No, it is about the noise. In general, it’s about pollution – noise pollution and high-altitude air pollution. The concept aircraft from Boom uses medium-bypass engines which are likely to be a lot louder and less fuel efficient than high-bypass turbofans, despite their goal of meeting new ICAO noise standards.
I don’t care about the “choices” anyone makes unless it negatively affects me and my fellow citizens and is frivolous or otherwise unnecessary. Nobody “needs” to fly faster than sound.
Then you should be perfectly happy with a restriction on sound levels without having a full ban on supersonic flight.
I invite you to apply this principle to every modern convenience.
The law does not need to change at all to allow operation at or above mach 1. It already clearly states that it can be done with permission.
That permission will come in the form of Air Carrier and Air Operator Certificates. Those certificates allow a given identified operator to fly given aircraft in their fleet in accordance with whatever general or specific operational rules and exemptions apply to them, provided the aircraft is kept airworthy in accordance with those applicable standards, exemptions, special conditions, and equivalent safety findings.
The regulatory structure is fully capable of handling novel designs and innovation. The hard part is reaching agreement on what limitations any technology should have, but that’s what Boom’s certification team is having ongoing conversations with the FAA about.
I think that question ran its course, but the thread probably should be moved somewhere else at this point.
Let me give a simpler example. This assumes a bunch of stuff, like planes using a certain set of rules effective after a given date (think; new building code).
It is absolutely the law that at an emergency exit, you must be able to “see the likely area of ground contact” when looking out the window of, for example, an overwing emergency exit without opening the door. It is, strictly speaking, “illegal” to not be able to see the ground at those exits with the door closed.
Except on nearly every plane with an overwing emergency exit, you can’t see the ground at all. You see the wing.
Instead of grounding all planes and preventing these emergency exits from existing, there’s a routine exemption that’s been granted for years to allow these exits to exist, with modification that you have to be able to see the ground after opening the door, and you’re allowed to lean out and look.
The regulation as written still applies to other door designs, and simply hasn’t been changed because no one’s really freaking out about it. Just get the exemption, and you’re good to go.
Boom is just going through this process, for much more complex issues.
But the process exists.
For testing purposes. No one is getting a special flight authorization for regular passenger flights. But you don’t have to believe me; just read the law:
Here are the allowable reasons for an exemption:
(8) The reason(s) that operation at a speed greater than Mach 1 is necessary. A special flight authorization to exceed Mach 1 may be granted only for operations that are intended to:
(i) Show compliance with airworthiness requirements;
(ii) Determine the sonic boom characteristics of an aircraft;
(iii) Establish a means of reducing or eliminating the effects of sonic boom, including flight profiles and special features of an aircraft;
(iv) Demonstrate the conditions and limitations under which speeds in excess of Mach 1 will not cause a measurable sonic boom overpressure to reach the surface; or
(v) Measure the noise characteristics of an aircraft to demonstrate compliance with noise requirements imposed under this chapter, or to determine the limits for operation in accordance with § 91.817(b).
Nowhere in there is “regular passenger service”.
Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom, regularly posts that the law has to change for overland passenger flights to happen.
I have read the law.
I’m also an airworthiness and aircraft certification specialist, but what do I know?
Boom needs to demonstrate that what they’re selling is real, so yeah, the current allowance is to permit that aircraft to test those assumptions. The “laws” can change as the data is collected, via existing regulatory processes… getting permission.
This demonstrator is an uncertified experimental aircraft. It doesn’t even meet “typical” regulations to allow passenger service. Why they hell would it be allowed to do so at this stage of development?!? You can’t fly revenue service in a Boeing 737 Max 10 either, because it’s not type certified.
Boom can do the work to get a type certificate under existing regulations with or without additional permissions. But they have to do the work first.
What if they fail to achieve the promised noise levels (which is very likely) and then pressure a compliant Congress and European and Asian governments to ease the noise restrictions? Is it that unusual for a company engaged in a major new development to make promises it can’t keep? That’s practically business as usual at Boeing.
Why would I do that? Most modern conveniences are functional and relatively harmless. But I’d be happy to apply that principle to every gigantic pickup truck or bloated SUV that’s only ever used for grocery shopping and taking the kids to soccer practice.
I dunno, man. I’m sure that Scholl has plenty of well-informed aviation certification specialists at his disposal as well. You two are at odds here.
I’m not saying anything about their demonstrator. The question is whether, once (if) Boom produces an aircraft that meets all the normal requirements for passenger aircraft, has a type certificate and all that, whether they’ll be allowed to fly it supersonically overland without changing the law. Everything I’ve read–from people that should know–is that the answer is no.
