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Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

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Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#231

Post by notahacker »

rbanffy wrote: post #50
talldayo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment. Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions…

> Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that. At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thin…

> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes

I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.

You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#232

Post by binary132 »

chgs wrote: post #188
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA to New York or San Francisco to Honolulu in 2 to 3 hours would be a game changer. You could probably fill a plane at least once a day on those routes for a handsome profit.

I suspect if Concorde had been made by an American company the “overland” issue would have been solved.

That doesn’t fit with my understanding about the cancelation of the Boeing SST project.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#233

Post by anothertroll456 »

giarc wrote: post #59
anothertroll456 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not really, that's like saying "they relied on closing the doors to the aircraft to achieve supersonic flight". Both happened, but aren't related if I'm reading the comments correctly.

That's a really dumb response. Yes, it relies on closing the doors to achieve supersonic flight too.

The Boom plane doesn't rely on afterburners at any point in the trajectory to achieve supersonic flight. So yes, you would be reading the comments incorrectly.

Gosh this website is full of ignorant people.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#234

Post by bgnn »

mandevil wrote: post #100
ceejayoz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boom also requires afterburners, at least for now. You can watch them kick in on the telemetry (which goes from "100%" to "A/B" for all three engines) at the bottom of the video around the 58:35 mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/-qisIViAHwI?feature=shared&t=35...

Boom is not currently flying their intended engines, the Symphony, which does not exist yet. (1) The XB-1 is flying with J85's just like a T-38 has, and just like a T-38 it can go supersonic with afterburners. If the Symphony is able to meet its design goals, it will not need afterburners for any part of flight. How much they will be able to deliver on that remains the biggest open technical question for Boom. (2) 1:…

With the amount of billionaires increasing, I'd think more people than Concorde had pay for civil supersonic.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#235

Post by notahacker »

dylan604 wrote: post #79
hnuser123456 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.

Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing

Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept (though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#236

Post by mikeyouse »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #218
mikeyouse wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds.. $200 million in North Carolina for production: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/nc-... $60 million from the US Air Force for development: https://www.aerospacetestinginter…

The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet. And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?

Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.

It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.

It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#238

Post by buildsjets »

sedatk wrote: post #159
cromulent wrote: post #121

“Currently, all civil aircraft flights are prohibited from operating above Mach one speeds over land in the United States.” [1] Mike Bannister’s excellent book Concorde talks at length about how “handsomely profitable” the BA service was (as opposed to the Air France one) from 1984 until the 2000 crash and subsequent grounding put them in to a spiral where keeping enough people certified was too expensive. One part o…

Concorde experiences one fatal crash in 27 years: entire product line gets cancelled. Meanwhile, Boeing 737 MAX... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You don't know what you are talking about. The product line was cancelled many decades before the crash due to lack of sales. After the crash, the Concorde fleet was modified, returned to service and remained in service for another 3 years before it was removed from service and retired due to the high cost of operation.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#239

Post by __loam »

actionfromafar wrote: post #200
__loam wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military has had supersonic aircraft since the 1950s, why would they care about this?

If it's cheap to produce.

The F16 is already cheap, proven, integrated with everything, and available in great numbers. The Air Force also has a super sonic bomber in the B1 lancer, and a mass produced supersonic stealth fighter/bomber in the F35, which is actually pretty cost effective despite its public perception. Maybe there's a place for a large supersonic transport but the Air Force also has a lot of very heavy logistics aircraft already.

Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

#240

Post by crowcroft »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #215
crowcroft wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super impressive, but I agree with this, it was an easier project to plot on a spreadsheet and forecast a path to profitability. Using current technology and looking back at the Concorde to make any predictions on supersonic passenger travel generates a spreadsheet with a lot of red on it.

If somebody wants to burn their time and money trying I am totally cool with it. If they succeed in their vision they will be handsomely rewarded and transport gets faster. If they fail they still tried to make the future more amazing.

Hell yea brother
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