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Boom Aerospace Company Wants To Bring Back Supersonic Civilian Travel (bloomberg.com)
pacopico writes: A startup out of Denver called Boom Technology has just come out of stealth mode [by] talking-up their supersonic jet. It would carry 40 passengers and travel at Mach 2.2. The company claims that it's about 30 percent more fuel-efficient than the Concorde. Based on this, it could get its prices down to the equivalent of a business class seat on long-haul flights. At Mach 2.2, a trip from New York to London would take 3.4 hours. Boom is meant to start test flights next year out of John Denver's old hangar.
That sounds like a great way to jinx the whole thing. I hope they're extra stringent with their pilot intoxicant testing!
Would you really want to fly on an airplane built by "Boom" Aerospace?
That's even worse than Boeing (bo-ing!)
They need a new name. I get it, sonic boom. But that word has some brand recognition associated with it already.
Worst... name.. ever... for an aerospace company. Just one more data point in a very large set proving that geeks have no naming sense.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
They called themselves "Boom"? So they named themselves after the most annoying part of their product. They must have the same marketing team as "They're Disgusting on the Inside, and You Will Have to Look Inside, Sooner or Later" brand diapers.
outlandish thing I've heard in a long while. Between the "3d printing has changed the game", the "but we need to build a space elevator to preserve the species", the "solar panels in space make complete sense", and the "let's mine asteroids", it's refreshing to see something only about 40 years too late.
...billions and billions and billions of dollars in venture capital.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If they can get the cost of a 3.4 hour transatlantic flight down to the cost of a business class ticket on a regular airplane on the same route, whoever flies these things will get a good amount of demand (one of the big problems for Concorde is that not enough people were willing to pay the premium vs a normal air ticket, if this new mob has solved it so its as affordable as a regular business class seat that problem goes away)
Next we'll have a plane that goes almost as fast as the SR-71, and a space rocket that can lift nearly as much as Saturn V.
Truly incredible what we have achieved in the computer age in just 30 years.
Wouldn't it make more sense on a longer flight, say between North America and East Asia?
A 30% efficiency gain over a plane designed in the 1960s isn't terribly impressive... There was already a model B Concorde designed and ready to be built back then which improved efficiency and range... Coupled with new lighter materials, more advanced flight control systems, newer engine designs etc it shouldn't be all that difficult to get 30% or more.
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An aerospace startup is "meant to start test flights next year" of their supersonic jet prototype? The 1/3 scale prototype that doesn't yet exist? I'm more than a little skeptical.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
2. Make a plywood model.
3. ...
4. Profit!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I wonder if there is really enough demand for this. Surely there can't be that many people who have to be back in NYC the same day. As I recall, the Concorde had the same problem, low demand.
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Even with a 30% improvement in fuel efficiency vs a concord. Just take a jumbo jet and read a book.
Hush aerospace....
Seriously a poor choice of name for a company dabbling in the airline business
TL;DR - US airlines lobbied against supersonic travel over the continental US. Congress got the FAA to ban it. End of story. The rest is wishful thinking while ignoring the regulatory situation on the ground. (The original article has many inaccuracies and made up stuff... but hey, ads.)
Long Version
When British Airways and Air France pooled their resources to finance the entire Concorde project it was designed not only for UK/FR to US flights, but also NYC to SFO, and SFO/LAX to Asia and Oceania flights. Their projections were for seat prices about 1.5x regular first-class fares and travel 2-3x faster.
Fearing competition from these faster planes, US carriers lobbied the US Congress to forbid these aircraft, claiming that the sonic booms would be devastating to the people below, that air traffic control could not handle such fast aircraft, and that it would be unsafe. In reality, air traffic controllers handle supersonic (military) aircraft all the time, as they are allowed (with authorization) to exceed the speed of sound. As the majority of travel would be intercontinental even the sonic booms could occur over the ocean prior to turning inland to make the Mach-2 flight to the other coast. Finally, there were no safety issues with the Concorde, as it had yet to enter service in the US. Until its one fatal accident of ingesting FOD into its engine the Concorde had the unenviable perfect safety record -- unmatched by the conventional US air carrier services.
