[whinvik]

It's very disappointing to see how skeptical HN has become about new technology.

Making aircrafts is hard, making supersonic aircraft even harder and making a new supersonic aircraft company hardest of all. That there's progress by Boom should be encouraged. Otherwise we are just saying that aircrafts will continue to be the domain of Airbus and Boeing only who don't have much incentive to innovate.

[rgmerk]

The point is that there isn’t progress on the most critical part of a viable aircraft - the engine.

Some of us who weren’t born yesterday have seen this rodeo before, and when a startup aircraft manufacturer switches engines it tends to indicate their concept isn’t viable. The fact that Boom are proposing to build their own engine, rather than partnering with an established engine manufacturer, tends to suggest that the engine manufacturers don’t think it’s doable either.

Sometimes the establishment gets it wrong, but jet engine manufacture is a very mature field, and Boom isn’t proposing to do some radical new engine design. That makes me pretty suspicious.

[whinvik]

Ok I will bite. Commercial engine manufacturers are also an oligopoly so they also have very little incentive to innovate like aircraft manufacturers. The only way to incentivize them is to bring a big pot of gold. I remember Boom tried but one of the engine manufacturers initially signed on then withdrew.

[rocket_surgeron]

>Commercial engine manufacturers are also an oligopoly so they also have very little incentive to innovate like aircraft manufacturers.

Commercial airlines and military customers are so competitive that they will use single digit percentage gains in efficiency or performance to switch suppliers.

So turbofan manufacturers spend more on R&D that almost every other non-biotech sector.

Pratt & Whitney Canada, a subsidiary of US-based Pratt & Whitney (3rd largest turbofan manufacturer) routinely tops the list of the largest R&D spenders in Canada. No. 5 last year: https://researchinfosource.com/top-100-corporate-rd-spenders...

Rolls-Royce (the second-largest turbofan manufacturer, not the car maker) was No. 4 in the UK in 2019 (page 29): https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04...

General Electric doesn't break down their R&D spending by sector but they're always in the to 50 or so US spenders on research and development and they have to compete with the massive pharmaceutical and software (which is, understandably, mainly R&D) industries in the US to get on the list.

[jabl]

Sure they have an incentive to innovate, namely taking market share from their competitors.

The reason why they want a big pot of gold is that developing a new competitive jet engine is frighteningly expensive. The established vendors, with decades of in-house knowhow, will spend a decade and billions of dollars on a new from scratch engine. It's just not a game where a VC-funded startup with a very limited runway can expect to be successful.

But sure, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Not holding my breath waiting though.

[hef19898]

Both, aircrafy OEMs and engine OEMs, do innovate all the time. Their innovation is of the evolutionary instead of disruptive nature so.

And hey, Airbus and Boeing are flying their existings jets with SAF for quite a while now, Airbus did so with the A400M and the A330.

No idea why Boom thinks they can be an aircraft and an engine OEM at the same time when already one of things tends on the impossible side of things to begin with.

[mmustapic]

The technology was already solved decades ago, we had the Concorde. Supersonic flight is well understood. The hard part is to make a supersonic aircraft that's commercially viable.

Personally, I'm very skeptical when they say things like "zero carbon" or "anywhere in the world for $100", very difficult to believe them. The only progress they made for now is building a single seat supersonic plane that maybe will fly. We have lots of those already.

[Adrig]

Innovation doesn't stop once you manage to make something fly. Aerodynamics simulations, science of materials, engine design or manufacturing innovation like metal 3D printing are some of the areas that can completely revolutionize how we look at previous problems.

[mmustapic]

Are they doing something like that? If true, how will this solve the main problems of supersonic commercial flights, that being cost, noise and pollution?

[credit_guy]

Cost is mainly due to fuel consumption. Concorde was extremely efficient in cruise mode, but horrible during the takeoff phase. And unfortunately, at takeoff it was also the heaviest, having full tanks, so the problem was compounded.

If a new design can solve the takeoff problem, then you actually solve four problems: overall fuel consumption (so lower cost), less pollution (because you burn less fuel) are two. The other two come from the ability to efficiently fly subsonic, which is what Boom claim to be able to do (when they'll be able to fly, obviously). You don't have noise, and you have access to some routes that are partially overland. For example, you could fly from NYC to various cities in Europe other than London and Paris. Maybe Frankfurt, or Berlin, or Madrid, or Rome. 90% of the flight will still be over water, but you can have 10% over land without producing the sonic boom.

