[HN Gopher] Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
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Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
Author : rayhaanj
Score : 318 points
Date : 2025-01-28 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| For those wondering, it is in flight right now
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Watching it. :-)
| mbloom1915 wrote:
| Mach 1.1! *Xoldplay's 'speed of sound' song starts*
| dralley wrote:
| Is the goal to be able to supercruise, or are they just going to
| be to waste tons of fuel on afterburning like the Concorde?
| doctoring wrote:
| I had the same question. From their FAQ
| (https://boomsupersonic.com/faq):
|
| > Will Overture use afterburners like Concorde?
|
| > No. Overture will fly without the use of afterburners,
| meeting the same strict regulatory noise levels as the latest
| subsonic airplanes. The airliner will be powered by the
| Symphony propulsion system. Symphony will be a medium-bypass
| turbofan engine designed and optimized for environmentally and
| economically sustainable supersonic flight.
| foobarqux wrote:
| > ... 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.
| stetrain wrote:
| I think that statement is saying it will meet those noise
| levels for takeoff and landing, not during cruise which
| will be over the ocean.
| foobarqux wrote:
| It's intentionally misleading, they are technically
| saying they will meet the takeoff and landing
| requirements (which they are required to meet by law) but
| implying that the plane is going to be quiet at cruise
| (which they want to perform over the continental United
| States, not just over the ocean).
|
| Moreover, their statement falsely suggests that Concorde
| does not "[meet] the same strict regulatory noise levels
| as the latest subsonic airplanes" but 36.301 says that
| Concorde also has to meet the same standards as subsonic
| planes (standards which exclude operation at cruise which
| didn't matter for Concorde because it was over the
| Atlantic).
| ctippett wrote:
| I'm far from an expert, but at least as it pertains to the
| SR-71, that craft was designed to use its afterburners most
| (all?) of the time[1].
|
| Edit: Of course, the Blackbird had the benefit of refuelling
| mid-air.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/gkyVZxtsubM
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| 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
| talldayo wrote:
| 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.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| The Concorde was in fact able to supercruise. (As someone else
| pointed out)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I know nothing about Boom. Why is this impressive? We've achieved
| supersonic for passengers before. Are we meant to be interested
| just because someone is taking up the mantle again, or is there
| some new design that makes it impressive?
| bangaroo wrote:
| there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am
| aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active
| commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
|
| this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to
| reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > 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
| bangaroo wrote:
| i don't disagree with any of that, i'm extremely skeptical
| that they will ever scale this up
|
| however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying
| supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.
| talldayo wrote:
| "Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it.
| Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic
| military jets with a civilian designation as long as the
| jet is deemed airworthy.
|
| The real question is whether this will ever scale up to
| be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of
| unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in
| the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is
| going to give people the confidence to denounce
| traditional passenger jets.
| rbanffy wrote:
| This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that
| started as a civilian one and was never intended for
| military applications. Loses points for the military
| engines though.
|
| Still impressively cool.
| talldayo wrote:
| "in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America
| hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll
| have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a
| weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden
| Cold War environment.
|
| Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the
| Concorde yet. Not only do people not _need_ hypersonic
| flight, it 's going to create a premium class of
| hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with
| passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban
| operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and
| routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner
| and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring
| these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain
| skeptical.
| bangaroo wrote:
| as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in
| particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-
| focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a
| type of flight that has primarily been relegated to
| military operations for a very long time
|
| today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they
| did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test
| platform for a commercial airliner."
|
| there will be lots of future questions and concerns but
| we are far off from them, because they are not even close
| to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in
| the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
|
| i just think the little plane is neat.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is
| Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to
| minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly
| supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross
| the Pacific would be incredible.
| creer wrote:
| The work to minimize or delete sonic boom - that's an
| important one. And it's a NASA project.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Not only do people not need hypersonic flight,
|
| We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to
| visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct
| flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
|
| At this time, very few people visit places more than 10
| hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and
| different expands one's horizons. You learn that there
| are different ways of living, different ways of thinking,
| and that not everything that's different is bad,
| threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
|
| The more people know each other, the better we are able
| to work together. And the better we understand we are all
| on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel
| time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there
| enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain
| this business model?
|
| I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just
| fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a
| plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
|
| The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple
| reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the
| hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire
| industry for this critical part.
| notahacker wrote:
| > At this time, very few people visit places more than 10
| hours away from their homes
|
| I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people
| who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from
| their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a
| Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable
| ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
|
| You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far
| away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth
| paying extra so they can get back to the US from their
| European office without staying overnight aren't going to
| be doing much of that anyway...
| chgs wrote:
| If there's no direct flight now it seems unlikely there's
| enough demand to justify a supersonic flight.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Do none of the private jets like G6s or whatever fly
| supersonic?
| bangaroo wrote:
| nope.
|
| commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach
| 0.9
|
| i am very rusty on the economics and details of
| supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i
| recall is:
|
| - going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a
| rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves.
