[elidourado]

Disclosure: I'm at Boom, which is building a Mach-2.2 airliner. https://boomsupersonic.com/

I think it all depends on how much cost savings for how much speed. In today's dollars, a round-trip ticket on Concorde from New York to London was $20,000, or 4x today's business class price. For that, you got a tiny seat in a cramped cabin.

What we're targeting at Boom is an improvement over business class. We're making it profitable for airlines to operate the plane at today's business class fares. We're getting you there in half the time. And instead of a cramped two-and-two cabin arrangement, it's a one-and-one configuration (every seat is a window AND an aisle). The seats are similar to today's domestic first class seats, only designed for productivity.

So the choice a business traveler could soon face is: Would you like to get from New York to London in 7 hours in a lay-flat bed, or in 3h15m in a comfortable, productive environment? Price is the same either way. We think most people will pick the supersonic flight.

It should be noted also that the premium cabin market today is much larger than it was a few decades ago.

And finally, premium-cabin economics are only the first step. We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.

[ghostly_s]

Uh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?

[Apes]

Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency.

If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost, you need to use 1/10th the fuel, have 1/10th the maintenance overhead, and have 1/10th the staffing cost all at the same time.

You can't go over 100% efficiency in any area, so to see 1/10th the cost you would need the entire aircraft industry in the 1970s to be operating at under 10% efficiency, a low bar I am highly skeptical of.

It's not like Aeronautics engineers or the Airline industries were gorillas banging rocks together with no understanding of what they were doing, and I find it hard to believe there is enough room for a 10x increase in efficiency from the 1970s even with a perfectly efficient aircraft and airline behind it.

But hey, if you really believe it's possible, invest in Boom because they must have designed a cold fusion reactor running on tap water to power their jet and everyone who invests will probably become a trillionaire overnight once they reveal it.

[fanzhang]

Is it possible that in a regulated airline market $20k roundtrip went not into the marginal physical costs but regulatory overhead/profits/recovering fixed costs? If I showed you that a can of Coke in a Disney world vending machine was $3, and told you I could get a can at $0.30, would I have performed a miracle in the soda sciences?

$8K is a normal RT JFK-LHR ticket today in business class. This is vs $800 in economy. However, Boom proposes that the same $8K can support economy-style seating traveling at Mach 2.2 instead of mach .80. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 3x the speed will cost ~10x as much.

[vasco]

That depends on the proportions of the costs, if one area is much larger in absolute values, you can go higher than 10x improvement there, while keeping all other costs equal, while still getting an overall 10x improvement. Amdahl's law yada, yada.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Not sure why all these people are saying it totally makes sense that technology can provide a magic 10x improvement in efficiency.

People who have worked in computing all their lives will have seen multiple "magic 10x improvement" cycles, so might have an implicit believe that it will happen everywhere.

But one should not assume that this will happen for the task of pushing big metal tubes through the air by burning things. The physics of it is not on the side of easy 10x improvements in that case.

[gaius]

If you want to go the same distance for 1/10th the cost

And remember that both BA and Air France got their Concordes “for free”

[keymone]

In 50s cars were 15mpg in average. Today’s top tier mpg cars are over 120mpg. Order of magnitude. They are also safer, quieter, faster, cheaper in maintenance, etc.

Technology does enable 10x improvements over half a century sometimes.

[brandmeyer]

You just compared fleet average in one time period to an extreme outlier in another time period.

In reality, fleet average fuel economy has been nearly flat for four decades, with the biggest periods of movement being driven by brief excursions in the price of crude oil. Those efficiency excursions were in turn driven not by technological improvement, but by changes in the makeup of the vehicle fleets themselves (lighter cars, smaller engines).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

[keymone]

and here we're comparing "average" of supersonic flight half a century ago to a potential future outlier. i don't think i'm being outrageously unreasonable here.

[opencl]

The Concorde is not "average", it is the most fuel efficient supersonic aircraft to date by a huge margin. Yes it's kind of old but I think you are dramatically overestimating how much aircraft turbojet engines have improved in the past 40 years.

[BinaryIdiot]

To be fair it has been over 40 years since the Concorde was designed and built. While I'm pretty skeptical that a start-up is going to somehow design, build and deliver a supersonic plane I don't think such improvements necessarily have to be "magic". Plain ole iterative improvements over 40 years could probably handle much of that.

[vamin]

If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane, which halves your amortized capital cost per flight. That doesn't get you all the way there, but it's a significant cost reduction, which combined with others, could conceivably get you there.

