American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft (opens in new tab)

And they still have not solved the problem that ultimately sunk the Concorde. Fuel costs made it unprofitable to operate whenever the price of oil went up.

The small niche of customers willing to pay a significant premium in order to save some travel hours is not big enough to sustain an entire industry of specialized mechanics, parts suppliers, pilots, etc... Basically you need a critical mass of people riding these aircraft every year before the relatively high fixed costs eat you alive, and it's very hard to get a lot of people to buy into a high priced luxury service.

Over water isn't too bad a problem as many major routes (e.g. US - Europe, US - Asia, US-Australia, Asia - Australia) are over long stretches of ocean.

But will the range be there? Concorde was severely range limited, which somewhat defeats the purpose of faster travel (if it only works on medium length routes).

Cutting a 14hr SYD-SFO flight down to 8.5hrs is just more impactful than cutting a 7h LHR-JFK flight down to 4.2 (when taking into consideration significant time at the airfields for taxi, boarding, security checks etc)

Concorde didn't have the range for long haul and once you need to land to refuel you lose all time savings.

>Probably will be very expensive but it's exciting for future possibilities

Are you kidding me! I cant recall the last time I DIDN'T need to be in Honolulu in THREE HOURS!! This is a life changer for my Macadamia nut Addiction...

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In all seriousness, the best commercial prospect for this is high-speed-cargo.

Need a part from GuangZhu like TODAY?

Need an organ transplant from Ohio to Munich, TODAY?

Need to fire 900 employees via ZOOM call whilst flying to your other mansions to feed your pet slaves, TODAY?

Possibilities are boundless!

Interesting that this is slower that the Concord which cruised at Mach 2. I wonder if a slightly lower speed makes the economics more sustainable.

it's all turboprops and no afterburner. so, expensive, but much more affordable than concorde, maybe to the point of competing with subsonic first class

Not only very expensive, but basically coach class all the way through, even for the rich people.

> over water

All the imagined routes are over large bodies of water. Is it key to the functionality or intent of the aircraft in some way? Why not NYC to LAX in 3 hours?

This is not a winning proposition. Even if we presume these will fly from a VIP terminal so the time you spend at an airport is low, you still need to get there. I just can't see everyone being flown in and out on a helicopter but maybe my imagination is stunted. Once you begin to add up those hours, you are just not saving enough time for the surely astronomical cost.

You'd need a much longer range for this to be a real win. If you double that range then you can do JFK-SIN or PTY-SYD and then you could do an LHR-PTY-SYD flight in ~12 hours which would be a massive win.

Melbourne to LA flight is currently 13-16 hours. This plane would cut it to around 8 if they could extend the range and it would make the flight bearable (I find that first 8 hours are OK but anything after that slowly turns to agony). But the distance between Melbourne and LA is 6883NM and even Brisbane to LA is 6246NM. So, Australia is still out of reach. One could do Brisbane to Honolulu at 4088NM and then Honolulu to LA but with the layover total time will probably be the same at best or much longer. Maybe one day...

How are they doing this with sustainable energy?

> If one airline has supersonic and others don’t that could be a huge blow to the others

I think it's going to come down to exactly how fast or slow this is, the price, and what the hard-product (eg the seats) are like. A modern First Class is a very, very comfortable way to travel, and other than the novelty value, I'd certainly rather spend 8 hours in lie-flat that 5 hours in a recliner. That'll also depend on the time-of-day of the flight -- worth saving the time perhaps if you're traveling East-to-West, but for West-to-East might as well just overnight it?

Long story short, I think it'll have use-cases, but it's not like Concorde -- when Concorde launched, 1st Class over the Atlantic looked a lot like 1st Class inside the states now -- comfortable, but not somewhere you wanted to spend a lot of time

My personal hypothesis is that Asian and cross-Pacific traffic has grown considerably in the decades since Concorde was flying and I look forward to wealthy eastern markets keeping the supersonic market viable. If American and United don't figure it out I could see a gulf country carrier or Singapore Airlines making it work.

I haven't looked into profitability yet but a quick look at the list of busiest routes shows that Asia dominates the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...

Concorde also didn't work out for management reasons and generated most revenue right before retirement when they they finally lowered ticket prices and stopped flying them half empty like the absolute idiots they were.

United also has a deal with Boom, that was June this year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57361193

A few years ago BA specifically excluded the idea of supersonic travel because you can provide a much more comfortable sleeper service at a similar price while making more profit.

LHR is capacity constrained right now so they don't have slots to add more flights. Hopefully the runway expansion will be finished by the time Boom airliners are actually in service.