| there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in
| london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was,
| too.
|
| - noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of
| planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't
| like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes
| that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are
| mostly over water.
|
| it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if
| you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're
| uncomfortable while traveling.
| ghaff wrote:
| And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting
| (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got
| upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his
| reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once
| but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than
| having a nice dinner in first class.
| chgs wrote:
| There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A
| lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5
| hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.
|
| West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be
| in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a
| rate that 's hard to justify_
|
| Worse: drag in the transonic regime is generally worse
| than subsonic _or_ supersonic.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke
| basically all records. Why would there be less case for
| faster flights?
|
| Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but
| the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-
| continental (without stops along the way) and there are
| people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The
| Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay
| for this.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Would you pay $5k to fly basic economy?
|
| Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive.
| Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer
| humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
|
| Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing
| to pay to fly private. But how big is that market?
| Especially if you're still going to raise prices 2-3x?
| teractiveodular wrote:
| _Some_ passengers are extremely price sensitive, but
| full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the
| 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x
| more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first
| (actual first class, not US domestic).
| chgs wrote:
| There are thousands of business and first class seats
| sold between London and New York every day, most in the
| 5k plus per leg range.
| bangaroo wrote:
| the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the
| ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those
| private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a
| private jet.
|
| people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or
| the time it takes for the most part - they mind being
| uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with
| another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy
| cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different
| place than you usually do.
|
| at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a
| shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who
| cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of
| a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde,
| was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of
| the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been
| wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make
| similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and
| maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
|
| i think most of the people you're talking about would
| prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on
| private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower
| and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively
| small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much
| easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without
| traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a
| one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
|
| i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but
| previously when discussing the return of supersonic
| flights with folks who know better than i, this was the
| general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its
| face.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like
| those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in
| a private jet_
|
| Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet
| territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn't have
| suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don't have
| lay-flat options.)
|
| In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which
| something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic
| business seats. But lower service costs because you don't
| need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For
| long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not
| uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a
| stopover, which means the market values the savings of a
| couple of hours at around $5000.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights,
| airline competition and a consolidation amongst
| manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no
| evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private
| jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on
| other people's schedules between airports they dont want
| to travel to/from.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| No, you can kinda tell by the planes shape how fast it
| can go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule
|
| Certainly they're fast, wikipedia says the the G650 can
| get to mach 0.9, but it's called the sound barrier for a
| reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_barrier
| dylan604 wrote:
| That makes sense. I've known that private jets fly faster
| than typical commercial jets as well as flying at higher
| altitude.
| ctippett wrote:
| We've already been to the moon before, but I for one would
| be excited to see it happen again.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future "AGI
| workstation" would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic
| plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
| rvz wrote:
| Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the
| moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it
| has been already been done before.
|
| This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is
| exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
|
| Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to
| the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively
| and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry
| experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
| mshook wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're
| right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine,
| and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter
| jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).
|
| And what people always fail to mention when it comes to
| supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a
| technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom
| one.
|
| Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and
| you arrive, local time, before the local time of your
| origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great:
| you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the
| evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight
| time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
|
| So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at
| least on the French side, thanks to charter flights),
| people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a
| red eye...
|
| As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think
| what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they
| succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're
| right
|
| OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not
| supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil
| aircraft going supersonic.
| mshook wrote:
| Fair enough...
| creer wrote:
| You are right - (And it's not a civil aircraft just
| because it's painted white.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't
| really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably
| lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--
| depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty
| much have to do today.)
| enra wrote:
| I still prefer shorter flight time. I rather spend those
| hours in hotel bed or eating at restaurant than sit/lie
| in the airline seat.
| ghaff wrote:
| All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not
| paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if
| that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's
| a tiny percentage of the population.
| niklasrde wrote:
| If you solve the boom component, can you just keep going
| West? London, NYC, LA, Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, London?
| creer wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Supersonic is "easy" in the sense that rocket design is
| "easy." Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-
| government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic
| flight is still the sole domain of government contractors
| now. Boom is changing that.
| creer wrote:
| Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace
| engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world
| for many years. And most "government contractors" in the
| capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of
| which build both military and civilian aircraft and
| started small.
|
| Which means, for example, that even this small private
| company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel
| tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and
| supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the
| aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even,
| presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first
| time they tried - and was fully expected to.
| kindatrue wrote:
| Previously Boom's CEO said this:
|
| "That's not travel, that's like a thing you might hope to do
| once in a lifetime," says Scholl, before adding, "Versus where
| we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours
| for 100 bucks."[1]
|
| Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught
| people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they
| will achieve this.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-
| hour...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel
| consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not
| sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly
| Overture won't be capable of that.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic
| passenger missile approach.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel
| predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable
| of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45
| minutes type of thing
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I
| think they've mostly backed off that though, as Starlink
| offers an easier market opportunity and just as much
| revenue potential.
|
| The supersonic plane would have advantages over the
| rocket approach though. Rockers require long,
| inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities.
| (But would have the selling point of a microgravity
| transit.)
| notahacker wrote:
| Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working
| mostly on that concept (though when they eventually went
| bust trying to scale up last year I think they were
| focused on reusable space launch business model which is
| ironically more realistic)
| blinding-streak wrote:
| ICPM! That's a new acronym you just coined!
