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Richard Branson Reveals Prototype For Supersonic Passenger Aircraft (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sir Richard Branson on Tuesday heralded the rebirth of supersonic passenger flights with the unveiling of a prototype aircraft promising 3.5-hour flights from London to New York for an "affordable" $5,000 return. The billionaire Virgin Group founder said his Spaceship company would help Denver-based startup Boom build a new generation of supersonic jets and reintroduce transatlantic flight times unseen since Concorde was scrapped. Branson is partnering with Blake Scholl, a pilot and former Amazon executive, who will later on Tuesday unveil a prototype of the new jet in a hangar in Denver, Colorado. While several other companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are developing new supersonic jets, Scholl said his plan was likely to beat them to market as it does not require any new technology that would need approval by regulators. Scholl said test flights would begin in southern California, with plans to launch the first commercial departures in 2023. If the plans stick to schedule, Boom flights will launch 20 years after British Airways and Air France decommissioned Concorde. He said Boom would succeed where Concorde failed because developments in technology and lighter materials meant tickets would be much cheaper. Boom will have just 45 to 50 seats, compared with Concorde's 92 to 128. Scholl reckons the demand for affordable supersonic flights could make this a $100 billion market. He said his plane could work on 500 different routes, but would concentrate initially on London to New York, San Francisco to Tokyo, and Los Angeles to Sydney.
No. The One Percenters who will ride those planes simply don't care about you shitfolk.
The most profitable routes for supersonic aircraft are mainly over oceans, so the aircraft won't be supersonic over land for those routes. I don't know how they would handle a Los Angeles to New York route, though.
Since this is for the 1%, post Brexit there won't be a London where the 1% want to be. Try Frankfurt to New York.
At $5000 a seat, you think they give a shit about sonic booms disturbing people?
Interestingly, women and minorities will be the most impacted by these flights.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Boom is a really stupid name for an aircraft company. That's like naming a ship company Drown.
No. The One Percenters who will ride those planes simply don't care about you shitfolk.
Concorde proved that there aren't enough one-percenters to make supersonic aircraft economically viable. People want cheap fares and direct flights. Even most rich people aren't willing to pay a thousand dollars an hour for a quicker flight.
Most rich people I know are cheapskates. That's how they got to be rich.
$5,000 is the price of a business class seat on the routes they're talking about (not even first class), and it's a quarter the price of the Concorde. It just might be cheap enough to get a self-sustaining amount of traffic, which will provide an ongoing incentive to develop cheaper and cheaper planes. It's getting past that initial wall that's the problem, which the Concorde never did.
Sonic booms are resolved two ways. First, the same way that the Concorde did: use it on trans-continental flights. North America to Europe and Asia are the two obvious examples. Second, modern technology and computer simulation enables a reduction in the intensity of the sonic boom. What's available today is a decent reduction from the Concorde, although it's still nowhere near sufficient to enable supersonic flight over populated areas. But with a large fleet of supersonic aircraft flying, you get a powerful incentive to push that research forward.
Bullshit. Who wants to live in the boring provincial town of Frankfurt?
The 1% like London.
It's what we engineers call a 'paper airplane.'
Or 'vapor' airplane.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The price quoted it pretty close to a business class ticket on a traditional flight, so the market may actually be there.
Not true; in fact the reverse! In its later years, (once BA and Air France had figured out that people did not actually care how expensive the tickets were, and racked up the prices), Concorde flight were very profitable.
Of course, this ignored the massive R&D costs that were written-off by the UK and French governments and could not be recovered due to the small number of units produced.
Concorde was retired mainly because Airbus decided to stop offering maintenance...understandable because it was 1960s technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The name Boom was chosen after comparing favourably to Kablammo, Plunge, Missing, FreeFall, Disintegrator and Fireball during test marketing.
Do I have to check my privilege?
Or can I carry it on?
Concorde's reputation as a luxury plane might be a bit off, as well a the common perceived reason for its demise. I recently read this interesting post about interesting Concorde facts, although there are a lot more.
