Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video] (opens in new tab)

I don't disagree that it's proof they will succeed, it is however proof that they can build a supersonic aircraft. That is no small thing.

Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.

In terms of 'risk stacking'[1] they are definitely a big step closer to being in successful.

[1] Risk Stacking is the set of risks a company faces between the current time and being operational. Technology risk is always level 1 (can they build what they say they can build), after that comes market risk (will people buy it with enough margin for both continued operation of the company as well as further development), and the third is execution risk (can they operate efficiently enough to create a net positive economic product.)

Concord was actually a cash cow for all airlines who had them. The only reason why airlines stopped using Concord was because of the crash and the inherent safety issues that were found. But the actual business model worked - limited in scope but it was highly profitable.

“That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the concept of the Concorde might not have been a worldwide hit, it was certainly a good market fit for these two airlines at the time.”

Overall it was obviously a money looser because of the high development costs (paid for by the governments).

It only needs to be economically viable for billionaires bored with collecting yachts and $100 millionaires who want to flex with charter flights. Scheduled commercial service is a pipe dream but not a requirement for success.

I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.

It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.

You also have to make it environmentally sustainable like they did when they talked about a partnership with Prometheus fuels back in 2019, even then what's the point compared to regular planes if these "are likely to burn between 4.5 and 7.5X more fuel than subsonic aircraft in 2035." [0]

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/rutherdan.bsky.social/post/3lgstwvv... -> 2021 NASA assessment https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205009400

Basically, the critics: "unless you build a 100B company, we are not wrong"

I mean, yeah, sure.

Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards.

And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.

> you are not going to be able to buy a ticket

You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years.

Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.

Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.

Extremely generous investors?

I really don't think that will be competition at all. People like to travel and the demand is there for faster international flights. For business travel, people either prefer to go in person or have to be in person. Also with time zone differences, virtual meetings require one party to often have to meet at odd times. The ticket price probably will be higher than what most people want to spend for vacation, but there will still be plenty of people willing to pay.

> paired via Starlink

What advantage does Starlink provide here? Isn't it a higher-latency, slower connection than most people have access to at home?

Until they make it at least three times bigger, yes.

Silly question, but would it be feasible to just equip a plan with a telescoping nose merely for this effect that could be deployed prior to supersonic flight?

There are residents for sure in that corridor, but the residents are on Edwards AFB, and are fairly used to sonic booms. When I was on Edwards, there was still the last operating SR-71, and that boomed any time it flew.

GP was asking about this flight's sonic boom. That's the whole point of Boom: to make supersonic airplanes with small sonic booms.

Right, and making an improvement is a big part of Boom's marketing. (It's in their name?!) I'm surprised I didn't hear them make any comments about it in the video during the flight as they crossed the sound barrier each time. Unless I missed it?

This doesn't say anything about today's flight though?

> Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.

Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.

Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.

There's zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year, when zero of the market leaders want their business.

Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation.

Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about building and iterating new engines hundreds of times until you've made enough iterations that things stop melting in corner cases. It's about finding out, the hard way, every single way your assembly could possibly fail, melt, explode, wear too fast, or otherwise fail.

Understand that making modern engines often requires significant innovation in non-destructive testing to ensure the actual parts you are buying/making are up to spec.

Understand that Russia has a portion of decades of experience building, designing, and INNOVATING in jet engines and still struggles to build modern jet engines.

Understand that China struggles to produce economical modern jet engines despite massive funding, huge incentive, and literal national security concerns. The C19 jetliner currently uses an American engine.

Empirically, building modern jet engines seems HARDER than building modern rocket engines! It seems to require maintaining literal decades of raw engineering experience and patience, and now scale all that effort to a company that in 9 years has been told by all existing engine manufacturers "Nope, we won't make a profit on this plan", and has instead spent their time building a single demo plane that does not demonstrate any experience in building engines.

Perhaps for Jared Issacman type of billionaire .