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental
| ballistic passenger missile approach.
|
| The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be
| lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances
| has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently
| shallow.
| mppm wrote:
| Once you get out of the atmosphere, lift is ~0 too.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| If you're going fast enough, you don't need lift.
|
| But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's
| imagining something somewhere in between those two
| extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low
| enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity
| to maintain altitude.
| mppm wrote:
| "Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though.
| Suborbital range is _very_ short on the lower end, and
| increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can
| boost to 2km /s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you
| not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either
| atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing
| really useful in between.
| adastra22 wrote:
| GP is not talking about a ballistic trajectory though.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One possibility is a trajectory that's a series of skips.
| jjk166 wrote:
| There actually is still significant lift. We define the
| edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio
| of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity
| (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight
| with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't
| fly conventionally in space but lift might still be
| generating a force which is significant compared to your
| craft's weight.
| credit_guy wrote:
| The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude,
| while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It
| is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km,
| where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic
| speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the
| CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is
| doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital
| depreciation, insurance, etc.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit
| alarm is blaring_
|
| LA to Sydney is $10k on a good day for lie flat. You could
| probably charge $15 even 20k a seat and (a) turn a profit
| (b) filling the plane.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Did you miss the part you quoted that said "$100 in 4
| hours"? It does not say $100k.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It does not say $100k_
|
| >> _You could probably charge $15 even 20k a seat_
|
| Neither do I.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| That's overstating it. I literally did this flight in
| Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I'd say tickets from LA
| are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to
| Sydney next week in that range.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Seems like they want to bring back supersonic commercial
| flights similar to the trans-Atlantic Concorde flights. But
| with more destinations.
|
| Per their site - https://boomsupersonic.com/overture
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| The same could be said about those who watched SpaceX since the
| Falcon 1.
| gangstead wrote:
| 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.
| ortusdux wrote:
| The Concorde relied on an afterburner to achieve supersonic
| flight, so it burned a ton of fuel. It also could not go
| supersonic over land because its sonic booms were too loud.
| This mean that flights could only go over the ocean, and they
| were expensive due to fuel costs. Boom's goal is to reduce the
| sound of their sonic booms 30x and eliminate the need of
| afterburners.
| hangonhn wrote:
| 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
| jdblair wrote:
| That's right, the Concorde had engines capable of
| supercruise - long distance supersonic flight without
| afterburners.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_sup
| e...
| mshook wrote:
| This is correct, reheat / afterburner was used from Mach
| 0.9 something to 1.7, after which they'd were off. So
| yes, Concorde could supercruise.
| gpderetta wrote:
| IIRC Concorde could super cruise a Mach 2 which is
| unmatched. It would also flight supersonic for most of
| its journey which is also presented unprecedented
| difficulties.
|
| It was really an unique plane.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Legend says the Tu-144 used afterburners the whole time
| while supersonic, but, then, it seems five units have
| engines without afterburners (RD-36-51's replacing the
| Kuznetsov NK-144 used in most of the fleet).
|
| I wonder what was the noise level in those late models.
| ddalex wrote:
| WHAT ?!?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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/-qi
| sIViAHwI?feature=shared&t=35...
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| The engine in XB-1 test plane is not the same that's going
| in the production plane.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| When the production engine exists in physical form, we
| can absolutely discuss its capabilities. The XB-1
| demonstrator is, using afterburner to get to speed,
| demonstrating _other_ design features intended to keep
| the noise down.
|
| The original plan was a commercial partner for the
| engines, but the big three - Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney
| and General Electric - turned them down. It's one of the
| biggest remaining question marks in the entire project.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| s/When/If/
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > The engine in XB-1 test plane is not the same that's
| going in the production plane.
|
| There _IS_ no production plane, nor can there be. The
| last company they wanted to use for engines dropped them
| as a client years ago (others did earlier):
| https://english.alarabiya.net/business/aviation-and-
| transpor...
| mandevil wrote:
| Boom is not currently flying their intended engines, the
| Symphony, which does not exist yet. (1) The XB-1 is flying
| with J85's just like a T-38 has, and just like a T-38 it
| can go supersonic with afterburners. If the Symphony is
| able to meet its design goals, it will not need
| afterburners for any part of flight. How much they will be
| able to deliver on that remains the biggest open technical
| question for Boom. (2)
|
| 1: Well, their Plan B intended engines. Their Plan A was
| that one of the Big 3- RR, PW, GE- would make engines for
| them, but none were interested in taking the risk that a
| difficult engine could be designed and built in enough
| volume to make the investment back.
