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Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

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Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#431

Post by lmm »

searine wrote: post #326
theothermkn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to be first in this space. Because of the fuel costs of supersonic travel (the flow is inherently dissipative above Mach 1), the margins are too tight for anything but business class travel. As soon as you have a supersonic option, you've moved business class out of your subsonic fleet, along with that revenue. With the loss of the effective subsidy of business class, coach costs go up, and the market sh…

>Nobody wants to be first in this space. Yeah, there already was a first in this space, and it went down in flames.

One major crash, at an airline with serious maintenance issues. The final cancellation was supposedly on economic grounds but politics factored into it (I have heard it claimed that AF deliberately overstated maintenance costs to prevent BA from continuing to operate Concorde).

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#432

Post by notahacker »

theothermkn wrote: post #313
nharada wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that other established players haven't entered this space (i.e. Boeing, etc)?

Nobody wants to be first in this space. Because of the fuel costs of supersonic travel (the flow is inherently dissipative above Mach 1), the margins are too tight for anything but business class travel. As soon as you have a supersonic option, you've moved business class out of your subsonic fleet, along with that revenue. With the loss of the effective subsidy of business class, coach costs go up, and the market sh…

> That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.

Honestly, I'm not even convinced that bit's true. Copying what others are doing is often the least effective way of competing. If supersonic premium carriers actually start eating into your business class demand, the sensible, conservative response is to refit your existing transatlantic fleet with more economy seats, refocus it on new routes or consider shedding an aircraft or two. You lose a stream of profit and a touch of prestige, but don't gain the problem of having to profitably operate new aircraft specialised for a highly volatile market segment. Especially when it's a new airframe programme from a no-name manufacturer.

To be honest, in a hypothetical and unlikely near future in which business class priced supersonic transport exists, subsonic premium services will happily coexist alongside them due to better start times, destinations and connections, even on the few routes actually suited for supersonic transport. But yes, there might be fewer flights and higher coach class ticket prices on a handful of routes.

For the most part major airlines didn't benefit from trying to cannibalise part of their existing business to copy [reliably profitable] low cost carriers, and they'll do just fine without the riskier option of supersonic medium haul all-premium flights.

I think (and I've spoken with considerably more commercial airline fleet planners than the average person) the sales challenge with this concept is even bigger than the engineering challenge, which is saying something.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#433

Post by lmm »

StavrosK wrote: post #64
rdl wrote: post #9

Pretty amazing that materials science (lighter, carbon-fiber aircraft; hotter, more efficient/powerful turbines) has made this economic. Concorde never was. NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart. Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an alre…

> single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart. Was the LON-NYC flight time the problem, though? I think that to go door-to-door right now you spend 50% of the time in the air and the other 50% on the ground. With this company, you'll be spending 3.5 hours in the air and 8 hours getting to and from airports and through security.

This was business travelers who would all already have precheck or whatever it's called.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#434

Post by lmm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #144
themgt wrote: post #3

Sorry but is "Boom" really a good name for an aircraft company? I get it's supersonic, but my first association was an exploding airplane.

Well it hasn't hurt "Bomb ba dear" :-) (that is the pronunciation I've heard for Bombardier) So no, name is probably not an issue. Getting a passenger plane to market without any other supporting business, that is much much harder than explaining the name. Not a lot of people can raise funds for 10 years of expensive runway (no pun intended).

Bombardier makes you think you're the one dropping the bombs (since that's what the word means), not the one going boom.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#435

Post by wyattpeak »

mangecoeur wrote: post #173
rdl wrote: post #9

Pretty amazing that materials science (lighter, carbon-fiber aircraft; hotter, more efficient/powerful turbines) has made this economic. Concorde never was. NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart. Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an alre…

On the other hand, when you have have a video call instantly and practically for free this looks like a very self-indulgent expense. Not exactly the eco-friendly option either.

In what possible way is a video call equivalent to international travel?

