[duckfruit]

Always love hearing from Boom. By far the most impressive YC startup I know of. In a sea of interchangeable SaaS and mobile app ventures, they are out there doing hard things and actually trying to make a reality the kind of future we all dream about. Inspirational. They certainly have some daunting challenges to overcome but hope they pull through. I'm rooting for them.

[exogeny]

The amount of commenters on here that are hating on it without actually reading out what they're doing or understanding their business plan leads me to believe that they're going to be very successful.

[deepGem]

I get the hating. By that argument, even private jets are an abomination and so is the lifestyle of almost every billionaire out there. It is no surprise that the top 1% account for all of the pollution of the bottom 50% of the population.

Depending on your perspective, every expenditure and experience that money can buy, can be viewed as wasteful and harming the environment. For someone with no access to water, a long shower feels very wasteful.

If we don't actively come out of this dogma and not embark on some ground breaking technology, our lives won't change at all. So many new technologies from aircraft and space technology have made it to mainstream - Kevlar, carbon fiber to think of a couple. So, even if Boom ends up building only billionaire's toye, there is a possibility that second and third order inventions can make it to mainstream society and bring about change at scale.

[reallydontask]

> Depending on your perspective, every expenditure and experience that money can buy, can be viewed as wasteful and harming the environment. For someone with no access to water, a long shower feels very wasteful.

You seem to be searching for a binary answer to something that most people would agree is a gradient. A long shower is not even in the same ballpark as a private supersonic jet, you clearly know this.

> If we don't actively come out of this dogma and not embark on some ground breaking technology, our lives won't change at all.

It's not an either/or proposition

[idlewords]

Not all of us dream of a future where the ultra-rich get to shatter everyone else's windows with their sky toys.

[ktta]

Isn't the bulk of today's commonplace technology previously something only the the rich could afford?

[rob74]

Yes, but air travel is already something everyone (in the developed world) can afford. Same as almost everyone can afford a VW Golf, Ford Focus, Toyota... whatever. What Boom wants to build is the equivalent of a Ferrari or Lamborghini - it does the same thing as a normal airliner, but faster and in a more resource-consuming and therefore expensive way. And, like most people can't afford a super sports car, most people won't be able to afford a ticket for their supersonic airplanes (same as they couldn't afford a ticket for Concorde).

[JumpCrisscross]

> air travel is already something everyone (in the developed world) can afford

Ship travel was already something most people in developed countries could afford. What’s the use of getting around faster and higher off the ground?

[reallydontask]

A Transatlantic crossing took around ~ 100 hours, whereas a plane takes ~ 7 hours. So, we are talking about an order of magnitude improvement.

It's hardly the same thing with a supersonic airliner, which just reduces the time in roughly half.

[credit_guy]

However, the first commercial passenger transatlantic flights took 29 hours, on the Panam B-314.

http://www.century-of-flight.freeola.com/new%20site/commerci...

[anovikov]

If it will be as expensive as Concorde, it won't work exactly as Concorde didn't. It's got to be a lot cheaper - at least 2x cheaper - to have any chance of working. And then, everyone who can afford a first class ticket, will be able to afford that.

My bet is somewhere like $4000 roundtrip trans-Atlantic ticket or $3000 cross-country ticket in U.S. is about the maximum the market will bear.

[madamelic]

>$3000 cross-country ticket in U.S. is about the maximum the market will bear.

Boom won't be flying over any country. They will only travel over oceans, to prevent issues / complaints that Concorde had.

[anovikov]

Then they are toast before they start. Any supersonic startup must solve the noise problem first. It is solvable with proper aerodynamical tricks, at least in theory.

[soapboxrocket]

I would note that today's VW Golf has better horsepower and a higher top speed than the first Ferrari.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I wonder what the difference in MPG is?

[hobofan]

"The bulk" is hard to quantify, but looking around for technology in my apartment (and whatever else I use outside of it on a daily basis), I wouldn't say so. A lot of it was previously available for well-off (not rich) households, and then became cheaper mainly due to scale. That doesn't seem to be a direction they are going with a low passenger count plane that has the biggest benefit for people that spend a lot of time traveling between continents (like regular high-stakes business trips).

More importantly most of those things don't inconvenience the people around me. If I use my computer or my kitchen-aid (high-price items in the past), it doesn't disturb my neighbors (or would have in the past when they were still in their infancy).

[nickpp]

Do you read? Books (and libraries) used to be something only kings could afford. Then technology (the printing press) made them something for everyone.

[Cthulhu_]

When it comes to electronics: Sure, that has gotten cheaper by a thousandfold or however much it has been.

When it comes to transport: Partially; air travel has become fairly accessible for a lot of people now compared to a hundred years ago. Cars are also pretty common now - although driving is still quite expensive.