|
| 2: Their biggest legal question is over-land supersonic
| regulations. Their biggest economics question- and probably
| the biggest and most important of all of them- is how much
| will people pay for civil supersonic?
| kypro wrote:
| > how much will people pay for civil supersonic?
|
| Do we know how much more it's likely to cost? I could
| easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x.
|
| Anything beyond 2x I imagine would start to price out the
| average person and anything beyond 5x would probably
| price out the vast majority of potential customers.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| Their business model for a long time has theorized that
| they can deliver an operating cost that would allow
| airlines to offer tickets at roughly current business
| class ticket costs, which would be a fraction of Concorde
| ticket prices expressed in current dollars.
|
| I don't know if those theorized efficiencies will be
| delivered (a lot depends on that engine) or if airlines
| will price tickets at that level. But it's the theory so
| far.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _could easily see people paying 1.5x - 2x_
|
| People pay more than that for domestic first class, which
| doesn't even have lay-flat seats. $2,500 or even $5k for
| a New York <> San Francisco 2-hour flight would
| absolutely sell.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| A number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at least
| some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights. UA has
| over a half dozen Dreamliners flying back and forth
| daily, all with Polaris cabins. I know AA and Delta have
| routes with them, too. I agree, a two-hour flight time
| would be better!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _number of US carriers offer lay-flat seats for at
| least some of their coast-to-coast domestic flights_
|
| They're limited. And I regularly see them going for $4k+.
| bgnn wrote:
| With the amount of billionaires increasing, I'd think
| more people than Concorde had pay for civil supersonic.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| There are some interesting technological developments around
| fuel efficiency and minimizing the "sonic boom" that's felt on
| the ground. Neither of those killed Concorde though, because
| the entire idea of Concorde turned out to be incredibly faulty.
| MOST people weren't in such a hurry to get from point A to
| point B that they'd pay 5x-10x a normal business/first class
| ticket to cut a trip down by 50% or so. The intended 100+ units
| to be built and sold turned out to be a fantasy, airlines
| weren't interested.
|
| Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new,
| airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent
| in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that
| represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't
| be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet
| wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler
| didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID
| FLIGHT. Today that's routine.
|
| So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need
| or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to
| have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an
| airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a
| sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
|
| tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a
| technological one, and the economics haven't changed.
| ctippett wrote:
| 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.
| mshook wrote:
| Well Concorde showed pre-orders don't mean much... :-D
| jandrese wrote:
| Pre-orders are just wind until they're actually delivering
| product. It doesn't cost the carriers much to make the pre-
| orders. The calculation is that if it somehow pans out then
| they won't miss the boat, if the company fails then they
| aren't really out anything.
|
| To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't
| think they would get this far. I still don't think they are
| going to build full scale production models and actually
| sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going.
| Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too
| though.
| mshook wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I suppose the question is whether you feel like spending
| 3-5 times as much for the same flight, to save a bit of
| that time. Perhaps you would be, but I think you can
| understand how most wouldn't, even if they could. That is
| of course assuming that unlike Concorde, this can do
| single-hop journeys longer than a trans-Atlantic flight.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _whether you feel like spending 3-5 times as much for
| the same flight, to save a bit of that time_
|
| Plenty of people do for comfort. And these seats don't
| look horrendous.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| You have a good point, maybe they'll find the sweet spot
| between price and utility.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I keep seeing you using this $10k figure, where is that
| coming from? I'm fortunate to fly intl biz class a lot, and
| I rarely see prices that high. In September I flew SG from
| NYC to Singapore in biz class for $4k RT.
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| 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.
| 16bytes wrote:
| They're betting that they can make supersonic travel
| sustainable and profitable with a new aircraft and engine
| design. The Concord wasn't either of those.
|
| The business case is apparently solid enough that several
| airlines are partnering with them during development.
|
| This is the first actual demonstration that they can achieve
| supersonic flight in their demonstrator aircraft, so it is a
| significant milestone but they are years away from their full-
| scale aircraft.
| bluescrn wrote:
| 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?
| MBCook wrote:
| What if this ends up being more efficient for long flights
| over oceans due to the ability to fly in thinner air?
| mmustapic wrote:
| Probably not, and for sure the company is not expecting
| to be more efficient than subsonic.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's the first supersonic plane from a YC startup or any
| startup for that matter. Also they are hoping to do profitable
| passenger travel which hasn't really been done - concorde had
| ups and downs but mostly lost money.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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. The end goal is also to be much more efficient
| than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which
| multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the
| production model capable of supercruise.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Concorde used supercruise for most of the flight -
| afterburners were only used for departure and for transonic
| acceleration.
| Someone wrote:
| > 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| While true, the catch is that very little technology
| relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since
| Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that's about it.
| Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints
| it was built for and those constraints haven't really
| changed - airport parking docks remain the same size,
| runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the
| same distance apart, people don't want to hear sonic booms,
| and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all
| the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go
| but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer
| to turn a profit.
| timeon wrote:
| > 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?