[ptaipale]

> If your flight time is half, you can run twice as many flights per day with the same plane

Certainly not. Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced. Some of these activities happen at the same time with each other, but many of them not.

[ubernostrum]

Planes don't spend all their time flying. A significant part of the time they are being boarded or people are stepping out, and freight is being loaded and unloaded, and the plane is service, fuel tanks are filled, catering material brought in, wings are de-iced.

The turnaround time -- time needed for everything that happens from when the plane arrives at the gate to when it departs again -- is only comparable to flying time for smaller aircraft doing shorter domestic hops.

For aircraft doing the kinds of inter-continental segments a supersonic airliner is targeting, there's no real comparison. And airlines most certainly do optimize for time spent in the air; a plane on the ground is a plane making no money. So you see a single aircraft bounce around among a bunch of hubs all in one day, for example, or larger, longer-range aircraft doing rotations of where they fly to (like having the same aircraft do a flight from the US to South America and back, then off to Asia and back, to optimize for arrival/departure times and minimize time spent not flying)

[ptaipale]

Of course airlines optimize it, but still, boarding alone takes a significant portion of the total time needed for a long-haul flight.

If I look at the latest long-haul flight I took, the flight time was 11 hours, turn-around time at airport 4 hours, for a total of 15 hours. If you'd drop the flight time to half, and manage to do accelerate boarding, cleaning, re-fueling etc in 3 hours, you'd come up with 8.5 hours. Much better, but not even close to be able to deliver twice as many flights per day. It'd be more like a 50 % improvement.

[ubernostrum]

Long-haul utilization also depends on one other factor, which is time zones. It can be worth leaving the plane on the ground longer in order to line up for a more desirable departure/arrival time.

You see this a lot with transatlantic flights, where they spend more time than necessary on the ground at each end, but doing so sets up better timing (like eastbound TATL flights departing in North American evening and arriving in European morning).

[coolspot]

However super-sonic aircraft require more maintenance than regular airplanes due to higher stress on all systems.

[TylerE]

Twice as many flights means twice as much fuel, twice as many landing fees...

[nothrabannosir]

Those are marginal costs. Parent comment was talking about amortised costs, i.e. fixed costs. Such as the airplane, itself (depreciation per mile of flight aside, but that’s another point).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost_of_capital

[rcxdude]

IIRC lifetime ratings on aircraft are most heavily based on the number of pressure cycles the airframe receives, i.e. the number of flights it does, not the length of time it spends in the air or its age. So being able to do twice as many flights in the same time just shortens the lifetime of the aircraft.

[elidourado]

The Concorde entered service in 1976, and program launch was in the Kennedy administration. It would be surprising if technology didn't advance enough to bring huge improvements over that time period.

There are broadly three enabling technologies, plus a couple of economic factors. Technologies:

1. Carbon fiber. With the 787, we finally have a transport-category aircraft with significant amounts of carbon fiber that has gone through full FAA certification, which significantly lowers the barrier to us using it. Carbon fiber does a lot for us. It is lighter and stronger than aluminum, but it is also more thermally stable. Concorde grew about 15 inches in flight as its temperature rose in flight. Our leading edges will reach over 300ºF at Mach 2.2, and our plane will grow less than an inch in flight. That is a significant maintenance cost reducer. Carbon fiber also enables more complex geometries without expensive tooling costs. Our plane won't have a straight line on it. We can take better advantage of area ruling to improve aerodynamics. In contrast, Concorde's fuselage was a cylindrical tube.

2. Engines. There is a (much slower) Moore's law for engine cores; they get better at a rate of around 1 percent a year. Move 50+ years forward from when Concorde's engines were designed and you have a real improvement. Concorde used 4 turbojets (i.e, zero bypass ratio) and we have 3 medium-bypass turbofans. Plus no afterburners are needed. When Concorde used afterburners to punch through the transonic regime, they had a 78% increase in fuel flow for a 17% increase in thrust.

3. Computational fluid dynamics. Concorde is all the more impressive for the fact that it was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Wind tunnel tests are expensive, taking six months and costing millions of dollars. We can do virtual wind tunnel tests in software in about 30 minutes. We still use tunnels to closely test harder aspects of the design (e.g., low-speed handling qualities), but we have much more rapid design iteration than Concorde could have hoped for.

