I’m sure Calhoun will wipe away his tears of disappointment with his millions and millions of dollars in exit money.
Another Boeing CEO crashes and burns as Dave Calhoun pledges to leave, but he’s giving himself until the end of the year.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun to step down in wake of ongoing safety problems | CNN Business
ETA: Ninja’d by mere seconds!
Now we get to see if the board is also willing to clean house of all the MBA mentalities in the next 3 layers of management.
And replace them with what? Engineers? Ahahahahahahaha! 
Oh, wait a minute… 
A couple days ago Boom Supersonic flew the first flight of their demonstrator. As with most prototype X-plane first flights, this one would be graded a success if they didn’t crash. And it was a success.
Their website & vids: Boom - Supersonic Passenger Airplanes (boomsupersonic.com).
Articles in relevant magazines:
- It’s a few years late, but a prototype supersonic airplane has taken flight | Ars Technica
- Boom Supersonic Announces First Flight of XB-1 Jet Demonstrator - FLYING Magazine
- Boom’s XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator Makes First Flight | Aviation Week Network
I was disappointed that Flying of all mags managed to publish a pic of the touchdown and label it a takeoff. Geez guys, are there no pilots on your staff? The last one, from Aviation Week, is probably paywalled; the others are not.
The AW article included a discussion about the test plan, which will quickly get up to Mach. And about the near-total lack of forward visibility on the test aircraft, such that landings are made looking at a HUD-like artificial vision vid screen in the cockpit, backed up by a Navy style LSO providing verbal feedback during the approach as a sanity check during test and a final backup plan if all the vid and computer stuff was to fail.
YouTube may have more vids; I did not check.
I don’t know if the articles get into this, but I’ve heard some claims that due to changes in Boom’s business plan, the XB-1 is almost useless as a testbed and instead mainly serves as a way to attract funding. Which might be enough to be useful (it’s no small feat to put together a functional supersonic plane). But they still have almost all of their work to do to make a viable passenger craft. Including, apparently, developing new engines from scratch.
On one hand, it’s easy to dismiss their chances of success given that established engine makers have many decades of experience. But maybe it’s an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Medium-bypass turbofans haven’t been optimized for the commercial market for a very long time. So it’s possible there’s lots of room for improvement in cost/performance/efficiency available even to an inexperienced organization.
Granted that there’s not a direct stepping stone from the XB-1 to the current generation Overture design. And no, none of the articles I read addressed that concern. Although it is legit.
The development and now flight of XB-1 does validate their airframe and propulsion integration engineering, their software and flight control plans, and their flight test process. And of course their overall manufacturing and project management skills.
None of which would be in doubt if this thing was being built by e.g. Embraer or Gulfstream. Or Airbus or (maybe these days?) Boeing. But for a new company, they have to get all that stuff up and running well too. And seem to have done so to a first approximation. All of that will transfer directly to the next design.
So XB-1 is much more than a publicity stunt. But yes, their overall development arc would have been far better if they’d settled on their final product configuration early enough for the test article to more closely resemble the production product.
As to engines for Overture …
I don’t claim engine design expertise, nor have I been following Boom’s business situation very closely. I do know the major manufacturers declined to build them a purpose-built engine, and no current off the shelf engine fits the bill.
But those same manufacturers may be quite willing to sell or rent some of their design expertise, software codes, materials and fabrication tech, AM experience, etc. Plus all the usual accessories ranging from FADECs to oil coolers. So Boom doesn’t have to reinvent the jet engine.
It does look like that’s the case (from Wikipedia):
Named Symphony, the engine will be developed under partnership with three entities: Kratos subsidiary Florida Turbine Technologies for engine design; StandardAero for maintenance; and General Electric subsidiary GE Additive for consulting on printing components.[29]
So yeah, not entirely from scratch. Though I wonder if they’ll run into the same problems as SpaceX did with the Merlin engine, where they hoped to outsource some components (like the turbopumps to Barber-Nichols), but eventually just insourced everything due to high costs and poor organizational compatibility.
am I the only one that thinks that this whole supersonic-travel is some 40-50 years late?
this is a dead duck decomposing in the dried up water
not gonna happen - the technological problems being the least of it … Like expecting that BMW or Mercedes will develop that cool 850hp 12 cyl. engine for a cool sports-coupe … they could, but they wont
The assumption is that the richy-riches will remain unburdened by any need to reduce their carbon (or noise) footprint.
