Their website says:
> Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7
Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR<->JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip. I am surprised that it is so cheap. I guess that route is very competitive.
I don't understand the excitement on HN about Boom. The market is tiny. This is a terrible investment. What is the global demand for this aeroplane (if they ever build it)? Maybe... max 200. Look at the order book from the 1960s when the Concorde first flew. Less than 100 total orders. Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Also, it is terrible for the environment. The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
(Various edits.)
Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy?
Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure. But the real reason for the ban was that they were foreign-made sonic booms.
Now the world's only supersonic passenger plane is being made in America, you might find Congress is much less worried about sonic booms.
You are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
This was done to prepare people and gauge the reaction to BOEING sonic booms, for the SST. Everything about a supersonic future was scuttled when it became obvious that people clearly suffered when planes flew supersonic above them.
Keep in mind that the US Air Force still does not go supersonic over populated areas except when absolutely necessary, like during 9/11.
This study mind you was done with SCHEDULED sonic booms. Now imagine, instead of being able to set your clock to a loud, disruptive noise and plan around it, you must deal with completely unpredictable and variable EXPLOSION of sharp noise (130ish decibels is standing 100m from a jumbo jet as it spools up or a trumpet being blasted directly into your ear from a couple feet away)
People already hate the noise of cities when that noise is an occasional quiet siren heard from a mile away a few times a day. Imagine instead if the noise was completely unpredictable explosions. Also imagine you can't move out of the city to get away from it, because the sound blankets an entire flight corridor.
Unless NASA finds a way to magically evaporate all the energy in a sonic boom such that it makes almost no noise at ground level, we would have to literally depopulate mile wide corridors of the US just so a bunch of stupidly rich people can get from NY to LA in an hour? Nah
Sources:
Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet
Thomas Petzinger, Hard Landing
I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).
Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder.
> The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes.
5-7 times as much.
My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.
Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.
If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA <-> Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.
One of the unique selling points of their proposed aircraft is that it won't be so loud:
> Boom says Overture will be a lot quieter than Concorde and the supersonic military aircraft that were flying at the time the FAA ban
How have they demonstrated that they know how to cause quieter sonic booms?
Secondly: Although the final proof of it is in the full scale aircraft for sure, a lot can be done with software modelling (1) and wind tunnels these days. And with the scale model that just flew, to be followed by "checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly." (2)
Thirdly, I point you to other "quieter supersonic" aircraft work in progress, the X-59. Some of their evidence-gathering process is detailed at the Wikipedia link, "development" section. (3)
It will be interesting to see how these work out; but if they do not, then it's a failure of modelling and design, not because they missed the directly obvious. But if you are an aerospace engineer and know more about this subfield, then say so.
1) "Boom has perfected its aircraft’s efficient, aerodynamic design using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel"."
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/28/travel/boom-supersonic-fi...
2) https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/boom-supe...
3) https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/x-59-quiet-sup...
There's been considerable work on sonic boom mitigation for many decades. Boom's long nose, flat underside, top engine, small wingspan delta wings are all designs expected to mitigate a sonic boom. Let's see if it works in practice.
I feel that you're getting diminishing returns at the point of reducing 4 hours to 3h30, given that flight time is just a part of the whole "door to door" time, there are several hours at least that aren't flight time, and that the expensive tickets all come with an hour or three in an airport lounge.