| scrlk wrote:
| 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
| mikeyouse wrote:
| "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
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future
| taxes for when they start production. - seems a little
| unfair to count it against the company when they haven't
| even started production yet.
|
| And the total amount of private funding raised to date is
| $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the
| government? Seems like a good deal for the government?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes -
| but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants,
| infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the
| subsidies are government spending to make the facility
| more useful for Boom.
|
| It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending,
| I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new
| industries! But the conceit that they're doing this
| without any government support should be disregarded. I'm
| only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of
| the company in question is definitely not a proponent of
| that type of spending.
|
| It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent
| goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!"
| while ignoring that every one of their companies had
| multi-million dollar government contracts.
| mlindner wrote:
| I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous
| when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It
| doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't
| have located in the state in the first place without it. It
| just acts to remove the drag on the company being
| successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax
| revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's
| no downsides.
|
| And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax
| dollars for the company.
|
| Just talking about the "$200M" number.
| ethagknight wrote:
| It's not a huge deal for humanity, but it's exciting for
| aviation enthusiasts and those studying the air travel space.
|
| To my layman's eye, they've built a civilian version of a
| trainer/fighter jet, now all they have to do is scale it up to
| airliner size :) Long way to go but you have to start
| somewhere.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Arguably more impressive than deepseek.
| ge96 wrote:
| So funny how everything is live streamed now I like it,
| transparency is good
| nhoss2 wrote:
| Pretty exiting times in aerospace these days. Seeing spacex doing
| awesome innovation with starship and boom making good progress
| bringing back supersonic air travel
|
| Can someone innovate general aviation
| HappyJoy wrote:
| There's a company called Airhart that's trying to bring Fly-By-
| Wire to GA. But (at least in the US) I think innovation would
| be better focused on regulations - looking at you aeromedical
| specifically.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Successful supersonic test! Amazing what humans can achieve.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test
| flight today_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077
| echoangle wrote:
| Why are some camera shots so dull? Is that a HDR problem?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Long tele lens - lots of air between it and the plane, I'd say.
| echoangle wrote:
| It was actually fine for the air-to-air shots but all shots
| from the ground/drones were very washed out.
| ics wrote:
| For those wanting to jump to where it goes supersonic, it happens
| a little after minute 11 on the flight time. The camera shots are
| clearer during subsonic flight, then it gets fairly blurry. The
| takeoff and climb were interesting to see; also before it goes
| supersonic the shots from the air are remarkably clear.
| tomaytotomato wrote:
| Can't wait to live the good life of the 80/90s again with that
| our parents enjoyed with 5 hours flights to New York.
|
| More technology advances please so we can break through this
| zeitgeist of human pessimism and introspection.
|
| Onwards and upwards!
| jandrese wrote:
| My parents certainly never did that. Very few parents did, the
| tickets were way out of the price range of the typical
| passenger. It's like pining for the days when people traveled
| in the opulant lounges of ocean going steamer ships, forgetting
| that the bulk of the people were crammed into tiny cabins with
| few amenities for the long journey.
| JshWright wrote:
| Scott Manley posted an interesting video including some
| interviews and technical details on XB-1 (as well as some time in
| the XB-1 simulator near the end of the video).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITGgRhjcHAM
| ctippett wrote:
| The plane looks so small on the runway, I thought how could it
| possibly hold 64-80 passengers.
|
| Hint: it's because the XB-1 is a one-third scale model of their
| fully fledged Overture.
| hinkley wrote:
| So it's a jet for ants?
| ctippett wrote:
| Is it okay/usual for the test pilot to partake in a glass of
| champagne so soon after landing?
|
| On a side note: Channing Tatum is a shoe-in for playing the
| pilot, Tristan "Geppetto" Brandenburg, if this ever gets made
| into a movie.
| nfriedly wrote:
| It's certainly better than before landing!
| ctippett wrote:
| For context, my father who's a commercial pilot for Air New
| Zealand says this wouldn't be condoned. Take that as you will.
| mv4 wrote:
| Watched it live, and it was amazing. Beautiful aircraft.
| finiche wrote:
| BMW
| nwatson wrote:
| To be built in Greensboro, NC / North Carolina ...
| https://boomsupersonic.com/superfactory
| zoba wrote:
| Wow, as a Winston Salem native this is interesting news. Thanks
| for sharing.
| nwatson wrote:
| I'm in WS myself now, going on 12 years.
| mrtksn wrote:
| How cool is that, hopefully will pressure Airbus into developing
| one too. So far they did silly concept vides only.
|
| I'm also quite worried about Airbus after winning against Boeing
| becoming complacent since Chinese or Russians are not even close.
| belter wrote:
| How do you make this profitable?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.)
| alex_duf wrote:
| I assume the question was about the questionable economics
| of running a super-sonic airplane profitably.
|
| The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money.
