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American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

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Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#511

Post by midoridensha »

junofan wrote: post #508
midoridensha wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big problem here is that it would only be useful for trans-oceanic trips (i.e., international). This is American Airlines . Who in their right mind wants to spend top dollar to fly internationally on an American airline, worst of all AA, one of the two worst airlines on the planet? Anyone with some money who wants a nice international flight is going to take one of the Asian or Middle Eastern airlines, not…

Isn’t that the point of the purchase? A differentiator for this market?

Maybe, but I don't see how it could work. It's like Walmart trying to sell luxury products to billionaires. The regular customers won't afford these luxury products, and the billionaires sure as hell aren't going to shop at Walmart. AA is the Walmart of airlines (or worse); anyone with good taste isn't going to buy a ticket from them for any price, no matter how fast the plane is. These planes aren't going to be that much faster; why bother with shitty AA service when you can get a ticket on one of the Asian airlines or Emirates instead and enjoy high-quality service?

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#512

Post by junofan »

_ph_ wrote: post #464
runarberg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will that also be the case if they actually have to pay for the carbon they emit in the process? Currently airline passengers don’t have to pay for their carbon emissions, but I doubt that’s gonna last for much longer (we are in an emergency after all). And I’ve seen elsewhere in this thread that the emissions are likely gonna be somewhere between 5x and 10x of normal sub-sonic flights. The price of this extra carbon…

Good question. Currently fuel for international flights isn't taxed at all, as far as I know. Which explains the popularity of flying. Fuel for cars costs several times more, at least here in Europe. Starting to tax airplane fuel would be an important step towards reducing the CO2 output. Possibly that would trigger a switch to synthetic and carbon neutral fuels.

It’s less than 2% of global CO2 emissions. If your tax scheme shaved off 15% of demand, you’d be saving 0.3% of global CO2 emissions—equivalent to a few months of global emissions growth.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#513

Post by Maursault »

capekwasright wrote: post #103
replygirl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why the downvotes? the original design was trying to use 3x turboprops, and i can see articles on google about them switching to 4x turbofans after the xb-1 work edit: see parent edit, i was wrong. you guys are pretty good at making someone with misinfo feel bad though

The original design was meant to use 3x turbojets, not turboprops.

What does "turbo" mean in this context? Are these things somehow using exhaust to spin a turbine to force air into the intake faster for boosted performance? Or is it just jive, spin, marketing, to sound cool?

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#514

Post by runarberg »

junofan wrote: post #512
_ph_ wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Currently fuel for international flights isn't taxed at all, as far as I know. Which explains the popularity of flying. Fuel for cars costs several times more, at least here in Europe. Starting to tax airplane fuel would be an important step towards reducing the CO2 output. Possibly that would trigger a switch to synthetic and carbon neutral fuels.

It’s less than 2% of global CO2 emissions. If your tax scheme shaved off 15% of demand, you’d be saving 0.3% of global CO2 emissions—equivalent to a few months of global emissions growth.

The thing is that we have failed miserably at reducing our carbon emissions, and we are simply out of time at the moment. Any action we do is already too late. All we can do now is mitigate the worst effects.

There will be a global cost scheme for carbon at some point in the future. I hope it will be a simple tax (imposed by each state by some international agreements; although some weird cap-and-trade scheme with limited effect is probably more likely given how governments are behaving) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is mostly in effect by the time Boom plains are in commercial operations.

Whatever the scheme there will probably not be an exception for international flights (I’m guessing countries will be focusing their efforts on exempting their militaries). The thing is that every industry is going to try to get a discount, and that is simply not possible (we are in an emergency after all). So it doesn’t matter if it only shaves of 0.3% of global emissions (which honestly would be a disaster and not acceptable in the long run). What matters is that all industries (except the arms industry; lets be realistic here) will have to suffer equally for their sustained pollution.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#515

Post by milesskorpen »

cjrp wrote: post #215
milesskorpen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airplane wifi is garbage and wildly unreliable.

Getting better in my experience, last flight I had about 1-2Mbps which was plenty for browsing and sending messages/emails. If that's all you require to do work, then it's fine.

Every now and then it's not awful, that's true. But it's just entirely non-functional and/or extremely slow a high percentage of times, which means you can't reliably plan to have functioning wifi, which means you can organize your schedule around it.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#516

Post by phire »

tgv wrote: post #182
phire wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that sustainable synthetic fuels can't exist? Or don't current exist? Because those are two very different statements.

Well, it requires a lot of power, so building a large plant will be difficult and expensive.

On top of what danans calculates, they are currently researching solar reactors that convert biomass directly into biofuel with sunlight, skipping the losses and costs of converting sunlight to electricity with regular PV solar.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#517

Post by sofixa »

newsclues wrote: post #435
sofixa wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather than high speed rail to get the masses into cities for work That wouldn't really work outside of some very specific cases. High speed rail (300km/h+) needs some distance to get to its cruising speed. Below that it's a waste of money. The shortest high-speed rail route i know of is Paris-Reims and it takes 40 minutes, which is decent for a commute, depending on home/work to train station distance.

Those specific cases cover massive numbers of people so why aren’t they being done? I don’t expect HSR everywhere but in the dense areas

But you need dense areas at specific distances for high speed rail to make sense for commuting.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#518

Post by hef19898 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #456
hef19898 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embraer jets got rebranded as A220s not that long ago, great planes that took over the market that served by short 737s and A319/18s. No competition for the bigger planes, that is true.

The A220s were Bombardier. Them selling out to Airbus had more to do with general issues at the parent conglomerate (they also exited trains and snowmobiles to raise cash). But they still make corporate jets.

Ha, I always mix up Bombardier, Embraer, Boeing and Airbus when it comes to whom bought whom. And yes, Bombardier always made great aircraft. Embraer as well, by the way.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#519

Post by simonebrunozzi »

foobiekr wrote: post #362
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #225

IMHO a better title would have been: "American Airlines to buy 20 Overture aircraft from Boom Supersonic" When reading the original title, I had the impression that the company was going to be acquired by AA. Instead, it's "just" an order of 20 aircrafts. Note that this is not a new move by Boom, they played this card when raising money when they pitched at YC demo day, and they're doing it again. The problem I have…

The deposit could be $1 for all we know and fully cancelable with no commitment to buy or deploy. The press release is basically fluff.

It says non-refundable. But agree it could be as low as a buck.

Re: American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

#520

Post by icemelt8 »

galgot wrote: post #396
Retric wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to have dramatically reduced fuel consumption, but fuel wasn't the issue for the concord the limited number of viable routes where. Going from the Concrods 3550nm range to 4250nm should help with that as it opens up several new routes and longer routes see a more significant drop in travel times.

Still there are not much other routes you can go supersonic in one flight but trans-atlantic, which Concorde could do. Trans-Pacific which could have been the big money making route, like LAX to Tokyo, you need to be able to do 4737 nm... which makes the 4250 nm just short to make it. They would face the same problem the Boeing 2707 team had (or even Lockheed with the L-2000 project), no matter how they tried, too sh…

Going to North America via Dubai or Qatar is a big route industry.
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