Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters? This is easily one of the most exciting startups out there at the moment. It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work.
Is it the everyman's plane? Certainly not. But it essentially makes living in Tokyo/Hong Kong/Singapore/Sydney and working in SF much closer to living in New York and working in SF (which a lot of senior executives and investors do). Imagine if Australia East Coast was a 6hr flight and 5hr time difference to SF. New York is a 6hr flight and a 3hr time difference to SF. Seems a lot different all of a sudden doesn't it?
Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all. Having these senior people able to work locally can enable them to seed their hometowns with thriving local offices that train new generations of talent.
Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets (both very complex industries) over very well established incumbents. Don't underestimate how much organizational dynamics can weigh on a company. Do you think the best people at Boeing are going to risk the next decade of their career working on a plane that might only do 300 orders when they could go get easy promotion working on the next 787?
"Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all"
Jeez, this again.
What is it about we tech folk that allows a little aptitude to let our ego get so far out of whack?
I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.
There's a bunch of guys and gals in Hong Kong/Canada/Iceland/wherever who are just as capable of doing the same job without intercontinental commuting.
As others have said, the Internet exists, which mitigates the need for international travel like you've suggested anyway (which is absurd, not least for the environmental damage this implies).
Think you are missing the point. Earth doesent just give us resources we then use, we invent ways to use things as resources. Oil wasnt a resource, uranium wasnt a resource,the sun wasnt a resource, we had to find ways to turn them into resources.
>> I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.
There are a few target markets that are special. Celebs are each unique, their earning power is tied to this uniqueness. Such an aircraft is great if you want to film in the UK but spend your weekends in NY. Much of Concorde's passenger base fit this profile.
Then there are the truly wealthy. There might actually be an environmental argument for them to use this aircraft. Compare it against the carbon footprint of someone flying on Emirates in that airborne apartment they sell on the A380. I'd bet that a semi-normal seat on this rocket will be less carbon intensive than one of those giant first class seats on a slower aircraft. Maybe a few people opting for a less-opulent but far faster option might actually reduce net carbon emissions.
As far as the carbon footprint goes, the energy required to move a thing with a given mass scales quadraticly with speed, same goes for overcoming air resistance.
However, there could be some novel gains in engineering an engine that isn't dogshit inefficient at low speeds like the Concorde ones were.
To have any chance of taking control of our collective carbon footprint we need to move away from technology like this not towards it.
And until we can manifest fundamentally different technology for air travel we should collectively and rapidly scale down our dependence on long distance commute.
Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.
>Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.
But it's the reality. Electrification of individual ground transportation, and the phasing out of gasoline cars, is absolutely inevitable over the next 20 years. But jet fuel isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. It's just a matter of physics. It's foreseeable to have small scale electrified commuter aircraft shuttling people within 400 miles. But any type of long haul flight will be done with turbine engines burning kerosene. Even with a 10x increase in energy density for LiPo batteries, we still wouldn't be there.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but not having a viable alternative to fossil fuel driven flight right now doesn't justify accelerating the damage it's doing by leaning further into it.
Aviation is small fish though. REALLY small fish. This type of aviation even more so. It accounts for only 1-2% of anthropomorphic CO2eq production. Benefits outweigh the bad. I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about supersonic travel.
I'm kinda surprised to see this kind of hostility. Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested even though the IPCC HIGHLY advocates its use. It is all about relative impact. Part of the problem with resolving climate change is that even the people who acknowledge it fight among themselves and don't push for both current technologies (which includes nuclear) and research for new technologies (fusion, batteries, and better solar/hydro/wind). We need to just listen to what the experts say, not what you read in some blog post or HN comment.
Aviation is currently a small fish because it's currently available to such small part of the population on a regular basis. For those that take part of it it's a major part of their footprint. Scaling it up to more people is very unsustainable. Therefore fossil fuel aviation is unsustainable in a world where more and more people get richer.
> Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested
It's not the "same thing". Nuclear has some sustainability benefits. Bringing back commercial hypersonic air travel seems to have no such benefits.
If we cut carbon out of everything else, the price of oil will drop, and aviation will be able to greatly expand.
Air travel is low now only because it's expensive. People world gladly take many, many more flights if they were cheaper.
Of course if we taxed carbon this problem would go away, and taxing international flights would probably be easier than a general carbon tax, if flights were all that was left.
Internet experts, politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals can argue until the end of time about which CO2-emitting products and services deserve to, or should, exist.
Just the same way the expertise of the most-brilliant central planners in the USSR and elsewhere allocated resources.
It doesn't work. There's a better way which is also consistent with democracy and individual choice. But people don't like the sound of it.
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted... this is 100% the best way to incentivize reduction in carbon emissions. And just keep upping the tax gradually as needed.
It's the next-best solution. The only reasonable argument in favor that I've seen is that it is easier and more authoritarian (maybe be careful believing this is a good thing?) to set a hard cap. But a carbon tax can always be adjusted.
It's inferior in econonic efficiency and comprehensive coverage to a carbon tax.
And if implemented incorrectly, it becomes corporate welfare, and this has already happened. It has potential to be just another corporatist-cronyist scheme at taxpayer's expense.
And to date government and bureaucracy have been pretty horrible about solving climate change.
Carbon tax is a simple, elegant, efficient, effective solution. Most people just dont like the sound of it though.
If you edited your original post to add carbon tax, it would probably read a lot clearer. (I upvoted it, I agree)
How would you solve the trade component though? Because carbon production would just shift elsewhere unless:
* there was an international treaty where states each agreed to raise carbon taxes and cut other taxes or do a dividend, or
* import tariffs were levied in proportion to the carbon used in imports from countries that didn't have a similar tax
The latter would demand a large bureaucracy and have a lot of distortions.
I realized recently that a carbon tax isn't like an income tax. An income tax only occurs on profits, whereas a carbon tax is an input tax. This makes the jurisdiction shifting problem more acute.
A carbon tax is still my preferred solution, but was wondering if you had any ideas on how to get around this.
I dont really have a strong opinion or definitive answer.
What I know is that many other industries deal with somethint like this. Not just taxes, but costly regulation hurts domestic production. For example, countries which do not respect responsible fishing practices have a competitive advantage.
Part of the answer can be: just dont let those countries sell fish within the US. Others can be international treatise or laws.
If I were king, I'd need to spend more time to consider my options, but I guess a treatise is in order. I dont see how any climate change action within the US's 350M population will do anything meaningful to solve the problem if the other 6.5Billion are not cooperating.
Except for the fact that markets are a great way to manage rivalrous goods, dynamically balance economic need against cost without the need for a centralized authority to have high-touch meddling (which presents a corruption danger), oh and most importantly, ad I said, they work, empirically, as with the United States SOX and NOX markets
Initial post wasn’t meant to be hostile at all and I’m still unsure of whether or not supersonic travel is a net positive or negative.
My issue was with the parent comment essentially suggesting that you can justify boosting emissions from flight travel because we still rely on fossil fuels, so might as well double down. Nobody was suggesting that we immediately cease all flight travel. I’m open to the possibility that supersonic travel is a net positive, but the argument needs to be around what we’re getting in return for the emissions and why that’s worth it.
People saying supersonic travel is a step in the wrong direction are listening to experts who agree that our use of fossil fuels is a threat to humanity and the environment. And what about when experts disagree? There has to be some level of independent thought to parse and apply what experts are putting forward.
> Why would you be aware of people worrying about something that currently doesn't exist?
I'm not sure how to break this to you, but scientists are generally aware about up and coming technologies. And we do think about potential future impact.
So let me rephrase
>>I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about potential future implementations of supersonic travel.
You don’t expect to see an unvarnished historical perspective derided that way here, but I suppose you have a point. Can you tell me where I’ve changed my mind on this issue?
By that standard you shouldnt be using the internet. The “damage” is questionable to say the least. There is a whole group of poor people who need access to fossil fuels to survive, but are you going to stop them from getting it in the mame of climate change? Are you goin to stop buying computers and other products build and distributed using the internatioal supply change? If not why expect others to do what you dont?
I don't understand this logic. How does one action with unfortunate side effects excuse another?
Sure perhaps we shouldn't be using the internet. Or perhaps we should do a lot more to make sure that the energy used for powering the internet is sustainable.
But our deficiency in that area doesn't make this activity any better.