But I don't see how we can ever have personal airplanes be as affordable and accessible as cars. Not going to happen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

[Tuna-Fish]

Boom isn't in the market for making personal airplanes as affordable and accessible as cars. What they are trying to do is to make normal air travel, as it already exists, faster. Because very large jets cost a lot of money to design and develop, they start with smaller ones and work their way up.

This first demonstrator is a two-seater. The next jet they are designing is the Overture, designed for the ~50 seater business jet segment. And as the name hints, they don't intend to stop there.

[mpweiher]

> can ever have personal airplanes be as affordable and accessible as cars.

Sibling comment already addressed that Boom isn't "personal airplanes".

However: why not?

I mean, apart from the current fact that not enough people want this.

Let's look at a Cessna. It masses around 800kg empty, so lighter than many modern cars, and that's not due to exotic, expensive materials, and without that, cost tends to be roughly proportional to weight.

The engine is a four cylinder with 180hp. My car gets 200hp out of 2l with a turbocharger, but aviation tends to use very old-school engine tech for reliability, so it's got huge displacement, almost 6 liters. So there's some room for improvement there, particularly once we go electric, because electric motors are so much more reliable.

Fully electric is already viable for flight-training and other short-range needs, and unbeatably cheap for those missions. (A friend and I had this idea of getting a used Antonov An 2 and stuffing it with electric bus batteries for a south-/west- to east-bay commute... The numbers worked quite well).

Hybrid electric could mean getting to use much smaller, cheaper, common, efficient engines and use the electric engine and some batteries for safety.

Avionics? Yup, somewhat complex and expensive, but really not for too many intrinsic reasons. The gold standard for GA today is (still?) the Garmin 1000. An iPad has most of the same sensors (as does my Apple Watch), and the compute power is nothing to write home about.

[tomohawk]

Visit a DuPont mansion from 100 years ago. What were considered extreme luxuries of the super wealthy are now commonplace. In fact, we live better in many ways.

The reality we live in today was created through the use of wealth that employed people and produced better and better goods to meet more and more people's needs.

[nickik]

People never understand that argument. With literally every new technology for over 200 years the same argument is made.

[crispyporkbites]

Not really, most tech starts in industry or the military. Most things aren’t pioneered by billionaires- you could make the argument that millionaires are often the early adopters that commission/bring tech down to the rest of us.

But there will never be a future where private jets are economical for the masses (even private cars aren't really economical for the long term for everyone globally), and I doubt the tech Boom are developing will make it into widely used commercial planes, but perhaps it will.

[missedthecue]

Don't keep your windows in the Atlantic ocean then?

[_Microft]

And because there are no people in a place, it's completely OK to pollute this place with noise, by burning bunker fuel, dumping unused munitions or mabye even nuclear waste there, ... you see the problem with this mentality?

[adwn]

> And because there are no people in a place, it's completely OK to pollute this place with noise, by burning bunker fuel, dumping unused munitions or mabye even nuclear waste there

Boom won't burn bunker fuel, nor will it dump munitions or nuclear waste, so how is this relevant? Some of those are real problems, but none of them will be made worse by Boom.

[_Microft]

You conveniently ignored "noise" from the list you quoted there.

[adwn]

I don't think the fish below the surface of the ocean are going to notice some noise originating from 10-15km above the surface.

[vkou]

I will bet money that if this plane ever starts carrying passengers, Boom will immediately start lobbying for overland supersonic bans to be lifted. Shareholders would demand it.

Pardon my lack of enthusiasm for yet another fight between privatized gains at the cost of socialized harms.

[nix23]

In Europe they have no chance, if the Airplane makes boom, your out.

[kenneth]

Europe being the only geo to actually deploy a supersonic jet commercially…

[nix23]

If your talking about the Concorde...that's exactly why it would never happen anymore.

[petre]

It depends where it booms. If it's at 10 km above and nobody hears it, or above international waters, it doesn't matter too much.

[nix23]

For sure you hear it above 10km, it just does no destroy a window.

> Supersonic operations over land must be conducted above 30,000 feet or, when below 30,000 feet, in specially designated areas approved by Headquarters United States Air Force, Washington, D.C., and the Federal Aviation Administration.

https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...

and

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/17661/can-a-son...

[nix23]

Said the guy on the horse about the first automobiles.

[TLightful]

Said the guy existing within the boundaries of earth's capacity.

[nickpp]

How exactly do you think we’re gonna escape those bounds?

[TLightful]

We won't.

And flying a few execs from New York to London in 3-4 hours with renewable fuels isn't going to quite achieve that.

[nickpp]

The world, a couple hundred years ago: We won’t fly.

[TomSwirly]

We won't. We'll destroy the planet, and ourselves with it.

[rkangel]

Technological advancement is good in its own right.

The issues with inequality of wealth are real, and separate.

[lm28469]

> Technological advancement is good in its own right.