Seriously, I could start listing the things you can accomplish with one and not the other and I would never run out of steam.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#436

Post by rwmj »

bscholl wrote: post #192

Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly. Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.

Why do you bother having pilots on board? Why not have the majority of the flight directed automatically, perhaps assisted by a ground manager dealing with several planes at once?

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#437

Post by ungerik »

diskcat wrote: post #387
btilly wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk says that eventually we will move to VTOL supersonic electric jets, but he is too busy with other projects to implement it. Have you thought about this idea, and in what time frame do you think someone might try to implement it? Elon's basic idea is that air-breathing jets are limited to altitudes at which oxygen tops out, and then are mostly fighting drag from nitrogen. Electric ones can go to higher altit…

Yeah but you are getting 50:1 difference in energy density between hydrocarbon fuel and battery. Also, vertical takeoff is extremely inefficient because a wing can generate a lot of lift compared to drag. this in addition to the fact that a vertical lift system is only used during take off and landing while being dead weight the rest of the trip. even elon can't override physics

The big power requirement of VTOL is not the problem in the overall energy budget because the hovering time is very short compared to the total flight time. Main problem is the additional weight of the more powerful engines.

BUT: If you want to fly supersonic, you need very powerful engines anyways, so if you can re-use them for VTOL it's a win win.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#438

Post by pjc50 »

lmm wrote: post #429
SeoxyS wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A jet engine (e.g. turbofan) relies on combustion in the engine in order to function. The ignition of the fuel from within the engine is key… it is not just there to just create energy to drive rotational force. You would you use an electric motor on a plane without going back to what is essentially a propeller design?

An engine is just a mechanism for converting stored energy into forward motion - the details are, well, details. There's nothing wrong with propellers (probably impellers will be more efficient), and those efficiency numbers are (presumably) including that.

No, the details are completely critical to making it work!

I'm kind of surprised that Elon Musk, who clearly knows his stuff in rocketry, is handwaving the difficulties of an electric jet. Personally I see it as far more likely that we'll continue to use conventional aircraft but start synthesising fuel from renewable energy. The US Navy is already looking at doing this to make jet fuel from spare carrier nuclear power:

http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2014/nrl-fuel-fr...

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#439

Post by ungerik »

nharada wrote: post #226
bscholl wrote: post #192

Hi - I'm Blake, Founder/CEO at Boom. After watching no tangible progress in supersonics since Concorde was shut down, I started Boom because I want supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly. Will try to answer as many questions here as I can.

Why do you think that other established players haven't entered this space (i.e. Boeing, etc)?

One word: risk!

If there are only two equally large competitors left in the market you won't get radical innovation.

Even "conventional" programs like the 787 and the A350 had big problems because they tried out new things. If you screw up a big program, you may loose lot of 50% market share for the next two decades.

Re: Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes

#440

Post by alex_duf »

Scramblejams wrote: post #241
alex_duf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it'll only be a very tiny fraction of the aviation market. So is everyone driving in the morning: a tiny fraction of the transport pollution. Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction. To add to staceymakano's point: in the transport industry, I feel very uncomfortable when a a new alternative doesn't perform better on the environmental side.

Add every tiny fraction and you get a significant fraction. Not even remotely true in this case. Aviation accounts for about 2% of carbon emissions, by my cursory Google search. Boom aircraft will, in the absolute best of outcomes, never account for more than a very small fraction of that number. And a small fraction of 2% is still, no matter how one tries to spin it, a very small fraction. In any event, power (P) re…

> By your logic then, one should probably never be manufactured.

Correct. My nerd side tells me supersonic planes are the coolest thing on earth, my hippie side is telling me we'll live better without it.

And I still disagree about the fact that a tiny fraction can be ignored.

The main reason why climate change is a thing is because we consistently and repeatedly failed to acknowledge our impact on the environment and justified it by comparing it to other people's impact (and I include myself in that statement).

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