Who are you to decide what is ok and what is not? How do you know that building a supersonic jet doesent open up for other technologies or methods that wil improve effectiveness of fuel consumtion? I dont understand with what logic you get to decide that your consumption is ok but other peoples use isnt.
Nonsense. It's less than 1% of our carbon emissions iirc. In theory we could convert that over to biofuels and/or hydrocarbons produced using CO2 from the atmosphere, at which point it would be carbon neutral. It may be the only reasonable way to get the energy density we need for practical air travel in the near term.
“The global aviation industry produces around 2% of all human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Aviation is responsible for 12% of CO2 emissions from all transports sources, compared to 74% from road transport.”
But that’s with current aircraft supper sonic is less efficient and enables longer flights having a very outsized impact for minimal gain. You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets, going 2-3x as fast adds little productivity.
On top of that emerging markets are just as happy to start flying as start driving which is pushing up flying’s impact every year.
> You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets
Speak for yourself — I can't sleep on planes. Nor is airplane internet anything close to high speed by any standard. It's expensive as hell and doesn't exist over oceans. At the same ticket price, for long-haul international, I'd greatly prefer an economy-sized seat in a 2.5x shorter flight to a biz-class seat in a traditional flight.
The cost of these things are well into first class territory* which I find much easier to sleep in vs business class. Turbulence can still occasionally be a thing, but it’s less frequent on long haul flights because they have more options.
As to internet over the ocean, Gogo has quality high speed internet via satellite. If you have not flown on one of these flights or a competent competitor you will notice a real difference.
*At least until a large number of aircraft are in service. Airlines make the most money per square foot with business class, but first class is still a critical revenue stream. Free up first class space via these and run fewer large aircraft with a higher percentage of business class is going to be most efficient. This also means you end up with either fewer economy seats or more expensive ones as currently first class and business class subsidizes economy.
Much as you wish it were the case electric battery power does not have enough power density for mass aircraft transit yet. They're much too heavy. We're getting there but we're still a good decade away. You're certainly not going to get supersonic airliners with electric aircraft. (Elon Musk keeps talking about it but even he states that the energy density isn't there yet.) People need to realize the difference between fiction and reality.
How much do nuclear submarine power plants weigh? :-) Looks like on the order of 600 tons; also looks like 787s carry over 100 ton just in fuel fully loaded. So it is plausible that a scaled down nuclear sub reactor should supply plenty of energy at reasonable weight budget. Obviously you'd want it to be somewhat robust and maybe eject + parachute it for catastrophic scenarios, rather than irradiating whatever the plane runs into.
The problem is shielding all of the people. When you land the plane all of that ionizing radiation bounces back at the people inside giving bathing them in fatal or near fatal levels. The shielding is just too heavy and the physics of shielding make it very unlikely we can develop anything lighter.
Also should the plane have an accident you now have radioactive material spread over miles. Which is also not an easily solved problem.
The energy requirements of moving in the water and the air are completely different so its not a good comparison point. And subs use nuclear power I am pretty sure nobody wants to have planes flying with nuclear reactors over their heads.
I don't see why this is any less viable than the other alternatives. It's the only option that we've already tried. Before invention of air travel.
I mean of course I see that people don't change. But that's the very thing we absolutely need to fix. We have to stay within our means. Not doing the thing that brings cost seems like a simple enough solution.
Until we have better technology we have to scale down or reliance on unsustainable tech. The alternative is adverse degradation of our most sophisticated technology available - the biosphere.
Yeah, see, saying “let’s all stop doing this thing” where the thing has diffuse long term bad effects for everyone but short term benefits for the person that does it generally doesn’t work. People have been trying that for a long time. It has to be written into law, or the benefits (economic or otherwise) need to be tilted toward doing the right thing.
I think a large carbon tax is the only shot of getting everyone on track with reducing impact.
Yes. No disagreement here. We absolutely need to put it into law. Although, making such legislation happen doesn't seem to work either. But we need to make it so.
I think slower flight might be best for long distance travel. Something like an airship. I don't know much about the technology, but my naive view is that the technology is undervalued. An airship has VTOL, is quieter, is more spacious, produces less carbon emissions, etc.
Weather issues are one problem for airships. Actual ships are an option for transatlantic routes but there is basically one limited alternative for that. People basically want cheap and fast. Once you get beyond driving that mostly means subsonic planes.
International airline travel can already be pretty much as roomy as a mass of people are willing to pay for on a route. And shifting to a slower mode of transportation that's equally or even more roomy tends to carry a big premium as well. Taking the train or a ship on a multi-thousand mile trip costs more than certainly economy flying does. You can generally travel in comfort. You just need to pay for it.
My wife and I took our then-infant daughter on a 2800km train ride about five years ago (Toronto to Saskatoon by VIA Rail). We paid extra to have sleeping berths with meals included vs regular seats, but overall it was pretty expensive and slow:
- You spend a lot (would estimate 30%+) of time waiting on sidings for freight trains to pass in the other direction because there's only a single track owned by the freight company, so their trains get priority.
- There's no back up plan, and only a few trips a week. Our train happened to run on time, but I had a family member try to take it a few years later and ended up having to cancel for refund and fly instead because the train was running 24h late and she needed to be home for something.
- It's priced and advertised as an "experience" comparable to going on a cruise. They serve you nice food, but obviously the cost of all that service is baked into the ticket— no one is pretending that you'd choose this option just to get to your destination.
- We got our fares for around 60% off, but it was still $450 per adult, I think, which was a lot more than our return flights were (we could afford neither the time nor money required to take the train in both directions). Getting these fares required weeks of monitoring for VIA's "discount Tuesday" promotions and then building our travel plans around the specific dates offered.
- No wifi or even cell reception for most of the route. The northern Ontario section of the route is extremely remote and not at all scenic— just mile after mile of unremarkable forest.
Maybe there's room for an option that's slightly more comfortable and slightly slower, if that's what an airship would offer? But as far as the train goes, it's lots more comfortable and many times slower, but there's just no way to make the cost comparable to flying when you need to pay for all those hours of staff and equipment.
Air ships were already obsolete before the Hindenberg disaster. Being by over twice as much the most expensive mode to travel in, having to take a trickle shower, share a dry toilet with 20 other people, and sleep in a bunkbed (all to save weight) is an extremely lousy deal.
Edit: Why are people downvoting this? I just googled it and confirmed what I posted here.
No. The payload fraction is just too poor. For instance, the Hindenburg, which was the largest, most advanced Zeppelin ever built, had a payload capacity of only 21,000lbs. That's using hydrogen, which, is, obviously not real safe. If it had used helium instead, it would have had a payload capacity of -34,000lbs.
For comparison, a single 40' standard container has a maximum load of 57,000lbs, and a large cargo ship can carry thousands of those.
What was the mass of the Hindenburg without the lift gas? Doubtless modern composites could significantly reduce that mass, which could go directly into increased payload.
Alternatively, an airship of the same mass of the Hindenburg could be made significantly larger, and since payload scales with the lifting gas volume, payload would also increase.
Oh, and throw the Hindenburg's aluminum piano over the side.
I note with interest that you say the Hindenburg would have had a greater payload with Helium rather than Hydrogen. Why do you say that?
I saw the dash, but didn't understand it. If the payload with hydrogen is 21,000lbs and it is -34,000 pounds with helium, then it seems like it wouldn't even get off the ground. But clearly, it did get off the ground with passengers using helium, it was designed to fly with helium.
Okay, I stand corrected about it flying on helium, thank you for correcting me, +1. However, the Hindenburg was designed to fly using helium as the lift gas.
Why is that an absolute? Can't biofuel sources be refined into jet fuel?
I understand that subsidies currently create perverse incentives in that industry, but I struggle to see why bioengineered carbon-neutral jet fuel is fundamentally not viable. That thinking seems very closed-minded.
Biofuels have been a disaster inasmuch as we've destroyed enormous amounts of rainforest to grow them, releasing quite a bit of carbon in the process (and destroying wildlife habitat, of course)
That'd not an argument that carbon-neutral supersonic jets are impossible and should be abandoned.
Biofuels doesn't necessarily mean subsidized corn fields... for example, algae and bacteria grown under specialized LEDs powered by renewable energy are another path forward.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. We can research supersonic jets in addition to better electric storage and propulsion systems.