Rich people prefer the Rolls or Bentley when being a passenger, Sport/ performance vehicles are only fun if you are driving, I would expect the G650/800 style jets would be the preferred plane even if it is slower when you can travel in style and with your entourage.

Also range would be a consideration to this type of jet for passenger travel. Travel times makes difference only for long distance over the ocean flights, these jets tend to be quite short ranged.

XB-1 is only designed for 1000nm at 2.2 Mach compared to the 7000nm of G650 with cruise speed of 0.92 Mach. Basically XB-1 can fly for 40minutes at a time at its cruise(top?) speed of 2.2Mach

I'm in WS myself now, going on 12 years.

They have some interest in a "special mission" version, a common aerospace euphemism for militarized.

They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.

That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...

Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.

I can't think of a single aerospace company that is not dual-use. I doubt Boom is building with that in mind but if they're around in 50 years, I'd be shocked if they did not have a thriving defense business.

(which I think is good but ymmv)

The military has had supersonic aircraft since the 1950s, why would they care about this?

Is there a shortage of those?

They won't do supersonic jets in particular, but they already have a ton of moonshots to try make sustainable aviation possible and with economics that make sense. Stuff like hydrogen propulsion, hydrogen electric, and battery electric designs, with a variety of weird shapes and forms. They're the only big aircraft manufacturer with such a wide array of potentially groundbreaking (if they make it) research. And theirs is drastically more important than Boom - time and time again, it has been proven that mass aviation is all about economics, not speed. Soon it will be economics + sustainability, speed being a niche which might not even be profitable (Concorde, Convair and many others have tried differentiating themselves on speed and failed).

https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hydro...

Won't do things like A380?

> How do you make this profitable?

Selling it for more than it costs to build.

Computer-based modelling, advances in our understanding of supersonic flight and sonic booms and a mature civil (and private) aviation industry make the profit case much more compelling than it was for the Concorde. (The real test will be in their engine.)

By understanding that it'll take over a decade, maybe multiple decades, to break even (because it's not a tech company) and planning accordingly.

Could this thing take a polar route from New York to Hong Kong?

For Concorde the entire supply chain is long gone. A clean sheet design based around currently available parts would be cheaper than trying to resurrect an old design.

As for speed, Mach 3 is really tough because of extreme airframe heating. Mach 2 is about the highest sustained speed an airplane can manage without using really exotic materials or active cooling.

You are contradicting yourself.

You can either a) rebuild the Concord or b) use modern technology.

If you use modern technology, its not a Concord anymore.

And you can't magically go Mach 3 just because you say its 'modern'. What existing engine can do that? And even if you had an engine, a Concord will not do that anyway.

So really you are talking about developing a whole new plane. And that's gone cost 10-20 billion $ and including the engine like quite a bit more.

I think Boom is doing exactly what you propose. What you propose just doesn't look like you expect it to look.

"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..

$200 million in North Carolina for production:

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/nc-...

$60 million from the US Air Force for development:

https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/flight-te...

$2 million SBIR grant for development:

https://www.sbir.gov/awards/187787

> The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde

I would think that is not very hard to accomplish. Their first flight is almost half a century after Concorde’s. Technology has progressed.

As an (imperfect) comparison, in subsonic flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Past):

“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”

Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.

Concorde used supercruise for most of the flight - afterburners were only used for departure and for transonic acceleration.

Concorde didn’t use afterburner during cruise. There’s a lot of discussion from pilots and engineers in a long thread https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question-7.h... describing the actual flight profile.

There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html

> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.

Why is this interesting?

No. I don't think that's correct. The Concorde used its afterburners during take off and to get through the transonic region, where the drag is very heavy. Once you've gone past that the drag drops. At that point the Concorde can turn off the after burners.

Source: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-engine-re-heats

Boom also requires afterburners, at least for now.

You can watch them kick in on the telemetry (which goes from "100%" to "A/B" for all three engines) at the bottom of the video around the 58:35 mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/-qisIViAHwI?feature=shared&t=35...

    > The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic flight, so it burned a ton of fuel.

Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise

    > Supercruise is sustained supersonic flight of a supersonic aircraft without using afterburner.

    > Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic

Real question: How many in-production/operation engines in world can fly supersonic without afterburners? I think it is only a handful, all insanely expensive and backed with squillions of dollars of gov't/military money. And, the maintenance cycle must be out of this world expensive.

There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.

And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.

> there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation

There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.

This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part

> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.

They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.

Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.

Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.

> which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks

That's while my tesla robotaxi is making that 100 bucks driving leprechauns to their golden pots!

Totally not vaporware guys.

New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.

I suspect it'll only ever be a toy for billionaires.

For the rest of us, isn't air travel supposed to be something we're giving up/ramping down due to climate change?

There were enough passengers, and flying the Concorde actually became profitable for the airlines once they figured out they just needed to charge through the nose for it. This was despite prodigious fuel consumption and that fuel becoming much more expensive after the oil crisis.

The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.

> Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?

Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.

My take is it's not even an economic problem. Unless you fly really fast (like Mach 3++), flying east sucks.

Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.

If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.

With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.

But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).

Concorde did that in 3 hours FYI.

If it's already going to be expensive and exclusive they can easily design a program where all the passengers have to be some kind of TSA++ pre-approved ahead of time and perhaps have a special terminal and/or security screening line.

The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.

Last time I flew from Heathrow it was 45 minutes from car to take off, and that was with a 20 minute door close.

It doesn’t take 2 hours to go through security , certainly not in the first class section in any case.

On the live cast the presenter mentioned Boom have already secured ~130 pre-orders, including United Airlines. Not bad considering the Concorde anticipated 100+ orders but only manufactured a fraction of that.

I hadn't made that connection but it's really apt. People watching Falcon 1 flight 4 get to orbit probably said "It's 165 kg payload, so what? We've been sending satellites to orbit for 50 years. ULA just sent (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1538) a 2000 kg payload to orbit 3 weeks ago!" It really is significant what Boom did in the time frame and budget they had.

It also had a three person crew, and post 9/11 was the start of structurally higher oil prices, both of which were a death knell.

The true nail in the coffin was the development of the lie flat business seat, which meant that you could cross the Atlantic in three hours in a plush but cramped seat, or spend less money to sleep for six on a redeye and arrive well rested. At that point three hours was not a compelling enough time savings, but the Concorde also didn't fly far enough to do routes where the speed resulted in more significant time savings, like on transpacific routes.

Also, my understanding is that AF was not profitable on Concord even ignoring those accounting costs. So AF wanted to shutter the plane after the accident, and changing the costs of shared maintenance equipment from 50/50 to 100/0 made BA's numbers go into the red too, because it wasn't very much profit.

Yeah of course there was always going to be an end date. However, there are people saying it was not profitable at all and that is not really the truth.

Bannister knows probably more than anyone about the topic and tells the story well. Thoroughly recommend the book. His tale of a guy called Bill being invited into the cockpit and discreetly given the controls to fly supersonic was awesome. Of course, later over a beer Bill (Weaver) talked of his times flying the Blackbird at twice the speed, and of the time it disintegrated around him.

NYC to LA in 3 hours would be an 8 AM flight which would land at 8 AM, same day.

Just mind boggling to think of, no trouble finding 100 people daily who want to do a day-trip to California.

I suspect if Concorde had been made by an American company the “overland” issue would have been solved.

I thought about Hawaii also. Rich cities in Northeast Asia might also be a good target: Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing to Hawaii might be good targets for weekly (or charter) flights. The tricky part (except Tokyo) would be negotiating supersonic flyover rights. I cannot imagine that Japan would be excited to have regular supersonic flights over their main island from Seoul or Beijing.

Regarding LA<->NYC, I think you could make a dent in that market with an all business class flight that flies slightly less than Mach 1 (0.95 or whatever) and has special security screening and baggage handling. People might be willing to pay 30-50% more compared to business class on a regular flight.

