Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yes, but the trans-Atlantic flights were pretty profitable. Makes sense to start there, then develop trans-Pacific routes. Although range is an issue, the Concorde's max was 4500 miles. San Francisco to Tokyo is 5100 miles, so you might be looking at a refueling stop, which could eliminate any time saved by traveling Mach 2.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I'm more than a little skeptical. Either this tiny startup is so incompetent that they don't even have a basic grasp of the scale of the problem they're attempting to tackle, or it's a straight up scam. An all new advanced materials airliner ready to fly in 20 months? If this were some wartime thing and you had a fine tuned skunk works with a Kelly Johnson type at the helm and you had engines ready to go from a different division and an airframe you could modify and a prebuilt avionics cluster then maybe. For a brand new startup it looks outright impossible.
The almost complete lack of detail on their page is another huge red flag. As far as I can tell they have some computer render of a curvy jet and what looks like a scale model of a very old jet engine.
I read the internet for the articles.
Yes. Range is a big problem.
Standard high-bypass turbofans are very fuel efficient (effective specific impulse 6000s - 9000s) - but they don't work at all at Mach 2+.
This design must be using either low-bypass turbofans (3000s-4500s), or turbojets (about 2000s - 3000s). If they need afterburners to maintain cruise (as most supersonic designs do), that will reduce fuel efficiency even further (1600s - 2500s).
The longer trans-Pacific routes are already at the limits of what a subsonic high-bypass plane can do while carrying a large payload, so don't expect any supersonic transport to be able to compete there, with engines that are 2-4x less fuel efficient.
(Note for anyone tempted to rebut with quotes about the Concorde engine's "high efficiency": that's thermodynamic efficiency, not practical fuel efficiency. The relationship between the two is complicated for jet engines.)
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).