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it's all turboprops and no afterburner. so, expensive, but much more affordable than concorde, maybe to the point of competing with subsonic first class
When I saw “all turboprop and no afterburner” I imagined some new flavor of “all cat, no cattle”.
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Companies love low cost R&D that doubles as low cost marketing!
Also I'm assuming it is hard to do this kind of project internally because it seems so cool. A lot of employees would be upset if they were not allowed to take part.
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.
Might be related selecting an engine. The previous version of the design had a fantasy engine that didn't exist (I think the specs came from a military engine that they couldn't use due to export restrictions), but now they are working with Rolls-Royce, and appear to have actually selected an engine design. It must be smaller than what they originally wanted, because they moved from a 3 engine design to a 4 engine design.
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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?
I wonder how noisy they are even sub-sonic. Concorde was so loud on takeoff and approach, you'd stop and look up even living ~20 miles away from Heathrow. If you tried to introduce that now, there's no way would it be accepted.
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…
United also has a deal with Boom, that was June this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57361193
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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.
Also sanity. I’ve done a 16 hour flight before, and let me say never again . I slept for half of it and the other half was still miserable.
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Turbofan (what's on most commercial jet aircraft), not turboprop (jet engine driving a propeller, generally on smaller commercial and some private aircraft).
ah, neat! looks like they recently switched from 3x turboprop to 4x turbofan edit: had to correlate sources to find that a bunch of popular aviation blogs got the original design wrong. was actually 3x turbofan -> 4x turbofan
edit: see parent edit, i was wrong. you guys are pretty good at making someone with misinfo feel bad though
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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.
Concorde only used afterburner(en_us)/reheat(en_uk) for a small part of the acceleration phase of the flight not for cruise.
If Boom is able to come out with a new supersonic aircraft, is it possible for a startup to compete with Boeing or Airbus in subsonic aircraft? Either coming up with a new design or another innovation that can compete. Or, are those companies pretty much set with impassable moats?