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).
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.
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.
"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).
Do you read? Books (and libraries) used to be something only kings could afford. Then technology (the printing press) made them something for everyone.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Oh, I also doubt fish (or other life in the ocean) won't mind a small increase in temperature in the ocean, or tiny sonar noises a few hundred kilometers away, or an increase in above-surface CO2 levels, or ...
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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...
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.
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.