|
| Maybe the premium aspect will be enough, given that we have
| a bigger and bigger chasm between rich and poor, or maybe
| the economics of running it won't compete against sub-
| sonic, lower fuel consumption planes.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm skeptical. Trans-Pacific would be interesting for
| some because that's a long time in a plane even with lie-
| flat seating. But then you need a lot of range because
| once you have to refuel you've cut into your time
| advantage.
|
| NYC to London or Paris? Sure.
|
| But now you still need to find people willing and able to
| spend $5K+ each way. I'd _like_ to do it but
| realistically I 'm not going to.
| senko wrote:
| First class NY to Paris in a couple of weeks, one way, is
| ~$6k "best overall", with $10k for "fastest" (checked a
| random flight on Skyscanner).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _First class NY to Paris in a couple of weeks, one way,
| is ~$6k "best overall", with $10k for "fastest"_
|
| La Premiere will regularly go for $20k one way.
| echoangle wrote:
| And how many people are booking that for that price? Is
| that enough to build a dedicated service on?
| senko wrote:
| [delayed]
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd expect for trans-oceanic, you'd have people
| scheduling their travel around limited flights, given the
| unique offering.
|
| I.e. you aren't trying to figure out "How do I 100%
| capacity a 8:17am daily flight?" (traditional subsonic
| carriers) but rather "How much demand is there per
| week/month?" (Boom)
|
| If the flight is Wednesdays-only, then folks line their
| travel up on Wednesday. Because the alternative is a much
| longer flight.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are usually at least daily flights on most routes.
| Business travelers, in particular, aren't going to wait a
| few days to take a flight that's a few hours faster.
| Absolutely no one is heading out 5 days early to shave 3
| or 4 hours off their flight time.
|
| Even for tourism, I wouldn't.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Especially at 2-3x the cost
| ghaff wrote:
| I suspect a lot of people here get really excited at the
| idea of supersonic flight but would never pay the
| business class+ premium themselves.
| echoangle wrote:
| Yes, I think many people would at most do it once so they
| have flown supersonic, and then never do it again.
| fsloth wrote:
| $10k transatlantic return hop. Add expedited immigration.
| Does not sound insane. First class tickets London-NY can
| be already in this price range. Not for everyone of
| course (certainly way out of my price range).
| ghaff wrote:
| There's a market, just not sure how big. Business class
| works mostly because there's a big plane full of people
| paying for Economy (and maybe Economy Premium) and I
| suspect a lot of business is upgrades for flyers with a
| lot of status or mostly using miles. With e-entry (not
| sure how it will work with ETA now), I haven't waited
| long in London for immigration in ages.
|
| British Airways business class-only flights from the City
| airport have been off and on. Don't know their current
| status. I _could_ afford business but it seems like a
| poor value relative to other things I could do other than
| maybe a co-pay with miles trans-Pacific.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money._
|
| I see this stated all the time on HN, yet there's a whole
| section at the top of this very comments thread where
| people are talking about how very profitable the Concorde
| was.
|
| One person quoted the line "There were times, in fact,
| when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute
| around 40 per cent of BA's entire profits."
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Could this thing take a polar route from New York to Hong
| Kong?
| crowcroft wrote:
| Airbus won't do anything until someone proves the economics of
| it make sense.
| drysine wrote:
| Won't do things like A380?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| More of the same but bigger? While it is a feat of
| engineering to make an aircraft the size of an A380 it is
| essentially the same design as every other commercial
| airliner, not revolutionary.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Super impressive, but I agree with this, it was an easier
| project to plot on a spreadsheet and forecast a path to
| profitability.
|
| Using current technology and looking back at the Concorde
| to make any predictions on supersonic passenger travel
| generates a spreadsheet with a lot of red on it.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| If somebody wants to burn their time and money trying I
| am totally cool with it. If they succeed in their vision
| they will be handsomely rewarded and transport gets
| faster. If they fail they still tried to make the future
| more amazing.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Hell yea brother
| IndrekR wrote:
| Without A380 there would be no A350 XWB.
| chgs wrote:
| Probably not again given what a commercial failure it was
| Intralexical wrote:
| Boeing proved "Big Plane" was profitable with the 747.
|
| Unfortunately for Airbus, it also stopped being profitable
| before they finished the A380.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| So why is this happening but SST got pilloried due to noise,
| vibration, moisture in the stratosphere, ozone layer, etc. Did
| these issues get solved with the Boom aircraft, or is the
| solution to route around them via marketing and hope no one opens
| a history book?
| stego-tech wrote:
| Watched the livestream. Haven't gotten that excited over a
| performance test since the early days of SpaceX, before the dark
| times.
|
| Wishing them all the best! Beautiful aircraft, beautiful
| demonstration, and hopefully more beautiful datasets that exceed
| their expectations.
|
| Just don't Milkshake Duck this.
| dang wrote:
| Previous thread in sequence:
|
| _Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test
| flight today_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42852077 -
| Jan 2025 (99 comments)
| thepaulmcbride wrote:
| The angle of attack at both takeoff and touch down is pretty
| wild!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I can't let go of the suspicion that this could become some
| kind of military (drone or not) airframe.
