires succeeding at two different extremely difficult novel things at the same time, your success probability goes from "epsilon" to "epsilon squared").