I 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.
>I 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
The model for all of these aerospace startups is to just develop something interesting enough for an acqui-hire. Boom will never build a passenger jet. But some of their tech may make it into the next generation of GE engines if they're successful.
That's a lot of hopium given that they're making their own engines because no real engine manufacturer thinks it's a good idea. The entire company was created because a rich techie had an exit and liked flying. A lifestyle business, I guess.
If 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.
If 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.
I 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.
I'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].
Boom is trying to build their own engine for the full size aircraft. That's tough. The number of groups that have built a reliable high-performance jet engine is very small. China still has trouble doing it.
The XB-1, the 1/3 scale model, uses standard General Electric J85 engines.[1] Old, reliable, not too expensive, and used by many prototypes over many decades.
Surely there is somebody with enough brains in the Pentagon to diversify their supplier base away from the moribund Boeing-esque incumbents, right? If they haven't learnt this lesson post-SpaceX, when are they going to figure it out?
A couple billion bucks is pocket change to the DoD, they literally "lose" it in their couch cushions, and it could eventually be the difference between "viable domestic defense aerospace industry" and "buy threaded steel nuts for $9000 each, with an 18 month lead time and 5000 pages of paperwork."
> Boom is trying to build their own engine for the full size aircraft.
Hahahaha. No.
That China still has trouble is one thing. The fact that Russia also has issues, with around 80 years of experience, tells you everything you need to know about how non trivial the task is.
Then again, SpaceX managed to pull their thing off, using modern tooling and some of the world's best rocket engineering teams. Russia and China, with all of their expertise don't have SpaceX's capabilities either. Supersonic jet engineering isn't exactly the same thing as rocket engineering, but they're related.
Appreciate the reference, I wasn't familiar with the ICAO noise standards.
If I'm reading things correctly it looks like Stage 5 caps out at 50dB, whereas a cursory search on the decibel levels for a supersonic boom comes up with 110dB.
That seems like a pretty large divide! Am I missing something?
Edit: A sibling comment appears to have addressed my confusion.
> cursory search on the decibel levels for a supersonic boom comes up with 110dB
Short answer is we aren’t able to predict how loud a sonic boom will be [1]. Raw decibels produced at source is one thing. But you also have components like direction, dispersion (spatially as well as temporally) and frequency and how altitude and even moisture effect all that.
We’re making progress [2]. But the conventional wisdom is you need a perceived loudness on the ground that matches subsonic airliners to have a hope in hell of FAA approval. (Would note that a sonic boom in this context is not a physical phenomenon but summary of perceptions. There will always be an acoustic reaction to supersonic flight. But the far field effects that characterise a “boom” aren’t inherent to supersonic flight.)
This is a lie. They write "Overture’s takeoffs will blend in with existing long-haul fleets, resulting in a quieter experience for both passengers and airport communities, meeting or exceeding ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) requirements for all subsonic aircraft operating over land and at or near airports."
Note that they are talking about takeoffs (and presumably landings) only where there isn't any sonic boom anyway, not cruising.
Hell of a claim with zero evidence. By your logic, I could disprove the Sun by not observing it at night.
Yes, the ICAO rules are for takeoff and landing. When subsonic planes are the loudest. Concorde, for example, couldn’t have met these requirements.
We don’t know what Boom are targeting for in-flight noise. But we can guess, based on its parity with ICAO take-off and landing requirements, that it aims to match subsonic noise levels on the ground. There is strong evidence we can soften and disperse a high-altitude boom [1]. Whether it’s doable by Boom is an open question.
What? I cited their own document to show that your claim was not about the sonic-boom noise (which is what people are worried about). You say yourself "we don’t know what Boom are targeting for in-flight noise".
What do you mean about "its parity with ICAO take-off and landing requirements"?
Good 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.
Not 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.
Concorde got a pass because it was British and even then it was controversial.
Boom will still have to meet all noise pollution rules now and in the future. Noise rules are designed for normal passenger aircraft, they will not get any exceptions.
I don't doubt that they can make something much quieter than Concorde but can they make it as quiet as subsonic aircraft?
Market 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.
In the meantime we got 9/11, and all the security procedures that goes with it. It is nowadays much slower to fly than before, and that time is mostly incompressible, making the benefits of supersonic flight less incentive.