[hef19898]

Magic start-up disruption, of course.

[whinvik]

Yes parts of it were solved decades ago but Boom is not doing exactly the same thing. Concorde for example had an afterburner.

[mmustapic]

Concorde used afterburners for take-off and while transitioning to supersonic, then it cruised at Mach 2 without afterburners.

The thing with Boom is that they are saying "we are doing this new great thing", and it's not new, Concorde did it. How are they specifically going to be better than Concorde? Just not using afterburners during taking off? Are they going to be cheaper? How? Just by saying they will?

That's why I understand that people don't care about this technology, because it's nothing new, and there's no proof Boom is doing something radically different that will solve the main problems of supersonic travel.

[cycomanic]

On top of that nobody needs it. The issue is that supersonic jets are really anachronistic, it's the most wasteful way of flying and it doesn't even buy you much time for most distances because you have to fly subsonic over land.

[avidphantasm]

It feels like Boom is a product of the zero interest rate frothy market, where there was lots of money chasing “disruptive” technologies, which breeds not-so-good ideas. In particular, Boom seems to have attracted investment because it purports to solve a classic rich guy problem: how to fly overseas a bit faster, but at a price premium. They still have some momentum from the zero-interest rate environment, but how long can that last?

[mmustapic]

Exactly, unless they propose a radically new technology, subsonic will always be much much cheaper and efficient.

[avar]

Their plans include minimizing the sonic boom, and to convince the FAA to lift that restriction.

[aeternum]

More fuel efficient and noise minimization.

[masklinn]

> It's very disappointing to see how skeptical HN has become about new technology.

Completely made up nonsense with no evidence is not "new technology".

> That there's progress by Boom

Is there though? PR is not progress.

[kitd]

Completely made up nonsense with no evidence

Citation?

[goodSteveramos]

this is a really funny comment if you think about it. Instead of simply presenting the evidence, you demand that he prove there is none. Quite a bold demand. got to respect that on some level. If you disagree, prove there isn't any evidence that Im right.

[kitd]

Not so. He is the one who made the original statement. The onus of proof is on him to show what is "completely made up". It's a fairly extreme statement after all.

[masklinn]

No, the original statement is that there is “new technology” which HN is “skeptical of”.

The evidentiary requirements for a dismissal are no higher than what they dismiss. Which in this case is a PR bit completely devoid of evidence, so 0.

But if you’ re interested in evidence I actually scratched a bit at one of the names mentioned, and I can’t say I’m impressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33983419#33996877

[kitd]

Sorry, but that wasn't his statement. It's quite clear that he states that what is presented as new technology is completely made up nonsense. He may be right, but he needs to show what in the article is completely made up nonsense so that we know if he is.

[cm277]

Hmm, all of these things are hard; they are also fairly easy compared to building your own jet engine. There are a handful of jet engine makers in the world, 2 or 3 that can build passenger-grade engines and 2-3 (small overlap) that can build supersonic jet engines.

The physics within a jet engine are basically unknowable. The material science is the hardest we have. The tolerances and margins for error are insane. I wanted Boom to succeed and even believed some of their hype, but this basically means they are dead.

[constantcrying]

Kratos will build the engines. Plane manufacturers usually do not build their own engines.

[masklinn]

And Kratos is currently a minor manufacturer of engines for missiles and expendable drones ("attritable UAVs" in their own words), not a manufacturer of airliner engines, or even bizjet engines.

[constantcrying]

Yeah, apparently actual large scale manufacturers, GE, Honeywell, Safran, etc. have no interest in producing supersonic engines.

Gotta take what you can get I guess. Honesty I don't think you are wrong with the scepticism, if some actual large engine company took up the challenge I also would be more confident.

[hef19898]

Rolls Royce, the only company that ever made civilian super-sonic jet engines, for the Concorde, dumped Boom in September. So, it is not tha Boom doesn't have an engine OEM partner. They had, and that partner was not interessted beyond some initial research.