> Optimized for speed, safety and sustainability

I hope any airline that gets these gets punished by all the other customers for the environmental irresponsibility of pushing this gass gussling technology.

Wow, you can blow through your whole annual carbon budget in only 4 hours!!

> big legacy carriers

Who are the new “non-legacy” carriers in this setting?

Companies love low cost R&D that doubles as low cost marketing!

I will say that I’ve seen plenty of “non-refundable” contracts in this industry (see Qatar’s ongoing tiff with Airbus over coating peeling issues) result in either side unilaterally cancelling delivery of airframes. It would really come down to what exactly went wrong whether or not AA could truly couldn’t claw that deposit back.

Awkward... The website FAQs still say "XB-1 test flights are planned for early 2022."

By 2026, with the typical delay till 2028 they’ll face the prospect of Earth-2-Earth starship flights

They still don't have an engine that allows them to fly supersonic...

> At the time of the first flight the options list contained 74 options from 16 airlines:[44]

14 commercial aircraft were delivered of 20 total.

Let us all hope. It's hard to imagine any future at all where this planet starts adding newly inefficienct means of travel. That there might be a market for faster travel is no comfort.

Some people want to live and work in different places.

Rather than high speed rail to get the masses into cities for work, we are getting fast planes for the wealthy to work in NYC and spend the weekend in European villas.

Makes you scratch your head trying to justify this while climate change is encouraging people to eat bugs.

For concorde the numbers are quite different. Stealing from truly epic concorde thread on pprune.

https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...

At the beginning of the take off roll, each engine would be burning around 21 tonnes/hour.

Anyway, back to some figues; at Mach 2, 50,000', the typical fuel burn per engine would be around 5 tonnes/hour, falling to around 4.2 tonnes/hour at 60,000'

Adding to the supersonic questions - how will they deal with the sonic booms? I assume they're still banned over land, which significantly adds to travel time?

Since no engine for it exists yet, no one knows.

Sorry, I had to reword and shorten the headline from the linked page to fit within HN's title length limit.

Thanks for clarifying I was confused why an airline was getting into the airliner business, this makes much more sense.

Yeah should say places order for boom aircraft

Agreed

and guess what happened at that time too: capital suddenly got very expensive and companies went under.

this is the worst possible time for launch and the name will be quite poetic

Unless Boeing or Airbus screw up financially, which is almost impossible, the duopoly is set in stone. It will take massive government backing to change that, Airbus itself is proof of that. The only parties that do challenge the big two on single aile jets are Bombardier and Embraer, one of which was bought by Airbus and one which was almost bought by Boeing.

I think there is some questions of them being able to scale up the production.

But Boeing and Airbus aren't invisible if you are offering a product they don't sell. See A220 with somewhere 220+ units sold. It did end up in hands of Airbus, but it was effort by Bombardier.

No. There is no way they can compete with say Airbus's quality and build quality. If they think people are gonna trust their lives to a startup company kept afloat by current interest rates over Airbus, I got a bridge to sell you.

If supersonic travel was in demand post-pandemic and rising inflation, interest rates, Airbus would've been all over it.

> The costs of flying an airplane isn't proportional to its fuel usage. The faster an aircraft is, the more flights it can perform per day.

It is indeed not proportional, but not in the way you are thinking. Drag (and ~fuel consumption) scales with velocity squared, so a plane flying twice at fast (and neglecting any time at the airport, which would make the argument even worse) would use four times as much fuel. I.e., even if twice the amount of passengers would be served, it would be done for four times the fuel consumption and four times the carbon emissions (or twice the fuel consumption per trip).

The fuel burned by an aircraft is almost certainly the dominant portion of its lifecycle carbon emissions. I expect the carbon emissions due to its manufacture are negligible by comparison. Have you seen a source either way?

On the heels of a news headline saying they’ve cancelled another 30,000 flights through November, I’d bet you’re on to something.

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/american-airlines-to-cu...

Getting from curb-to-gate today is easier and faster than it was pre-9/11.

That's just domestic. For international travel it has been a literal exponential decrease in hassle.

Of course, this all depends on whether or not the airport you use (and it is 100% dependent on the airport itself) has deployed all of the automated systems being used to lower terminal transit times.

Seems more alluring as a private jet.

There is no substitute for F2F for some types of work. Everyone I know hates flying, even if it is lie-flat. If someone can reduce the pain of flying to UK/Europe and Asia by knocking a few hours off then I would definitely prefer it.

I'm pretty sure a Europe-Australia line that doesn't take two days with 3 layovers would sell like hotcakes regardless of accommodations.

