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American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

boomsupersonic.com

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Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#421
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oil embargo hit the entire industry hard, but Concorde continued operation into 2003. Over time as other aircraft became more efficient the efficiency gap grew much larger but it was still profitable up to Air France Flight 4590.

Concorde survived on government subsidies, especially with the R&D costs, but also the maintenance chain. It was a point of national pride for the UK and France, but also a money pit for both countries.

> Concorde survived on government subsidies, especially with the R&D costs, but also the maintenance chain.

Yes, and this was mostly necessary because of the small unit counts and small number of routes, not because of fuel costs (though the latter certainly did not help.

Both could be significantly better with Boom: more routes, and lower fuel costs.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#422
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone claiming you are wrong hasn't bothered to google. Literally the first response for "overture turboprop" is a series of articles confirming what you said. > The Overture supersonic aircraft will be powered by three turboprop engines, which includes two that will be mounted under each wing, while the third engine will be fitted at the end of the fuselage. https://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/overture-…

There is no way you could go supersonic with a turboprop

if your next stop is tbe pavement and its a one time use aircraft...

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#423
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awkward... The website FAQs still say "XB-1 test flights are planned for early 2022."

XB-1 is a prototype plane for R&D. It's target first flight now is fall 2022. Overture is a production model for commercial operations.

Ehich measn, technically and legally, XB-1 isn't an aircraft. As pointed out elsewhere, the hard stuff is up ahead. Cudos so for BOOM for having customers signed on, something a lot of eVTOL companies only managed to do very recently.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#424
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oil embargo hit the entire industry hard, but Concorde continued operation into 2003. Over time as other aircraft became more efficient the efficiency gap grew much larger but it was still profitable up to Air France Flight 4590.

Concorde survived on government subsidies, especially with the R&D costs, but also the maintenance chain. It was a point of national pride for the UK and France, but also a money pit for both countries.

[deleted]

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GB is the more neutral term, UK is pushed by the Conservatives and nationalists/royalists

GB is not "more neutral". Great Britain is the name of the post 1707 Union of England and Scotland. It's not neutral if you are a member of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom is the name used by the country at the UN but is, of course, not neutral if one is a member of the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland. No one uses .co.gb domains.

Here .... en-ie and en-gb are different things, because the Irish English dialect is a bit more distant from British English than the Scottish one. Whereas .uk is a country code representing a specific political entity.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#426
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as has ever been discovered - no, this won't work. You can think of a fan as just a prop enclosed in a housing (jet engine). A prop loses effectiveness at the speed of sound because the air passing the prop gets a high pressure shock wave that effectively makes the prop not prop-shaped, so it can't move air. Picture it as using a hammer on glass instead of pushing on glass with your hand, one works way better…

What about the Tu-95? It's famously loud due to (says Wikipedia) supersonic propeller tips. Do you know why they're still effective?

I am convinced that if you were to dimple the propeller (tips) such as a golf ball is pitted, you would reduce this effect.

Further, if you wer to dimple/convex in an alternating pattern the leading edge of any aero ... efficiencies would increase.

Micro-dimples are better.

Understand the eddys, as Da vinci would say....

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

biofuels or synthetics. not sure if they plan to own the fuel supply chain, so "net zero" may come through offsets to cover the impact of producing the fuels

They appear to have signed a deal with YCombinator startup Prometheous Fuels to supply the SAF fuel, with carbon offsets to cover other carbon costs. https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ (very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing)

Cool site indeed. Unfortunately (but expectedly) experts are challenging the feasibility of it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#428
post #200

So they went from scaled down Concorde configuration : https://www.airway.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Boom_Ov... to a very scaled down Boeing 2707-300 configuration : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707 (that tiny fin tho...). While reducing cruise speed to 1.7 mach. I see no visible changes to deal with the sonic booms problem. So operation would be like Concorde I suppose, subsonic (or hi-subsonic) over…

And they still have not solved the problem that ultimately sunk the Concorde. Fuel costs made it unprofitable to operate whenever the price of oil went up. The small niche of customers willing to pay a significant premium in order to save some travel hours is not big enough to sustain an entire industry of specialized mechanics, parts suppliers, pilots, etc... Basically you need a critical mass of people riding these…

Didn't the founder say he envisions supersonic tickets to be $100? I can't even buy any subsonic tix for less than $120.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#429
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/noStupidQuestions ; Can these be 'stacked' - Can you have a turboFan in line with a turboProp such that the output of the wash of the Fan feeds into the Prop, but with a portion of the wash spinning to thrust on the outer ring of output.=, via a design in the cowlings which is hyper directed thrust vents (think the grid of straws used to funnel water into a cohesive column, which can be directed) Imagine a small di…

Edit: removed battery voltage analogy. You might be interested in reading this stack overflow answer about differences between turbo prop, jet, and fan. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/71301/what-is-t... Another aspect to consider is changing engine characteristics for different conditions. An example is changing the structures guiding air into the engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intake_ramp

This is why we CAN have nice things.

If everyone were to take their response as if they were educating a youngling, to grow with an understanding, the world would be a better place.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The disruption can happen as many routes transition to electric. Boeing and Airbus might wait for to long. There are already new companies doing short-distance electric passenger flight. These companies could well scale to longer distance flights. You could also imagine a company like Tesla getting in that business as well.

There are no electric jet operated commercially, and wont be until at least 2026. And those that are in development are meant for distances around 100-200 km or strait up urban mobility. The latter of which falls squarely into the helicopter segment. And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard. Really hard, it is with the potential exception of life science t…

> There are no electric jet operated commercially, and wont be until at least 2026.

Yeah, I wasn't making any time prediction, but big technology changes can break established industry patterns.

> The latter of which falls squarely into the helicopter segment.

There are lots of markets in the past that flew these kind of routes and with electric other can again and more routes can be added because of the changed economics. Helicopters are unsafe and have low capacity, I don't really think they are actually competing in the same space.

They address something different then something like the Heart Aerospace ES-19. That plane is 400km, 19 seater designed to launch in 2026.

And that is with incredibly conservative choices, conservative air-frame, conservative batteries and so on.

There is a huge amount of potential for increasing the range left once you fully optimize every aspect of the plane around electric.

> And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard.

I picked Tesla for a reason. Tesla works with SpaceX. Those two companies already work together on many fronts. Tesla battery packs and electric motors in SpaceX vehicles. They have shared research divisions in material science and likely other things. Musk has been talking about electric plans for decades, its pretty clear that he wants to develop them and has mentioned before that between Tesla and SpaceX he has the ingredients. Its just that there is so much more scaling to do in automotive and trucking that it doesn't yet make sense to invest the resources.

Lets just be real, Tesla knows much more about electric motors and batteries then companies like Heart Aerospace, or existing companies like Boeing/Airbus. Yes the industry is regulated more and certifications are more strict, but a company that produces 3+ million electric motors a year (more large electric motors then anybody else in the world) fully vertically integrated, can manage to match companies like Heart or Airbus when developing battery packs and electric motors and get them certified and produced.

SpaceX speaks for itself, they outperform Boeing to an almost embracing degree in space, see Crew Dragon compared to Starliner. I am confident that if they were to work on an airplane they could do it. They had to do a huge amount of certification work for DoD, for NASA, they know how to work with regulators and the get hardware certified.

Now of course, it would not be easy and success in aerospace is never guaranteed. But the ingredients are there and the is little question they could raise the required funding. I think that would be a better thing to focus on then robots to be honest.

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