71–80 of 112 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Business Class trades well above 3X tourist class. If you are a tourist searching business class on Google Flights, of course it’s 5-6x more expensive. True business class / upper class travelers get discounts of 20-50% for J. And no, they’re not using Amex/Chase Travel.
> True business class / upper class travelers get discounts of 20-50% for J. And no, they’re not using Amex/Chase Travel. What are they using, then?
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats Most of the profit on a plane is made in business class. If airlines could fly an all-business configuration, they would. The problem is the smallest planes that can do high-paying routes like LON-NYC are bigger than that customer set. So the airline throws in economy seats, often barely breaking even on those, to fill space. In a world with small a…
There is one airline that flies all business class. An A321Neo with 76 lie-flat seats, NYC to Paris/Nice/Milan. Random date selection yields $2700 one-way New York to Paris. https://www.lacompagnie.com/en/about/services
> 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…
Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
IIRC, the last news was that Rolls-Royce noped out of that (1), which is an indicator that it's either not technically or commercially feasible.
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house?
I'm not an expert, but this seems like it's on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure.
i.e. Without engines, they have nothing, and if Rolls-Royce can't do it, then who can?
1) https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
AKA they're doing what every other aerospace company has been doing for decades, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization [0] with simulation in the loop. If you were to ask them how they're leveraging Design of Experiments I bet it'd be met with "design of what?". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidisciplinary_design_optim...
> At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI. As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job. As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
I listened to the podcast that the founder did about a week ago. It reminded me of how retired folks in the middle class open a restaurant when they don't know anything about running a restaurant. Except this dude isn't investing $1M on a McDonalds, he's investing hundreds of millions. He seemed almost proud of his inexperience, and nearly said that it gave him an "advantage" because existing engineers weren't willin…
Incidentally, Ray Kroc, the guy who made McDonalds the $200B company it is today, didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. His closest experience was selling blenders.
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary…
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary…
Computational simulations have been involved in aircraft design for decades. However, at some point you still have to verify the simulations with real world tests. I think (as a non-expert) the main reason no aerodynamically novel aircraft have been developed lately is because we have essentially optimised designs, already. To be clear, I am not saying that we can't do better. I am saying that the manufacturing (and…