How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
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How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
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Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#2> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people
This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#3> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in…
My take is that they felt like they were already pushing their luck with the prototype and didn't want to scare investors away when it inevitably crashed.
I share your skepticism, especially with their timeline. It has been some time since I looked at them closely, but they originally pitched developing their own supersonic capable turbofan to power their eventual production model. Especially with such a small team that seemed overly ambitious to me.
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#4> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in…
I work in aerospace and I don't find this development strategy unusual prima facie. I don't know if Boom is explicitly doing rapid spiral development, but this is what it would look like from the outside - a development vehicle that doesn't resemble the final vehicle design in many ways, but does have strategically selected commonality to validate and buy down risk on specific subsystems and operational concepts. They may be retiring XB-1 simply because they got the data they needed.
That being said, I share your skepticism of Boom as a company. As far as I know, they still don't have an engine for their production aircraft design.
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#5> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in…
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Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#6> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range.
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#7> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range. Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state. Gi…
It might be a fad, but the current trend in US public aviation is increasing premium cabins and premium revenue:
https://simpleflying.com/why-us-carriers-doubling-down-premi...
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#8> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in…
The market for Boom is not commercial passenger flights. So much time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc. that the flight speed is not a big deal. Existing commercial passenger jets could already go faster without going supersonic and save some time, but it doesn't matter. Even if you fly commercial passenger jets at the absolutely face-melting Mach 3.3 of the SR-71, you don't really save enough time to matter. The maximum speed in flight doesn't do anything to address ground delays.
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#9> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in…
My take is that they felt like they were already pushing their luck with the prototype and didn't want to scare investors away when it inevitably crashed. I share your skepticism, especially with their timeline. It has been some time since I looked at them closely, but they originally pitched developing their own supersonic capable turbofan to power their eventual production model. Especially with such a small team t…
Hah.... in the back of my mind: announce they're going to crash it before the fly it.
"This flight we're validating our model by pushing the real world to the limit. It should explode about 38s into the test and crash. We've cleared the expected area"
Re: How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
#10> We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance.
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.