Constraints on the customer base:
- Absolutely must have face-to-face meetings on another continent
- Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights
- Can't do any productive work on a normal flight, so important to reduce flight time
- Not staying for a long visit, so cutting a couple of hours from the flight is important (Edit: added this item)
- Not rich enough to fly charter
That's a tough set of criteria, especially with CFOs looking to cut unnecessary business travel. Zoom is a lot cheaper than business-class travel.
After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project.
Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights.
I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.
And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche.
> if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week
I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes.
Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)
Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
And we wonder why the planet is set to "broil."
"Who cares, someone else is paying for it."
If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.
Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result.
There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.
Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors.
Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.
Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche
Metadata though... that's another story.
And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.
The growing backlash against the environmental impact of private jets may change this calculation a bit.
That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.
This means you can spend more fuel/be less efficient overall for a much more comfortable acceleration profile.
In terms of safety, starship will fly hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before people fly on them. They'll get there.
In reality a Starship flight would probably sell few very expensive seats instead; just like Boom's aircraft only has 50 seats. Which would make it worse than subsonic flights in terms of fuel used, but still competitive with supersonic.
Also, starship has more pressurized volume than a 747. You can fit a lot of people.
It doesn't much matter what is/isn't possible, or what could/couldn't be economical, if the company & engineers who say they are working to develop it...are not actually capable of shipping even a puny nerfed toy version of their supposed product.
My guess: the RR engineers concluded "maybe it's possible, but these idiots will never achieve it". Then quietly shared that with their colleagues at other engine makers.
Haven't seen any explanation on why Boom can't just buy a few current fast jet engines for their demonstrator.
The other stuff is incremental efficiencies, not enough to fundamentally change the very challenging math of supersonic flight efficiency.
The faster you go in an atmosphere the more the atmosphere resists. It gets less and less efficient the faster you go. That's just how it works.
They don't have an engine for a plane that they have yet to fly, for a concept that has limited commercial viability in the first place. We will look at companies like United and American Airlines that signed letters of intent to purchase these as foolish idiots.
In the day and age of remote meetings, there is nearly no alpha in being able to be in London three hours earlier from NYC. You would simply hop on a Zoom call if it were that urgent. Nobody is going to pay up for the cost if they are flying for leisure. There are limited viable routes in in the first place.
Unlike Theranos, supersonic engines already exist and they are regularly used by the military. The issue is that none of the big boys are willing to pony up a lot of money to build, test and certify one for civilian use unless they can definitely get paid for their effort.
And yes, there are willing buyers who will pay ludicrous amounts for comfort or speed, as the increasingly elaborate arms race in first class (eg. multi-room suites a la Etihad's Residence) and the entire private jet market demonstrate. The Concorde was profitable towards the end of its life despite mind-bogglingly high fuel costs, so there's definitely a market if -- and it's a big if -- Boom can pull it off.
It’s a very bold statement to say when you have no evidence that Boom would or even could ship an airplane that would put people’s lives in danger.
Theranos was not simply a company that made large promises that required leaps in technology and then lied repeatedly about having succeeded in making those leaps. They risked patient safety by providing phony blood test results. It’s important not throw around that epithet unless it’s earned.
To really be Theranos-tier, they'd have lied about having the engine already. They didn't go that far, they never claimed to have the engine already. Nor is the engine they desire one that's actually impossible, as Therano's vision was.
Has it cost them anything at this point? A little PR bump for zero expense and zero consequences doesn't seem all that foolish.
Especially if the plane needs long runways to takeoff.
Due to the travel times others have touched on to the major airports in nearly all big cities.
Lighter private jets have a huge advantage in travel time of being able to take off from the closest small airports.
If it's a really long route, like Sydney to London, then it would start making sense. But this could not support the thousands of engines needed to break even on R&D costs.
* Airport-to-city travel time
* Airport security time
* Optimize boarding (very straightforward solutions but require passenger education)
* Speeding up taxiing / takeoff sequencing (not sure how but there's gotta be a better way than what we do now)
Each of those are challenging but would be more impactful (and more solvable?) than supersonic flight time!
Ick.
If it was more like 3x, that might make it work on a cost benefit in certain cases, but physics makes fools of us all it seems…
Much easier and faster experience. That's how JSX operates.
You also wouldn't need to add any additional infrastructure as opposed to ideas like vac-trains or MAGLEV in general.
You still need one of the most expensive parts of that infrastructure which is the rights of way, stations/highway interchanges and a transport corridor from the city to an airport (which can't be as close as a conventional airport due to 5x the flight volume, louder engines and sonic booms).
The 900km of a rail corridor in the low population regions doesn't cost as much as that 30km of highway or metro tunnel directly under the CBD and 70km of arterials, onramps and interchanges.
Does anybody know more about this "military variant"?
That would not fit inside of Boom's aircraft.
Boom can increase fuel efficiency via the airplane architecture with e.g. composites. The near commercialisation new civil aircraft from china achieved a 10% reduction doing so. The same can be said for noise reduction. Hence what Boom should do is simply to order Rolls royce to produce the same engines again. However one should know that R&D for the successor of the concorde engine has already been spent and such engine has been designed. Unfortunately the U.S imperialist oppressive bans killed the concorde economics before the production of said engine, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593....
Now about the noise levels let's adress the fact that it is a non-issue. 1) If you look at the empirical scientific comparisons, the mean noise of the concorde is significantly lower than many civil airplanes, especially the ones with 4 engines. 2) The boom while intense, is very transient. It is not heard from people inside the airplane. It is a non-problem for the obvious reason that your jet does not need to be supersonic for 100% of the trajectory, therefore a plane can and should go to very high altitude (already a supersonic requirement) and/or above low density population (rural, ocean) and only then bypass the speed of sound, making the noise boom a moot problem. While this solution is trivial, political bans and people hysteria isn't.
What is at stakes? A lot of things, supersonics isn't just cool, it is a life saving technology that can allow the transfer of key people in records time (expert surgeon in niche disease emergency for example) which can have very high utilitaristic value. It can also make it much more pratical for key people to meet physically (e.g. key academicians for a symposium about advancing the state of the art in a topic) which is high impact considering cognitive biases regarding human agency.
Note however there are other supersonic engine makers than rolls royce, for example any country that makes supersonic military jets can obtain such engines. It is easy to forget that the first commercial supersonic engine was not the concorde but a russian tupolev. While the tupolev has reliability issue, few know they had an alternative engine (likely more reliable). In addition to the tupolev engines, I would look into the state of the art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 Regarding SOTA civilian turbofan there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 in development, although it can power an antonov (!) and seems very versatile I wonder if (not a turbojet) it can perform supersonicity without afterburners.
regarding those options however, russia bad, china bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_XA100 https://www.geaviation.com/press-release/military-engines/ge...
When something like Boom announces:
American said it too had paid a “non-refundable deposit” – it also did not say how much – as part of an agreement to buy up to 20 of the jets.
I foresee the failure of all supersonic airplane ventures until NASA comes up with a viable sonic-boom free design. Even then, the fuel burn could still make it unsalable.
Developing a jet engine that could allow Boom to meet its performance targets is a nation-state level endeavor.