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

Re: Pricing...

[imgod2u]

But how much time do you save nowadays though. 20 years ago when the Concord ran, you got to the airport 45 min ahead of time with plenty of time to spare.

Today, international travel takes about 3 hours at the airport alone. Let alone the flight. So if we're taking 9 vs 6 hours spent, is it really that big of a difference?

Also, the economics of flying means that fuel efficiency is the primary factor in profitability. So if this thing eats up twice of 3x the fuel as a 787 but earns twice as much per flight, airlines won't be running it.

Re: Nope

[Rei]

Is it really that expensive? I know some people who had run a small startup automaker that raised 30-something million. They were about 3 months out from first commercial deliveries (having made a couple dozen prototypes to various degrees, ranging from empty shells to full builds), with about $10m still left in the bank - when the board decided to bring on a guy from Detroit (Paul Wilbur, the guy responsible for the Chevy SSR, and a bunch of other train-wrecks-in-car-form), who then proceeded to run the company into the ground.

Are aircraft that much more expensive than cars, that you can't even build a demonstrator for that kind of money? To be fair, the automaker's vehicle was technically classified as a motorcycle, so their regulations weren't as onerous as for most cars (but they still did full crash and crush tests anyway, voluntarily). But, I mean, they just churned out prototypes one after the next.