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OTOH if flying becomes more rare, then the only demand left will be from people with deep pockets. Maybe the only way there is a market for supersonic jets is if all the other long haul routes go bankrupt.
And the people with really deep pockets already have a jet. ;-)
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You sound like someone who doesn't live that far away from your destination. I live in Australia. Bring the boom boom flights! If I can get to London or New York in less than 20 hours, I will be very happy.
Flying trans-Pacific or the equivalent without refueling requires a whole different class of aircraft and seems very unlikely.
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Or maybe the military has technology we don't know about yet?
I'm not so sure. Airplanes are hard to keep secret when they're flying around, and existing planes have their capabilities pretty well figured out by now. It's not every day a new airframe is built. I'd expect the $100MM USD F-35 to have all the latest tech, being the newest fighter available.
As a (pre-Covid) extreme frequent flyer, supersonic and other rapid point to point initiatives are thoroughly unenticing. Part of the reason I loved long flights was the ability to put away the laptop and zone out to a book or movie with some wine before landing, dealing with immigration, hotels, Ubers, and days of frenetic, high stress meetings afterward. The prospect of trying to optimize how fast we can jump from…
Same here, I'd rather upgrade to a comfy class for 12 hours than spend multiples of the cost to shave off a few. If it's flying on a schedule the only real point is less seat time (okay, also whee fast airplane), much of the time slow airplanes will have left and landed before the fast airplane's next scheduled departure and landing. These will make for one hell of a business owned or leased aircraft, although that d…
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(Big fat disclaimer: I don’t understand anything I’m about to say) Wouldn’t the windows be broken _behind_ the plane? In my mental model, you’re flying below radar so anyone on the ground will know you’re there anyway. If you’re sub-sonic people hear/see the plane and you hope they don’t have time to do anything before you strike. If you’re supersonic they hear/see the plane, their windows break, and you hope they do…
You would leave a long trail of broken windows and reports from the moment you went supersonic in their territory, charting your trajectory. Threat detection is a network, not a single point. However, if you're moving fast enough and the target is close enough, your premise is valid. They would not have time to react. Cruise missiles tend to be used for those mission profiles.
If the enemy doesn't know you're there, you don't need to go fast.
Isn't one of the main drawbacks of supersonic flight the noise?
The traditional solution was to only allow supersonic flights on the coasts where the jet could fly out over the ocean for the boom.
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Same here, I'd rather upgrade to a comfy class for 12 hours than spend multiples of the cost to shave off a few. If it's flying on a schedule the only real point is less seat time (okay, also whee fast airplane), much of the time slow airplanes will have left and landed before the fast airplane's next scheduled departure and landing. These will make for one hell of a business owned or leased aircraft, although that d…
To address the "empty Concorde" problem, Boom is explicitly targeting a 50-seat business class layout with similar seat cost per mile. Filling 50 comfortable seats is an order of magnitude easier than filling 100 uncomfortable ones.
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You would leave a long trail of broken windows and reports from the moment you went supersonic in their territory, charting your trajectory. Threat detection is a network, not a single point. However, if you're moving fast enough and the target is close enough, your premise is valid. They would not have time to react. Cruise missiles tend to be used for those mission profiles.
Has it perhaps occured to any of you that flying at below radar altitude at supersonic or above speeds, would be dangerous and would have no benefit? If the enemy doesn't know you're there, you don't need to go fast.
They do have systems that help and/or automate parts though.
Going fast into and out of AO is the way you stay alive.
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It's hard to say how efficient this plane will be before it's built (or more details made public) but from what I've read sofar the big version, 'Boom Overture', is meant to use turbofan engines. That alone should provide significant fuel savings over the Concorde, which used turbojet engines with afterburners on takeoff. Even so, supersonic flight is less efficient than getting there a bit slower. Unfortunately, air…
Seems to me that everything is nonlinear in the domain of aircraft, particularly when concerned with "efficiency". There is an equation [1] which makes it clear that the power required to maintain flight is a function of air density, drag coefficient, lift coefficient, wing area, and -- velocity cubed. All things being equal (which they never are), double the speed and you need 8 times the power. So in the most simpl…
The same physics applies to fast trains and other modes of transit. Fast electric trains have the advantage of not having to lug their fuel along with them at speed.
> consider that energy is a function of both power and time applied; if you double the speed to fly from say London to NY, would you cut the time to fly to less than 1/8th what it would otherwise be?
I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but note that by definition going twice as fast will get you there in half the time. Work and Energy are in alignment here because of the various efficiency losses you’re talking about.
The Concorde did have some reprieve in that it flew 20k feet higher than the usual cruising altitude.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21881/at-what-a...
Ultimately high speed transport is not about conservation of energy. It’s about conservation of human time. Weighing that against the environment and other factors are important but few people weigh their total use of energy in a given day.