61–70 of 180 posts
From their web page: “Faster travel brings the world’s people, cultures, and experiences within reach. Life happens in person, and at Boom we see breaking the time barrier as a moral imperative. XB-1 is the first step in bringing supersonic travel back to the world.” -- Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO The life happens in person part currently sounds like a relic from the past. I hope Boom makes it through the travel re…
From their web page: “Faster travel brings the world’s people, cultures, and experiences within reach. Life happens in person, and at Boom we see breaking the time barrier as a moral imperative. XB-1 is the first step in bringing supersonic travel back to the world.” -- Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO The life happens in person part currently sounds like a relic from the past. I hope Boom makes it through the travel re…
They are targeting $5K for round trip tickets between NY and London. It is really just making it faster for the rich to travel for fun or work. Supposedly it is inherently 3X as expensive as subsonic planes from a cost per seat mile point of view. It is basically a cheaper replacement for the Concorde. Also it seems that their biggest difficulty is coming up with suitable engines. The engines that they need don't exi…
Having built a glass/kevlar/epoxy kayak, it's a little mind blowing to read about people building a supersonic airplane, using similar (albeit far^N more precise) techniques.
Did you build a pygmy kayak kit by any chance? I did, it was the most fun I've had building something in my life. The entire "epoxy plus fibrous material" is truly a winning solution for so many applications, apparently hyper-sonic wings, too!
Having built a glass/kevlar/epoxy kayak, it's a little mind blowing to read about people building a supersonic airplane, using similar (albeit far^N more precise) techniques.
Did you build a pygmy kayak kit by any chance? I did, it was the most fun I've had building something in my life. The entire "epoxy plus fibrous material" is truly a winning solution for so many applications, apparently hyper-sonic wings, too!
i'm in no way qualified to give any praise/criticism, it just caught my attention (from the linked post on their cockpit/fuselage bonding https://blog.boomsupersonic.com/20-hour-bonding-event-speeds... ) "It’s the following morning and bonding appears to be successful, but it’s essential to confirm that the bond lines are shaped correctly or “filleted.” A member of the engineering team, who is certified in the proces…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are targeting $5K for round trip tickets between NY and London. It is really just making it faster for the rich to travel for fun or work. Supposedly it is inherently 3X as expensive as subsonic planes from a cost per seat mile point of view. It is basically a cheaper replacement for the Concorde. Also it seems that their biggest difficulty is coming up with suitable engines. The engines that they need don't exi…
I hate points like this. Pretty much all technology starts out for rich people. I mean if you don't have supersonic flight at all its technology will not improve either, neither will the economics of scale. Air travel itself is already only for the rich, and travel in general is mostly for the rich, if you want to look at it from the poorest in the world. Elon made this point the best with Tesla, and in 10-20 years t…
This plane, while awesome, is not a Tesla, it's never going to be as cheap as a commercial flight, and it's certainly not going to make the world a better place.
The level of care and organization in this photo feels equivalent to what I would expect for a ground robot prototype out of a startup. Can any aerospace engineer comment on what they see? Does their setup inspire confidence?
I'm sure it's all very highly technical work, but that caption and photo was hysterical.
Airbus A220 - $90M
Airbus A320neo - $110M
Boeing 787 - $140M
Boeing 777 - $320M
Airbus A350 - $325M
Gulfstream G700 - $75M
All of these can of course carry more passengers (except the Gulfstream), but assuming it's somewhat efficient from a fuel perspective, and assuming an airline could sell ~60 business class seats on each leg, I'm optimistic for them - cutting your trip time in half is certainly something to brag about.
For reference, as an example, a British Airways 787-9 used for transatlantic routes seats 8 first, 42 business, 39 premium economy, and 127 economy.
The blog post is hyper focused on the wings and didn't make a lot of sense without context. This link[1] was extremely useful to better understand what Boom is doing and how far along they are. [1] https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1/build
This test plane has a range of 1k nautical miles but a cruising speed of Mach 2.2, which works out to like 40 minutes of flight time at max speed? That seems like a really tight window for takeoff + test + land + any kind of safety buffer. I'd be curious to know how they handle those logistics.
It should be able to fly much further if they planned to run out of fuel and ditch.