That's great if we have the algae and bacteria. Right now we don't seem to. Maybe we should invest the money there.
In theory, you can power a big car on responsibly sourced fuel. In reality, selling millions of big cars is a huge problem, because of course people will understandably put in the cheap, ubiquitous fuel for which they're not covering externalities.
This saying is not suitable here because unsustainable technology isn't good. It's simply not worth the cost and we are borrowing from the future.
If the venture would be unprofitable up until the point when it would be sustainable would we still push money into it?
I say we should treat any venture that is unsustainable the same way we treat those that are unprofitable. But we don't. We allow unsustainable ventures to carry on without ever becoming sustainable. Which means that it is constantly borrowing (stealing) means from everyone else.
In my mind the most viable way to make air travel sustainable is to use synthetic fuels produced with commercialised fusion power and atmospheric greenhouse gases as input.
It sounds very sci fi and I'm not sure it would even work on a napkin calculation produced by a thermodynamics professor.
Sure; it's not an unreasonable approach for making such travel carbon neutral; the idea being you're sequestering parity amounts of carbon via the atmospheric gases -> fuel process, and nuclear power covers the inefficiency of such a process.
Downsides include:
1. It's only neutral. It doesn't remove gases we've already released.
2. The process is almost certainly extremely expensive. Until something like emissions taxes are levied, it will not be a competitive fuel.
It's slightly better than neutral. Captured atmospheric carbon would be stored out of the atmosphere in fuel tanks until use. And we could decide to capture and sequester more than we plan to burn again, since in this scenario we have the capturing tech sorted out.
Sure, under the assumption it's cheap to sequester more than all of the oil we extract out of the ground and consume today, then some could be stored to make it neutral or even positive. There are two big steps in there that might or might not ever happen.
When it became clear that there was absolutely no way this could work for more than a token number of flights without absolutely devastating consequences to the planet we live on.
Not to mention that many of us have a "better" idea what to do with 100 million dollars and would gladly trade some our founder's equity for the opportunity!
> and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all
> "It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work."
What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?
Humanity doesn't need a new Concorde. The only real upside I could possibly see is faster transport for organ transplants, and how often is that actually going to happen?
> What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?
For any serious discussions, video conferencing is a garbage replacement for in-person meetings. If anything, the latter is becoming more impactful as lower-level functions get clearly displaced to the former. As others have mentioned, jet fuel doesn’t have to be carbon additive.
Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics. Boom is entering an area where the large incumbents have failed because the physics doesn’t work with the economics. And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.
> Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper.
That was one part of their strategy, but the ultimate goal was always to make it cheaper through reuse and not through cheaper production.
> It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.
Tell that to all the people who claimed that the way SpaceX does the landing of their rockets would never work out because of the "fuel economics", "the way the engine is designed", etc..
Before SpaceX actually achieved it, there were a lot of people out there who doubted that their approach is feasible.
Did SpaceX actually proved that their economics work? We do know that they sell them much cheaper than competition, but do we know when/if VC money stopped paying for the difference?
> Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.
That's quite a revisionist characterization of SpaceX's 15-year toil, which many had described as impossible. Elon Musk said it best in March 2017 [0][1] when they achieved the revolutionary feat of successfully landing a reused rocket:
“It’s the difference between having airplanes that you threw away after every flight, verses reusing them multiple times."
“It’s been 15 years to get to this point, I’m sort of at a loss for words. This is a great day, not just for SpaceX but for the space industry as a whole, in proving that something could be done that many people said was impossible.”
I certainly wouldn't call something that had never been done before by anyone a well-understood technology.
> And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.
You may be correct on the physics, but you are ignoring other dimensions that could make this endeavor feasible. The first Concorde flew 50 years ago. Our understanding of CFD, materials science, manufacturing techniques etc has progressed significantly from what they were 50 years ago.
{deleted} - largely due to me misreading "mid 2020s" as "mid 2020" for delivery of new planes and being highly skeptical of the ability to go from 0 to airliner in 5-6 years.
SpaceX spent less than 100mm year until 2012, and delivered something that cost others billions to create. As mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of inertia in older/larger corporations.
Um... what? The Falcon 1 and 9 were built from scratch, at least as much as anything is. They developed their own rocket engines and most of the components as usual aerospace components were too expensive to hit the price they were targeting.
Boom is certainly an extremely risky startup (as was SpaceX)... but isn't that what venture capital is for?
Are you just completely bonkers? If we start considering Atlantic flights normal and pleasant for commuting than we can completely give up on ever saving the planet. Regular aviation is already extremely pressing on our CO2 output, supersonic flight is way way worse!!
CO2 emissions from international flights will be capped at 2020 levels by international agreement so supersonic flight will have no net effect on emissions.
> "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
I was one of the idiots who didn't understand the Dropbox monetization strategy. Until recently, I thought the strategy was "whales" like in a casino would pay for everyone. I think I couldn't get past the idea that they were giving something that keeps costing them money away for free forever. What I didn't realize is how "sticky" something like Dropbox can be. I don't think I can get most people who use Dropbox and pay $80 a year to switch to Google drive and pay $50 a year. They have a workflow there.
I guess I'm trying to justify my reaction to Dropbox. Frankly, I still don't understand why Dropbox turned down acquisition offer from Apple. I still don't get it.
I don't remember laughing at Dropbox though. It was more bewilderment than anything.
It's a little weird that he includes Columbus there. Columbus was many things and genius wasn't one of them. Persistent, egomaniacal, outrageously cruel to the point that the Spanish crown threw him in prison, extremely bad at basic arithmetic -- but not genius.
Wow, what a bunch of nonsense. We are facing an environmental crisis due to fossil fuels consumption and here you are flippantly offering intercontinental commuting for work. For some reason, you think people who work in America can't find space in its giant, mostly empty landmass and instead need to commute on supersonic jets from Asia. Wtf?
Reducing flight time is not the same as reducing travel time. The real killer with respect to travel time are layovers airport delays. Cheaper airplanes capable of flying farther will reduce the number of layovers, and the big airlines know this. The market for supersonic planes will be small.
On a side note, why aren't there more startups trying to reduce passenger time at the airport instead of focusing on faster airplanes?
There's an entire industry of companies dedicated to kiosks, security etc. But the reality of time at the airport is margin to avoid costly missed connections and mandatory security checks which aren't things which can be cut with technology.
The bigger problem for a business case for paying extra to fly supersonic is that convenience is as much about timing of landing as length of flight, especially in an era where portable computers and digital connectivity exists and regular long haul flights are generally comfortable enough for the average business class flyer to sleep on. Cutting three or four hours out of an 12 hour flight doesn't sound quite so exciting when you realise that it's a choice between 8 hours in a seat or 12 hours in a lie flat bed with a choice of departure times and arrival airports.
It really doesn't. All it does is allow you to cut the line. I love Clear, and I use it all the time, but it doesn't make security faster, it just makes it faster for you. If everyone was enrolled in Clear, security would take exactly the same amount of time.
Well if people pay for it, you can have more security processors and process more people at once. So it is a parallelizable problem solvable with more money. If everyone had their own personal security processor, then security only adds a few minutes on each end.
A lineup anywhere is a sign of not enough money being paid, so people pay with their time.
I do bet that some of the fee you pay to Clear goes to the TSA, which pays for more security staff.
More poignant examples: mobile passports and global entry. Fundamentally faster (checks performed when you enroll, and then automatically, and while you get off the plane), and scalably so.
I’ve watched people attempting to use the kiosks. The TSA agents are basically just as fast in the average case, and way faster in the worst case.
The biggest delays are people who don’t have their ID and ticket ready when they get to the front of the line, and people who can’t figure for the life of them how to use the kiosks without additional assistance.
More intensive security checks have made passing through many airports slower than it was 20 years ago despite e-tickets etc: the bottleneck is security regimes wanting more thorough checks, not the speed at which passports can be scanned. Obviously better economies of scale for direct flights reduces time lost to the hub and spoke model, but that's not a startup opportunity for someone wanting to focus on things other than planes ;-)
No it doesn't. I laugh at the people who pay out the ear to skip 10 minutes in a line. Most of your time is spent emptying your pockets and unloading your suitcases into boxes and clear doesn't help with that at all. (They keep adding more and more requirements for what can't stay in your luggage.) The solution to faster air travel is to delete the TSA.
