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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.
They'll be testing a prototype that's one-third smaller than the commercial version within the next year.
from the marketing geniuses that brought you "side effect pharmaceuticals", "cirrhosis malt liquor" and "divorce playing cards".
Nullius in verba
Modern commercial aircraft development, testing and certification programs take upward of $5Billion these days, just what do these people think they are going to achieve with $30million? That won't cover the cost of the engines...
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/...
I do not think that this name will fly with current airport security. They will have to do a hell of job with PR to promote Boom supersonic plane. Don't event think about trying to spell it out at any airport.
The linked article states the prototype will be 1/3 the size of the real plane while the paragraph above says it will be 1/3 smaller. Not the same thing.
Editor, thy name is click-bait credulity.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
'Boom' in this case is what you hear on the ground when an aircraft goes supersonic. The Supersonic Boom.
But yes you may have a point.
I'd fly on it in an instant. I flew on Concorde three times. A Wonderful experience.
The biggest issues with this project are excatly the same that Concorde faced.
1) The high cost of fuel for the trip. Concorde used Re-heat all the time it was supersonic. This may have changed.
2) Nations won't allow it to fly supersonic over land. This has not changed.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Underwhelming, for two reasons. First, the supersonic flight technology has been well understood for over 50 years - building a supersonic airplane is just a matter of will to do so, and sufficient funds. Second, related to the first, this is an easy undertaking, if operating it profitably requires charging $10K and up per passenger for the London - New York trip. Do it so that the price does not go beyond $1,000 per passenger for that route, and we will be impressed. Otherwise, stop wasting the public's time.
I really don't understand the scale model thing.
When you go to scale up, you're practically building an entirely new vehicle.
It didn't make sense for the HyperLoop, and it didn't make sense for the DC-X. It's not going to make sense here.
'Boom' in this case is what you hear on the ground when an aircraft goes supersonic. The Supersonic Boom.
No kidding?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There's a lot more supercruise capable planes these days. Of course they don't go 2.2 supercruising.
Honestly it should say "may" not "will", these things seem to rarely work out as proposed.
?
Scale models are useful when they fail, though.
Is that like an ATM Machine?
"... marketing geniuses..."
Apparently a lot of technically-knowledgeable people don't have social ability. Boom Supersonic!!! "Boom" is what you hear when there is a crash.
There are many more like that. For example, Malwarebytes is software named after the problem it is supposed to cure. Doesn't anyone at BOOM have a mother?
Son: Mom, what do you think of the name BOOM for our company?
Mom: No, son, that's not a good name.
Son: Why not?
Mom: You're only 3 years old. You'll understand when you are 4.
I was told Slashdot would be adding UTF-8 support "soonish" and that was like a year ago. I'm not saying that hasn't happened, I'm saying they are hoarding the sweet UTF-8 support and keeping it offline!
whipslash, why hath thou forsaken thine brethren?! ;(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Hail Satan!
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.
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Who the hell wants to hear man-made thunder all the time?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
WTF, the Concorde supercruised all the bloody time.
Scale models are useful when they fail, though.
They are useful in limited realms, given that what's being tested is not the final product. We should probably be designing things to not fail.
Experimental Bomber number 1?
Have gnu, will travel.
Concorde used reheat only during take-off and then accelerating through the sound barrier. It definitely didn't use it for supercruise at Mach 2.2; at this speed the Olympus engines operated at their maximum efficiency--as designed.
50 year plus old turbojet engines, small and less sophisticated wing (missing vortex lift), only a fraction of the resources of Concorde design/development - won't cut it.
carbon/composites instead of RR58 aluminium alloy, CFD modeling and current FWB controls will surprisingly or not fail to produce meaningfully better performance
kudos to the Concorde designers who still have to be topped almost 50 years after its first flight
Concorde wasn't grounded because people wouldn't pay the premium for an ultra-fast trans-Atlantic crossing, it was grounded due to FOD from a shoddily-maintained Boeing owned by United.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
OTOH, the Concorde had horrible fuel consumption on the ground, could consume two tons of fuel to taxi to the runway. A new design might fix this by using electric motors in the gear.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I really do, but the endless parade of of proposed supersonic transports starting with the Boeing SST, that were eventually canceled makes me pretty pessimistic.
