Apparently several companies are working on them but none of them have a release date.
My question is, supersonic flight has been the commercial world for over 40 years, yet in all that time no company found it profitable to turn out a small supersonic jet for heads of state and the ultra-wealthy? It seems to be the demand would have been there, back in the 1980’s there was plenty of high rollers, opulent heads of state and rock stars who would have loved this as a toy.
Also the tech seems to have been there, we’ve had low priced supersonic trainer jets around since 1958. (Northrop T-38 Talon). Sure an SSBJ is bigger, but its not rocket science…
I would imagine a suitably priced SSBJ could be profitable with only 100 models sold, and there would have seemed to be enough ultra wealthy candidates around since the 1970’s at least.
So what am I missing, why don’t these exist already?
One major issue is that it isn’t legal to travel faster than the speed of sound in many, many places. (because the sonic boom causes disturbances and can even break windows) That cuts into any time savings. A second issue is that you are looking at enormous development costs - if you have to spread those costs between a few aircraft purchased by wealthy patrons, the per aircraft cost could exceed what even billionaires are willing to pay. Think about it - you can’t reuse wings or engines or tons of other equipment from slower jets. Everything is different.
That also makes for huge operating costs - you’re proposing a family of aircraft that only 100 or so will ever be built, each using unique wings, engines, and fuselages specific to the rigors of supersonic flight. That means that getting replacement parts or fixing the aircraft would be hugely expensive, and since your mechanics are inexperienced - less aircraft to practice on - and since there are fewer pieces of hardware in existence to get operating experience on - failures and crashes are more probable.
Billionaires presumably are reluctant to risk dying when they might instead have decades of life left to enjoy their billions.
Hopefully Stranger on the Train will be able to narrow these issues down to more specific numbers for what the cost differences would actually be.
There have been no supersonic commercial flights since 2003, when the Concorde was retired. SST flight has a number of problems, including cost, noise and range.
A bigger issue. The development costs for a supersonic business jet must be on the order of billions of dollars. The 787 dreamliner cost 32 billion, as a comparison point. It’s obviously a much larger aircraft using exotic composite materials, but it isn’t supersonic.
Anyways, you need to invest billions of dollars. You draw up a spreadsheet for it. How big is the market size for supersonic business jets? Well, how many have been sold in the past? Oh, it doesn’t exist as a market. Well, how many people might buy one? Now you’re just guessing. You’re deciding whether or not to commit billions and billions of investor’s money into an aircraft that may not sell enough copies to even break even. This is a high risk investment.
You’d have to charge an enormous amount of money per aircraft to provide enough of an ROI to be worth the risk to investors - but the more you raise the per aircraft price, the fewer individuals are willing to buy one.
If it costs 10 billion to develop, and 100 aircraft were sold, that’s 100 million per aircraft. But you have to include the actual production costs per aircraft - say another 50 million. Now, you need a huge ROI to repay your investors. So let’s ask for 200 million per aircraft for that. 350 million each.
As you can see, Boeing would sell you a brand new 747 or several 737s for that. You could have swanky flying apartment in the sky instead, it just would fly slower than a supersonic business transport.
I can see a way around this “unknown market size” problem. You could start up a kickstarter, open to billionaires only, for one. If you can get 100 billionaires to preorder one - for a discount price of $250 mil each or so - you’d have the capital to design and build the jets, and you’d have solved the “unknown market size” problem.
Given that of 1148 T-38s built, 210 have crashed in some form, this isn’t a great advertisement for your average billionaire.
As Habeed says, you can’t fly supersonic in many places - where for most intents “many” means over land. There is no role for one over the US or over Europe. You can only usefully use one over the sea, and their range is awful, so you probably can’t usefully use one for any meaningful journey.
The super rich simply buy bigger rather than faster. Anything from 737s up to A380s can be bought and outfitted as personal jets. Owning a A380 is restricting as well, there are not all that many places you can go. But the mega rich are more likely to want to fly in ultra luxury with all their staff than ride in a cramped death machine.
