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Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

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

#461

Post by myrmidon »

michaelt wrote: post #437
throwaway2037 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so. Their website says: > Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7 Concorde flew NYC LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC LON are currently 7 hours. Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip.…

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy? Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure.…

Sure, being a domestic enterprise might help here, but you will have to deal with regulations abroad, too (and Concorde had arguably the edge there because it had both London and continental Europe as home court).

I'm also fairly sure that softening/undermining noise regulations in general has become harder (less tech enthusiasm, more NIMBYism, especially in Europe).

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

#462

Post by gcanyon »

Avshalom wrote: post #457
engineer_22 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pushing something for such a long time despite being so far from any commercial traction feels insance to me. They must have something that you ain't got...

Extremely generous investors?

I think they were going for "the right stuff"

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

#463

Post by notahacker »

rbanffy wrote: post #460
notahacker wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, a…

Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials. I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.

There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment

The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction

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

#464

Post by Toutouxc »

WalterBright wrote: post #424
throwaway2037 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so. Their website says: > Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7 Concorde flew NYC LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC LON are currently 7 hours. Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip.…

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? Is it? I lived in Kansas in the 1960s. Sonic booms from the AF base were common. They weren't that loud. Electric storms (a regular in Kansas) were considerably louder. > The Concorde burned fuel (passenger miles per liter) at roughly twice the rate of non-supersonic aeroplanes. 5-7 times as much. My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you cou…

> My dad said when he pushed his jet supersonic, you could watch the gas gauge unwind.

Did your dad fly military jets? Most older jets can't supercruise, i.e. go supersonic without using afterburners, and afterburners consume unholy amounts of fuel. Concorde did consume quite a lot of fuel per passenger mile, but it could supercruise.

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

#465

Post by metacritic12 »

echoangle wrote: post #224
jameslk wrote: post #115

Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 I remember seeing this post about Boom going through YC, 9 years ago. It's really cool to see the founder laying out what he wanted to accomplish in the comments and then seeing it happen today. Especially fun looking back at those comments saying it couldn't be done and all the haranguing over the name "Boom" :) Congrats to…

It’s a good start but I wouldn’t say the critics are proven wrong already. Even getting the full-scale version flying won’t be enough, you need to make the whole operation economically viable so it actually makes sense to operate it. I’m not saying they won’t manage to do it, but they haven’t proven that they will be able to do it today.

I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.

It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.

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

#466

Post by alex_duf »

reaperducer wrote: post #209
alex_duf wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the question was about the questionable economics of running a super-sonic airplane profitably. The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money. Maybe the premium aspect will be enough, given that we have a bigger and bigger chasm between rich and poor, or maybe the economics of running it won't compete against sub-sonic, lower fuel consumption planes.

The Concorde was notorious for bleeding money. I see this stated all the time on HN, yet there's a whole section at the top of this very comments thread where people are talking about how very profitable the Concorde was. One person quoted the line "There were times, in fact, when the seven aircraft in the fleet would contribute around 40 per cent of BA’s entire profits."

If I recall correctly, that's one of the well documented places where I had understood the fact that the concorde wasn't profitable, and would more or less never by in its current context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBvPue70l8

Which isn't to say Boom may not succeed.

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

#467

Post by InTheArena »

michaelt wrote: post #437
throwaway2037 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so. Their website says: > Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7 Concorde flew NYC LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC LON are currently 7 hours. Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip.…

> Are people forgetting about how incredibly loud is a sonic boom? It is unlikely that it will get rights to fly over land, just like the Concorde. Remember a few years back when the Canadian-made Bombardier C-Series was selling well, so Boeing got their allies in the US government to impose a 300% tax on them as an "America First" policy? Well, the rules around sonic booms were similar. Were there sonic booms? Sure.…

This isn't true. The backlash to sonic booms grew well before Concorde and was part of why the US government canceled its support of the SST program. Boeing canceled their part of the 2707 because of the (extremely) unexpected success of the 747 program (a larger plane slower addressed a larger market) and the 737 success.

Sources:

Joe Sutter, Creating the worlds first Boeing Jumbo Jet

Thomas Petzinger, Hard Landing

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

#468

Post by Telemakhos »

anovikov wrote: post #374
justmedep wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concord was actually a cash cow for all airlines who had them. The only reason why airlines stopped using Concord was because of the crash and the inherent safety issues that were found. But the actual business model worked - limited in scope but it was highly profitable. “That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the c…

It worked because not just the development costs were paid for by the government, but acquisition costs were, too. Planes were given to the airlines for free, completely paid for by the states. Also, only be BA made good profit on it and only after mid-1980s. Air France could barely break even. If not the PR effect that put those airlines above all others as the only ones flying supersonically, they'd never make any…

> Who'd pay that kind of money today for a commercial flight?

Nobody. That's part of Boom's plan: they want to make the Overture jet cheap enough to fly that tickets will cost about what business class costs on regular intercontinental flights. They're keeping the problems of the Concorde in mind as part of the design process.

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

#469

Post by InTheArena »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #414
Jakob wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not taking away from your point, just for comparison: A British Airways first class LHR-JFK roundtrip is $10K today for an 8h flight. Supersonic would be 3h.

Is Boom aiming to be faster than the Concorde? I don't think so. Their website says: > Overture will carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7 Concorde flew NYC LON in 3.5 hours. I guess Boom will fly the route in about 4 hours. Also, regular commercial flights on NYC LON are currently 7 hours. Also, using Google Flights, I priced LHR JFK on first class about T+1month for 7 days (Mon->Mon). It is about 5.3K USD round trip.…

The one new factor is the route fragmentation that occurred over the Atlantic with the 757 and 767 and the fragmentation that occurred over the Pacific with the 777 and 787. These changed from a model where only hub to hub flights where every seat had to be sold to be viable from a financial point of view to enabling many city pairs to work, and airlines still to make a profit, even if the business class seats are not fully sold. This led to a much larger market, which plenty of room for 3-10k "business class" tickets on these flights.

If boom can hit that same number, they will have success out of the USA Europe market and premium intra-asia flights - the two most profitable route systems in the world.

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

#470

Post by nosequel »

lutorm wrote: post #417
hugs wrote: post #237

I haven't seen anyone directly address it in the comments here (or in the video): was an audible sonic boom noticeable on the ground during today's test flight?

Given that they were only authorized to fly in the "Bell X-1 supersonic corridor", I'd wager that sonic booms are fairly commonplace there. I doubt there are any residents around. https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2003098938/

There are residents for sure in that corridor, but the residents are on Edwards AFB, and are fairly used to sonic booms. When I was on Edwards, there was still the last operating SR-71, and that boomed any time it flew.
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