I dont think supersonic will be a success. Remote has made business travel a lot less necessary and more predictable, so people are more likely to plan multi-hop business tours rather than flash transatlantic and transpacific flights. The failure of A380 is also telling: people are fine with flexible hops. But most of all people want to reduce their carbon footprint by minimizing travel distances, not travel times.

So we can kind of rough it out - improving speed will make fuel costs go up (but how much?) but other fixed costs will go down (pilot time, airframe time, etc).

However you may also be stuck where the people who will pay for the faster time are the types who will NOT sit in cattle class, so your airplane will have to mainly be first-class/business style seating.

Why would you assume this aircraft wouldn't have a luxurious cabin? It looks pretty nice from the one rendering they have on the site. 1-1 seating, so direct aisle access for all. Plenty of room.

Aviation makes up a rather small portion of transportation emissions. I don’t think there is much point in focusing on clean air travel when cars and trucks produce such a massive amount of carbon emissions in comparison.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

This will be hardly greener than taking a regular aircraft.

I thought it was a reference to the supersonic boom, although supposedly their planes will not have that loud noise. But as an airplane name it's very bad, nobody wants to go boom boom

I'll offer Iceberg Cruise Ships Inc. free of charge.

It already is if you fly business class. I’ve done drop off to gate <10 minutes at LAX & SEA multiple times.

It's phrased in such a way to give the idea that they've made a significant commitment, but it's entirely possible it was something like a 1% down payment.

"Non-refundable deposit" could be $1. In exchange they get their name mentioned in a load of press as being associated with new technology etc., so massively worth it for them. Also worth it for Boom as having "orders" from credible airlines makes them look more credible.

It's the manufacturer's name, not the airline. No one says "Thank you for flying Airbus". They would still say "Thank you for flying American Airlines".

I thought the same.

But, it's an interesting thought, and in line with a very interesting thread that kragen brought to my attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32009925

FedEx likes to buy out Boeing facilities so that they're not "completely reliant" on Boeing for anything, see https://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/news/102874-fedex-to-take... "Air cargo carrier FedEx Express (FX, Memphis Int'l) is to take over the lease of Boeing's Dreamlifter Operations Centre at Paine Field, Everett, quashing any hopes of a return of the B787 Dreamliner production to Washington State."

I wonder why more airlines don't choose to do similar things.

Yes these are "non-binding" commitments that are just marketing. Very deceptive but standard practice in aerospace. For example only a fraction of the Concordes that were committed in this way were actually purchased.

Until the plane is actually flying in the air you should just treat any announcements as misleading (they announced that their test airframe was ready, what, 3-4 years ago?).

> When reading the original title, I had the impression that the company was going to be acquired by AA.

Same... at least they should put an S to aircraft... but then again maybe they hit the strict character limit...

Same here, regarding the misperception of Boom being acquired by AA

Totally agree about the wording of the title comment and other commenters in this thread.

But "Boom Supersonic is transforming air travel with Overture, the world’s fastest airliner, optimized for speed, safety, and sustainability. Serving both civil and government markets, Overture will fly at twice the speed of today’s airliners and is designed to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Overture’s order book, including purchases and options from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines stands at 130 aircraft. Boom is working with Northrop Grumman for government and defense applications of Overture. Suppliers and partners collaborating with Boom on the Overture program include Collins Aerospace, Eaton, Safran Landing Systems, Rolls-Royce, the United States Air Force, American Express, Climeworks, and AWS."

This^ is significant support they already have. So they could operate for 10+ years, which seems like they will (even if they are just in R&D and burning cash). In a way, it is viable to the employees and suppliers, if they get paid for such a long time haha.

The deposit could be $1 for all we know and fully cancelable with no commitment to buy or deploy. The press release is basically fluff.

> Good luck to Boom, but I am unconvinced this is a viable company and a viable business.

Same. I think their timelines are too aggressive. I want to be proved wrong though!

Just want to reply to my own post here to add that most people don't realize that the Cirrus SR22 is the world's best selling single engine piston aircraft and has been for the past 20 years. And it's wholly owned by the Chinese government. I'm aware this is a different market, but I want to illustrate how we're losing our lead in some critical areas, while we focus on creating solutions looking for a problem.

Incidentally, Boom is 5 minutes from my office here in Centennial, Colorado and where I fly out of KAPA. I'd like to see innovative US aerospace companies succeed, but I feel like these guys are chasing the wrong idea.

This isn't going to be applicable to 95+% of aviation, but for something like a flight between the US and Australia, e.g. LAX to SYD?