We are talking about the demonstrator because the law you linked to is about the demonstrator.
Once that aircraft is type certificated, a whole hell of a lot more will be known about it. It may meet environmental and municipal noise regulations inherently, meaning supersonic flight is A-OK over land. It may only meet them at certain altitudes. There may be other reasons why those altitudes can’t be permitted over land, or may be a patchwork situation, but that could very well work. It may be too damn noisy no matter what, with physics being what it is, and overland supersonic ops will forever remain out of reach.
We just don’t know enough yet. Sure, Boom probably knows more than I do, I don’t work for them. Maybe they’re trying to get the law changed now because they know it’ll work out, or maybe because they already know it’ll be impossible and it’s all a scam. It’s probably somewhere in between.
The whole point is this; laws can be exempted, they can get those exemptions, but they have to explain why it’s acceptable.
Then perhaps we should regulate based on harm. You know… like noise levels.
What if anyone does anything? You can fabricate any fictitious scenario you want. If you can repeal noise restrictions, then you can repeal the supersonic ban as well. Or the ban on kicking puppies.
Didn’t mean to sound dismissive. I did my share of tinkering. Learning how a doorknob works was an early one.
Except they aren’t his equations. It’s his theory, but not his 20 (!) equations. They were reformulated later by Heaviside, a name even less well known.
Of course, he’s got the Heaviside Layer, but most people have never heard of that..
You’re glossing over the central point that I’ve made several times. Sometimes the future doesn’t unfold as one might have hoped, and sometimes it’s because what we naively perceive as exciting and futuristic technological advances turn out not to be as practical as we thought and perhaps not particularly useful, either. Or as the saying goes, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Some of us are old enough to remember this breathless ad from Pan Am early in the jet age. Presenting themselves as futuristic leaders in aviation, they were going to be flying both the Concorde and the Boeing SST. They ended up flying neither, and today are flying nothing at all.
I didn’t know that, but I’m not in the least surprised. In a similar way, Minkowski did a lot to make Einstein’s work simpler and easier to work with.
Some people have heard of the Heaviside Layer, but unfortunately it’s mostly due to the awful song from Cats. The Heaviside Function (step function at 0) might be better known, but still pretty obscure.
While I was reading this my first thought was “That’s a real thing?” I did not like Cats. I remember some of the songs but have never bothered to find out what the Layer was.
That’s not a point. It doesn’t even resemble a coherent argument.
Again, try applying your principle to literally anything else. Should we proactively ban all technological development because some of it doesn’t pan out? Seriously, what are you even trying to say here? So what if some tech ends up being impractical?
The people crafting the law couldn’t have known if future technology could have suppressed the sonic boom problem, or general noise, or efficiency, or economics, or anything else. It’s just a dumb, flat ban on operations over supersonic flight.
Again: ban the actual harmful consequences, whether noise or pollution or whatever. If that is in effect a ban on certain technologies because they are inherently harmful, with no possibility for improvement, then so be it. But don’t ban things based on things that could not possibly be known and are likely to change in the future.
Nobody NEEDS to fly.
Nobody needs modern sanitation. Humanity has lived with rampant cholera and dysentery for far more millennia than it has not.
No, it’s perfectly coherent to say that major technology initiatives should be premised on net benefit to humanity. It’s perfectly coherent to say that we ignore the lessons of history at our peril.
No one today would suggest that air travel was a bad idea (although it has indeed been quite properly suggested that private jets have a hugely disproportionate environmental impact). Yet it would also be foolish to pretend that air travel, in terms of noise, CO2 and NOx emissions and vapour trails that trigger high-altitude cloud formation, don’t have a deleterious effect on climate. We simply choose to accept it because modern society couldn’t exist without it, and we look for other ways to mitigate climate change.
The problem with supersonic air travel is that it has even worse environmental impacts with fewer incremental benefits.
Where in the stuff I wrote that you last responded to did you see the word “ban”? I’m not arguing in favour of the overland supersonic ban, although I suspect the reason it was framed that way is that it’s simpler and easier than trying to work into legal terms some perceived noise levels which may vary with terrain, atmospheric conditions, and other factors. It’s the same reason that we have speed limits instead of laws demanding that everyone “drive safely”.
Since I’m arguing for technologies that are a net benefit to humanity rather than detrimental to our long-term interests, this supposed analogy is exactly the opposite of what I’m saying.