| __loam wrote:
| The military has had supersonic aircraft since the 1950s, why
| would they care about this?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If it's cheap to produce.
| __loam wrote:
| The F16 is already cheap, proven, integrated with
| everything, and available in great numbers. The Air Force
| also has a super sonic bomber in the B1 lancer, and a
| mass produced supersonic stealth fighter/bomber in the
| F35, which is actually pretty cost effective despite its
| public perception. Maybe there's a place for a large
| supersonic transport but the Air Force also has a lot of
| very heavy logistics aircraft already.
| jameslk wrote:
| Boom (YC W16) - Supersonic Passenger Airplanes:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
|
| I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years
| ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he
| wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen
| today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it
| couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :)
|
| Congrats to the Boom team! Such a great accomplishment.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I've been one of the skeptical commenters (under another
| username), not because I think it's technically impossible, or
| because I hate innovation or bold bets, but because I don't
| think the economics make sense, and their original timelines
| and cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude, at least.
| Aviation is littered with startups that burned through hundreds
| of millions over the course of a decade or two and then
| disappeared.
|
| And as others have pointed out, this is cool, but hardly novel,
| and after nine years and hundreds of millions, they've only
| accomplished the _easiest_ part of what they need to accomplish
| in order to carry commercial passengers on supersonic flights.
| Regular passenger jets built by the most experienced companies
| in the world take tens of billions and decades to go from
| conception to flying. Boom has decades ahead of them before
| they're going to reach the finish line.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| This is a long way from a supersonic passenger flight, isn't
| it?
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| echoangle wrote:
| It's a good start but I wouldn't say the critics are proven
| wrong already.
|
| Even getting the full-scale version flying won't be enough, you
| need to make the whole operation economically viable so it
| actually makes sense to operate it.
|
| I'm not saying they won't manage to do it, but they haven't
| proven that they will be able to do it today.
| cubefox wrote:
| So apparently the successor to the XB-1 test plane, Overture, is
| planned to be mainly a luxury airplane, similar to Concorde, just
| somewhat smaller.
|
| I don't see a reason to be excited about this. Their CEO compared
| their test flight to the Falcon 1 rocket, the Falcon 9 precursor.
| But a better comparison would be Blue Origin's New Shepard, or
| Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne, because they also mainly offer
| luxury services. By contrast, the Falcon 9 rockets have real (non
| luxury) commercial and scientific value.
| cromulent wrote:
| "Currently, all civil aircraft flights are prohibited from
| operating above Mach one speeds over land in the United States."
| [1]
|
| Mike Bannister's excellent book _Concorde_ talks at length about
| how "handsomely profitable" the BA service was (as opposed to the
| Air France one) from 1984 until the 2000 crash and subsequent
| grounding put them in to a spiral where keeping enough people
| certified was too expensive.
|
| One part of this profitable change in 1984 was surveying their
| customers (who typically did not book their own tickets) to see
| what they thought the price was. About $5000 was the perception.
| It was actually $3000, so they quickly raised the price to the
| perceived one.
|
| https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap...
| cromulent wrote:
| Started reading the book again :). The $5k fares were the
| transatlantic ones. They made a lot of money doing day trips to
| Venice, Helsinki, Cairo, etc - places only Concorde could do in
| a day.
|
| "Lord King's edict that the aircraft had to be profitable
| within two-and-a-half years had been realised. There were
| times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would
| contribute around 40 per cent of BA's entire profits".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| LA to New York or San Francisco to Honolulu in 2 to 3 hours
| would be a game changer. You could probably fill a plane at
| least once a day on those routes for a handsome profit.
| gopalv wrote:
| 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.
| messe wrote:
| I had a similar experience flying from Dublin to Seattle a
| couple of years ago. Take off around 16:00, land at 17:00.
|
| In that "hour" I'd watched (IIRC) Fellowship of the Ring,
| Sunset Boulevard, and--out of a morbid sense of curiosity
| that I regret--Moonfall.
| jonsen wrote:
| Once I flew north-west at the time of sunset. I had the
| view of the most beautiful big red sun right at the edge a
| sea of snow white clouds for more than an hour.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGvYKtiwHlA
| chgs wrote:
| I suspect if Concorde had been made by an American company
| the "overland" issue would have been solved.
| binary132 wrote:
| That doesn't fit with my understanding about the
| cancelation of the Boeing SST project.
| nine_k wrote:
| I suspect many more Americans could potentially sue the
| airline for the noise than English or French, due to the
| structure of the respective legal systems. So the financial
| risk of overland operations over the US, even with the ban
| lifted, could be too high still.
| sedatk wrote:
| Concorde experiences one fatal crash in 27 years: entire
| product line gets cancelled.
|
| Meanwhile, Boeing 737 MAX... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| jachee wrote:
| 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.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| 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).
| sedatk wrote:
| I still feel like it was on the path to repopularization
| when it crashed, and wasn't given a second chance.
