141–150 of 488 posts
Sorry but is "Boom" really a good name for an aircraft company? I get it's supersonic, but my first association was an exploding airplane.
Man, HN's standards for a top story and a top comment are really different, are they?
How can they discuss cost and dates when it sounds like they don't even have firm plans on the engine? The promise of Boom is very compelling and good luck to them, but it's just a dream right now. If it was as easy as the founder makes it sound, Boeing would already be doing it.
Pretty amazing that materials science (lighter, carbon-fiber aircraft; hotter, more efficient/powerful turbines) has made this economic. Concorde never was. NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart. Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an alre…
If they could make it quiet enough to go over land, transcontinental US flights would be great; LA/NY in 2.5 hours would likely have a pretty high demand. [edit] As someone who flies LA/DC fairly regularly I do have to mention my favorite record of the SR-71 doing that flight in under 65 minutes.
Transonic (approximately Mach 0.80 - 1.2) flight uses significantly more fuel than subsonic flight does. Business jets like the Gulfstream G550 burn more fuel at M0.9 than regional Boeing 717(MD-95) at M0.75 with 4 times more passengers.
The F-22 Raptor can supercruise at M1.6, with half the range compared to cruise at M0.85 similar to other fighters.
If Boom can optimize an aircraft for supersonic transport it would still be expensive to operate. For comparison, no US operator has all business class scheduled flights from LA-NY, and British Airways flies their all business class NY-London flights in an VIP A320 series jet that cruises at M0.7 which is slower than most airliners on the route.
Sorry but is "Boom" really a good name for an aircraft company? I get it's supersonic, but my first association was an exploding airplane.
So no, name is probably not an issue. Getting a passenger plane to market without any other supporting business, that is much much harder than explaining the name. Not a lot of people can raise funds for 10 years of expensive runway (no pun intended).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Unless you're worried that they're actually going to try to build an airplane out of cardboard" I dunno. They do say "carbon fiber" a lot... and that is a description of cardboard....
Carbon fiber is incredibly strong when engineered properly: "During the test, the wings on the 787 were flexed upward “approximately 25 feet” which equates to 150 percent of the most extreme forces the airplane is ever expected to encounter during normal operation. The test is used to demonstrate a safety margin for the design and is part of the certification process to show the airplane can withstand extreme forces.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top speed of a 747 is 0.85 Mach, so it should cut the duration by more than 2x.
Speed only matters for the cruise part of the flight. The first and last 45 mins, plus airport time are not different. The slowdown portion of a Mach 2.2 flight will be even longer. (edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top speed of a 747 is 0.85 Mach, so it should cut the duration by more than 2x.
Speed only matters for the cruise part of the flight. The first and last 45 mins, plus airport time are not different. The slowdown portion of a Mach 2.2 flight will be even longer. (edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top speed of a 747 is 0.85 Mach, so it should cut the duration by more than 2x.
Speed only matters for the cruise part of the flight. The first and last 45 mins, plus airport time are not different. The slowdown portion of a Mach 2.2 flight will be even longer. (edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NYC-PEK or NYC-PVG would be awesome, but there's a lot of inland there. A lot of really sparsely populated inland. How politically influential are the Siberian fur trappers this route [0] overflies? Enough to counteract the fat overflight fees that Russia likes to charge? [0] http://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper/rout...
You are right -- there would be a bit of extra subsonic about 150km into Canada, but it would work. Flight time at 2.2 would still suck, but there could be a market. Probably depends on the total traffic between the city pairs, since some fraction would pay for supersonic coach-size business vs subsonic business/first.
Sorry but is "Boom" really a good name for an aircraft company? I get it's supersonic, but my first association was an exploding airplane.
ipad got a lot of bad association initially because of the feminine hygiene product. NYT, CNN, WSJ, and many tech press criticized it soundly. Nobody cares anymore.