Hmm I’m not so sure. My sister used to be a project manager at an Enterprise software company. She lives in NL and was put on a project in Prague at some point. Think 10-20 engineers setting up some product at the customer site, ie it was worth tens of millions (licenses + consultancy fees).
After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project.
Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights.
I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.
This is a dying niche (source: have worked in Enterprise software for 20 years, used to live on a plane like your sister) that is largely moving to cloud deployments run by remote teams (those teams may themselves be co-located). The other prevalent model is opening a satellite office on the customer's continent, so that staff can be semi-local with shorter commutes.
And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche.
> if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week
I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes.
Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)
Transatlantic is a bit of a special case as most corporate jets don’t have the range for that, without doing something extreme like going way out of their way and stopping in Iceland (and thus being even slower than commercial)
Honestly that sounds exactly like the type of "small niche" of customers that GP talks about. There can't be too many megacorps willing to do this and I bet most project managers wouldn't go for it either.
Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
'Million miler' or 2M status meant something different twenty years ago than now. Now it means the person is unable to use communication tech and instead subjects themselves to invasive screening at airports.
It was unavoidable for some people twenty years ago. Now it is a badge of stupid.
Indeed. I never got to 2x/week, but in the late 1980s I was traveling about seven days a month. I switched jobs, and for a while would see jets heading in to the local airport and think how grateful I was not be on them.
Yeah. People are obviously getting back to face-to-face meetings. But I'd at least like to think that jetting from NYC to London just to sign some documents or to shake hands on a deal over lunch is something we'll see less of.
If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.
You save more time by flying a 'private plane' (with checking/security lines + it will fly at your preferred time) than flying a commercial supersonic jet
Oh this is absolutely another problem for supersonic time savings.
Supersonic flight over the continents is problematic, but not everyone lives on a coast. So many customers will have to take slow planes to aggregation hubs, which can easily add hours to an itinerary. Edit: And the aggregation hubs may not all serve the same destinations. Could easily see SF residents having to fly commercial to NYC to catch a Boom to London, even though there might be a Boom that flies SF-Tokyo.
Once you add up the fixed time costs of getting to the airport, security, flying to a supersonic hub, the percentage of time that can potentially be shaved off the itinerary dwindles.
Boom unfortunately does not have the range to make it transpacific nonstop either. Which is kind of a shame because 10+ hour Asia-NA flights would be a great nut to crack in terms of halving travel times.
I flew business multiple times, Frankfurt-SF (~14h), and it's a breeze if you can lie down and sleep. Not even boring. Jet lag is way worse than the flight itself.
JFK - HKG is 17h30. Even SFO to HKG is 12h30, and those are two cities on the coast in a middle position. (I'd rather pick Shanghai as a comparison but there are no direct flights at this time due to zero COVID so the info is hard to get.)
The longest scheduled flight right now is probably SIN to JFK at 18h30m. Qantas wants to do a 20h JFK-SYD route.
The point was that you get to bypass a lot of the usual airport routine with private and also have greater flexibility when you fly. (Though flight plans still need to be filed and airport runways can still be congested.)
And, yes, a private supersonic would be even faster but then it becomes even more of a question about the size of the market.
Even if there was a business here, it is not a good _startup business_.
Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result.
There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.
By this token, we should never see fission and fusion startups. Yet NuScale is quite successful. They are now a publicly listed company (ticker SMR) with a market cap of more than half a billion dollars. Not quite a unicorn yet, but then they did not ship any reactor either. Once they do, their market cap will shoot up. Helion is the startup that Sam Altman is so happy to talk about (e.g. [1]). Maybe it will not succeed. Scratch that, most likely it will not succeed. But if it has a 1% chance to succeed, then Sam will see his investment go up by a factor of 10000, so in expected value it is a winner.
Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors.
You had it right at the first sentence. Becoming publicly listed at a time when total garbage was getting on the market via SPACs (which is what NuScale did) is not validation of anything.
Boom has a 99.999% chance of failing. Without an engine lined up, they aren't even in the business they're claiming they are, and haven't been for years.
It so happens that NuScale went public exactly 6 months ago. Since then S&P500 went down more than 15% while NuScale went up more than 30%.
As for Boom, I have to admit, they have a problem.
The problem is that companies like GE that make jet engines, can make quite some nice profits by selling to the military. The XA100 [1] most likely exceeds any requirements Boom can only dream of, but being military technology, it is off limits for them. If GE lands a fat contract to provide engines for the F35, then they'll sell thousands of engines, with very little uncertainty. Getting involved with Boom will only complicate their life. If they don't fully compartmentalize the two departments, they can get in trouble. If they do, there's no synergy. Plus, the doubts will always be there that they leak military technology to the civilian side.