I fly a fair amount, and I haven't been in a situation where I had to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before a flight in years - typically 1 hour is plenty of time, and if I weren't optimizing for low-stress, could get away with 45 minutes most days for domestic flights.
90 minutes out of 17.5 hours of travel ( 16 hour flight from SFO to Singapore) represents a small amount of 'incompressible' time - cutting that 16 hour flight down to 8 or 10 would make a HUGE difference, especially given timezone/IDL issues.
Air Canada just announced today it's inreasing check-in cutoff time to 1hr - roughly meaning if you don't get to the counter at least 1hr early you're out of luck.
Not sure if it impacts those who travel without luggage and check-in online.
I contrast this to when I used to be able to (long ago) roll up to the airport a mere 20mins before takeoff time.
>I used to be able to (long ago) roll up to the airport a mere 20mins before takeoff time.
I worked for a guy once when I was working in downtown Boston for a bit and the times I traveled with him he would absolutely drive me crazy by not wanting to grab a cab to the airport until well under an hour before flight time.
Today, I usually breeze through security in a few minutes with TSA Pre for early morning flights. I still arrive about 2 hours in advance because I find it more relaxing and my limo company pretty much wants that much slack anyway. (I rarely check luggage.)
Boom Overture, which does not yet exist, is supposed to have a range of 4,250 nm (presuming they can get their engines to actually exist, which is a giant question-mark). That means they can bring JFK-FRA into service, but SFO-SIN is going to be tight even on just one refueling stop (7340 nm but the jet stream is working against you the entire way- sometimes it will require a second refueling stop!).
There are a few airports (like MCO [Orlando’s commercial airport]) where I do try to give myself 90 minutes, but for most of my trips, I leave my house about 60 minutes before boarding and get to the airport about 20-30 before boarding.
I grew up in Cedarhurst, NY, 3 miles from Kennedy Airport. The Concorde at subsonic speeds was very loud. It was a loud, window-rattling rumble. But the worst of all were the 707s. They _screamed_. If I was outside when one went over Runway 31R/13L, I'd have to cover my ears.
Supersonic uses a lot more fuel. It's highly unlikely LA - Singapore can be done on a single tank. Adding a stop for refueling negates much of the time benefit.
A lot of these regulations are regulation on speed not noise. I expect some governments will be amenable to changing their speed restrictions to decibel restrictions (which Boom claims they can comply with).
I 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.
Unsure 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
They don't need to do that on their own though. They just need customers who want a supersonic plane who are willing to put their backing to overturning the ban. If a few dozen super rich people say they'd be able to create a million jobs by shaving 20 minutes off a trip 'the people' will often listen.
Overture is an airliner [1]. With a $5k price target (I’d guess $10k), their market is habitual business-class travellers. Not even the low-end private jet crowd.
Going after business class travelers in a world with Zoom and 'doing more with less' being the zeitgeist of corporate spending is starting to sound like doubling down on making gold-plated horse buggies five years after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.
> business class travelers in a world with Zoom and 'doing more with less' being the zeitgeist of corporate spending
Not sure if you’ve flown recently, but the front cabin is full, increasingly of leisure travellers who can work remotely. (Not upgrades, either. RASM is up and growing.)
Also, Zoom meetings are great for middle management and start-ups. But middle management wasn’t being flown around in business anyway. If you’re pitching a billion-dollar LP, you’re flying to meet them.
> Not sure if you’ve flown recently, but the front cabin is full, increasingly of leisure travellers who can work remotely. (Not upgrades, either. RASM is up and growing.)
It seems like US legacy carriers have gotten a lot better at offering discounted business class fares vs. simply throwing it open to upgrades and standbys when they can't fill the cabin with full fare pax.
I suppose maintaining exclusivity is less of a concern these days; they've probably figured out that competing with Middle Eastern and Asian carriers on luxury is a losing battle.
> Also, Zoom meetings are great for middle management and start-ups. But middle management wasn’t being flown around in business anyway.
Many companies still allow business class for transcontinental flights, for all employees. Big Tech is kind of an exception here from what I've heard.