The link talks about an issue with US aircraft over Wales. At 18k the sonic boom caused some ceiling tiles to fall. Not cataclysmic but not the kind of shake I’d want over anyplace I lived. It also covers the rules in the US which includes limited places allowing supersonic flight. FAA allows supersonic flight over 60k feet though anywhere. Throw a ceiling of over 60k feet on to the design specifications for any plane that wants to regularly use it’s supersonic capability.
I think the argument from a strictly time-saving perspective is hard to make. The way private jets shine in that regard is in getting rid of most of the airport time on either end of a trip and being able to fly direct into smaller airports, which has the effect of making same day round trips to regional destinations practical which wouldn’t be if flying commercial.
The amount of time you’d save by flying twice as fast would only be really noticeable on longer hauls and even then it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. For example, the Concorde shaved about 4 hours off NY to London, which is nice, but that’s not like a huge game-changing amount of time saved that suddenly makes it a doable day trip. The extra speed might be useful on longer trips, but not if you have to stop for fuel more often which you almost certainly would.
They typically cause rattling dishes/windows and vibrations, and as described as sounding variously as explosions, fireworks, gunfire, and so forth. People near airports already complain about the noise, sonic booms on top of that will just increase the problem, especially if those booms are the result of the most elite increasing their personal convenience.
No.
Sonic booms audible on the ground have been generated by aircraft flying as high as 21km (test with the B-70 Valkyrie in the 1960’s). Research has been done and is continuing with technology to reduce the intensity of sonic booms, but results are limited.
Such actions are usually done over largely uninhabited regions where they might disturb wildlife but not people. Military jets might go supersonic over inhabited areas in an emergency but it’s not done routinely where it will disturb people.
It’s hard to make a case for new forms of fast transit these days. Communication systems have gotten good enough that sending people across oceans to do things in person isn’t necessary in most cases. For things that must be done in person, there’s not much that needs to be done in person across the ocean in a few hours that can’t wait a few more hours for a much cheaper flight.
For things done for pleasure, those wealthy enough for expensive tickets have basically said, “we’d rather spend a few more hours in comfort than get there quickly in cramped seats with small windows”, so that’s what airplane manufacturers built.
Well as the wiki article in the first post makes clear there are several companies working on this who do believe there is a market for it.
I guess going by the answers on here, the issue is, have advances in composite materials and engine efficiency got to the point where you can make a long range supersonic business jet? Second, can some different shape of engine or aircraft body or both reduce or nullify the sonic boom?
For instance it cuts off the 1.5 to 2-hour check-in lead time that is usually recommended before boarding a commercial flight, plus at the other end the time spent at the luggage carousel and having to do ground transfer between trains and shuttles.
The SSBJ, like the 747/A380 executive jet, would be a very narrow niche market. It’s doable but most magnates will say why bother, especially with the ban on civilians flying supersonic over inhabited land in most of the developed world.
And if you really need to be able to do business NOW, we have telepresence systems so that you can do so without leaving the home office.
Hmm, theres 1645 Billionaires in the world according to Wiki and another 100 or so heads of state of rich enough countries.
You telling me there isn’t 200 people out of that pool that wouldn’t pay big money for a supersonic jet if it could seat 10 people and travel cross pacific?
two more problems would be noise on the ground and cost to operate. supersonic travel pretty much requires turbojet or low-bypass turbofan engines. These things are incredibly loud at takeoff; what good would a supersonic business jet be if it couldn’t land or take off at major airports?
as for cost to operate, turbojets and low-bypass engines are much less efficient than the typical high-bypass turbofans on your average airliner, so fuel costs would be considerable for a small plane. It’d be even worse if the engines required reheat (afterburning) at any stage of flight.
Given the fuel consumption, what would the range be for a supersonic business jet? The more expensive business jets sell on the basis of their extremely long range.
