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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.
Boom is a really stupid name for an aircraft company. That's like naming a ship company Drown.
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?
As a non-1% resident of London, I wish you were right, but I doubt it. To understand you need to see London from a rich person's point of view. From that perspective, the main thing you are interested in is political stability (i.e. a ruling political class that will protect your interests/wealth), which the UK almost uniquely has through a hereditary monarchy at the top (which clearly has an interest in protecting unearned wealth), a parliamentary system that is pseudo-democratic (house of lords, first past the post), and a judiciary that can curb the power of government against the people (look at the way private citizens can sue the government).
Compare this with other countries which have either more populous democracies (where the masses can simply vote to redistribute your wealth) or those with less democracy (where the leader might decide they want a share of your wealth). Where would you rather hoard your assets? The answer is London.
The other big benefit of London is that it is the pre-eminent global tax haven through the non-domiciled status system. It is essentially like a supermarket for tax havens, where you can live in London and shop out your tax liabilities to any of the convenient offshore tax-free locations around the world, without having to live on a sleepy island in the middle of no where. Many of the available tax havens have power structures that connect up with the UK mainland, which gives great confidence in the protection of your wealth.
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
I am glad some are trying to revive supersonic jets, although I hope they will make them in a "greener" fashion.
The Concorde was actually designed for low fuel consumption. And it was actually pretty good for the standards of the day, it's just the day moved on rather faster than expected. There are basically two ways of increassing the efficiency of a jet engine: increase the pressure ratio thereby increasing the thermodynamic efficiency and increasing the mass flow, decreasing the maximum velocity of the air.
Neither is especially easy. Larger engines also create more drag, weigh more and big fans are hard to make. It turns out however that was much easier and high bypass turbofans cropped up pretty soon. The former is very hard because it increases the core temperature. Pressure ratios have been slowly creeping up, making use of single crystal nickel turbing blades with cooling channels running through them. That allows them to operate safely above the creep limit of the metal astonishingly.
Except the concorde! Flying higher, it starts from colder, lower pressure air and uses ram compression along with the conventional turbocompressor core, reaching an astonishing pressure ratio of 70, compared to only 50 on the absolute latest technology Trent 1000. The contemporary 747 engine reached a mere 23:1. The concorde gambled on the pressure ratio being decisive, but it lost out to larger, slower planes with high bypass engines.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
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'.