Concorde seats did not cost $20,000 (you *did* read the original article, right) they cost $5,000 to go JFK-CDG. Boom wants to compete with that with $5,000 seats. That price was keeping the Concorde full and this would too... but they'd need to do overland CONUS travel to make a profit. Those routes would require a change in FAA rulings. Also there was *NOTHING* about September 2011 that stopped the Concorde. It had long been shelved after the 2000 crash in France. (Seriously, the original article just wasn't paying attention...)
To start a supersonic program today is in some ways different than in the 1970s. Our technological advances are great; our computers and modeling and simulation are awesome. However, our litigious culture has become much worse. Our astroturf-root organizations and sock-puppet lobbyists have gone from mere industry mouthpieces to an entire industry of opposing anything "revolutionary" or "disruptive." Other than cute little ads that tell you a dollar razor is "disrupting the shaving industry", that the Segway is "disrupting the bicycle industry", or that the Occulus VR is disrupting the video game industry, you can rest assured that in modern over-regulatory-happy America it's easier to legislate against change now than have to explain why you didn't prevent it later.
Do these guys have a plan? Yes. Do they have a product idea? Yes. However, until they address the regulatory issues that led to the demise of the Concorde, there will be no market success.
Please note: If you like getting your facts from Wikipedia, please remember that it's a compromise of facts from everyone who chooses to edit it. That means that you're not going to find "The US airlines acted like spoiled children and pissed all over Concorde and bought Federal Legislators until Concorde left for Europe." It's still the way things happened. You're also not going to find "military flights can go supersonic any time they want" in there because there's a desire on the industry's part to leave us thinking that supersonic is just plain loud and dangerous. It's still the way things happen.
To get a better perspective (at least with only its one author's bias) I recommend these two books:
1. Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner
2. The Concorde Story
Enjoy.
Ehud
P.S. I would love to see supersonic passenger travel back. It may start at $5,000 a head, but soon there will be deadhead flights, specials, two-fers, red-eyes, and we can fly from LAX to JFK in two hours (30 to get to the coast and transition to supersonic, 1hr flight, 30 to subsonic and approach).
Some of these attempts sound equally likely.
One of the rules in engineering is that you really shouldn't engineer near the limits of your materials. For instance a modern day hammer is so well below what can easily be made with steel and wood that we don't worry about its reliability; even a 50% reduction in strength because of a flaw would still give you a pretty useful hammer, or if the person wielding the hammer is unusually strong, still not a problem . At the opposite end of the spectrum are the materials that go into supersonic or hypersonic transport. If the slightest thing goes wrong the whole thing will just turn to crap. There are all kinds of pictures of airplanes that had fairly catastrophic failures (Aloha Airlines Flight 243 where it went convertible) and the plane landed fairly well. In hypersonic flight a tiny failure would typically result in the thing turning into a meteor.
So the question is not if a hypersonic transport can be built, but if a rough and ready hypersonic transport can be built. The answer at this point is NO.
As was discovered with Concorde. The plane could fly under ideal circumstances but the Concorde that crashed wasn't that badly damaged as far as a 747 would have been concerned. This is why there are a zillion 747s and no more Concordes.
So the only way for these sorts of planes to ever make it to civilian use will be that ever greater testbeds are produced that prove the foolproof nature of the state of the art. A military transport would be a good start. Then when we see pictures of large hypersonic planes where huge bits are torn open and the plane successfully made it to the ground we will not only feel safe to fly in them, but the insurance companies will green light their future.
Another great example of this sort of engineering being at the very edge would be the damage done to the last shuttle where it was hit by foam. Then the minor damage from the foam basically burned the wing off on reentry. Again the same damage to a 747 might not have been noticed by the flight crew and only picked up when someone was looking at the parked airplane on the ground.
John Denver's hanger may be cursed. Unlike John, I hope Boom does not forget to fill up its fuel tanks prior top take-off. AS bit of that mountain dew can make your head funny and fly you right into the ground. But who am i to judge? Maybe it is better to be dead than sober.
Bam!
Back at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, aerodynamicists claimed a breakthrough: computer codes that made it possible to design a supersonic airplane with a much reduced sonic boom. The snag was that the craft could not be very large. It would be a corporate jet. Gulfstream saw a market and teamed with the Skunks.
