Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

boomsupersonic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 531 posts

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#41

Post by froidpink »

nradov wrote: post #26
JCM9 wrote: post #11

Strong FOMO settling in. Premium transatlantic routes routes like NYC-LHR are super important to the bottom line of the big legacy carriers. If one airline has supersonic and others don’t that could be a huge blow to the others. Of course things didn’t work out that way with Concorde, which was not commercially successful and more of a spectacle than something founded in business fundamentals. But if Boom can make su…

LHR is capacity constrained right now so they don't have slots to add more flights. Hopefully the runway expansion will be finished by the time Boom airliners are actually in service.

That is some wishful thinking there

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#43

Post by bryanlarsen »

moffkalast wrote: post #17
JCM9 wrote: post #11

Strong FOMO settling in. Premium transatlantic routes routes like NYC-LHR are super important to the bottom line of the big legacy carriers. If one airline has supersonic and others don’t that could be a huge blow to the others. Of course things didn’t work out that way with Concorde, which was not commercially successful and more of a spectacle than something founded in business fundamentals. But if Boom can make su…

Concorde also didn't work out for management reasons and generated most revenue right before retirement when they they finally lowered ticket prices and stopped flying them half empty like the absolute idiots they were.

Interesting, I had heard the opposite. BA did a survey of passengers and realized that most passengers had no idea how much the tickets were worth since their employers had purchased the tickets for them. They thought their employers paid more than they actually did, so BA realized that they could considerably increase prices without losing many customers. BA raised prices and finally started turning a profit on Concorde.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#44

Post by rflrob »

akmarinov wrote: post #19
HPsquared wrote: post #13

How is the fuel efficiency of these? They go faster, but I assume they would also fly higher where the air is thinner. Does it cancel out?

Adding to the supersonic questions - how will they deal with the sonic booms? I assume they're still banned over land, which significantly adds to travel time?

The routes they mentioned in the press release (NYC-LHR, LAX-Hawaii) are almost entirely over water.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#45

Post by gruturo »

nikhizzle wrote: post #22
alphabetting wrote: post #3

Overture is being designed to carry 65 to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7 over water — or twice the speed of today’s fastest commercial aircraft — with a range of 4,250 nautical miles. Optimized for speed, safety and sustainability, Overture is also being designed to fly more than 600 routes around the world in as little as half the time. Flying from Miami to London in just under five hours and Los Angeles to Honolulu in t…

Interesting that this is slower that the Concord which cruised at Mach 2. I wonder if a slightly lower speed makes the economics more sustainable.

If this is achieved without afterburners (as I understand it is), then yes, this is an immense difference in fuel consumption and radically impacts the economics.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#46

Post by darrenf »

chrisseaton wrote: post #25
akmarinov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only very expensive, but basically coach class all the way through, even for the rich people.

> coach class all the way Has there been a render of the interior or something?

There is on the Boom site, and it certainly doesn't look like regular cattle class

https://boomsupersonic.com/static/images/overture-experience...

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#47

Post by cjrp »

ISL wrote: post #24
akmarinov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only very expensive, but basically coach class all the way through, even for the rich people.

Rich people value time highly. Coach-class that gets you somewhere quickly can be worth a lot more than first-class that takes twice as long.

It's true, and makes sense where your face-to-face time is the key thing. But where it's just "work time", surely you can do a good amount of work on a 7 hour flight in a decent business class seat with reliable internet? Especially if you can also minimise the time wasted on the ground (fast security line, lounge with areas to work, airline calling your flight when it's almost finished boarding not at the start, etc.).

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#49

Post by atdrummond »

bragr wrote: post #5

>American has paid a non-refundable deposit on the initial 20 aircraft. I guess that's not nothing given how these sorts of contracts usually give the big name brand company lots of outs if the speculative company goes bust, but by bragging about it without specifying the amount, I'm guessing it's a low amount.

I will say that I’ve seen plenty of “non-refundable” contracts in this industry (see Qatar’s ongoing tiff with Airbus over coating peeling issues) result in either side unilaterally cancelling delivery of airframes. It would really come down to what exactly went wrong whether or not AA could truly couldn’t claw that deposit back.
Post reply on HN