That's a shame. GE makes some incredible jet engines.
Maybe the war in Ukraine will end and one day Putin won't be president anymore, and Russia won't be under sanctions. Then Boom could buy an engine from Saturn, such as [2], the engine that powers various Sukhois. The military-civilian tension will still be there, but Russia will need to export things, so maybe a deal could be made.
A military engine is unlikely to be the answer for Boom. They just won't be cost effective.
The math for efficiency and maintenance is just different for sovereign governments, maybe a derivative could be made more efficient with less maintenance required.
Fighter jets require like 6 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight - sure, it's not just the engines, but it's a big part of it.
The real problem boom has is the number of viable flights is _very_ low - really just the ones Concorde flew (NY-LON, NY-PAR), and Concorde never made money.
A couple comments up someone claimed DXB-NYC being a route - more than half of the great circle route is over land, and it's more than 50% longer than the rosy projections Boom put out. Realistically, they'll be lucky if they're within 10% of their stated range. But of course, not without an engine.
We also didn't care about being green back during the Concorde - but Supersonic flights will likely be 5x-10x worse on a per passenger seat mile basis for emissions. Really hard to get around wind resistance being a square of velocity.
> Really hard to get around wind resistance being a square of velocity.
That's a common misunderstanding. Very common.
In cruise mode Concorde was as efficient as a Boeing 747.
When you go faster, you do two things: 1. reduce the angle of attack, 2. fly higher. Concorde was flying twice as high as subsonic jets. The end result is that you still get increased drag, but much less than the square (or cube) of velocity would suggest.
Ok, but increased drag it is, right? Right, but you go faster. If your drag goes up by a factor of 2, but your speed by a factor of 4, then in the end you burn less fuel. It so happens that Concorde's drag went up virtually by the same factor as its speed.
The problem with Concorde was that it was horrible aerodynamics during the takeoff stage. At that point the plane is the heaviest (its has full fuel tanks), so the problem was compounded by some sort of "tyranny of the rocket equation".
Can Boom solve this problem? My guess is that this was their pitch to investors. In the 50+ years since Concorde was designed, both computers and computational fluid dynamics experienced huge advances. The computer I'm writing this on has probably performed more flops since I started writing this comment than the entire computational modeling for Concorde in its decade-long work.
As for military engines (and their maintenance) being expensive. F-35 is like a Formula 1 car, as USAF general Charles Brown once said. Its engines are pushed to the limit on a constant basis. A commercial jet is very different. It does not need to pull huge Gs. Its trajectory is very, very predictable. I'm sure a company like GE could make a very cost efficient jet engine for Boom. It's just that they have much better ROI if they build engines for F-35.
> In cruise mode Concorde was as efficient as a Boeing 747.
Yes - a plane that carries 550 passengers vs a plane carrying 100.
Also, the game has changed a fair bit - no one is building 4 engined planes anymore - because while it was about as efficient as a 747, it’s going to be less than half as efficient as a 777. That carries 400 passengers.
The wiki page I linked quotes an L/D ratio for Concorde (in cruise mode) of 7 to 7.5 and for Boeing 747 of 15.3 to 17.7. Taking the mid-points of 7.25 and 16.5 we get that the L/D ratio for Boeing is 2.275 higher than of Concorde. But Concorde's speed was 2.41 times higher than Boeing's (Mach 2.05 vs 0.85).
There are 2 things to go from here to actual fuel per passenger*mile. How much fuel do you need to produce the same thrust, and how much aircraft do you need to carry a passenger. On both counts, supersonic airplanes have a problem: supersonic engines have a lower bypass ratio, so they are inherently less efficient, and supersonic planes need to be sturdier, and therefore heavier than subsonic ones.
These problems are hard.
But the difficulty of building a supersonic aircraft does not come from the air resistance being the square of the speed.
By the way, the L/D ratio decreases with the speed, but it does not tend to zero in the limit. This fact is actually stunning, if you think of it. As the speed goes up, at some point the L/D ratio stops decreasing, so you end up burning significantly less fuel per mile. That's the reason some militarizes invest in hypersonic missiles: they have much longer range than their size alone would make you think.
Lift to drag is interesting - but without dividing by seats or tons is incomplete. You’re not really measuring work being done (actually transporting goods or people).
These problems are hard.
Lift induced drag goes down as velocity decreases, parasitic drag goes up as velocity increases. There’s there’s wave drag to contend with. Yes there’s weird places where going faster is helpful, but I doubt we’re going to see real net efficiency gains going faster than Mach .8-9 anytime soon.
So, can Boom compete with subsonic airplanes. Where can they have an edge?
