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Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

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Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#401

Post by mark-r »

mathattack wrote: post #328
bscholl wrote: post #192

Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly. Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.

Great idea. The airline industry needs innovation around product and service to get out of it's current race to mediocrity. 2 questions: 1) Why 2.2 times the speed of sound? (Why not aim higher?) 2) Where will you get the capital? Seems like a very big ask compared to the typical company coming out of YC. Again - good luck! I would love to clip 4 hours from the SF to NYC flight.

SF to NYC seems unlikely; the sonic booms from the transition between subsonic and supersonic are disruptive enough that they're essentially banned over land areas.

Edit: I'm informed by other comments that the boom occurs the entire time you're supersonic, not just during the transition. That makes it even worse.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#402

Post by mark-r »

tempestn wrote: post #278
bertil wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it make sense for you to fly West from SFO, turn around, go super-sonic over the ocean and fly towards NY — then again, decelerate over the Atlantic, and turn back? i.e. what is the distance from the shore you can boom?

As others have said, the boom is continuous. However, what you could (and presumably would) do is gain altitude at sub-sonic speed, then go supersonic only once cruising altitude is reached. That should help with volume. Also presumably they would avoid flying over major population centers.

Is the boom attenuated by flying through much less dense air?

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#403

Post by danjayh »

paulmd wrote: post #166
ohitsdom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has made this economic. That remains to be seen. They don't even have an engine yet, so this is still firmly in the "we'll see" category.

Seriously. People here are way underestimating the costs to develop and certify a major commercial airframe, especially across the multiple regulatory regimes inherent to international flight. You're probably talking about on the order of a billion dollars even if you're playing it cheap. If you want to start re-engineering components instead of buying off the shelf, that number will go uphill rapidly. This is not a…

Hell, they'll have half a billion just in the computing & control systems. Having worked to design, build, and certify the avionics systems on three major commercial aiframes, one of which is now flying (787), I am hopeful but beyond skeptical. When a company backed by the government of the world's largest economy (Comac) can't make decent progress on a subsonic airframe built with 20+ year old and well understood technologies, and when leading airframers like Boeing had a helluva tough learning curve building a composite subsonic airframer (787), I'm beyond doubtful that this startup is going to build a supersonic composite airplane before it goes bankrupt. Google '787 wing box' and '787 delamination' if you want to know the kind of pain Boeing went through when trying to build a composite airframe.

If you want to get and idea of the magnitude of the regulatory hurdles in a domain that most here will understand, google DO-178C. The mountains of documentation that you have to produce for the software will push any integrated avionics development effort well into the hundreds of millions, unless they plan on using bog standard off-the-shelf parts, and even then they'll have to deal with the flight control system, which will have to be custom by necessity. For some google food, search on 'wcet analysis', 'structural coverage analysis, 'MCDC analysis', 'requirements traceability', 'stack analysis', etc. There are huge hurdles to leap through to get certified, and that's just for the software.

I hate being a wet blanket :(.

OTOH, if they can get capital in the 5-10+ billion range, poach all the best folks from Boeing, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, GE, UTC, Gulfstream, etc. etc. etc. (which will involve setting up offices in Seattle, Phoenix, Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Savannah, the UK, France, etc. -- the aviation scene is a bit older, people have families, and are not so keen to move), then they might actually pull it off. Which would be awesome. And I'd totally be in (if they set up an office in my area, that is).

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#405

Post by rohit89 »

nharada wrote: post #142
ohitsdom wrote: post #84

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.

I agree, this is an insanely hard problem to solve. There are dozens of companies with tons of capital and massive R&D budgets that haven't already done this, presumably because they either think it's too hard, the regulatory hurdles are too high, or the market is not ready. Why can this startup do what they can't?

...because they really want to do it? If there's one thing I've learnt, looking at what the big companies are doing/didn't do is a really bad metric for things like this.

