[motivated_gear]

How a company begins to how it gets to sell products for $100m is fascinating. Boeing built their first plane soley because they had bought another plane, subsequently crashed it and then posited that it would be faster to build a brand new plane instead of waiting for parts. They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50".

Obviously Boom is doing something orders of magnitude more technically complex than a simple bi-plane but maybe, if they're scrappy enough, they can pull it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing#History

[notahacker]

Aviation has moved on a bit since Boeing was founded over 100 years ago, and their client base is looking for any potential vendor to be the precise opposite of "scrappy". To put things into perspective, nearly all airlines outside Russia and China find proven, modern, thoroughly-tested and performant airframes from state-funded Russian and Chinese conglomerates with very attractive pricing and financing a bit too "scrappy" in terms of the available ongoing support for operations to even consider. A new entrant is going to need to spend $20bn+ to get a single aircraft ready, and they they're going to need to sell a couple of hundred to get close to breaking even. A brilliant outcome would be a gulf state liking the novelty of the concept enough to say "we'll take 50" and even that didn't translate to many further sales for the A380

[nostrademons]

They've got LOIs for 76 aircraft @ $200M/plane from 5 airlines:

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-jal-inve...

There's certainly both technical & market risk, because an LOI != cash in the bank. But that's why investors are willing to invest. If Boom delivers on its technical promises to spec, that $15.2B in revenue lined up before the first prototype flies.

[notahacker]

It's not $15B lined up before the first prototype flies, it's $15B that might happen, eventually, after Boom has delivered on its technical promises by flying and certifying the airframe, if the airlines at that stage decide the finished article fits with their operations at that time, they're happy with the operational risk and they can raise the capital to finance the aircraft acquisitions on adequate terms.

JAL putting in $10m of seed investment is showing a bit of faith, but the rest is just pieces of paper.

Concorde had firmer commitments for 74 aircraft back in the day, but only ever made 20, most of which were sold off at a subsidised price and spent most of their time on the ground.

[jpatokal]

On the other hand, next time you find yourself in a regional jet in the US, odds are pretty high it was built by a scrappy manufacturer of Brazilian bush taxis, namely Embraer. So it's not impossible to break the Boeing/Airbus duopoly if you have a suitable niche (regional jets, hypersonic aircraft) just very hard.

[reaperducer]

They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50"

I wonder if Boom could get a boost by convincing it that the Boom jet can be useful. Certainly not for troop transport, but maybe it can be used to move field commanders around quickly in times of crisis.

[donarb]

Fighter jets can already do that should there ever be a need.

[njarboe]

"Certainly not for troop transport"

For special ops I could definitely see such purchases. Just not at a large scale.