According to some sources, it was killed mostly because it was more profitable to operate a more conventional plane, not because it was not profitable at all.
This plane was such a marvelous piece of technology, and there is plenty of very interesting reads on it all over the net. I am glad some are trying to revive supersonic jets, although I hope they will make them in a "greener" fashion.
If you have to ask, make your way to the Greyhound station.
USB, USB, USB!
An aircraft that burns even more fuel per mile than a normal one and nicely pollutes the stratosphere to boot. Perhaps Branson should just stay on his carribean island and enjoy the sea - before the hurricanes get so bad due to climate change that his house is blown away.
And yes, I know there are plenty of people on this site who don't think human induced climate change is real and I respect your right to hold that opinion. Try respecting mine and don't reply with a load of insulting bile. Thanks.
You are confusing the 1% with the 0.01%. There is an elite within the elite. The super-rich. The oligarchs and billionaires. The Forbes 500. The guys who consider themselves so far above everything, their private airplanes have underage prostitutes as a complimentary service for guests.
The 1% can afford $5k and consider it a good investment if it saves them some time and gives them the privacy of a small plane filled exclusively with people of their type. The reason golf clubs have a $10k yearly membership fee - it keeps out the peasants.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You must mean the 1% of the 1%. It only takes 400-500K of household income to be in the top 1% in the US. The idea of someone (technically a household, most 1% households are two income) earning only 400K and flying private is ridiculous.
I am in a 1% household (500K/yr) and I rarely even fly business class unless someone else is paying for (NYC->London b-class ticket is $3-6K depending on when and who you fly).
"Upper middle class" in your eyes seems to be the top 2-3%, and the "1%" in your world must be the top .05%-.01%.
These aircraft will whoosh over their heads and the massive sonic boom will ruin their hair (women) or weave (minorities).
No sig today...
I don't want complain but the problem with most flights is not flighttime but the total time. You have to get to the Airport, check in, wait in line to go through the security check and wait at the gate. How about som innovation here?
They solved that by strapping Ryu to the airplane, so he keeps blocking em with hadoukens.
They spent five years developing their first commercial craft... and then accidentally destroyed it on its fourth test flight, killing the copilot and seriously injuring the pilot. Ironically, the crash had nothing to do with it being a rocket; a combination of too few safety lockouts and poor pilot training led to the air braking system being deployed at too low of a speed. Which was a brand new huge setback. The fact that it took five years to even get to that point was itself due to a series of delays, including a complete redesign of the motor (really, the first team should have just read the research on hybrid rocket engines, they would have learned that polybutadiene, while a classic binder for solid rocket fuel, does not make a good hybrid fuel).
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Burn rate, mainly. Solids are very different from hybrids in that the oxidizer is intermixed with the fuel, and thus it's easy to get any burn rate you want, from "none" to "rapid unscheduled disassembly" ;) With hybrids, combustion only occurs on the surface as a surface/gas reaction and the rate of reaction there is limited, so it's much more of an issue. With polybutadiene, this means having more channels and thinner walls to get the burn rate up, which increases the odds that chunks will break off as it burns, among other problems. It's generally recognized that the optimal situation is to have a fuel that readily forms a low viscosity melt layer which can be easily aerosolized, dramatically increasing the surface area. So, for example, fuels like paraffin wax and polyethylene work very well for hybrids. Combustion enhancers like aluminum significantly help as well.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
It is logical, that they have influence within their respective organisations.
It's the influence on politics, media and society that is disproportionate, because being a good manager or CEO or investor or funder doesn't say one thing about being good at politics, guiding a country or making politics.
The reaons the world is in such a sorry shape is exactly that we allow managers to run it, instead of visionaries and idealists.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That's why modern government systems have checks and balances and separation of powers.
Which work great to keep idealists pragmatic, but fail utterly when all branches of the government are run by the same type of bureaucrats.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org