The TSA made what was something that individual airports paid for to meet regulatory requirements into a federal agency. It's the laws & requirements, not the specific labor agency doing it.
For example, the TSA added pre-check, which does speed up security by reducing requirements.
And the UCIS has added kiosks for global entry and us citizens, which effectively increases the number of security processing 'staff' at checkpoints, making things faster.
> And small, efficient planes make direct flights competitive with connecting ones.
No it doesn't, because the limitation at most major airports is the number of takeoff and landing slots. More, smaller, planes would reduce capacity because you can only have a plane takeoff every 3 minutes or so.
Small planes allow one to bypass a congested airport in a huge city when going from one medium city to another, by right-sizing to the crowd that wants to go between them. Among other benefits, it makes the huge city airport less congested.
I think the value proposition is much clearer for 12+ hour flights, mostly on Asia Pacific routes, rather than something like NY - London. Saving 7+ hours flying LA - Sydney or LA - Singapore would be a huge win and I think appeal to people flying business on those routes. It certainly would have for me when I was flying Toronto - Seoul regularly.
Some people would pay a lot to be able to fly from New York to London (or the other way around), have a 2-3 hour meeting and fly back before bed time. Stay in the same time zone and wake up with your own house.
> The real killer with respect to travel time are layovers airport delays
For international flights, actual flight time can be brutal. I have colleagues who regularly take 14 hour flights. Some people would gladly pay extra to shave a few hours off of that.
I'd really love to see this advancement as most of the flights I take are 10+ hour direct flights.
> On a side note, why aren't there more startups trying to reduce passenger time at the airport instead of focusing on faster airplanes?
Just thought about it, it could actually be harder for startups to work on reducing passenger time at the airport. A main blocker would be convincing airports (and/or governments) to adopt your solution.
A jet like this, with a smaller capacity, could potentially serve more numerous lower-demand point-to-point routes like the 787 does, versus the hub and spoke served by 747s and A380s.
That depends on whether you're in Asia or the USA. On the USA the 787s are mostly displacing routes that would've been operated with connecting partners (eg United to a bunch of Chinese cities), vs in Asia where they're used on high density high frequency regional routes.
The 767 was a great plane for those routes especially on the shorter end (like TYO-SEL or TPE-HKG). The 787 is significantly heavier so performs poorly in terms of fuel efficiently until it's flown a couple thousand miles to make it up in better cruising performance.
Airports make roughly 1/3rd of their revenues from airline companies, and 2/3rds from renting retail space. They don't have any incentive to make your stay at the airport shorter.
I think most people on business trips where they could be reimbursed for valet parking at an airport probably take Uber or Lyft already, which saves the same amount of time.
Is that nearly enough money to do what they intend?
Edit: To be clear — I find the prospect of affordable supersonic flight super exciting. But, knowing 0 about the aviation industry, what's the secret sauce that makes this believable (e.g. budget at least one order of magnitude lower than competing products)?
$100m is the sticker price for one Boeing 737, an evolutionary design with research and manufacturing costs amortised over an order book of thousands
This is money to keep Boom afloat to the next raise, but that's not exactly unusual in SV startups which are a lot less capital intensive than aerospace
How a company begins to how it gets to sell products for $100m is fascinating. Boeing built their first plane soley because they had bought another plane, subsequently crashed it and then posited that it would be faster to build a brand new plane instead of waiting for parts. They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50".
Obviously Boom is doing something orders of magnitude more technically complex than a simple bi-plane but maybe, if they're scrappy enough, they can pull it off.
Aviation has moved on a bit since Boeing was founded over 100 years ago, and their client base is looking for any potential vendor to be the precise opposite of "scrappy". To put things into perspective, nearly all airlines outside Russia and China find proven, modern, thoroughly-tested and performant airframes from state-funded Russian and Chinese conglomerates with very attractive pricing and financing a bit too "scrappy" in terms of the available ongoing support for operations to even consider. A new entrant is going to need to spend $20bn+ to get a single aircraft ready, and they they're going to need to sell a couple of hundred to get close to breaking even. A brilliant outcome would be a gulf state liking the novelty of the concept enough to say "we'll take 50" and even that didn't translate to many further sales for the A380
There's certainly both technical & market risk, because an LOI != cash in the bank. But that's why investors are willing to invest. If Boom delivers on its technical promises to spec, that $15.2B in revenue lined up before the first prototype flies.
It's not $15B lined up before the first prototype flies, it's $15B that might happen, eventually, after Boom has delivered on its technical promises by flying and certifying the airframe, if the airlines at that stage decide the finished article fits with their operations at that time, they're happy with the operational risk and they can raise the capital to finance the aircraft acquisitions on adequate terms.
JAL putting in $10m of seed investment is showing a bit of faith, but the rest is just pieces of paper.
Concorde had firmer commitments for 74 aircraft back in the day, but only ever made 20, most of which were sold off at a subsidised price and spent most of their time on the ground.
On the other hand, next time you find yourself in a regional jet in the US, odds are pretty high it was built by a scrappy manufacturer of Brazilian bush taxis, namely Embraer. So it's not impossible to break the Boeing/Airbus duopoly if you have a suitable niche (regional jets, hypersonic aircraft) just very hard.
They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50"
I wonder if Boom could get a boost by convincing it that the Boom jet can be useful. Certainly not for troop transport, but maybe it can be used to move field commanders around quickly in times of crisis.
No? Not directly comparable but perhaps useful as an indicator of general magnitude, the Boeing 787 had a development cost of $16 billion. Assuming it costs 1/10th as much, that's still over $1 billion.
An industry analyst estimated that it costs about $400M to develop a subsonic light business jet. A supersonic aircraft would cost more due to greater technical risk.
I totally disagree. It's plenty to demonstrate and build most of the technology. It will take much more money to bring it to market, but that's primarily regulations and validation of umpteen edge cases/fatigue life, and proving that you've done so to the FAA.
Source/disclaimer: Aerospace engineer that builds rocket engines for a startup.
As for the market... As a simple person, I probably won't ever pay that for any flight. Businesses may think it is worth it.
As for comments to the effect, "physics hasn't changed since the concorde failed," no, but materials and manufacturing really have. Turbine engines have evolved a lot since then. That companies like Boeing do not build such aircraft doesn't tell you anything, any more than studying the success of Apple in embedded systems tells you whether or not there is a market for them. Perhaps a poor example since embedded systems are not a disruption, but my point is that entrenched incumbents may not pivot simply because they are doing well where they are, and all the more so in a more heavily regulated market.
In short, I think it will be interesting to see how it turns out. For any aerospace startup, the hardest part is raising enough money to stay afloat and focus on their work. $100M starts to build enough momentum that they have a real shot. The question now is what they do with that shot.
> As for comments to the effect, "physics hasn't changed since the concorde failed," no, but materials and manufacturing really have. Turbine engines have evolved a lot since then. That companies like Boeing do not build such aircraft doesn't tell you anything, any more than studying the success of Apple in embedded systems tells you whether or not there is a market for them. Perhaps a poor example since embedded systems are not a disruption, but my point is that entrenched incumbents may not pivot simply because they are doing well where they are, and all the more so in a more heavily regulated market.
This. So much this. The specious argument about physics really irks me.
- Time between the first commercial air travel (1914) and when Concorde began development (1962): 48 years
- Time between when Concorde began development and today: 57 years
Translation: Concorde's tech is OLD. Think of how much aviation technology advanced in the 48 years between the first commercial passenger flight and Concorde beginning development. Now think about how much it inevitably has advanced in the 57 years since Concorde's technology was developed.
The founders of Boom have openly stated that they intend to build a more fuel-efficient aircraft, leveraging technological advances to provide exponential increases in efficiency. If they can't do that, the economics don't work out - plain and simple. But they're making a pretty good case that they can to date, and this funding will help them further demonstrate that their plans have promise. As an aviation geek, I personally hope they succeed.
Technically, I am sure it is possible with todays manufacturing, material and 3D printing capabilities etc., but I am thinking the biggest battles Boom faces will be regulatory.
Getting the aircraft certified by every country's aviation body is going to be massive (unless they restrict flights to within the US only, which will basically negate the positives of international supersonic flight).
Then there are the battles against various environmental lobbying groups, like Concorde had to do, who will try to enforce curfews and restrictions on supersonic flights over populated areas.