If this was a company started by Elon, perception of this company would have been totally different.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#406

Post by rohit89 »

ejcx wrote: post #34

I'm reminded of the first half of "Web Design: The First Hundred Years"[0]. Commercial planes have not gotten faster and have in fact gotten slower. I personally agree with the sentiment of the blog post, that a 5 hour flight across the atlantic is fast enough but it's still neat to see startups getting in to this space. 0 - http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

I don't agree. Faster travel is always better - whatever the mode of transportation. Once you hit a certain speed and price point, it will radically change the lifestyle of people. For example, the hyperloop with 30 min travel time between SF and LA would mean that people could literally live in one city and work in another city.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#407

Post by alextgordon »

jdc wrote: post #228
zerr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment is actually more than relevant... A lot of people have fear of flights and the name which brings negative emotions is an issue.

What I find is that arguments in the comments are held to a lower standard. There's no way an original article can get away with the kind of hand-waviness we in the peanut gallery can. If someone writes an article whose primary assertion was unsupported by evidence or credible source, it's probably going to get flagged. Do it in the comments, and the hive-mind takes over. Which, now that I think about it, could be a…

People are only trying to help. Better now than when the press hears about it and starts taking the piss out of them.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#408

Post by blairanderson »

putzdown wrote: post #319
bscholl wrote: post #192

Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly. Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.

Terrific premise; I hope you succeed. But advice: 1. "boom" is not the right name. Explosions. Annoying/scary sonic boom. These are not the associations you're looking for. Try "glide," "zip"—something along those lines. 2. In your very first team picture I see a grumpy-looking fellow with hands in pockets. A few images on he's still there, now joined by another grump with crossed arms. These people look disengaged a…

Please do not tell people what to do. Its a waste of bandwidth. Thank you.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#409

Post by voltagex_ »

bscholl wrote: post #208
Pyxl101 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exciting work! I'd be glad if supersonic flight was a reality again. How do you plan to tackle the challenge of opposition to supersonic flight? Overland supersonic flight has been banned in US and Europe because the loud noise of sonic booms annoyed residents that the planes flew over. Coastal residents continued to object to supersonic flight. Is there a path to offering transcontinental flights again, and if not,…

Thanks! We are very excited to be doing this. We're starting out focused on long flights that are mostly over water, like New York - London or San Francisco - Shanghai. Around an airport, our airplane will be about as quiet as other new aircraft. The sonic boom will also be much quieter—and we'll continue to make future iterations even quieter. It's hard to say exactly when, but I expect the supersonic overland ban w…

is SYD -> SFO too far?

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#410

Post by hellyeasa »

Sorry, this is ridiculous, it just wont happen (not ever, just this company). From my experience in the aerospace industry, having a manned prototype aircraft of this scale fly within 2 years, supersonic no less (!!), is an impossibility. It is simply not possible, at least with any sane regard for safety.

Aircraft are hard, you need an army of experienced engineers, like thousands, and hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and resources to design a 21st century aircraft. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or whoever, that's the state of the art nowadays. You need to run numerous (supersonic!) wind tunnel tests of a design (each test spanning months, with year long lead time before testing, and months of analysis and design in between tests). There are only a few facilities in the world (like the 10x10 at Glenn Research Center) that can provide such wind tunnel testing. Structural and aerodynamic work will take years of iteration to meet basic design challenges. Actuators, flight computers, air data sensors, etc... need to be chosen with very careful forethought via trades with big name suppliers, and lead times for these things can be 9 months to 1.5 years easy. The engine is as important as the entire airframe its self, and there are only three engine manufacturers in the entire world that could make an engine for a plane like this. One would need to be designed from scratch from one of these manufacturers and would easily take 3-5 years! Oh, and they would need a ton of capital and thousands of engineers to do it too. This doesn't happen from a scrappy looking start up with random engine parts sitting in a room with a whiteboard. This is a joke, investing in this company is a sure way to throw away your investment. Sorry, that's the cold hard facts.

Yea, spacex managed to succeed, at least so far, but look how big they are now and how long it took them to get where they are today. And I would argue that spacex's engineering challenges are easier than those needed for a 21st century supersonic jet transport.

Sorry, that's just the state of aerospace engineering today. Major new aircrarft are only developed by the big boys with the experience and resources to make it happen over a 10-20 year time frame with continued but small investments in R&D, and incremental leaps in technology.

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