Last: Is there a video game like Theme Park or Railroad Tycoon that allows for the simulation of an airline market? That could be fun.

Air force one is always a safe proven design.

The product line was effectively cancelled by the oil crisis of 1973 and severe economic issues in the mid 70s. It had nothing to do with a crash (of an airplane; there was a market crash involved).

The Concorde manufacturing was cancelled in the 1970s. The crash was in 2000. The last flight was in 2003.

They didn't stop flying due to a crash. It was the money.

Because the 737 Max had type commonality with the old 737s, and because of how behind Boeing was on deliveries, the pilots could still fly on the old 737s and that stemmed some of the loss of money.

Concorde was a very unique plane, the pilots were specially trained for it, and having them sit around was expensive.

You don't know what you are talking about. The product line was cancelled many decades before the crash due to lack of sales. After the crash, the Concorde fleet was modified, returned to service and remained in service for another 3 years before it was removed from service and retired due to the high cost of operation.

The manufacturer withdrew support for Concorde so the airlines couldn’t it anymore

Thus is the might of the “Industrial” part of the Military-industrial Complex, of which Boeing is a significant part and which Concorde was not.

The GP isn’t, a major part of Boom’s initial PR was that they’d enable domestic supersonic by solving the sonic boom issue through technology. Over the years aviation watchers have suggested they might have failed at that and are looking to solve it through spending VC money on lobbyists to allow noisy supersonic overflights.

> ... meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest subsonic airplanes

Extremely dishonest: as far as I can tell (CFR title 14, B36.5) there are no specific noise level regulations for subsonic cruise flight (i.e. not take-off and landing) because you can't hear subsonic aircraft at cruise altitude. On the other hand, however, you will be able to hear sonic booms.

The SR-71 engine is a weird beast operating like both a ramjet and turbojet due shaping the flow and injecting fuel in the air stream.

A ramjet [1] stays efficient at high speeds even though it on the outside kind of looks like an afterburner.

  It was a conventional afterburning turbojet for take-off and acceleration to Mach 2 and then used permanent compressor bleed to the afterburner above Mach 2. The way the engine worked at cruise led it to be described as "acting like a turboramjet".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

The afterburner on the SR-71's engine is being fed super-compressed bypass air from the intake. It can ignite the exhaust with comparatively minuscule amounts of fuel when compared to a regular turbojet.

At speeds beyond Mach 3, you don't even need fuel to ignite the oxygen. The simple friction and drag of the airframe is enough to ignite the oxygen around it and surround the aircraft with superheated plasma.

They had just started the run right after a positioning turn.

Nor did my parents, but I guess I should have clarified better. They at least had the option to be able to do this. It was taken away when Concorde was grounded, but now we have an opportunity for supersonic flight for people, of course with a price tag.

That's a good thing in my books.

The camera also lost focus on the jet during the record where it went transonic for the first time ever (around 1:01). It looks like they struggled for a while to recover focus against the featureless sky because I would guess they had their lens set to auto focus, which uses a spot or grid of consensus edge detectors. There's no circular polarizer filter equipped because you can see window glare, and that momentarily caused the AF grid to choose the window as the subject because there wasn't (any?) a good enough stabilizer. For a relatively stationary subject like this, it's more reliable to pull focus manually because the camera can be jostled without confusing an AF algorithm. Even better to periodically use spot auto-focus to acquire the sharpest focal plane, then flip it to manual.

It was actually fine for the air-to-air shots but all shots from the ground/drones were very washed out.

Somebody must have forgotten to load a LUT into the camera!

That's been the status quo since Concorde. The problem is it's hard to make a supersonic jet that has decent subsonic performance, you kind of have to pick one flight regime or the other to optimize for. And the market for business jets that you can only really fly transoceanic is small.

I was more disappointed that the shot went out of focus as the plane crossed the barrier. I did find it rather amusing that as soon as they started lauding starlink, the feed dropped, which is what you are talking about I think

Growing pains for their camera crew