IMO for domestic US travel business is rarely worth the premium anyway vs. premium economy; I'd rather grab a window seat with added legroom and work (or game on my Steam Deck) through the flight. Business class service is often a distraction, and in return you get food that's frequently worse than what you can find in the airport.
It 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.)
What about the Gulf States? Also lots of money, lots of ocean if they're traveling to South Asia/South East Asia, opportunity for subsonic to Europe, etc
For bizjets, that's another good use case, thanks.
I don't know how much travel there is along these routes, but you could probably shrink Dubai-Mumbai, say, from 3 hours to 1 hour, and that would be handy for meetings- only a 1.5 hour time difference with IST. But regular subsonic flights can also give you meetings in a day over that, so I'm not sure how much extra companies would be willing to pay for a commercial flight along those routes.
Concorde was very popular with business travelers, though. 3-4 hours in the air is a lot easier to deal with than 7-8. Maybe you don't get to a formal meeting on the same day but it still frees up time in the evening to meet with local colleagues, and leaves you much more fresh for that meeting the day after.
According to stories I heard, BA was able to turn a small profit on Concorde, but Air France never did(1). That was with each plane being given away for free (excuse me, 1 pound/franc each) subsidized by their governments. So with the prices that they charged (2) and free planes both airlines were close to break-even in operating costs. Presumably Boom is planning on charging more than 1 dollar for these planes, which means that the prices are going to have to be even higher than Concorde's were decades ago. And that means that people are going to have to justify it to their company even harder.
Believe me, I would love to have flown on one. I know a couple of guys who did, and it sounded really cool. But if the economic case doesn't close, then the only way they get sold is as toys for rich people, hoping to eventually trickle down to us mere mortals. Eventually. Maybe.
1: This is why after the crash AF decided to retire the Concorde, and going from having to pay half of the maintenance facility upkeep to paying all of it pushed BA from small profit into the red, hence BA following AF into retirement.
2: Which were high! Back as a teen in the 1990's I looked into it, hoping to talk my parents into flying one for a translant we were doing, and the cheapest ticket on a Concorde was like 3x more expensive than even 1st class on a 747. We flew steerage on a 747 instead.
3-4 hours in the air is a lot easier to deal with than 7-8 hours on a 1960s B-707.
On a Dreamliner with modern entertainment, higher cabin pressure, satellite internet, big windows, far better seats and much, much quieter engines? Meh, NBD.
I 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.
This? Nothing of general consequence. Once XB-1 goes supersonic, which Boom says it’ll do later this year, we’ll get real-world sonic-boom reduction data that could influence the FAA. It will also demonstrate the drag of their nose design, which should inform fuel-burn estimates for their airliner.
Following that, the hurdle is the supercruising engine. The XB-1 uses afterburning J85s to go supersonic. Presumably, getting the FAA to flip on overland bans would unlock the capital needed to finish Symphony [1].
For context, the prototype of the T-38 chase-plane that Boom employed went supersonic on its first flight in 1959. And that was a Northrop private-venture, not a government contract.
> Development of the engine will be by Kratos subsidiary Florida Turbine Technologies for engine design, General Electric subsidiary GE Additive for additive manufacturing consulting, and StandardAero for maintenance.
Impressively experienced folks behind the Symphony engine.
Never heard of Kratos or FTT, they just bought a small turbine maker. GE Additive doesn't sound like they're doing any design work, just manufacturing.
None of the majors were interested in making a 35K engine (or apparently modifying their cores with the previous 4 engine design), it would be in a zone between large biz jets and commercial single-isle. The former are hundred million dollar iterations of existing designs, the latter are billion dollar developments now. As this is not a conventional engine, it will cost $1B to certification if they're lucky.
I guess it's theoretically possible if KSA is funding it like Lucid and your expectations are way lower than Lucid.
FTT definitely knows how to design and build jet engines, but iirc all their designs so far are small subsonic engines for drones and cruise missiles. I'd love to see it happen, but his is brand new territory for them in both size and performance.
2 is pretty easy to explain in my opinion. It's not hard to find people who are passionate about aeronautics who want to build a radical new product, rather than be cog number 13482 in the machine of Airbus making fixtures for testing wing spars or whatever, but there aren't many opportunities to actually do that because the cost barrier is so high. But that rolls around to how is 1 possible, so I see your point there.