On the economics, we are right-sizing the aircraft. Concorde had 100 seats, but it usually flew with a very low load factor (half-empty). Our design has 55 seats, which is similar to the premium cabin on today's widebody subsonic airliner. What this means is that any route that can sustain widebody subsonic service today will basically work supersonically. We expect much higher load factors, which are helped by business class fares and a lower number of seats to fill relative to Concorde.

This leads to economies of scale. Whereas Concorde really only was profitable between New York and London, Boom flights make economic sense on hundreds of global routes. Which means we'll sell more planes and drive maintenance costs down further. Only 14 Concorde units ever saw commercial service. Ultimately, when Concorde shut down, it was because Airbus stopped making spare parts. In contrast, one public report by the Boyd Group estimated supersonic demand at 1300 planes. With almost two orders of magnitude of planes in service, we'll achieve much better scale on maintenance.

Hope this answers your question about the magic.

[tajen]

A good way to image this is, in 1969 for the moon landing they had to code the timestamps in negative. Of course it’s a joke but it tells a lot about how far that time was.

[ttul]

"Shut up and take my money," -- JAL Executive

"黙ってお金を取る" - JALエグゼクティブ

[LoSboccacc]

medium bypass can push mach 2.2? holy intake shock. any precedent for engines having such performance?

[lambdasquirrel]

The F-22’s engines have 0.3:1, it cruised at Mach 1.8, and it’s old 90’s tech now. Correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe 2.2 is pushing it, but the claim doesn’t seem outlandish. The Boom doesn’t need the wings of an air superiority fighter, amongst other things.

[CaptainZapp]

I still don't buy it.

That said, I sincerely wish you prove me wrong and pull it off.

It's a huge risk and certainly deserves to be rewarded.

[joering2]

What makes you think you are going to sustain that ridiculous cheap price of a ticket?

I fly to Europe constantly on first class and tickets are usually circa $8,000 round trip. When I saw your "plane" with huge seat space, huge windows and $3,500 per round trip NYC-LON I immediately looked for your phone number to send you $350,000 for my next 10 years of flying. Please just take my money!!

Bottom line it will not be sustained so some deep alteration will have to be done. I would rather spend $8,000 in first class 7 hours flight this summer, than book my 3.5hr flight with you that will happen in 2028, because you are highly overbooked. Of course adding 100x more units in flight won't cut; air space is not like bakery you just can add another oven.

> We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.

In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door. Your approach is similar to those who envisioned building harness for 100 horses in a row to go faster, right before a Diesel engine was invented.

[hcknwscommenter]

> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door.

I feel like this assertion deserves a big "maybe" in there somewhere.

[mustacheemperor]

Definitely. The commenter who can't believe supersonic flight is commercially feasible by the early 2020s thinks it's because we'll fly from London to NYC via space elevator and slow through reentry via "huge magnets." To be honest, I don't know enough about the science and business of flight to know whether this pitch for Boom is feasible, but I'm not as inclined to buy this particular argument against it after this point.

For the record, I hope Boom succeeds. When I was a kid I learned about the Concorde as the future and it's been a real shame to watch it stay in the past.

[mrbill]

Until one day a magnet fails and "safely land" turns into "dies screaming after impacting at terminal velocity into a city center"

[amluto]

> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator" and then pull back with Earth gravity, slowed down by huge magnets and safely land in New York in less than 19 minutes, door to door.

I’d like to see the trajectory that takes you from NY to London in 19 minutes without squashing you and/or causing insane amount of heating. Bonus points if the only source of thrust is a fancy air brake.

[woolvalley]

I wouldn't make predictions about things that are not possible to make today with with unlimited budgets.

One past example of predicting the future with unlimited budgets is the xerox alto.

[keenerd]

> not possible to make today with with unlimited budgets

The Lofstrom Loop is possible today for a few billion dollars. Though "catching" an incoming capsule with a Loop is going to take a while to human-certify.

[woolvalley]

What is a few? That is the in the range of infrastructure projects for many nations. China could create it for example.

[petre]

> In few decades we will be catapulted into space from London without engines on "the Moon elevator"

I used to imagine the same thing when I was a kid, that by the turn of the millenium we'll be piloting flying cars. But here we are in 2018 sitting in traffic jams in the same old boring four wherlers. Yes they're more efficient and reliable but still a chariot on wheels.

Nowadays I'd rather imagine supersonic flight is possible from an economic standpoint and wish Boom the best of luck with their enterprise.

