Supersonic doesn’t make too much sense for short flights, but I routinely fly 10+ hour routes and it’d be wonderful if I could shave 5 hours from the total flight time. If they can do LA or SF to Tokyo or Taipei, it’ll make a miserable trip into a bearable one.
Exactly. Anything over five hours is very unpleasant for me. Over eight hours and I'll actually segment the trip with a hotel stay in between. Turning a 10-hour flight into a five-hour flight would save me a full day .
Sure, I'd take the shorter flight, everything else being equal. But what premium would you pay for that ability? The article only mentions being better than Concorde at 5x the fuel cost (I assume it means per passenger-km).
I will never understand why Boom chose such a terrible name. Of course it is a novelty to hear a sonic boom once or twice, but who wants to hear them repeatedly? I imagine they will fly mostly overwater like Concorde, but why remind people on the ground of the most annoying thing that a supersonic flight does? Much worse, as safe and reliable as they can build and fly these airplanes, eventually there will be a fligh…
If powered flights were invented today it would have been banned for noise and safety concerns. Just look at how upset people in SF get about the once a year Fleet Week aerial demonstrations.
There's a view that over reliance on software contributed to the total loss of flight AF447 (since pilots were not sufficiently experienced in how to fly the plane in the various fallback modes to be able to react appropriately in an emergency).
That's more of a training issue than a software issue.
The two are closely related. It’s like saying SQL injection bugs are a training/code review issue. But what if the software eliminated that risk (e.g. ORMs).
But it jump started Airbus, a hugely successful aircraft manufacturer, the difference between Airbus and Boeing is the dependence on fly-by-wire a technology that was first used outside the military in Concorde. So yes it was £3BN down but Airbus supports > 100,000 jobs in Britain, France and Germany. If you compare it to the current Space Launch System, which is a vapourware project which exists to provide a channel…
That calculation rests on the assumption that Concord was a necessary step toward Airbus. Given that the Airbus A300 actually entered service prior to the Concord, it seems to me that Concord was not a necessary precondition. Granted, the Concord was the first aircraft to have fly-by-wire. However, it used an entirely different technology (analogue fly-by-wire) to the Airbus A320 (digital) and preceded it by a decade…
Well it set a precedent for Cross-European collaboration and presumably a whole bunch of engineers from Britain and France all started talking to each other sharing ideas, learning each other’s language and cultural differences in the early 1960’s. The development of the A300 was started about 8 years after France and Britain merged their SST projects, the bulk of the development of the A300 was done in the 70’s. The engineers that worked on the Concorde programme would have started to become available to begin work on the A320 in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Also there is at least one digital computer in Concorde, I think it was the engine/intake controller that prevents the unstart problems that the Blackbird suffered from but I don’t remember TBH.
Ticket should cost anything between 2 to 4 times a normal one. If it works, it’ll capture a lot of business and first class tickets from normal airliners
> Concorde was profitable Only because the planes were sold to the carrier for a nominal (£1, iirc) price. If you consider the development and construction costs, the Concorde is billions in the hole.
> Concorde is billions in the hole. This is the role of governments. From this R&D hole, aerospace jobs were maintained, people were trained, technologies were developed and a whole lot of other side benefits to both countries involved. It’s not unlike NASA’s space program - if you look at the market value of the equipment built, it’s just an enormous money sink. We all know it’s not.
NASA and JPL and other ostensible civilian employers of rocket-scientists and other aerospace engineering experts has a nice side-effect of effectively giving the government a strategic-reserve of highly-skilled experts who can be reassigned to ASAT, ICBM and bomber weapons development at short-notice - and also means those same experts aren't employed by any rival or potential rival superpowers.
...kinda like how the US's civilian nuclear fusion programs were/are a way to keep people who-just-so-happen to be nuclear weapons experts gainfully employed and handily available after the cold war ended. Y'know... just in case!
You are forgetting one thing: how the electricity is generated. Nuclear reactor is clean, hydro energy from waterfall in Norway is even better. Or a coal power plant in Germany. Electric engine might be super efficient. But at the end it could also be coal powered vehicle.
I will never understand why Boom chose such a terrible name. Of course it is a novelty to hear a sonic boom once or twice, but who wants to hear them repeatedly? I imagine they will fly mostly overwater like Concorde, but why remind people on the ground of the most annoying thing that a supersonic flight does? Much worse, as safe and reliable as they can build and fly these airplanes, eventually there will be a fligh…
That's a good point. I'd guess that it's optimized more for investor/employee attention than the broader market. It's evocative of cool physics and "disruption" instead of the blandly pleasant tone one takes to appeal to consumers.
I wouldn't be surprised if they rebranded if/once they start offering flights.
These kind of projects remind me of elaborate fronts for money laundering... why?
Presumably because you're too reflexively cynical? There's an option between rabid optimism and wild conspiracy theories, and it's just "mild optimism/pessimism + wait and see"