The will not be able to fly overland in most places while going supersonic for the foreseeable future. The real demand for this plane is going to be long haul business travel where flights are 10+ hours and those of us doing it regularly are already forking over 4 - 7K per ticket normally. Fortunately if you look at the world most of the cities you will want to fly to are basically on the coast, or a short distance inland.
Given the current emissions of air travel I find fairly repulsive to spend that much money designing a new airplane going completely in the wrong direction in terms of fuel efficiency. There is no way ( regardless of altitude, unless you’re going in LEO ) to avoid the huge drag losses of going supersonic, so most of that ticket price is going to go towards fuel.
If this ever flies and there is a kerosene carbon tax, that plane is dead.
Recovering the externalities on jet fuel would only add about $0.19/gallon¹ with jet fuel going for >$4/gallon today, so say a 5% tax. I think they'd survive just fine. In fact, if I were them I'd voluntarily and ostentatiously pay that on every drop of fuel… supersonic and green.
Or without a carbon tax… 200 gallons of jet fuel makes 1 ton of CO2 and costs ~$800. Current state of the art in CO2 capture is $94/ton. For a self imposed 12% fuel surcharge they could be carbon neutral.
I think we are looking at different ends of the market, I'm using a search of the retail price at airfields near me in the last 30 days. (My parameters don't get reflected in the URL, you will need to choose some to get results.)
I suspect at "airline" scale there is a large discount over the full service pump prices I'm seeing. This might change the percentages to 10% and 25%.
It's also possible I'm seeing the "putz price". That made up price that "no one really pays", unless you are that guy who doesn't know better and does.
42 gallons in a barrel of oil. So the bottom price is going to be about (oil price)/42. Lots of complications in converting a random quality oil into jet fuel at an airport, but at scale you might add 10% to 20%. With current oil prices this does work out to around your $1.10/gal price.
It feels like you're missing the point, which is that our current level of air travel is unsustainable (just like the rest of our way of life in the USA). Any increase in fuel consumption is unforgivable, no matter how small.
Current carbon tax schemes are laughable and will not be sufficient to prevent disastrous climate change. The carbon tax calculator in the article you linked only goes up to $50/ton, while the IPCC report calls for carbon prices as high as $14,300/ton by 2050. Obviously prices that high would mean a de facto ban on carbon. And that's what we need to avert disaster.
You are correct that increased emissions are definitely bad, but you may have missed how a carbon tax scheme would work in practice.
From a climate perspective, there is not much difference between being zero carbon versus carbon neutral. In other words, adding 1kg of CO2 in one place, and removing it elsewhere is effectively the same as being zero carbon.
So, while a carbon tax does create an economic incentive to avoid emitting carbon, what it really creates is a market to offset carbon. No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air. The smooth ramp-up of any carbon tax allows offset price discovery without significant disruption.
Anyway, net result of a carbon tax would make having a plane be effectively carbon free, and current air travel would thus not be unsustainable.
In the airplane case, what would likely happen is that biofuels, which are inherently carbon neutral, would come to dominate (easier to let plants capture carbon and then turn them into fuel than to sequester CO2 directly from the air). However, that is irrelevant from a consumer perspective, and we'll just see an x% increase in cost as the offset market price gets baked in.
Out of interest, may we ask - How do you reconcile your carbon emission research against other ecological considerations?
Does your group use a preexisting model to map externalities / run simulations?
Many thanks
(Apologies for taking the conversation out of scope slightly)
Not really. There doesn't need to be a "cap". You can tax every single ton of net carbon.
Traditional cap-and-trade has a very valid criticism that it doesn't fix the problem, only limits it slightly and moves it around. If you add carbon-removers into the equation, and set things up to have 0 or even negative carbon per year, and then you actually do fix the problem.
Any reason able carbon tax (not that politics are reasonable would pay (negative tax) people who remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and tax people the same rate when they emit it.
It’s pointless to scream at this flying tree though. Methane and energy production emissions both completely overshadow emissions from aircraft, and have actionable, less painful paths for improvement.
Is that necessarily so? Esterised vegetable oils? It seems like a bit of an extreme knee-jerk to me. Basically, we're all supposed to be "disgusted" at any application of combustion? I think such issues need a bit more thought and nuance than that.
"Disgust first, ask questions later," is 180 degrees in the wrong direction for improving public discourse. I urge you to reconsider, then lead by example.
Well if you're investing a lot in newer plane tech, yeah I'd like them to think about the externalities of what they do and find alternative solutions. For example on high-flying airliners (I expect this plane to, like concorde, fly around FL550) you could potentially go with a hydrogen propulsion at least in cruise, since the outside air temperature wouldn't result in H2 boil.
Once a new supersonic jet is built and flying then these changes can be done, by others if necessary. Don't you think building a supersonic jet is a hard enough problem already? We are still burning oil in 99% of cars and you are worried about burning oil in supersonic jets?
It's the lack of fuel efficiency which has killed off various other exploratory supersonic flight programmes from ever going anywhere. Ultimately to be successful they have to convince airlines the extra speed will convince passengers to pay for the extra fuel. I think that's unlikely in the near future, and Boom will have to raise a lot more to convince people otherwise.
I’m always conflicted when I hear about Boom. I’m cheering for them, but I can’t help feeling like it’s a scam. Then again, there is nothing impossible technicaly about civilian supersonic flight...
Trying to resurrect a gas-guzzling technology in the face of irreversible climate change is not "integrity" by any definition I've ever used.
This is a technology that could only benefit people wealthy enough to afford it. There isn't even a nice story to tell about how it helps humans as a whole.
The R&D that went into your phone can be derived from wall street types buying cell phones in the 90s.
As technology gets better, the probability that it will become affordable to the masses increases greatly. It's not guaranteed, but its definitely non-zero.
This is equivocation - parent was discussing the founders' integrity in the sense of whether they are running a scam, not the broader moral integrity of developing this technology.
While I am dubious about commercial supersonic flight (at least without significant investments in reducing emissions, though avoiding afterburning should already help), improved designs will at the very least lead to developments in the field, and possibly in related fields such as suborbital flight and spaceplanes.
You can be dismissive by saying it's equivocal, but I explicitly mentioned that I was broadly considering all definitions of integrity that I've personally used.
It may not be a dishonest company, but lots of harm can be done honestly.
I've been in an adjacent industry and am nearly always a skeptic about these sorts of things. With Boom specifically though, I don't think they're a scam. Their developmental timeline is definitely optimistic, but assuming they're able to get continued funding as needed (i.e. billions of dollars), I expect they'll succeed.
The technology around Supersonics has existed for nearly half a century. The Concorde supersonic plane was flown in 1969 - nearly nearly a half century ago. At the time, one of the big cost was gas. Significant improvements has been made to materials to improve gas efficiency for supersonics.
Boom can use the Tesla approach by starting with business class customers to prove the demand then moving down the latter to consumers. Tokyo could be a weekend trip if the flight was five hours.
The "Tesla approach" doesn't work at all with aerospace: the programme costs are all up front and you want to sell as many units as possible as quickly as possible to recover them, and the major demand all comes from the airlines. Scaling to meet demand is much less of a worry than having a product being in demand.
Business aviation is a less lucrative market than commercial, and business-only commercial flights is a market which has almost completely failed to make any profit. In automotive terms, not only are there are a lot more people buying buses than cars, you also don't make a higher profit on the cars either unless you're the interiors outfitter....
On a commercial plan, business travelers accounts for >70% of an airline's profits. My read on the article is that Boom is targeting the business customers on a commercial flight and faster transit time is one of the biggest wants for business travelers.
They're a large part of some airlines' profits because there's a small number of people willing to pay silly prices on most routes at most times of day.
That doesn't translate particularly well to less frequent 55 business class seat flights on most of those routes; even if the flights are shorter the arrival times are probably a lot less convenient for most of the executives.
The all-business class model has struggled to be economically viable even on ideal routes like London-NY. Those economy seats give you a lot more flexibility when the business class seats aren't selling.
(And as ghaff pointed out business travellers /= business class; most people travelling on business have an economy ticket sized budget)
Most business travelers don't actually travel business class. And don't get to pick premium levels of service. And that would be even less the case if those premium levels were at a premium over today's premium levels.
The rate of business travelers who fly business class is not 100%, but it's very high for most airlines.