[kakwa_]

It's a really personal opinion, but I don't think that we saw a lot of technological breakthrough in the last 50 years.

Except in genetic, chemistry and computer sciences, most other fields looks a lot like where they were 50 years ago.

It's true that there were a lot of incremental changes, greatly improving the overall efficiency, and also a far wider adoptions of these technologies. But the basis for most concepts/designs are in fact quite old.

The first computers are from the 50ies and the transistor from 1947, the 737 first flew in 1968, the 747 a few years later, the first nuclear plant dates back from 1956, Soyuz still flies despite being based on the 1957 R7 ICBM, the basic design of cars is pretty much established since the 20ies or 30ies.

Short of the internet (agree it's a big "short of"), our lives are not that much different than in the 70ies or 80ies (at least in the US/Europe).

And in fact, it's not a big surprise. A big factor in radically changing our material condition is to get energy, and a lot of it. First there was coal 200 years ago, then oil and gaz in the late XIXe century (plus electricity for its versatility and ease of distribution) and, finally, nuclear fission (and it was only a semi-success seeing the current and near future adoption). Short of a new energy source, with an output an order of magnitude higher than we currently have (Fusion? if we manage to pull it of), I don't see why we will have major technological changes.

[simonh]

Exponential scientific and technical advancements only happen in the early stages of the large scale adoption of a technology. Von Braun went from launching hand made rockets as part of a rocket club to leading the team that engineered the moon landings, but since then rocketry improvements have been incremental. I think with computer technology we're still in an early phase. Eventually we will reach the limitations of the current silicon transistor paradigm. Maybe something else will take over, maybe it won't.

But sometimes several things come together to lead to a new capabilty. SpaceX recoverable rockets aren't just due to incremental improvements in rocket engines, they're due to improvements in a whole host of different areas - materials technology for lighter rockets, software improvements, better heat shielding materials and frankly new economic imperatives. Those all came together to push us over the edge of a new capability. Maybe the same will happen with supersonic passenger planes.

[joering2]

Unless we have WW3, I can guarantee you the lightweight personal transportation will take on 3D shape (personal flying machines) within next 25-50 years, but it will not overlap with ability to control them. And that even better! In 20 years AI will drive much better than best human driver in worst road scenario. Why bother giving steering wheel to non-pilots, if AI can do better work by then ?

[larkeith]

Space elevators will be wonderful... if they are feasible. We have yet to identify a material with sufficient tensile strength to construct a space elevator, and may never do so.

[joering2]

[...] it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.

More fun facts: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions

[larkeith]

Hence the "if". I certainly hope they will be feasible, but the fact that an alternative may be possible, contingent on the potential creation of currently nonextant materials, is absolutely not a reason to discourage development of supersonic aircraft.

[FiveDegrees]

That Asimov quote is actually pretty damned close to reality. Why is that exchange, of all things, sitting beside Neville "Peace for our times" Chamberlain?

[zokier]

> So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?

Power of 50 years of technological development. That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year. Considering that supersonic flight overall was still fairly new thing when Concorde was designed and CAD was non-existent back then, order of magnitude improvement does not sound completely implausible.

[brandmeyer]

> That's less than 5% improvement year-to-year

The aerospace industry isn't advancing anywhere near that fast. Most of the low-hanging fruit was picked over 50 years ago.

Case in point: The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G is a geared turbofan engine. From demonstrated prototype (1993), to flight testing (2008) to production (2016), it took _23_years_ to develop this engine. Efficiency improvement over baseline: 15-18%. That's quite a bit less than 1% y/y improvement.

[Scramblejams]

I worked on an aircraft which flies with the GTF. Just FYI, that’s a poor example to cite in support of your point. The GTF was set aside for many years due to expected higher fuel costs not materializing for a good while. It took some major impetus to get the program going again.

[CaptainZapp]

Just out of curiosity: Bombardier C-Series?

For what it's worth. As a passenger it's my preferred ride on short and medium distances.

[Scramblejams]

Yep, I did stress analysis on the nacelle. Glad you like it!

[samat]

It is the best passenger airplane I ever flew as a passenger.

[sjm-lbm]

And even though PW1000G has been in "production" for two years, it's had constant problems. Someone else here probabally knows for sure, but I think they finally fixed all their issues and hope to start producing in volume sometime soon. IIRC, they are still trying to get all the existing engines swapped out with fixed builds.

