Nothing I’ve read or heard has made me believe there’s a market for supersonic airliner. This is very cool for sure but I don’t know how they’ll ever sell a full size passenger jet. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.
Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
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Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#522Nothing I’ve read or heard has made me believe there’s a market for supersonic airliner. This is very cool for sure but I don’t know how they’ll ever sell a full size passenger jet. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.
Here's a quick validation of how well you're estimating the market: Without looking it up, how many commercial planes do you think are in the air right now?
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends where Boom's ticket prices fall. If they go for the low-rich market, their target customer moves schedules around themselves. If a CEO can't be in Europe until Wednesday, then the meeting happens Wednesday. And the key thing Boom will be selling is literally unique: fewer hours on a plane. To some, that's a nice to have. To people who hate being on a plane, it's worth a lot. And even lie-flat first class suck…
Color me skeptical. I don't think CEOs have as much schedule flexibility as you think they do. A lot of the time they're traveling to meet with customers, analysts/media, investors, and so forth. And they have a lot of timing constraints. Senior execs tend to travel a lot . It's part of the job description basically along with early morning and late night conference calls and, generally, often grueling hours although…
I'm seeing you jump back-and-forth from business travel to your own personal travel and conflating the decisions into one skeptical argument.
You don't buy first class, or even business class seats, as far as I can tell from this comment. You have to set aside your own reactions because you aren't in the target market.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10k transatlantic return hop. Add expedited immigration. Does not sound insane. First class tickets London-NY can be already in this price range. Not for everyone of course (certainly way out of my price range).
There's a market, just not sure how big. Business class works mostly because there's a big plane full of people paying for Economy (and maybe Economy Premium) and I suspect a lot of business is upgrades for flyers with a lot of status or mostly using miles. With e-entry (not sure how it will work with ETA now), I haven't waited long in London for immigration in ages. British Airways business class-only flights from t…
It's the other way around. Economy works because business subsidizes them.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could this thing take a polar route from New York to Hong Kong?
Planned range for the Boom Overture is 4900 miles, so only a little better than the 4500 miles of Concorde, which occasionally had to make a refueling stop going westward over the Atlantic. So it won't have the capability for transpolar or Trans-Pacific flights.
Seattle to Tokyo is under 4800. If they serve that route I will never fly anything else.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#526How cool is that, hopefully will pressure Airbus into developing one too. So far they did silly concept vides only. I'm also quite worried about Airbus after winning against Boeing becoming complacent since Chinese or Russians are not even close.
This is slightly off topic, but why cant we start rebuilding Concorde? Wouldn't it be much easier to rebuild using modern technology? And try to get Mach 3 over the Atlantic so London to New York could hopefully be under 3 hours including take off and landing.
I think Boom is doing exactly what you propose. What you propose just doesn't look like you expect it to look.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow qui…
>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would…
Oops, good catch, thank you. I got too sloppy with the napkin math.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the Q&A at the end of the video the CEO said: - Symphony engine being produced by EOY '25 - 3 years to have first full size Overture roll off the line - About 4 years to have it in the air for first time.
There's zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year, when zero of the market leaders want their business. Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation. Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about…
> zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year
Not one year. "produced by EOY '25" means they're almost certainly already very far along in the development process. There's no way they'd have a target date that early if they hadn't even started yet.
Looks like this article from last year says they were already doing hardware testing back then: https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/boom-supersonic-accelerates...
That said, as with any other aerospace project, I expect delays.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain). This overlooks development costs. Wiki says: > Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023). That is an astonishing price for 20 aeroplanes!
I didn't overlook development costs, I SPECIFICALLY excluded them, and SAID that I was doing so.
But you can't just exclude them. They are part of the cost.
Re: Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable Most likely it's aspirational, something to market to investors and potential employees.
> something to market to investors and potential employees Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]: > The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line. [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-four-hour...
Yes, and self driving cars are right around the corner!