For US and European carriers, it's around 75%. Since the cost is 4 - 7x higher than commercial, most people aren't paying for this expensive personally. Not sure about other industries, but for consulting and tech, the standard is to allow a business upgrade on international flights and not domestic.
i can't produce numbers but, anecdotally, the idea that 75% of international business travelers get to fly business seems...unlikely based on the people I know and even assuming my own terms are especially shabby. Very frequent travelers, i.e. greater than my own 75K miles per year or so, do get upgrades from time to time but the I dispute the idea that the typical tech business traveler is usually flying business.
There are enough billionaires in the world to support them if they have a product. Conventional business jets only offer more flexibility with little speed advantage beyond bypassing security.
The flexibility is worth more than the speed for most flights, and not many of the world's ~2000 billionaires are going to put down a large percentage of their net worth for a fast-depreciating personal transportation device that only becomes worthwhile if they need to leave their continent.
Fractional ownership works for the likes of Netjets buying existing aircraft types, but it's another niche-sized market and essentially a way for the superrich to avoid buying aircraft.
The one thing that the article doesnt mention is how Boom is going to overcome fuel capacity issues traveling to Asia. Concorde was never intended for trans-Pacific flight. They're going to need to either create an aerial refueling system, or land somewhere.
TBH: Aerion has more money, better tech and better technical, monetary and partner backing. Boom's timeline is extremely unrealistic. Aerion will fly around 2024 (give them an extra year as complex product timelines slip), and they have first-mover advantage. Aerion has flown numerous airfoil cross-sections on the bellies of research jets and is likely working on PoC for tech & subsystems, and design. Boom's website is mostly PR & wire-frames.. ambiguously indistinguishable from a scam without seeing other forms of validation (i.e., results (full-scale jigs in that hanger in Denver), partnerships, hires, orders). If Boom wants to secure more funding and orders, they're going to need publish more info to facilitate due-diligence.
What's interesting to me about this is that no major airline wants to go supersonic, for two reasons. First, because of the cost of development, and, second, because you lose a significant fraction of business class revenue to your supersonic fleet, raising the costs of tickets for leisure travelers and affecting routing. However, you don't want to be subsonic if another carrier is supersonic, because then they get your business class revenue.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if they make it.
Can anyone with a relevant background, a la aerospace engineering, begin to speculate as to how this team could accomplish such lofty goals on what very much seems like a shoestring budget? FTA, there's mention of "efficient aerodynamics, advanced composite materials, and an efficient propulsion system," but that seems to be the general arch of aerospace engineering anyway -- what's the secret to 10x more efficient R&D?
The technology's existed since the 1960s - the Concorde flew for 27 years. They're hiring a bunch of engineers out of existing aerospace companies to do the actual work - these companies all know how to build SSTs, they just don't think it's worth it.
What's changed is the market. It wasn't economical to run the Concorde for most of its service lifespan, because demand for fast business travel was limited and fuel prices were high. Then globalization and income inequality happened. There are a lot of very lucrative fields right now where it's beneficial to be in SF in the morning and Shanghai for dinner, then back to SF for the next morning. And fuel prices are on their way back down.
They can probably build it a bit more efficiently than in the days of the Concorde, Tu-144, and Boeing 2707, but the real driver here is the existence of wealthy firms who will pay a lot to shlep their employees across the globe in a day.
>Then globalization and income inequality happened.
Yeah, I think this is the new driver for SST. There's now a class of customers who can easily afford whatever the ticket price will be, so a market is assured.
Unfortunate for those of us who would prefer not to hear sonic booms day and night.
One thing to note is that this $100 million only needs to allow them to build their 1/3 scale prototype - if they're successfully able to demonstrate the viability of their technology, they'll presumably be able to acquire further funding much more easily.
I'd say they cant produce a low enough signature with the nacelles on the bottom as currently displayed. see all aircraft in this nasa clip from April 2018.
Being an aviation buff, I think Boom Supersonic is incredibly exciting.
Being a history buff(especially aviation), I wonder where it sits in terms of possibility <—> probability of repeating the tech industry(Microsoft related ties) enabled Eclipse Aviation debacle.
Eclipse Aviation was founded late in the Dot Com Tech bubble with a promise of cheaper Very Light Jet(VLJ) private ownership and air taxis.
Boom Supersonic was founded late in the current tech bubble with a promise of faster business class/first class travel.
My primary concerns would be the fuel burn per passenger seat miles and shorter maintenance intervals required based on current engine technology.
Is Boom SuperSonics a possible indicator of late tech bubble drawing board excess?
I’m actually not trying to be negative, because everything beautiful, cool, and fast is awesome.
I’m just concerned about a possible echoing of the Eclipse historical speedbump.
Some people say what did for the SST/Concord/tu144 was sunk cost. I read that BA was running at profit ignoring sunk cost when the fire blew the model apart.
But it was a niche product. So, if boom reoccupied the niche and can leverage the now long amortized sunk costs of supersonic research with some twists to get fuel cost and noise under control.. maybe they can be profitable.
I'd fly in one if it made sense cost wise (frequent business traveller intercontinental for twenty years) but I am also believing this is a terrible model for high altitude AGW consequences
I make 2 week trips almost every month from the Bay Area to APAC. I waste 2-3 days in airplanes. I am all for this. It is unrealistic to think it will not happen. The only question is will a space company get there first (virgin) where it is up and down in less then 2 hours to the other side of the world. Those that are making such a big issue with the CO2 lack persecptive. This will happen. The focuse for CO2 should be on the cars on the road and the energy plants and factories that are not green, not something that is overall a small percent of the carbon foot print. Removed the ground transport, factories and power plants that are not green and you are majorly net negiavte on CO2 output. The tech for this is going to advance, period. Focus on the things that has the largest foot print and the tech is ripe for the change (electric cars charged by wind/solar/hydro/geothermal/nuclear power plants).
Out of the 55 people on that plane how many actually need to save 50% of the flight time if they're already flying business or first?
Would this development not be better put towards smaller and faster planes rather than trying to transport ~55 people at a time? Make a small passenger jet that can do New York to London in 3 hours and it could possibly be profitable as a niche private jet not unlike Gulf/Lear/etc...
Growing up seeing the Concorde land and take off I would love to be on a supersonic flight at some point in my life.
The price point listed in the article is about $5000 for what's normally a 6+ hour flight. That much private jet time ranges for $15K-$50K, so it's a fundamentally different market.
I'd be similarly skeptical if it was just for consumer vacations, but there are a lot of business travelers who need to attend short meetings in faraway locations. My wife has 3 cross-country business trips scheduled this month alone, each of which is only for 1-2 days worth of meetings but takes about 4 days including travel time. In one case, she has a meeting in San Francisco in the morning and a dinner in NYC in the evening, and her employer's flying her out the day before so she can call into the SF meeting from NYC and still attend the NYC dinner, because it's physically impossible to make both of them.
It'll probably be a while before any SST is certified to travel over land, but the demand is there. I could see this being very handy for business travelers who regularly need to do NYC <-> London or SF <-> Tokyo <-> Shanghai.
Has Boom Supersonic solved the problem that when the government tested the impact of frequent sonic booms on the populated centres in the 1960s it drove people nuts, caused building damage, and people hated it?
The US has banned overland commercial supersonic flights, so yea, going cross country is still an issue but there's still very lucrative oceanic routes that would be unaffected. Also, there's large, sparsely settled parts of the US, Canada and Russia that aircraft routinely fly great circle routes over where sonic booms would be of little to no concern.
Obligatory quarterly post from me about optimism (or lack thereof on HN)! :)
It's unfortunate that so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work without actually understanding the idea, technology, or risk-adjusted return that investors may be considering. It's far far more interesting to consider how things may work or what you may be missing. I've listed a mini-FAQ at the bottom about Boom. I'm an investor in every Boom round, from before they were in YC so am clearly biased, but also know the company very well.
Props to everyone in the thread who is asking genuine questions and actually trying to understand what the team is building.
1. Isn't the most important part of reducing flight times the pre-flight experience (security, airport delays, etc.)?
Yes, you are correct. However, the long haul international market that is about 10% of the overall number of flights in the world is still a HUGE opportunity where the bulk of time is spent in the air. Boom is most effective in these longer 8-hour+ flight situations like SFO-Tokyo, LA-Syndney, etc. On these routes you would save a day round trip. For many people an extra day in the office or an extra day with family is a tremendous win.