[philwelch]

Not every technology advances at the same rate as electronics. An order of magnitude improvement in supercruise efficiency over Concorde--which is one of the biggest bottlenecks--would be a significant innovation alone.

[neuronexmachina]

It doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance. For recurring costs, I assume the two primary drivers are fuel and maintenance. There's been a lot of advances in fuel efficiency and maintenance costs since the 1960s.

[knappador]

Did not eat the 1/3lb hamburger at A&W. Knows math.

[jedberg]

The Concorde flew over 40 years ago. Technology has improved just a bit since then.

[maltalex]

You should reconsider the name. Not everyone will think of sonic boom when the word "boom" comes up in context to aviation.

[golangnews]

The name also succinctly states the strongest objection to the idea (noise pollution).

[eric_h]

I flew on the Concorde once. I didn't hear any sonic booms ;)

[josu]

I don't think you can hear the sonic boom when you are traveling above the speed of sound. I think that the sonic boom is only experienced by a stationary object observing the event.

[JetSpiegel]

That's the joke.

Startup idea: accelerate paying customers on the ground to Mach 1 to make the sonic boom go away.

[simonebrunozzi]

I wish you all the best, really, but your claims are really, really hard to believe.

[darkhorn]

Who belived that humans would fly! Or I would send you a message without a horse in an instant time!

[rayiner]

That’s a poor response. Major engineering advances that nobody sees coming are exceedingly rare. By the time an advance is close, it’s usually apparent to other engineers. For example, Samuel Langley’s unmanned engine-driven plane flew seven years before the Wright Flyer. It was quite clear by the late 19th century that human flight would happen and we had a pretty good understanding of how.

Will we have supersonic commercial travel at some point? Probably. But that’s not a very interesting statement. Are we close to supersonic commercial air travel and do we have a concrete idea how to get from point A to B? That’s the interesting (and very different) question.

(That is not to say I think Boom will or will not get there, I havent’t studied it closely. But I’m an aerospace engineer by education and history is littered with failures in this space, and progress since the 1980s has been grimly slow.)

[adrianratnapala]

What is the range?

Saving 3.5 hours between NYC and London is better, but not vastly better than the status quo. Your total door-to-door travel time will still be about 7-8 hours.

But in my office, just about everyone flies transpacific, or else even longer distances to Europe at least once an year. Mostly business class. And for us, halving the time would be a huge win. But for that to work, the planes need to be able to make the distance.

[kartickv]

Good question. It's the longest flights that are the most irritating, so the willing to pay may be higher. The example given on the Boom site of Los Angeles -> Sydney becoming 7 hours instead of 15 is compelling.

[monort]

The reverse is true for me, I'd choose 15 hours in a flat-bed vs 7 hours in an ordinary seat.

[adrianratnapala]

There is a point here. I am so used to travelling to and from Australia, that I find flights less than 7 hours to be annoying. You go through all he hassle of getting onto the dang plane, but don't have time to experience your flight in a relaxed, enjoyable way.

[chillydawg]

If that truly is your aim and you execute on it, then you are going to make some cash. Good luck with it and I hope you reach your goals.

[tajen]

Supersonic makes me dream but the most cumbersome part in air travel is not on flight, but on the ground, and could be massively improved for much wider ranges of people. But I’m not sure it can happen given that migrant protectionism growing all over the world. I’d take a 40-minutes boarding & customs experience with water, soap and pencils allowed over a supersonic flight. Well, in fact, I’m out of the market because the customs/TSA are so annoying with USA that I don’t go to US conferences at all.

[mikec3010]

I'm convinced that one or more of these advancements could revolutionize air travel:

* Back to the hub and spoke model, but without preplanned routes. You show up at the airport and they have a Just-in-time routing where you get one leg closer as soon as the plane fills to capacity. Pro: airplane almost always full. Con: you (or low fare passengers wait longer)

* (continued from above) : you dont even know which layover you will have until routing needs and weather are known. I.e. you want to go from NYC to Albuquerque. There happen to be about the same number who need to go from Tulsa to ABQ as who need to go to Tulsa from NYC. So 2 hr before your flight you find out it will stop in Tulsa so 8 people can get off/on.

* modular boarding on a mobile trolley. So instead of loitering in the jetway, everyone gets on a railcar size vehicle and gets ready to board the flight. This will allow them to queue up before they travel to the plane queue.

