So a new startup claims that they’ll be able to design and build a 40 seat supersonic plane that has the range to fly Auckland - LA non stop, and they claim that ticket prices will be able to be comparable to business class.
From previous threads on her on this topic it seems pretty unbelievable, the fuel costs should make it a non-starter unless they have some unbelievable break through. Except they claim to be using existing engines? The whole thing would seem like a scam to rope in investors except for the calibre of the names they have on board. What says the dope? What possible existing engines could they be using on these things? Could they possibly meet their performance and cost of operations claims?
I can’t really attest to the technology and if it is really feasible. But I’m mindful that companies fail, not because the technology doesn’t work, they fail because they build something customers really don’t want. They spend a lot of time mitigating the technology risk, and not enough on the market risk.
My feeling (without any solid data other than experience) is that the initial promises will not materialize and the scope and benefits will have to be scaled back from the hype, and that customers really won’t want what is offered as badly as the company expects.
Witness the failure of the Concorde to sell the hundreds of planes it was hyped to do; or the Segway; or Googleglass…same deal with the hyperloop.
Are there a lot of wealthy people who want to travel between LA and Auckland frequently and quickly? Seems to me that the entire target market for this service is Peter Jackson.
According to a longer article linked from the first one, New York/London and San Francisco/Tokyo are equal or higher on the agenda. I’m skeptical, but I’d love to see it happen.
I wonder if one of our resident aviation experts can tell me if I’m correct in thinking that flying at those speeds at 60,000 feet is also likely to greatly reduce the amount of turbulence passengers would experience.
Concorde failed in large part because American companies lobbied against it because it wasn’t American and in lesser part because of the Arab oil crisis.
That second factor may be the killer this time around.
Maybe, I’m not completely intimate with why the Concorde failed to sell anywhere near the number of planes planned; but I do remember the environmental outcry. The same issues could come into play for this plane
The larger point still fits. It wasn’t the technology that killed the success of the Concorde, it was the overall market resistance to the business idea. Whether that resistance is in paying customers, regulatory hurdles, organized competition, or perceived ‘dorkiness’ of the user or technology…any of those could be fatal to scalable successful growth
Was there an environmental outcry about anything besides the sonic booms?
A forty seat plane isn’t huge, there are existing turbo-jet engines that could be used, although whether they would be practical is another matter. The GE J85 has been used in both military and commercial aircraft. The Northrop F-5 uses a pair of these engines to reach Mach 1.6. However, the range of that aircraft is rather limited, a NZ to LA flight will require a lot of fuel. I doubt two of those engines is sufficient to get a 40 passenger craft with enough fuel across the Pacific at supersonic speeds. There are plenty of other engines to use, the Rolls Royce engines used in the Concordes are still out there, possibly economical to put the existing engines into use, but the cost is still very high, hard to see enough people spending enough money for those flights to make it economically viable. The Concordes were heavily subsidized.
A really cool logo, a la Next. Can’t do anything without one.
I think the real argument against most forms of super-high-speed transport is that ther just aren’t that many people who need to get somewhere in half the time, given standard train/aircraft speeds. The issues with flying SF-Tokyo are a lot more than a few hours of flight time.
The Concorde, in its functional years, was always pitched as the ride for C-level types whose time was so incredibly valuable that six hours to get to London would depress their company stock price, or something else trumpish. Always sounded like bullshit to me, one more preening bit of swank like a Patek Phillippe for every day of the week.
Yes, plenty. Regular pollution to noise disruption to destruction of the ozone layer
WHether these concerns were founded in reality is secondary. The perception of the problem drove public opinion against it; which again plays to the market risk assessment and mitigation that I’ve previously mentioned.
Yes. Concorde/SST flew in an especially sensitive layer of the atmosphere, and caused ozone depletion. Had there been more in service, as originally planned in the 1970s, it could have been a major ecological issue. Nothing’s changed there.
ETA Ninja’d by Sigene, but I will add that they were never allowed on overland routes (e.g. NY-LA) because of the noise issues. Their pollution is no worse than any plane, but it’s emitted at a bad location, compounding the ozone problems.
Well, the business class is full on most large aircraft and there are hundreds of these trans-oceanic flights every day. But like most projects, it will come in well over budget and below specs. I suspect the $2.1M is for initial engineering design.
The failure of the Concorde IIRC was that it could not make as much money, since it was early 1960’s technology and a very limited number were built. And, if you’ve every been inside, it was charging $8,000 for a flight from Paris to NYC in a tiny seat about the size of coach or smaller.
Mach 2.2 gives me a number of about 4.5 hours LAX to Australia or NZ (12,000km); range of a typical fighter 2500 to 3500km? So it would need 4 or 5 times the fuel load.
My recollection of the Concorde’s business model is that it was predicated entirely on “the US will buy them!”; it was never expected to be economically viable long-term without export sales.
My personal recollection of the Concorde’s noise issues is more spectacular. I lived near Dulles International Airport during the years the Concorde landed there. By the time she reached Dulles airspace, she had been over land for a while, and was not flying supersonic.
Nevertheless, the noise was absolutely epic. Despite being miles away, the Concorde’s rumble started out louder than other commercial planes…and just grew and grew in intensity, until it was a deep, sustained, booming thunder that you felt, everywhere. If that noise had been used in a movie, people would have accused the sound crew of Hollywood exaggeration. It was unreal.
We used to joke that the other side of the county was sliding off the edge of the earth. We always knew instantly when she came in to land.
Whatever noise concerns people had were absolutely justified.
I can’t dispute that, as I have no real evidence for or against it; but this is the sort of minefield the currently discussed business has to recognize, account for and mitigate. Again, this plane is less likely to fail due to technology, and more likely to fail because of market risks. Those risks can include nefarious, underhanded doings by the competition; whatever…they will have to somehow deal with that possibility.
do you have any evidence of this, or is it just conjecture on your part? Because the Concorde had a number of issues by itself which made it impractical for most flights:
couldn’t fly above the speed of sound over land
used pure turbojet engines which are very fuel-thirsty (the damn plane burned two tons of fuel just getting from the gate to the runway!)
needed afterburners for take-off and passing Mach 1, which made said thirsty jet engines burn fuel at a horrendous rate
using afterburners at take-off made the plane incredibly loud
limited passenger capacity.
With fuel and operating costs what they are, airlines would rather buy bigger, slower, more efficient planes and get butts in seats. The Concorde was an expensive-to-operate curiosity which existed so a handful of well-to-do folks could get to a couple of places faster than the rest of us peasants.
Whenever a Concorde departed from JFK, the entire airport stopped in its tracks and stared. Inside the terminal the rumble was loud and this is where the sound proofing made it such that 747s barely made a whine. I was taking the old shuttle bus from the A line to the terminals once when the driver announced that he had just seen the Concorde turn toward the runway above/in front of us so he “was going to wait right here for a minute” directly behind the take off. The rumble and roar were just awesome- the whole bus felt like it was going to shake apart. The true draft was all deflected so this was just the noise, and it lasted a long time. The whole bus was giddy the rest of the uneventful trip to the terminals. But I cannot begin to explain how loud the take off was compared to other jets.
B-1 takeoffs from Ellsworth over I-90 pale in comparison.
If this succeeds where the Concorde failed, it’ll be because there are potentially a lot more people globally in that sector of the market. Gross World Product is ~4 times what it was in 1980 and the vast majority of that increase is concentrated in the class of people who might think nothing of paying an extra few thousand dollars to get from Beijing to Los Angeles a few hours faster.
A relaxing of the rules about SST over land (if they really can make it quieter) will help. But I think the real reason this has a shot is that there are just more rich people interested in flying on it.