Most people don't realize but travel to Hawaii 10x-ed in the decade after the jet engine became common because Hawaii became a five hour flight from the West Coast instead of an eight hour flight. Imagine if you could get from SFO to Japan or China as fast as SFO-NYC.
2 - How can do this for so cheap?
It will be capital intensive to get to the final plane, probably ~$2B. Most of this can be financed with debt, however, because there are many billions in pre-orders from airlines already. This round gets you to fly a one-third scale version of the plane and be ready to raise an even bigger round to build the full scale plane and get to FAA certification in the series C.
The Boom team has been very smart in their go to market by maximizing the amount of already FAA approved technology that goes on the first plane. For example, the carbon fiber composite is the same as that used on the 787. Fast tracking the components because they're already FAA approved dramatically reduces costs.
3 - What qualifications does this team have? How can they possibly pull this off?
The team includes 80 technical experts and leaders from Airbus, Boeing, SpaceX, Gulfstream, NASA, and Lockheed. Collectively, the team has made key contributions to 40+ successful air and space vehicles the SpaceX Falcon 9, Airbus A380, and the SR-71 Blackbird. The team has led the development of many planes that have gone from 0 to FAA approved and launched.
Hope the above is helpful to people reading through and wondering how this makes any sense. I think Boom is a once in a lifetime, category creating company (like SpaceX or Tesla). Happy to answer more questions if you have any.
Appreciate conservative industries like aerospace need optimists like yourself to back ambitious projects that Airbus and Boeing have commercial reasons to avoid trying for themselves even if they thought they might be viable, but point 2 of your FAQ alarms me.
~$2bn is a ludicrously small sum of capital to get a "final plane", even compared with airframe programmes that took the 737 as a starting point and had the relatively straightforward objective of being a 737 but a few percentage points more fuel efficient and with a nice new cockpit. And no, you really can't debt-finance a new aircraft research programme with outstanding orders. Most of the money in an aircraft transaction changes hands at the delivery stage (deposits are a small fraction of the aircraft cost, pre-delivery payments are also a small fraction and are made in the months immediately prior to an aircraft delivery, not as r&d funding). The airlines usually need external financing to actually manage these payments which comes from the asset finance arms of conservative financial institutions looking to earn steady ROI from having assets with predictable residual values on their balance sheet, not a punt on a research project which may or may not actually deliver an aircraft. Boom's going to have to raise VC-type funding themselves; the airlines can't and won't do it for them at any scale. (I used to speak with senior executives at airlines involved in aircraft finance on a day to day basis so I'm not just being cynical here). And please correct me if there is undisclosed information and I am wrong on this point, but at the moment as I understand it Boom does not have "many billions" in orders, it has non-binding LOIs for an entirely notional 76 aircraft and $10m in equity investment from JAL is the only financial commitment from any airline.
So I'd be extremely worried if this was the basis from which investors in general were considering their risk-adjusted returns. I suspect this is more your attempt at an HN-friendly summary of the prospects based on casual conversations with employees, as someone who yourself backed the project for other reasons at a much earlier stage. But if they were making claims about funding much of their r&d from their order book in representations to investors (as I said, I suspect they aren't) I'd start viewing it a Theranos-level heist as opposed to yet another well-intentioned aerospace project full of good engineers trying something wildly ambitious (which is where I think they actually are).
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Obviously I won't be able to do justice to an entire business plan in a few sentences.
They are definitely not representing their order book as the basis for a full debt financing. I appreciate your assuming best intent as I use broad brush strokes in the parent comment and below.
A few thoughts:
+ I think the history of startups is also one of teams succeeding with far less capital than the incumbents. They're on track to build the fastest civilian aircraft ever built for less than $100M raised which speaks to their accomplishments to date. Aero is notorious for cost overruns but their capital efficiency to date is impressive.
+ Of course, the biggest risk is that there are cost over runs due to unforseen issues, e.g. Bombadier's C-Series estimated to cost $2B and that ended up closer to $5B (though that was also for multiple planes and configurations). At the same time the A320-NEO was done for below $1.5B I believe. Time will tell how much it actually costs but I think it's probably much closer to $2B than say $20B.
+ You are correct that these are not pre-orders. I shouldn't have used that term and should have used LOIs (and now I can't figure out how to edit the comment). As I understand it, the LOIs are of varying levels of commitment. The earliest LOIs were non-binding and with no skin in the game. More recent LOIs have more teeth. The strategy has been very clever. Each batch of LOIs has terms more favorable to Boom, so there is an incentive to move before the LOIs become less favorable to you (the airline). And there is a competitive dynamic that is at work that engages companies, e.g. JAL vs ANA, via incentives such as exclusivity on certain routes or deal sweeteners like the opportunity to invest. I think it's unlikely that 100% of these LOIs convert as external circumstances will always be a factor (e.g. airline gets a new CEO who has a different strategy) but the newer LOIs also have significant executive, CEO, and board buyin from the airlines, so they're certainly not throwaway. As you noted, airlines are very conservative about basically everything. The reason these LOIs are managing to get board level approval is that the math makes a ton of sense if the planes fly. You're essentially replacing less profitable narrow body jets with a Boom jet on certain routes so you stand to make more money as an airline if you get one of these.
+ It's much harder to debt finance the entire thing as an R&D endeavor at once but there are multiple ways to traunch this and phase it in over time. And not all of the costs need to borne by Boom directly. It's pretty standard for suppliers (not the airlines, as you noted) to put up significant commitments as part of the development process and bear those costs and risks. Many of the existing partners for major components of the Boom plane are bearing these costs directly already, because the math behind unlocking supersonic makes sense and even if the plane doesn't launch they stand to benefit from the R&D on these new components. Sharing these costs such that the partners benefit from the upside in a success case (huge new market the supplier is a leaders in) and in a failure case (IP that makes their existing components much better), while also bearing the capital risk helps reduce the capital and debt burden on Boom itself.
Anyway, your read that this is a well-intentioned aerospace project full of great engineers trying to do something wildly ambitious is correct. Anything I've misstated that might imply otherwise is a failure on my part, not Boom's. I also think they are as savvy on their business as they are talented at the engineering, which is why they've even made it this far.
The transPacific and Pac Rim routes do seem interesting if the range is there. For a lot of those routes even flying in comfort on an A380 or 787 is still just a long time to be mostly sitting down even if the food is great and you can sleep in relative comfort. And they're routes that a lot of executives and other highly-paid business people routinely drop >$5K on today. At least from my perspective, it's a lot more interesting than US East Coast to Europe where the flights are short enough that it's not that big a deal so long as you're comfortable.
I have no idea about the economics or practicality of this particular effort. But one place I agree with the criticism of the criticism is that I do think it's silly to operate from a premise that supersonic commercial flight will never make sense. In fact, it seems almost obvious that it will some day even if it takes a long time.
I find it amusing that video game consoles like the Atari 2600 were shelved once and now we have emerging businesses like Nintendo trying to capitalize on that dead market.
I actually think supersonic is the opposite of the direction to take air travel. The current speed of 500mph is already incredibly fast given the size of the planet. Even 200mph is sufficient.
The real problem is comfort. Planes are incredibly uncomfortable, even if you pay thousands of upgraded seating. I'd rather flights take 2-4x as long but be 10-20x more comfortable.
I'd like to see true innovation, using high-speed blimps or massive ocean-going ground effect airplanes, hovercraft, or something.
I'd rather take 1 day "air cruise" to Europe than a 4 hour hair-raising rollercoaster ride.
When I walked through Concorde (both the prototype 002 at Yeovilton Museum in the UK and the ex-BA one at the Museum of Flight in Seattle), I was struck by how tiny and cramped the passenger cabin was.
Personally, as attractive as supersonic flight is to a former pilot like me, I would far rather spend time in a wide body cabin and arrive a few hours later than suffer the claustrophobia of sitting in a skinny tube. From what I have seen, the Boom concept jet has a similar fuselage profile to Concorde.
My dad got switched to a Concorde once and his reaction relative to his usual 747 (probably) first class was cool to do once but meh. Less space and it got him into London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner on the plane.
And first class in those days, modulo first class lounge that got turned into more business class seating at some point, was much less comfortable than modern business class much less first class where it exists.