* planes queue up before a platform. Some mobile trolleys allow boarding from the rear while some board from the front. This theoretically halves the boarding time. Once the trolleys are vacated the plane doors close and the plane can slowly and safely taxi while the remaining passengers get seated. This would be safe so long as the brakes didn't jolt and knock an elderly person over.

* mixed cargo and passenger flights. I know this is already done to some extent. But what if there were a luxury branded airline that was first class only? And the other half of the plane were air cargo containers such that the flight were still profitable even without passengers.

* an options market for tickets. Allow traders to buy options on routes on particular dates. This may increase prices for passengers, but it would also allow airlines to insulate themselves from volatility. Let "the market" do the hard work of price calculation.

[chillydawg]

Last time I did London to New York (2 weeks ago) I spent about 25 minutes queueing in total (at both ends). I guess I got lucky, but my overall experience with flying UK to USA is that's it's actually pretty ok. I am a white guy though, so there is that.

[Aloha]

I really hope you guys are successful.

[btilly]

For the record, SpaceX is attempting to make the same flight in 30 minutes by suborbital rocket. Elon claims that it will be about the same price.

External estimates of a BFR launch, combined with his stated goal of 850 passengers, comes out to around 9k. Which is more. But...30 minutes...

[eloff]

Rocket flight would have to get a lot safer before that ever becomes a reality. Nobody is going to sign up for that if they have a 1 in 270 chance at rapid unscheduled disassembly. And even that rate hasn't been demonstrated to date - the risks for both Space X's rockets and NASA's space shuttle have so far been higher.

[btilly]

Yes. However it is possible in principle to make it that safe. Per current plans, Elon hopes to do that within a decade.

[eloff]

I hope it is a future that comes to pass. It would be amazing to buy a seat on a huge-ass rocket and take a trip to space and back. That's so far been only the realm of astronauts and billionaires.

[cat199]

if he can only avoid the boring boneheaded naysayers until then

[robotresearcher]

Where are they gonna launch from, that I can get to in a reasonable amount of time from NYC, Chicago, LA, Hong Kong, London, etc? They can't build another runway at LHR, let alone a BFR launch pad.

[btilly]

Ocean barges. So you get on a boat, take a 20 minute ride, get on the rocket, and reverse.

No land purchase. No construction. A good radius from any buildings in case of accident.

[robotresearcher]

London, Frankfurt, and Paris aren’t on the ocean. Three of the busiest airports in the world for business travelers.

[btilly]

They aren't, but a train to the ocean, then a rocket, is still massively faster than a transcontinental flight.

[gerdesj]

Disclosure: I'm a Brit.

I wish you all the best and if the concept piccy on your web site is close to reality then we'll see little delta winged flying needles in the skies.

Could you give us a very rough idea of say London to New York fare on this thing?

[sjrosen]

Their website says "Approximately $2,500 each way" for the London–New York route.

[corey_moncure]

Is radiation shielding a concern at your target altitude?

[tardo99]

Do you think the name "Boom" could become a liability if there are any accidents along the way?

[scrumption]

What a disgusting travesty that a single person would ever pay $5,000 to fly anywhere in 2018, no doubt to go do pointless busywork and "negotiation" that telephones already obsoleted the need to travel for a hundred years ago.

All while people starve in the streets, having bankrupted themselves paying for healthcare, while impoverished teachers buy school supplies with their own money. God damned sickening.

[gregorymichael]

Is a NYC-SF route a possibility, or are sonic booms only politically feasible over water?

[elidourado]

NYC-SF is a 2h30m block time (gate-to-gate) if it were allowed. Our sonic boom will be quieter than Concorde's, but because of the policy challenge, we are baselining overwater operations only.

[BinaryIdiot]

It's my understanding that, initially, it'll have to be over water but once it's proven safe they can get approval to fly over land. I don't know what that entails but that was my understanding of it last time I looked into it.

A NYC-SF or DC-SF route would be freaking amazing.

[jessriedel]

> but once it's proven safe they can get approval to fly over land

The prohibition on supersonic airliners over land is about noise, not safety.

[sailfast]

When Boom was first posted here I recall the narrative also including a lot of drag dynamics that would reduce the "boom" which would allow for more feasible overland routes / less noise pollution. Not sure where that sits now - I don't see it as much in their PR copy.

[gsnedders]

It's still their plan, AFAIK, but the regulatory hurdles to let them do it probably means it's a lot further off than overwater flights.

[dsjoerg]

There's lots of water near NYC and SF so maybe you do your sonic boom over the water and then turn towards land?