The basic technology for supersonic flight hasn't changed. Its not clear why the they claim that the will succeed where so many other companies have failed.
Boom reminds me of Thompson and Thomson driving along in the Tintin story 'Land of Black Gold' when their engine unexpectedly blows up: When one day your car goes "Boom!" Don't give up or change your tune! Call Autocar we'll be there soon! On the day your car goes "Boom!" * * B O O M ! * *
There is a long history of similar projects and they all face the same challenges: airframe, engines, engines, engines, engines, cash flow, actual demand from buyers, and safety. And time to get certified (likely to be 5-10 years) and lawsuits.
For a couple good examples of conventional aircraft enduring this, look no further than the HondaJet or Leonardo's AW609. Though I am not aware either has been sued, they HAVE taken a very long time to get from design to prototype to test vehicles to certification and sales. Honda worked on their jet for at least SIXTEEN YEARS to get certification, and it's not as radical as a supersonic jet.
Any new design is going to take years to get certified. Major updates on existing vehicles also take forever. It's just the way it is, and helps keeps these things from falling of of the sky. Which you want even more if the vehicle is supersonic and might kill a lot of people if it failed in flight.
Mostly, supersonic projects are stuck at the mercy of their engine supplier. There is always only one such supplier and any delays or problems there delay everything else. It's really only recently that some common airliners have even had an option for engine suppliers and you still have to choose in advance who will make them.
Sig for hire.
The DC-X was successful except for the idiot who didn't connect the landing leg.
Human error is not the same as a fundamental flaw in the program.
Sig for hire.
It's because fluid flow is not only computationally difficult but also the rules are all empirical with uncertain boundaries between different domains so sometimes it's not clear what equations to use. That's why there is still wind tunnel testing of scale models. Since the end product is going to be very large (and supersonic wind tunnels are very difficult things to deal with apart from very short test durations) it makes sense for the scale model to be a flyable aircraft that can reach supersonic speeds itself.
Not entirely. The model won't be a precise shrink down of the full design because it's a test of how the air will behave over the full sized design.
Testing is part of that. About the most obvious example is Edison not designing a perfect lightbulb on day one.
Refer to my post above about why aircraft scale models are still used. Simulating how the design works on a computer is still prone to producing results that diverge from reality unless you get a bit of feedback on what sort of modelling applies. Turbulent flow is a pain, laminar flow is not as simple as you would think and once things go supersonic many things that you would think are obvious get turned inside out (eg. subsonic nozzle converges, supersonic diverges such as the nozzles on the Saturn V).
The DC-X was successful except for the idiot who didn't connect the landing leg.
Human error is not the same as a fundamental flaw in the program.
If the DC-X had six landing legs instead of 4, one could have failed (like it did) without the thing tipping over and exploding. It could have also landed on rough terrain, both on Earth, and off (moon landing, anyone?) without needing a relatively flat place to land.
Making it small didn't really serve any purpose, other than to save some money up front, and McDonnell Douglas, at the time, was pretty much printing money (which is what made it such an attractive target for a takeover).
Yeah. This not a "omg, this is all new technology".
We built the fucking plane, we used it, it was stupid expensive, we stopped.
Google "Concorde Airplane"
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The key to making this project work is the advanced battery technology described in other Slashdot stories. As soon as those batteries are commercially available, this project will take off.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Give us Warp 2.2 and we can talk. Mach 2.2 is just another Concorde.
Concorde was not commercially viable, because it could only fly a few routes worldwide. NY / London, LA/Tokyo SF/Hong Kong etc. Basically you can't fly supersonic over land, without pissing the natives off.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I am old enough to remember when there were a few airliner crashes every year. The improvement since my distant youth came from decades of slogging detail work and accumulated knowledge. That's just the kind of detailed subtle knowledge a start-up company won't have.