1. Smart people can learn new things. Musk was also a SWE before starting his companies. I don't know what he demonstrated to convince investors, but if nobody else is pitching you a supersonic jet company and you think a supersonic jet company is a good idea, you don't have the option of a different founder, you have the option of the deal in front of you.
2. People want to work on cool stuff, if you have the cash for it, it's not actually that hard to find talent, particularly if you are working on something without a competitive hiring market (ie jets, not AI atm).
3. I feel pretty confident they can build a plane, there are many people who have worked on planes, many components are off the shelf, etc. The question in my mind is if they can meet somewhere in the middle on sonic boom reduction with regulators in a reasonable amount of time.
He didn't get investors really, that why he financed it himself. Later he got a few friends to invest. They were able to get some loans based on NASA fixed-price contracts. And then they only raised again later when they were further along, much further then Boom.
Building a large jet-liner isn't something many companies have done. Let alone a supersonic one.
Lots of great founders and engineers have even less pedigree.
Ultimately being a great founder requires humility to hire people smarter than yourself, drive to face adversity, and storytelling to build allies + capital.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a high school dropout or a PhD if you can’t rally a team to believe in a mission.
Funding: money used to cost next to nothing just a few years ago. Recruiting: where would you rather work, at bureaucratic AF bean counter run Boeing with zero potential upside, or at a startup which even pays more? Can they do it: I think not. Not for any particular technical reason, but due to the higher cost of money, of which they still need a metric ton, and due to how long it all takes. Eventually they’ll pivot into something they can actually do. Probably military.
> 1. How did a SWE start and raise funds for this company
Back when I was a CompSci student two of my friends did their dormmate's fluid dynamics project overnight in exchange for half a liter of fluid dynamics. Personally I was more into helping my other friend with his analog circuit assignments.
What I'm getting at is that Software engineering is not completely removed from the rest of STEM fields.
Well, he was an employee at Amazon in 2001, and started a company that was acquired by Groupon in 2012 when they had reams of money to throw around (hope he wasn't paid in stock!).
He was a SWE at one point but it seems like his career was more in the executive/leadership space before starting Boom.
This seems like the ultimate strategy, not actually ever planning on releasing a well tested supersonic plane and airline but rather selling the dreams for somebody else to take on a highly risky and niche space.
If nobody else is doing it already that just means very smart people have crunched numbers at those giant corporations and decided against it.
10 years ago I would've been excited but when I see outlandish valuations and startups without relevant experience in the very field they are going after, I assume bad faith
Many 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.
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.
It 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?
Fighter trainer and supersonic passenger jet are very different niches. Fighter trainers have to be maneuverable and going supersonic is small part of their job.
There are subsonic jet trainers, and most don't go that fast. Supersonic passenger jet needs to go faster for a long time in a straight line.
Not sure if a fighter jet is easy to make, even countries like South Korea have taken two decades to produce the 4.5 generation fighter jet and they still can't build their own jet engines, and the KF-21 is still on block 1.
Avionics and radar seems to be very expensive and where fighter jet manufacturers can make their own to capture the margins but I'm questioning whether a founder with no aerospace experience is able to produce military jets with even more stringent regulation than supersonic flights
Does 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?
My 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.
> 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.
There is little benefit to supersonic, most time spent traveling to far off places is wasted on time zone adaptation/jet lag, and it's nicer to do that in a slower plane with a roomier business class seat you can sleep in. They're solving a problem nobody has. Further, these planes pollute massively, much more so than regular flying, and the planet can't take that anymore. Wave that away with biofuels, but that just makes flying multiple times more expensive on top of the existing supersonic cost multiplier. Also, the sonic boom annoys the shit out of people trying to sleep on the ground. Sunset industry.
> 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.
there's no market for supersonic mass transportation. the market is the ultrawealthy who will spend whatever on the fastest private plane. the startup insight here is : the rich are getting richer
Efficiency... 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.
It'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.
When 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.
Doesn'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.
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.
If 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.
Ballistic missiles, being ballistic, have limited accuracy. It's also easier to detect them (flying higher and with larger radar signature) and tell where they're heading.
I 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).