[itp]

That's not how a sonic boom works. A sonic boom doesn't occur just at the moment that an object exceeds the speed of sound; it's a continuous phenomenon that is experienced by a stationary observer as a momentary event.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom

[hamandcheese]

The sonic boom is continuous at speeds above Mach 1

[knappador]

Who is building the engine?

[charliesome]

It's pretty disappointing to see that Boom is still using fossil fuel burning engines. Surely if you're innovating on aviation tech, Mach 2.2 flight for business people is less important than figuring out a way to fly that doesn't kill the planet.

[jandrese]

You might as well complain about how they don't power their aircraft with unicorn farts.

I have never even seen a proposal for a supersonic electric engine. The only thing that's even remotely close is a bit of dabbling in nuclear engines in the 50s and 60s that were cancelled once people noticed that the idea was insane. Also, impractical--the radiation shielding was too heavy.

[rsynnott]

There were a few test flights; it was _doable_, though probably not economic.

[elidourado]

Build us a Mach-2.2 electric engine where the aircraft design closes and we'll use it! We're an airframer, not an engine company. Would love to see some innovation in engines. Maybe a good idea for another YC startup.

[thinkling]

The point is that you're building a vehicle that (I assume) will produce far more pollution (CO2 and otherwise) per passenger mile than existing aircraft. Is that an ethical thing to do at this point in time?

[runarberg]

This is a good question to ask. The answer is obviously “no,” but it would be interesting to see an ethical argument for designing this.

[monort]

Is it ethical to raise consumption with a raise of your salary? Is it ethical to give the raise to these employees?

It looks like the answer should be the same to this and your question.

[TheOtherDave]

I'm sure they'll reconsider as soon as someone develops jet engines capable of mach 2.2 that don't burn fossil fuels. In the meantime, since speed is their goal, they don't have much choice.

[wbl]

And doesn't spew a giant plume of radioactive gas while irradiating the passengers.

[reaperducer]

That's extra on United.

[robotresearcher]

United could burn luggage for fuel. They're gonna lose it anyway.

[andygates]

If the thing needs to burn go-juice, give it green go-juice. Isn't biofuel-derived avgas a thing yet? Startup idea...

[nradov]

Others are working on that. The US military has already tested flying airplanes using sustainable biofuels. Once that fuel becomes commercially available, any airline will be able to use it in Boom aircraft (or any other airliners).

http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=96702

[ktosobcy]

Well, could we stop for a second and deeply thing if we really do need to make this travel? Recently I noticed that more and more things can be done online without the tedious flight…

[rwmj]

I've said it before, but why are you designing a plane with pilots on board? Automate as far as possible and have a remote control option as backup. It saves space, money (pilots are expensive), and human error.

[coatmatter]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0yGOSZUHwA explains why you won't have passenger aircraft without pilots for any conceivable time.

Driverless cars are only mildly succeeding right now because of Amercica's low standards when it comes safety.

[jen729w]

What does the FAA have to say about that?

(Spoiler: “no”.)

[tajen]

Right, massive shortcuts could be taken with no pilot on board (including the awesome $$$ seats in the front row), but that’s a story for another startup with a 20-year runway.

[JetSpiegel]

Just call it Airplane! and have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar do commercials.

[cardiffspaceman]

Abdul-Jabbar could say something awesome about dragging someone or something back and forth across the Atlantic, which hopefully people would understand was a movie reference.

[ghaff]

Pilots are pretty cheap relative to the cost of a trans-Atlantic flight. And you’re going to want some Captain type person even if you don’t need them as a pilot.

[reaperducer]

We can't get the cars to drive themselves in 2D space without killing people. What makes you think that 3D is going to be easier?

[Piezoid]

Sometimes the "curse of dimensionality" is a good thing :)

[stephen_g]

I’d actually say it’s a lot easier - there aren’t any crash barriers, planes are spaced far further apart, etc.

But at the same time, I’d never want to fly in a passenger plane without a pilot, because when emergency situations happen, autopilots usually can’t handle it and need intervention. When the engine on QF32 exploded, the pilots had to do checks and make judgements on something like 200 different error messages before they could land! Since so many of the plane’s systems were damaged by the explosion, a lot of this may not have been possible remotely.

And the stakes are much higher when an uncaught sensor error or something can mean flying into the ground from 30,000 feet - unlike a train (the only thing that actually has a good safety record running driverless so far) you can’t just stop in an emergency!