It’s pretty telling of where we are as a society that some people are scoffing at the possibility of just improving on a decades old technology.
I wouldn’t say it’s a dead cert to be a success but I’d say it has a good chance and it’s about time we heard about a new plane that does more than just add communal areas.
That has yet to be seen. I think of this as more of a way to offset costs rather than profit.
A CNN story: Boom Supersonic aims to fly ‘anywhere in the world in four hours for $100’.
That tells me that they are out of touch somewhere along the line. Anywhere for $100 isn’t even close to a reality on the efficient equipment of today. I’m guessing it may be closer to anywhere in the world for $10,000.
$10k is around the cost of a 1st class transatlantic seat today.
Which is a much more realistic price.
They would certainly have me for a customer! The reason I will not travel long distances internationally is the god-awful length of the flights. I cannot be trapped on an airplane for a dozen or more hours. No! However, if I could make the trip to Tokyo in 6 hours, I would shell out a lot of money to do so.
Also, flying halfway around the world in four hours is about Mach 3.5, which seems… unlikely.
The mention of travel times raises another issue – the extra time tacked on at each end of the trip (traffic to and from the airport, security, boarding and exiting) dilutes the advantage of making the actual flight faster – rather than 4 hours instead of 12 hours, the real difference is 8 hours instead of 16 hours, shaving a 4:1 advantage down to 2:1.
Concorde passengers were cosseted in a “Concorde” lounge with tea/coffee/champagne and pastries while their Lois Vuittons were loaded, but this was pre 9/11 so there will be more delays.
In many cases, the worst (and riskiest) part of the trip is getting to and from the airport. One big advantage of high-speed rail is that it goes from city centre to city centre.
As long as the price isn’t twice as high I’d pay for that halving or travel time. Maybe less so for work when my clients are paying for my time and may balk at the extra cost bit on vacation I’d do it every time.
Didn’t the French and British governments eat the cost of development? Certainly still expensive but doable if the company gets their government to write the checks.
Many think Concorde was a money drain but it was actually profitable to operate (if only just).
This thing is being developed by an American start-up company. I don’t expect the US government to give them subsidies, unless they can somehow sell a version of this to the Defense Department.
And actually, I’d be more comfortable if this thing were being developed by an established aerospace company like Boeing or Bombardier.
If they follow through on their claims, then sure, the cost may even come down.
But it seems as though costs would tend to be more than twice as high for more than twice the speed. Maybe they have a way of dealing with that.
The range that it can handle would be important, too. If it can make a trans-pacific crossing, say San Fran to Australia, in a more reasonable amount of time than 15 hours, that would certainly be a draw.
The proposed Boom aircraft is expected to do transatlantic in one hop, but not transpacific. But from the San Francisco they can get to Tokyo with one stop in under 6 hours. Lose Angeles - Sydney would be under 7 hours.
Ref my earlier post and this post I’m NOT asserting Boom will succeed in any of their goals, much less all of them. They may well disappear next year never quite having gotten their demonstrator into the air.
But overall these machines are an idea whose technology is now doable at more or less commercial-compatible costs, not just government-boondoggle-compatible costs. And more than one company is pushing forward on these ideas. Somebody will make it work at least a little.
Whether these machines makes economic, ecologic, or social justice sense is a different conversation.
I would imagine there are two major pieces to that puzzle.
There is probably some kind of advanced design that reduces sonic booms over populated areas. Being able to fly supersonic over the continental US or Europe is a huge deal. The Concorde was pretty much limited to flying supersonic over the oceans.
The Concorde had huge operating costs. Presumably this future SST will be larger and significantly cheaper per mile than the Concorde.
Between the two, supersonic airliner travel could be viable- 2.5 hours from LA to NYC, 6 hours from LA to Tokyo, or 3.5 from NYC to London are huge deals.
Speed works in the airline’s favor, in a way. If a conventional airliner can make two trans-Atlantic trips in a day (one each way), then a plane which flies twice as fast can make four. If the fare is double, then each seat earns four times as much revenue on any given day. Airlines want their planes in the air as much as possible. When they are on the ground, they’re not making any money.
I wonder what this would do to schedules. The last time I flew trans-Atlantic, the eastbound flights were usually overnight. A couple hours to turn the plane around and it would fly back to the U.S. east coast. Another turnaround, and another overnight flight back to Europe. A supersonic plane could make four trips, but how would the airline schedule them? Anyone paying for that extra speed probably doesn’t want to leave or arrive at 2:00 a.m.
The Boom Overture is similar in length to Concorde, but is planned to actually have a smaller passenger capacity. Concorde had 2-and-2 seating (which, as noted above, led to it feeling cramped), while the Overture is planned to be 1-and-1; Concorde could carry between 92 and 120 passengers, depending on configuration, while the Overture is planned to only carry from 65 to 80.
International passenger-miles traveled keeps going up (well, except for last year for obvious reasons).
However good you may think phones are now compared to decades past, people who buy tickets on airplanes (the only people whose opinion matters in this case) appear to disagree that there’s less need for travel now.
There’s a plausible argument that while demand for cheap slow international flights has gone up due to mass market tourism, that won’t translate into demand for more expensive faster travel. I don’t think it’s that compelling. There are more rich people than there used to be and rich people travel for tourism too.
Also, the sorts of business that are conducted internationally aren’t just about face to face contact with people. They’re increasingly about face-to-manufacturing-line contact. There are a lot more people with serious money behind them making regular trips from California to China/Korea/Japan than there were a few decades ago, and even video calls are poor substitutes for the kind of due diligence those trips represent.
Passenger jets may look like they haven’t changed in decades but there have been massive improvements in efficiency. Modern twin jets like the B737 MAX and A320A321 NEO use around 20% less fuel than their predecessors. The long term trend has been for airliners to be slower and more fuel efficient. They can fly further and take more direct routes due to better efficiency and improved reliability. You may think there has been nothing new because the configuration is much the same, but that is because the basics of aerodynamics has been solved and the nature of the trade-offs required means that the ideal design for an airliner is what we see now. There are tweaks to be made here and there but don’t expect anything radical. Even the Boom Overture isn’t radical, it’s just a refinement of Concord.
Before the B787 was developed, Boeing had a proposal for a “sonic cruiser”, a near supersonic airliner with a delta wing capable of carrying 200+ passengers.
The airlines weren’t interested, they didn’t want to be fast, they wanted to be efficient.
The challenge for Boom is not to create a supersonic jet that improves on Concord, that’s a given, it is to create a supersonic jet that fits economically with the 300 seat subsonic twin jets that will be flying in 2030. It needs to be viewed in the context of an increasingly climate aware populace and a fleet of airliners that are far more efficient than the gas guzzling turbojet powered monsters of the 1960s and 1970s.
Actually, right now it’s being subsidized by speculative investors, who’ve bought stock hoping that someday the plane will work economically, and their stock will be worth much more than they paid for it.
But (IMO) in the end, it will probably end up being subsidized by the US Government (taxpayers), since if it fails and the stock price goes down, those stockholders will declare that as a loss on their taxes, so they pay less taxes (and others pay more). And since this is an indirect subsidy, it probably costs more than a direct one, like the British & French governments subsidizing Concorde development.
This is a ridiculous definition of “subsidy”. People who lose money on a business venture aren’t being subsidized. They’re paying less taxes because they actually made less money.