| youngtaff wrote:
| The manufacturer withdrew support for Concorde so the
| airlines couldn't it anymore
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| My understanding was that, even for BA, the Concord was
| profitable on a cash accounting basis (as in, the tickets more
| than covered the cost of fuel, salaries, etc.) but not when
| accounting for a) the depreciation costs of the plane, which
| were much higher than for an ordinary Boeing or Airbus
| passenger jet since it was a one-off limited run and there were
| few spare parts and b) as you said, training new people to fly
| it, since it was an antiquated plane without a glass cockpit
| and the skills did not transfer to other planes. That's why it
| got harder and harder to justify over time until it was
| shuttered after the fatal crash during the general post-9/11
| aviation downturn.
| cromulent wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| London doesn't even require a red-eye from NYC--or actually
| from Boston/Washington although it's a very early star--on
| a conventional jet. I've done it pretty regularly. Not
| pleasant but I can get to London in time for a late dinner.
| twoodfin wrote:
| BA has one daily morning flight from Boston to Heathrow.
| The only non-red eye transatlantic out of Logan that I'm
| aware of.
|
| Always quite busy, and personally I'd much rather not try
| to get a good night's sleep on a barely 6 hour flight.
| mandevil wrote:
| 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.
| IndrekR wrote:
| Mike Bannister was also one of the commentators on this live
| stream.
| justicz wrote:
| Just awesome. Congrats to everyone who worked on this! Excited to
| see what's next from you all.
| elamje wrote:
| Do you think SpaceX or similar would be attacking this problem
| space if there was a business to be had here? Seems like a fun
| pet project that will lose money indefinitely, but love seeing
| small teams do big things!
| mrandish wrote:
| I haven't looked into Boom's business plan but I assume they
| wouldn't have gotten this amount of money for this long without
| a plan to make money that at least looks plausible to
| investors.
|
| Products or technologies that launch new markets often look
| like 'bad ideas' until someone figures out a way to make it
| work profitably. Otherwise we'd already be doing them. Paul
| Graham wrote a good essay on this, saying basically a startup
| entrepreneur's job isn't just finding a good idea that hasn't
| been done, because anything that looks like a good idea is
| probably already being done. It's finding something that
| _looks_ like a bad idea (so isn 't being done) and figuring out
| it's not bad if you just do it a different way or add a certain
| innovation. Of course, most things which look like bad ideas
| are actually bad ideas but searching the edges for exceptions
| is the valuable thing entrepreneurs do (along with creating new
| jobs).
|
| Also, you might be surprised there are several companies
| selling high-end transcontinental private jets. One of the
| newer features of the latest generation is that they can fly at
| .9 to .95 mach instead of .8 to .85 mach. That shaves more than
| an hour off a flight. It's a relatively small market but this
| new generation has a waiting list of those lining up to pay
| ~$20M more to save a few hours per round-trip. Sure, it's a
| small market but it's profitable. Note: I have no idea if
| Boost's plan involves that market but paying more to go faster,
| and especially having the fastest option, is usually of
| interest to someone.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| For anyone else who finds the opening music infuriating, it stops
| at 35:50.
|
| If anyone from Boom is reading this, please never do that again.
| Or at least pick better music.
| verdverm wrote:
| Congrats to Boom, but also r/killthecameraman
| ethagknight wrote:
| Seems like there is 0 harm to have a 5 minute delay on the
| whole broadcast in exchange for a more polished production. Me,
| the viewer, will never know. I know SpaceX is doing it, its
| trendy to 'watch us make history in realtime', but SpaceX has a
| couple orders of magnitude more cash to work with.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| yapyap wrote:
| holy wow!!
| joemi wrote:
| I wonder if they have cameras to show the pilot everything they
| can't see when taking off/landing, since it looks like it has the
| same forward-visibility issues as the Concorde (without the
| Concorde's moveable nose -- I think?).
|
| Pretty cool though! It was disappointing that the Concorde (along
| with commercial supersonic flight in general) was retired around
| the time I was becoming an adult and could begin to contemplate
| maybe taking a trip on it someday.
| bagels wrote:
| Great milestone, but still pretty far away from taking passengers
| as this is a scale technology demonstrator.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This thread:
|
| https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...
|
| which covers over a decade, contains many hundreds of entries
| from Concorde pilots, crew, flight engineers, cabin crew,
| maintenance personnel, and air traffic control recounting
| anecdotes and amazing things about the plane and events
| surrounding it. I started reading it and spent about three
| absorbing hours fascinated and amazed, unable to stop until it
| was time to go to bed.
|
| I'm going to resume when I have a few more hours, it's gold.
| carabiner wrote:
| There were rumors in the early 2000s of a QSP jet being shopped
| around by LM SkunkWorks to Wall Street. Also really strong rumors
| that Cessna was working on a similar jet. These projects probably
| died.
| hugs wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone directly address it the comments here (or
| in the video): was an audible sonic boom noticeable on the ground
| during today's test flight?
| spiantino wrote:
| seems too small. where do the passengers go?
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