Folks have addressed the regulatory problem. It’s huge. NASA has been doing research on reduced-boom operations. But so far that only works sorta, and only to lowish speeds around Mach 1.2. So it won’t let an SSBJ really haul ass & save material time.
Range is essentially miles-per-gallon consumption rate / fuel capacity. Capacity doesn’t scale the same as overall aircraft size. All long haul airplanes are big because they need to be to carry the tankage. We now have bizjets that can do the Atlantic non-stop. Trans-Pacific non-stop is real marginal and normally includes a couple islands along the way. So simply making a long range bizjet is hard.
Fuel consumption doesn’t scale well with speed either. It goes up much faster than speed does. So a long range and high speed really don’t go together. Now mix long range, high speed and small aircraft. That is out of reach. Not insanely out of reach; hence the various research projects & so-called paper airplanes.
As alluded to above, one of the big time savers for bizjets is operating out of low-traffic airports. Which, by and large, have smallish runways. High cruise speed and low take-off / landing speed are antithetical goals. We do a heck of a job in conventional subsonic jets getting the TO & landing speeds as low as we do. Making those speeds even lower to fit into small airports while also increasing cruise speeds well above the Mach is also out of reach. Again not insanely out of reach. But not there yet.
Finally, there is the business case. Most of the seriously expensive bizjets are owned by publicly traded corporations, not individual fatcats. And these folks are somewhat sensitive to the image of spending the shareholders’ money on toys for execs. Add the concern about much noisier takeoffs and landings and booming the proles all the way across the country and it has a serious image problem. Imagine if they invented a nuclear-powered yacht which spread *just a little *radioactivity wherever the wealthy went to play. That would provoke outrage, not envy.
A thing most folks don’t understand about booms is they don’t happen at the moment the aircraft passes through Mach 1.0. They happen continuously for as long as the aircraft is supersonic. IOW, you’re painting a carpet of explosion noise across a 30-mile wide swath all across the whole country. And so is the airplane 3 minutes behind you. And the one behind him, and him, and … All day long. THAT prospect was what killed public acceptance of the SST over land.
Making a SSBJ that can fly supersonic across the Pacific just added massively to the cost. Carrying sufficient fuel needs a larger aircraft which costs more and the cost of the fuel itself is not trivial. As to 100 Heads of State of rich countries - can you imagine the reaction in the press if the President announced he wanted to sent 200 million on a new jet? I certainly know how it would go down in the UK (or any other parliamentary democracy!). Also for Heads of State and top business people the limited saving in time is not that helpful. Generally at that level it is more use being able to travel with your staff, work, and sleep, on the plane and arrive rested rather than being cramped in a small jet for somewhat less time.
As to the sonic boom over land, even from smallish fighter aircraft it is very distinct and alarming. Every now and then the RAF go supersonic over England as the intercept civil aircraft out of contact with ATC and the police get bombarded with call from the public reporting an explosion.
Will one be able to cross the Pacific? Going supersonic means tossing fuel economy out the window. This passage from wikipedia could do with someone doing conversions for comparison, but it shows you’re going to need pretty big fuel tanks to make it across the Pacific.
The real tragedy is that tragic accident that killed SST, a tire blow-out, was NOT directly caused by tire failure! The investigation concluded there was debris on the runway that induced tire failure (as opposed to the worrisome build-up of heat on the tires known to cause blow-outs). SST was coolest thing when I was a kid…pre-dating the Space Shuttle.
During my childhood, the very rural area where I lived was oferflown by fighters on a regular basis (I’d guess we had a sonic boom once a week or so). It’s not that bad (not as violent as an explosion, for instance), but it’s enough to make windows vibrate, for instance.
I always had believed that we were on some flying path between point A and point B. I sort of assumed that military crafts were flying supersonic all the time, and until I read this thread, I never paid attention to the fact that I never heard a sonic boom anywhere else.
So, I gather from this thread that fighters were probably flying at supersonic speed specifically in this area because it was mostly uninhabited.