It would be nice if transPacific were faster (though that has its own set of range problems) but I don't find flying business class from the US East Coast to Europe a particular hardship.
> "I'd like to see true innovation, using high-speed blimps or massive ocean-going ground effect airplanes, hovercraft, or something."
No need for anything exotic like that, just build more and better trains. Trains also have a huge benefit of being easy to run off renewable energy (electric trains powered by the grid).
Even crappy trains like Amtrak operates are leagues more comfortable than air travel.
Trains are not actually easy to run with renewable energies. You need constant power over long distances to run trains effectively.
I would much rather have a coal or nuclear plants to run a fleet of trains rather then a bunch of batteries and some solar panels. Any volcano could disrupt not just air travel but also take down your land based transportation system.
But I agree insofar has having transportation being electric is a good thing. The same could be done for planes at some point. Elon Musk actually has a surprisingly good idea for an electric plane but he has no time to do it.
Even if you're running your trains off coal, you still win. Large scale power production is inherently more efficient. And we can do a lot better than coal of course, natural gas is much better for air quality. Current nuclear is miles better in terms of pollution and speculative near-future fission (LFTR,etc) could be damn near "renewable" in terms not having to worry about running out of the stuff. You've also got hydro, wind, solar, etc. In practice those later three aren't nearly as unreliable as you make them out to be.
Anyway, the point is that grid power is excellent no matter were you get it from, and because you can run them off the grid trains are exceptional.
Only one point, nuclear is already pretty much unlimited. We don't need LFTR for that. Uranium is easily plentiful enough and newer designs that are much closer then a full LFTR can use it much more efficiently as well.
Thorium would be nice because its already a waste product of current mining, however Thorium is really only worth it if you are doing a LFTR, with most other designs Uranium is preferable.
You don't need innovation. You just need people willing to spend money. Take the wide-body jet of your choice and either Boeing or Airbus will be more than happy to outfit it for a small fraction of the number of people who can normally be accommodated. And you can staff it accordingly.
Of course, you need to remain competitive with private jets that don't have the issues associated with scheduled service.
Sounds like what you long for are the halcyon days of luxury air travel. The problem was it was not much more comfortable and far more dangerous, Plus took way longer
I hate being an armchair critic, but Boom brings it out in me. It’s so arrogant to claim that you’re going to deliver a commercial supersonic airliner for pennies in just a few years. They haven’t even flown a scale model, built a full-scale model, etc, and they’ll need to innovate many different areas at once, from manufacturing to aerodynamic design to propulsion, etc. They could easily spend billions of dollars and 10-15 years on all that before they get to certification, which is incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Established companies like Boeing and Airbus that have been building jets for many decades don’t have a magic wand, and it takes them much longer and more money to incrementally improve their planes, not to mention entering an entirely new category where tons of innovation is required.
Why are people so convinced some random startup with no experience is going to be able to do the impossible? It’s not enough to point at SpaceX and say “they did it, so we can too!” It’s a totally different product category, market, and regulatory environment.
I wish there was a way to short the stock of private companies.
You're wrong on a bunch of points. They've been doing wind tunnel testing of scale models for a while, and they have a wealth of experience from hiring SpaceX, Boeing, Scaled Composites etc. veterans. This is a team with vastly more commercial aerospace engineering engineering than you devoting their time to this project. They're well aware of the regulatory environment, costs, and usual timelines.
Existing companies don't try anything radically new because of risk aversion, corporate inertia, whatever you want to call it. Why didn't NYC YellowCab invent Uber? They've been doing their thing for years and it's been working just fine. Sometimes you need an outsider to take a radical risk, that in all odds will likely fail, but every so often doesn't.
The article we’re commenting on specifically says they’ve started assembling a 1/3rd scale model that they hope to fly this year.
I disagree with the rest of your comment, but I see where you’re coming from. But almost every failed aerospace company has a bunch of people with industry experience. Doesn’t stop nearly all of them from crashing and burning. And even the unicorn that succeeds is very late and way over budget.
"some random startup with no experience" -- what about the experience of the people who founded the company and those they have hired? does that count as "no experience"?
"to do the impossible" -- since you have not invested any money in this company, why does it bother you so much that they intend to achieve goals you don't believe in? how many people predicted failure for the Wright brothers?
I root for Boom and will applaud all their achievements, because I appreciate ambition and feel grateful to all ambitious entrepreneurs.
There's nothing "impossible" about Boom's plans, commercial hypersonic flight has been done before decades ago and -- like with SpaceX -- tech advances since then have made the job easier, not harder.
It will still be extraordinary expensive and difficult, so I wish them luck.
No, it is effectively impossible for their planes to be legally flying by 2025, which is what they’re claiming.
Edit: to be clear, I wish them luck too, but I think they’re being dishonest with their timelines. The YC / startup culture is the polar opposite of the FAA culture, which is basically “move slow and make sure nothing breaks, and if it does, carefully examine the situation and change the rules so it doesn’t break again”
Zero chance that some random startup is going to have these flying with passengers in 2025. They follow a very long line of startups that have burned through billions of dollars and almost all failed. I’d be surprised if there was more than one or two new airplane companies in the past three decades that have survived without bankruptcy, state subsidies, etc. And none of them were trying to do something nearly so technically challenging.
All that said, I hope to eat a giant humble pie on my 2025 supersonic flight to London!
So, lets map the potential outcomes for commercial supersonic flight:
1. Boom (or some other startup) will deliver by 2025.
2. Boom (or some other startup) will deliver, but later.
3. Boeing (or Airbus) will deliver later.
4. No renewed supersonic commercial flights in our lifetime.
I understand you say 1 is impossible. But is 2 out of the question? is 3 more likely that 4? is 3 more likely than 2?
I don't know enough about Boom and supersonic flight, but I personally don't subscribe to the idea that tomorrow is entirely in the hands of today's established institutions.
There are commercial reasons for Boeing/Airbus to delay (3) even if the economics for supersonic flight were optimistic, though that didn't stop them rolling dice on the A380/787 as well as plenty of skunkworks projects.
Trouble for Boom is that promising (1) might make raising the capital for (2) more difficult. And also the big risk they deliver (2) which is known to be possible and don't sell enough aircraft to recover their costs.
Most likely scenario is that they either outright fail and fold, or they “succeed” but only by mid-2030s and after at least one bankruptcy. This is a terrible investment.
There's no technical reason that prevents Airbus or Boeing from building a supersonic airliner. The problem is not the supersonic plane itself, that's 70 years old tech: it's the cost of operating one profitably. Supersonic jets are gas-guzzlers while the airline industry is a low-margin industry. If airlines can't turn a supersonic airliner in a money printing machine then there's no business case in building one to begin with.
I would even go out on a limb and say that someday supersonic flight will be so relatively near to the economics of subsonic flight that it's often the norm. (In the same way that, in the US, you don't see a lot of props on regional flights any longer.) [ADDED: And yeah much higher drag at higher velocities, etc. but let's stipulate "tech."]
However, it's a huge economic hill to climb. Long haul flying is already pretty comfortable if you spend the money. Even on United which has been upgrading domestic routes. Of course, faster is better. But lie flat seating, decent food, and even mini-rooms go a long way towards making lengthy flights comfortable.
So you basically have to get close to those price points, which is the high end of the volume market. A few hours aren't worth that much even to most relatively wealthy folks.
Those aren't the high-end of the volume market. They're the private jet market which is circa an order of magnitude more expensive and correspondingly smaller.
I agree, but they’re going to try and innovate their way out of that. Which might even be possible, but not cheaply and quickly, which is my main beef with them.
Is it the everyman's plane? Certainly not. But it essentially makes living in Tokyo/Hong Kong/Singapore/Sydney and working in SF much closer to living in New York and working in SF (which a lot of senior executives and investors do). Imagine if Australia East Coast was a 6hr flight and 5hr time difference to SF. New York is a 6hr flight and a 3hr time difference to SF. Seems a lot different all of a sudden doesn't it?
Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all. Having these senior people able to work locally can enable them to seed their hometowns with thriving local offices that train new generations of talent.
Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets (both very complex industries) over very well established incumbents. Don't underestimate how much organizational dynamics can weigh on a company. Do you think the best people at Boeing are going to risk the next decade of their career working on a plane that might only do 300 orders when they could go get easy promotion working on the next 787?
Good luck to the team at Boom!!