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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
While Concorde was efficient at supersonic cruise, it was ridiculously inefficient getting there (and this was one of the main arguments for the proposed Concorde B).
Also note most aircraft capable of supersonic cruise nowadays don't use turbojets, they use low-bypass turbofans (mostly around 0.3:1).
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
[...] 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.