I don't think it's as clear cut as you want to believe. Technological progress is almost exclusively fueled by economical gain, economical gain rarely aligns with long term progress.

Was leaded gas a progress ? Freon ? Asbestos ? Privacy invading social networks ? I guess it depends on the scale you look at it but it's more "is technological progress always desirable ?" rather than "tech is always good, always trust the tech, always praise the tech"

[rkangel]

Do you mean that technological advancement usually makes someone rich? That's true recently, but in the past wars (and the military in general) have resulted in massive steps forward in technology.

It may not have been worth the cost in lives, but the benefits we've had since from that technology are still benefits.

[jdub]

> Technological advancement is good in its own right.

Holy shit, it's 2020. Look around.

[nickpp]

What, did Ludditism become the official 2020 philosophy?!

[nickpp]

Ice cream was initially a dessert only the rich could afford. Now it's for everyone. Except, of course, in communist wonderlands like Cuba or Venezuela...

[awiesenhofer]

Ice cream is huge in Cuba and similarly affordable as in every other country

https://www.mashed.com/220283/the-strange-story-of-ice-cream...

[nickpp]

But the state-made one sucks

https://qz.com/1320584/ice-cream-in-cuba-reveals-the-growing...

[Cthulhu_]

Chips and crisps used to be a delicacy. Can't see how that would be exclusive to the rich though, the components (potatoes and hot fat) are (and were) pretty commonplace.

[iguy]

Deep fried anything used to be a luxury, because calories were expensive, and a whole pot of boiling oil is a lot of calories.

IIRC, southern fried chicken in the US descends from cooking styles that only the aristocrats of western England could afford. Which their 2nd sons (or rather, their 2nd son's cooks) brought along to Virginia.

[TLightful]

Downvoted by the comfortable, complacent, .... s

[TomSwirly]

Funny, I'm rooting against them entirely.

But then I believe the human-caused climate emergency exists and is important enough to do something about.

However, it's pretty clear that I'm in a tiny minority, and we'll keep obsessively consuming and burning fossil fuels until it's all destroyed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I believe the human-caused climate emergency exists and is important enough to do something about

How is being a Luddite an answer to a novel problem?

Boom is developing supersonic passenger jets. That involves a myriad of thermodynamic, aerospace, materials, tooling and other R&D. Nobody is saying if Boom makes an aircraft every hundred millionaire has a right to one. That’s the point of regulation.

Arguing we should ban even thinking about new technology on the grounds that it might make climate change worse is dogmatic adherence to a cultlike level.

[soapboxrocket]

I'd love to see your math.

I don't have any math to support my belief just a little bit of logic, but it works like this: 1) 787 burns X lbs of fuel per hour in flight 2) 787 takes Y hours to fly from point A to point B at Mach 0.85 3) X lbs of fuel * Y hours = Z polution 4) Boom burns Xf lbs of fule per hour in flight (could actually be less because it's smaller or could be higher because of additional needed thrust) 5) Boom takes Y.85 to fly from point A to point B at Mach 1 6) (Xf) of fuel (Y*.85) hours = H pollution

So as long H is less than Z then Boom would be decreasing the impact on the environment. Now I know that there are a lot of missing numbers in here like passenger count production impacts, etc. But the solution you seem to imply is that flight just shouldn't happen and I'm not sure this is an option so if Boom can reduce the amount of pollution created by flying then it seems like something you should be for not against.

[thedrbrian]

I’d be surprised if boom could be more efficient per passenger mile. Remember kinetic energy goes up with the square of speed so doubling the speed requires four times the energy.

This is why your airliner is about 100 to 150 mpg per passenger but a container vessel is 1000mpg per tonne of cargo.

[tobinfricke]

> Remember kinetic energy goes up with the square of speed

More relevant is that drag goes up with the square of speed generally... in the subsonic regime... I'm not sure what happens across the sound barrier, but I believe it gets worse.

There is a wikipedia article on the topic (of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

"Concorde, a supersonic transport, managed about 17 passenger-miles to the Imperial gallon, which is 16.7 L/100 km per passenger; similar to a business jet, but much worse than a subsonic turbofan aircraft. Airbus states a fuel rate consumption of their A380 at less than 3 L/100 km per passenger"

But the real comparison should not be between subsonic and supersonic trans-ocean business trips. It should be between taking the trip or not taking the trip at all. The best way to reduce emissions is to avoid long-distance air travel completely.

[timwaagh]

its important to be realistic about it and realize that whatever is going on is not being caused by the very few flying in superironic jets, but the many living in concrete houses, driving, heating their houses, having children etc. we have 6 billion people on this planet all producing CO2. of those, approximately 0% will ever fly business class. I know it's not a truth people like to hear, because climate activism is supposed to be for the people, but ultimately those are going to get punished by it, not billionaires and their jets.