Aerospace Startup Will Build A Supersonic Mach 2.2 Aircraft (fortune.com)

A new commercial aircraft will fly more than twice the speed of sound, traveling from New York to London in 3.4 hours. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Colorado-based startup Boom Supersonic is one step closer to making such travel a reality after securing $33 million in investments to construct and fly its first supersonic jet, the XB-1 demonstration and testing craft, according to TechCrunch... With the new funding, Boom will be able to put that concept -- and the technology needed to power it -- to the test. "This funds our first airplane, all the way through flight tests," Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl told TechCrunch. "Now we have all the pieces we need â" technology, suppliers and capital â" to go out and make some history and set some speed records."
They'll be testing a prototype that's one-third smaller than the commercial version within the next year.

Comments

Pricing...

[TFlan91]

The 3 or 4 hours of travel time I'm saving doesn't really justify the proposed ticket pricing...

"The company hopes the Boom jet will take three hours and 15 minutes to fly from New York to London for a price of $2,500 per passenger in either direction, based on its initial prototype. Transatlantic flights currently take more than twice that time."

I fly from Boston to Munich, Frankfurt, Paris or London about twice every 3 months. Ticket prices for a round trip, in the winter, range from 600 - 800$, and in the summer the prices range from 800 - 1200$ (I fly lufthansa over the ocean, then wizz air to final destination, cheap af and lufthansa offers very good service for the price).

If you are going to charge 2500$ for a one way ticket, and the only benefit is I save 3 or 4 hours in travel time, I won't even think twice about it, fuck that.

3 hours of my time is not worth proposed ticket price (~3x for one way, ~6x for round trip).

Unless they reduce the pricing structure, the only people flying this will be bigwigs with too much money to spend. The pricing structure itself sets the company up for a death spiral. Poor investors, didn't do their homework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Pricing...

[maroberts]

I remind you that Concorde was substantially more expensive than $2500 and it was kept busy. There are a lot of bigwigs who are willing to pay that sort of money especially if their company is paying for it.

Re:Pricing...

[pz]

I have an uncle who flew the Concorde from NYC to London frequently. It was entirely worth the extra money to his company to have him there and back in one day. When he would make trips like this, it was to talk to investment banks and the like, and the stock price would take a non-trivial tick upward as a result. The six-hour-plus savings in his time was entirely worth the cost. Moreover, not having to sleep on a plane and have a shitty night's sleep rendering him less effective the next day was even better.

Now, there aren't many people who are like that, but the number is also not zero. Given the large collection of companies in the northeast with insane valuations (e.g., Big Pharma), I'd wager that there is still a market for supersonic travel to London at what amounts to business-class prices.

Re: Pricing...

[YuppieScum]

When Concorde flew, it had dedicated check-ins, security, immigration and lounges at either end of the journey, as befitting a premium and exclusive service.

With this in place, even today you'd spend much less time in the airport than the rest of us flying cattle-class...

Re:Nope

[maroberts]

Whilst accepting its not going to be pocket change, if it was $5 billion, the manufacturers of private jets would be unable to do any new aircraft.

Assuming its not a scam, they are claiming that $30mill will get their Proof Of Concept (XB-1) through, when I presume they'll seek a further round of funding to scale up. The problem is that scaling up is a big problem in commercial aircraft terms. Triple the size makes everything more than 3 times harder, because if it weren't we would be seeing 747 size Concorde lookalikes flying around right now.

Looking at their website however, it looks like the XB-1 is only a two seater, so I suspect their claims to get v1.0 out the door for $30 million plus whatever they already have may just about be possible.

Re:Boom - I do not think that this name will fly..

[Bert64]

1) The high cost of fuel for the trip. Concorde used Re-heat all the time it was supersonic. This may have changed.

Concorde used reheat for takeoff and when passing mach 1, at all other times it wasn't used including cruising at mach 2...
It wasn't needed, but punching through the sound barrier at mach 1 was quicker with reheat and actually used less fuel that way.

Re:Nope

[TopSpin]

if it was $5 billion, the manufacturers of private jets would be unable to do any new aircraft.

Boeing accounts the development cost of the 787, a sub-sonic widebody of the sort they've been building for 47 years, as $29 billion as of 2011. The Irkut MC-21, a conventional narrow body sub-sonic 737 competitor being developed in Russia (one built so far) has a program cost of $4.6 billion to date.

For $33 million you might get as far as testing a credible wind tunnel model. $33 million to test fly a "Boom Supersonic" built aircraft next year (!) is pure fantasy. Marketing bunk. Full stop.

There is a lot of VC sloshing around right now and some of it will unavoidably slop over the side and disappear down the drain.

Re:Change the name to "Crash Supersonic"?

[aktw]

Boom is also what you hear when it goes supersonic. Malwarebytes is a play on the phrase "Malware Bites." The fact that I had to spell that shit out for you is funny, though.

Re:Nope

[maroberts]

But they're not building the airliner for $30 million. It appears they're building a 2 seat, 3 engine plane to test out some of the technologies for $30million+ a bit more.
The nearest comparison is perhaps building the winner of the X-Prize Spaceship One which probably cost less than $30million, although it's hard to tell how much Paul Allen sponsored it for,