Going from a 15h to 8h flight will be huge -- that's 30h to 15h round-trip.

I'm American and visited Australia once, and realized I probably never would again, it's just too far. An Australian friend of mine here in the US only went home to see his family every few years. It just takes sooo long, stuck in an economy-class seat.

Supersonic makes a lot of sense not as general-purpose, but for long-haul flights between hemispheres. At least until there's an economy-price "sleeper car" equivalent accomodation where you can actually sleep on flights.

Agreed. Boom claims they will be "sustainable" because they are going to invent some kind of synthetic biofuel.

Wait, it looks like I either misremembered that claim, or they have backed away from it:

> "Overture’s fleet will be able to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuels."

https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability

Color me skeptical. Making existing aviation more climate-friendly would be a much more worthy goal than this ridiculous supersonic vanity project.

The world is a big place, it can handle 100 or so of these fluffing around.

And there actually may be realistic optimization scenarios.

People don't want to have sympathy for 'world leaders' for example, but often physical presence is an important thing. And they waste so much time.

I don't like my own PM but I'd rather they spent a little more to cut his travel time down; his time is extremely expensive.

And this sounds ridiculous at first glance: but even if he could literally get reasonable sleep more often. His decisions are so impactful, the leverage so much, it matters. And I don't even like the guy at all.

That aside the secondary advantages from it might be positive, we need R&D that's ahead of the curve.

I'm fine with this as long as everyone isn't flying it all the time.

Tone-deaf to many people who care about climate, sure. But what about to the executive types who believe they are so important that they need to be there in-person, and they get to expense these tickets to the corporate account? I think the same executives who are trying to kill work-from-home and have an inflated view of the benefits of in-person meetings will buy these tickets up.

In the GA segment, the Pipistrel Panthera is really interesting.

With the currently available conventional engine, it vastly outperforms the Cessnas and Cirruses, AFAICT.

So with the hybrid and pure electric options in development (these were planned from the start, so the plane is designed for them), it is still competitive.

https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/general-aviation...

(Not affiliated or associated in any way, just a fan of aviation innovation)

That was my first thought as well. We are in a climate emergency, and currently airlines are not paying for the damage they are systematically adding to the catastrophe. I don’t see a future where this just continues. Either we really mess up the climate with all the societal collapse that entails, or we make these polluters pay for their damage. In either case there is hardly a future for this “innovation”.

> Getting rid leaded avgas

I was shocked to hear that leaded gasoline is still around, so I did a quick search. Turns out most (all?) piston-engine driven airplanes still run on leaded gas. Jet airliners don't, so I'm not sure if the overall impact is significant, but nonetheless shocking to hear that we're still spraying lead into the air we breathe.

There's a flip side to reconsidering aviation--the choices we make as consumers. Since leaving the aircraft manufacturing industry over 20 years ago, I have flown on 3 flights at approximately 5000 miles total, all 3 of which I wish I could have avoided. I'm not saying everyone could live this way, or that I'm particularly environmentally responsible in general, but it is possible. My life during those 20 years was rewarding and interesting, for the record.

The pandemic was terrible for the most part, but it did give us an opportunity to rethink how we live and work, including how to lessen future pandemics and enviromental degradation with our choices on transportation.

Feels like there is a business case for people willing to pay to reduce trip times for trans continental flights.

The problem is that the greenhouse gas impact will be higher for a supersonic trip compared to a subsonic one. This is on top of the issue that we don't really have a good low carbon alternative for longer range air travel (batteries don't have anywhere near enough specific energy). The best option we have is synthetic jet fuel produced from green electricity. Producing jet fuel that way is many times more expensive than fossil fuel jet fuel.

> to get less people around the world faster

What does “less people” mean? You mean Boom is targeting only the ultra-rich? That’s not their aim. They aim to make supersonic flight both possible and affordable.

> Getting rid leaded avgas

Isn't that more chemical engineering? Boom sounds mostly mechanical.

> moving away from fossil fuels altogether which includes fields like energy storage and electric propulsion

Isn't this mostly battery tech? Seems like a stretch for these experts to be working on that.

> developing an efficient trainer to replace the piston lead-gasoline burning C172 that is so ubiquitous and makes up much of the 1500 required hours for an ATP license.

At least this sounds like something in their wheelhouse, but needless to say, there's no money in that.

Boom is developing a plane that has demand. Simple as that. Not everyone needs to try to save the world.

The idea is to move princelings around the world faster than lesser princelings. So long as they have the money they will suck up status symbols like a supersonic private jet.