The only surviving supersonic project is the decade-old Aerion business jet, designed to fly at supersonic speed over water and just-subsonic --- a few knots faster than a Gulfstream --- over land. But it's only a concept. The jet reappeared at a business aviation show in Geneva last May with its billionaire backer and Aerion's chairman, Robert Bass, offering to fund any qualified aircraft manufacturer to build it. Nobody yet has bitten on that offer.
Why We Don't Have An SST. Sukhoi--Gulfstream S-21
The ten passenger S-21 weighing 54,000 lbs empty would have required 58,000 lbs of fuel for a range of 2,700 miles.
I don't know how you plan global business travel around an aircraft that has only forty seats --- can you plan a seat being available or are you spinning the wheel of fortune?
You use more fuel, you create more waste and you only get there marginally faster because the vehicles tops speed if only one factor of many that determine to total trip time.
High speed land based travel makes more sense for now, oil isn't going to stay cheap for too much longer. If you can automate flight and eliminate large central airports then worrying about faster airplanes might make sense, but the real problem is the logistics of getting people in the air and getting them down. Using a crowded and insecure central location is just never going to be ideal.
There is also the fact that supersonic flight is a small market with unstable profit because it relies on oil to be cheap AND the economy to be doing good enough that people can waste money to fly a bit faster.
They might as well go all the way and change the name to CRASH, which in the case of explosions comes after Boom. Think of the slogan: "Fly with CRASH."
Reminds me of Malwarebytes software which is supposed to remove malware, not be what its name implies.
You are telling us here.
Concord proves you wrong.
They had an excellent safety record and that includes the accident in Paris. Management knew before that the fuel tanks were fragile (relative to pieces thrown up from the wheels or from disintegration wheels) and they did nothing. Because of cost, which was already an issue. After the accident they installed a carbon fiber mat below the tanks which will absorb such high speed particles and ensure there will be no fuel leaks.
BUT - fuel consumption and fuel costs killed this airplane. It was simply too expensive to operate, to maintain, to keep up the support organization which would supply the spare parts, do the maintenance and so on.
AF and BA only started Concorde operations because their governments more or less commanded them to do that. They got all planes for nothing and still they finally got the axe due to cost considerations. Also, because Europe by now is a bunch of defeatist lefty idiots.
Then build a small Concorde Airport on each side of the Atlantic. Speedy check-in, short distance to aircraft, extra high speed security. No need to mix these high paying people with the plebs destined for wood chair class.
Connect the airport with a helo service to central city locations. Check in luggage using taxi drivers.
Build a refuelling station on Guam, so that LA to Tokio and LA to Shanghai becomes feasible.
Refuelling will be done by landing, refuelling on the strip, turn around and take off again. Cost no more than 20 minutes.
Other interesting relations:
Singapore Sydney (mazbe refuelling in the outback, using same approach)
Hongkong Seoul
Moscow Novosibirsk (Russians would be more able to cope with a small boom then and now than us pussies)
Moscow Beijing with refuelling in Irkutsk
Actually the Russian ALREADY flew with the TU144 supersonically over ground: e.g. Moscow to Kasachstan. If they had the Concorde, it would have flown until 1991 (then Yelzins bottle of Vodka per day would have killed that service, too). But they only had a very experimental aircraft, which was rushed into service for political reasons (show the superiority of their system over the others).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#Operational_service
Look at youtube, explains all of it nicely.
Supersonic transport is not electronics. Yes, you single handedly fixed/solved issues which [other] people created in just 5 months. Flying (significantly) supersonic requires that you fix/solve actual physics. Solving one part of this project puzzle may very well be accomplished in just a couple of months, but you're talking about hundreds or thousands of individual tasks which have to be solved, all of them simultaneously, and if you get it wrong people will die.
Juggling with 3 balls is one thing. Juggling a dozen double sided, razor sharp knives without handles between a 4 people is more than 4x as hard. Having a 20 month-to-flight schedule would be a near impossibility. For comparison, Burt Rutan - one of (if not the) top advanced aircraft designers in the world (if not in history) started idea development for SpaceShipOne in 1994. The full time, privately funded, fast-track development started three years prior to the first supersonic test flight.
20 months shows that they don't even know what they don't know yet.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I see you've never dealt with obtaining a contiguous stretch of land from thousands (or tens of thousands) of landowners.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Boom is meant to start test flights next year out of John Denver's old hangar"
So far they have a computer rendering and a plywood cockpit mockup, and they plan to test next year? Suuuuuure they will.