[masklinn]

Technically two other companies also did:

- Kuznetsov Design Bureau, now JSC Kuznetsov, designed the NK-144 which powered the Tu-144S

- Kolesov Design Bureau, now NPO Saturn, designed the RD-36-51 which replaced the NK-144 in the Tu-144D

Both are now under the UEC state-owned group.

[julienfr112]

HN was very sceptical about blockchain/web3, and recent events show that HN was quite rightly so ...

[lajosbacs]

Counterexample where HN was wrong: the famous Dropbox comment.

[ksec]

Yes. There are far more wrong on HN than right. In fact the Web3 / Crypto example might have been the outliner.

[rnk]

There are random commenters (like me!) saying various things all the time. But there is kind of the weight of the mass of commenters. That's how we got to the semi-consensus (except for the crypto partisans) that web3/crypto seemed to be in a massive bubble with no clear use case and lots of likely fraud. Notice that for the AI boom going on right now this is not going the same was way as web3.

[syntaxing]

I mean, that’s just engineering in general. We’re all mostly pessimistic opportunists. Skeptical of any new technology but get impressed only when they actually deliver. Ideas are cheap (not easy though). Execution is where most ideas die.

[fakedang]

The challenge with supersonic flight is that you not only have to build engines that are capable of pushing your aircraft to the maximum limits of speed, but also it has to be able to carry a proportionate amount of fuel for it to be viable for flight. Supersonic aircraft consume fuel at a much higher rate than normal aircraft, hence you are forced to make a tradeoff between higher aircraft capacity and higher fuel capacity. This is not a problem for current military applications of supersonic flight, but for commercial purposes, it makes it financially unviable. You can only sell a limited number of tickets, which makes the proposition unattractive for large carriers. Thus your market would be limited to niche carriers/charters who cater to carrying a few UNHWs and execs, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a large enough market to recoup your investment.

Not to mention, Boom hasn't innovated in any way to solve the two key issues here - they aren't using a significantly lighter fuel to compensate for the tradeoff, nor have they radically changed the engine design to consume less fuel at supersonic speeds. If they did, they would be touting that instead rather than hiding behind a proprietary "superfuel".

[rakoo]

And making an aircraft that doesn't emit outrageous amounts of CO2 with equal access to everyone, irrespective of the size of their wallet, is the hardestest. Boom doesn't solve this, so why should we praise it ?

A technological progress isn't progress if it's a social or environmental regression.

[dncornholio]

Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine.

We should be super skeptical these days. Too many promises and not enough deliveries. Also, just because something is hard, doesn't mean it shouldn't deserve criticism.

[masklinn]

> Where's the new technology though? It's just a turbofan engine.

A supersonic no-afterburner 35000 lbf mid-bypass (whatever they mean by that) turbofan, cheap enough (to build and maintain) for civil variation, designed in two years would be a pretty impressive thing tho. If it existed. Especially from a company whose biggest previous offering is a 900lbf turbofan.

The F-35's F135 "only" has 28000lbf dry thrust, and the plane tops out at 1.6, while Overture is supposed to reach 1.7 (and supercruise, which the F-35 can not do).

Although in fairness the Tu-144D had engines specced at 54 and (like Concorde) cruised at M2.

On the other hand, it was even less efficient and economically justifiable than Concorde, and the entire thing was shuttered in 1983, after only 6 years, and regular groundings (Tu-144 only flew scheduled 103 times before the programme was cancelled, BA alone flew Concorde near 50000 times, and the class logged more than a million flight hours.)

But here all that exists is a Boom PR release.

[Ekaros]

I think NH would laugh out a startup saying we are going to build up and conquer entire world with our new processor architecture or operating system. Not based on existing one such as ARM or Unix.

[janef0421]

Is it progress? I don't think the time required to fly over an ocean is really a major problem. Time-sensitive clients can simply book an overnight flight during time they would be sleeping, and those who would be rich enough to afford supersonic flights can already afford comfortable accommodations on such flights. The benefits would be minimal and would be overwhelmed by the environmental damage and/or waste caused by the high fuel burn.

[Gatsky]

Yeah it seems a bit of a downer, but it’s mostly just noise. How many of us would actually invest money in Boom right now? Basically none. How many of us would short it if we could? Basically none.

The fact that Boom exists at all suggests sufficient optimism about new technology is out there somewhere.