They are probably right in much of the world.
I actually expect the USA, even if under Democratic party political control for the next 50 years to largely eschew any forms of regulatory carbon limitation. Carbon will stop being consumed only to the extent that carbon consumption is more expensive that alternatives without green subsidies or carbon taxes to alter the balance. However the current carbon subsidies will continue to exist. However bad that sounds, it will be 10X worse if the Rs get lasting control.
Note I do not think that’s the wisest thing the US government could possibly do. Nor do I think humanity ought to continue on their carbon bender.
I just think that what I predict is what will actually happen. They won’t stop burning carbon when the temps get crazy. They’ll stop burning carbon when there’s no more extractable carbon to be burnt or the last human dies of excessive heat or a side effect (e.g. mass starvation) of excessive heat. And not a week before.
I’m mostly in line with your pessimism, but take issue with this. They’ll stop burning carbon when alternatives become cheaper across the board.
It is obviously difficult to compete with an energy source that you just have to dig out of the ground, but not impossible. Even without subsidies, solar and wind can displace coal and gas. It’s not fully there yet, but it’s in the process of happening and I expect it to continue. It isn’t getting cheaper to dig carbon out of the ground, but green energy is getting cheaper. So there will be continued lunch-eating for a while.
For airplanes, it remains to be seen how it all plays out. Hydrocarbons will be with us for a while… but I think electric can play a significant role eventually, for cost reasons alone.
I actually agree with that part. As I semi-said in my paragraph about the Democrat’s probable legislative trajectory.
The only thing that will reduce carbon consumption is cheaper forms of non-carbon energy in a fully delivered state. End users will not pay extra for greenery. So greenery must compete on price and only on price. If somehow-green energy becomes noticeably cheaper than the carbon intensive kind, then adoption will be rate-limited by the ability to ramp production and delivery infrastructure of that new energy form. But demand for that new energy will be substantially zero until it’s noticeably cheaper.
Which is a very tall hurdle for a late stage highly optimized techno-capitalist economy to climb.
In my lower paragraph you cited I was implicitly assuming that transition never occurs to a meaningful degree, and so the choice remains burn carbon or abstain from energy consumption. And given that choice, we’ll do the full Easter Island and burn every molecule or die trying.
Sorry to be unclear.
64 days flying a Cessna 172 continuusly without landing.
In 1958 Robert Timm and John Cook flew a Cessna 172 that took a year to modify for the event. They uploaded fuel and food from a chase vehicle while flying above it.
DANG
I’ve seen that aircraft at LAS.
Was it at the hotel that sponsored the event?
In further Karenic news …
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that any more. Had that been my situation to handle, she would have been gone rather sooner.
Those flights from Santo Domingo are infamous for extremely entitled folks who are sorta-rich by the standards of the very poor country they come from, and somehow expect their exalted status continues in our more egalitarian culture wherein they and their cheap coach tickets aren’t top 0.1%, but maybe top 20%.
Of course there are plenty of ordinary Americans who pull the same shit. With equally little good reason.
In the terminal at LAS.
Cool. Thanks for the update.
It’s funny that the talking head laughed and asked where they went to the bathroom. He should have watched the video the other reporter presented, because he said in it.
Found this today:
In classic news media style the affected plane was a United 787 and the file photo is (foreground to background) a United Express ERJ175, a United 737-9 MAX, and a united Express CRJ-700. At least the pic is Newark where they were planning to land.
I am confused about why the pilots elected to drop a 787 into Stewart just a few minutes flying short of EWR when it does not appear the passenger situation was all that dire. The main runway at 8800 or 9800 ft long depending on direction is adequate. But the terminal and ground equipment is real limited, and coming all the way from Tel Aviv, it’d be real easy for them to end up in a legality problem and trapped there unable to continue.
They had a reason; I just don’t know what it was.