They have two actually:
1. they are a startup. Boeing and Airbus are old and ossified. Smaller manufacturers are probably not as ossified, but they already have a niche, so their risk appetite is different: they prefer to put their research money to work towards incrementally improving their current designs. Boom is in a life and death situation, they have a huge fire under their feet, and so they'll get more research done for the same amount of dollars
2. Clean slate. All current civilian airplanes are cylinders with flat wings. It's a proven formula. Manufacturers don't want to move too much from a proven formula. But Boom does not have this type of fetters. In particular, they can design a body that follow the Whitcomb area rule [1]. Which is what they are actually doing [2]:
Contoured fuselage: According to the principle of area-ruling, Overture’s fuselage has a larger diameter toward the front of the aircraft and a smaller diameter toward the rear. Boom has applied this design technique to minimize drag and maximize fuel efficiency at supersonic speeds.
In addition to that, Boom plans to use wings that are not flat (they call them gullwings). Presumably, they know what they are doing, they say they used 26 million-core hours of compute between the first and the second iteration of their Ouverture.
Will the manufacturing costs explode? I guess they should be higher than for traditional geometries. But that works to their advantage: it keeps the current manufacturers from trying these non-standard geometries, and keeps them in a local optimum from which they find it harder to move. But it won't be a dealbreaker for a premium aircraft. That's basically the Tesla Roadster gameplan.
I am not sure if you travel cross continent a lot. I live in India and for me to travel to the US for work takes 24 hours of continuous travel over multiple flights. If I can cut it down to 12 hrs, that would be a game changer for me.
This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours.
Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
But Supersonic is indeed AN answer. Delhi-Dubai takes 4 hrs. and if Dubai to NY could be done in 4 hours, I would very much prefer to buy that ticket - even if the fare prices are twice that of normal business class. Dubai-NY is a crowded route and there are plenty of very rich professionals who can take it on a regular basis.
And even for personal flights - considering that I have to travel only once a year between India and the US, I would very much welcome this option.
The current 24 hour long journey is just too brutal, and often time constraints mean that I can't break the journey into small hops over 3-4 days. And I shudder taking my family with me on such trips, given how much of a stress it causes.
DXB-JFK is over land almost 50% of the route, it will never make sense for Boom or anyone - you can fly subsonic to London and transfer to supersonic to shave a few hours off though - though shave off 45-60 minutes for transit buffer.
If they actually can get 4,250nm of usable range, you might be able to do something in Japan to SEA or maybe SFO, and that routing would make more sense probably.
But this is really really unlikely to ever fly - the physics and economics are so stacked against this until something really tectonic happens with how we store and use energy... but like not fossil fuels. It would need to be something that borders on "free", like if fusion existed, and was safe, easy and light.
Today's state of the art is what? a 2-hour flight from Delhi to Mumbai, then a 16-hour nonstop from Mumbai to Newark? 18 hours in the air. Versus a hypothetical 4 hour Delha-Dubai then 5 hour Dubai-NY for 9 hours total in the air.
So $1,100 for today vs $7,000 for supersonic (using business class fares as a proxy) to save 9 hours of flight time. My assertion is that there's relatively few people on any given route who have enough money and fly that route enough to make this a viable niche outside of a very limited set of routes.
> I shudder taking my family with me on such trips
I hear you on that! But also the notion of spending $7k for each of us is somehow worse.
Per Boom's website, they are targeting price points that would let businesses economically sell seats at normal business class fares. However, knowing airlines, I would be surprised if they sold tickets for less than (say) 1.5x the highest subsonic fare for the route.
Using the example above, that would put supersonic flights in the range of 10x economy, which feels about right for airline pricing. (At least until there are tons of supersonic flights to push down prices.)
One example of this is Los Angeles-Delhi. Probably possible with existing planes but would require cargo or passenger limits, which would make the route not profitable. No American airline is interested, given the connections available elsewhere, and Air India's (they've expressed interest in this pair before) habit of running routes at big losses will probably start to reduce now that they're privately owned. Airlines are perfectly happy to add more hops to your trip.
If there was a supersonic LAX-Singapore (I doubt India would allow supersonic planes), at least the longest leg of the trip is mostly over ocean, supersonic, and the Singapore-DEL flight is just a normal one.
Looks like United was running flights from SFO nonstop to Delhi until Russia closed their airspace to US flights. Looking at the list of longest nonstops, a hypothetical LA-Delhi, assuming usage of Russian airspace, flight would fit within the range of a couple of aircraft.
The JFK-Singapore direct would still be hundreds of km longer.
LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.
> Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights
Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.
Yeah but doing important drug deals on zoom is a major no-no.
Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche
It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more.
Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal
Curve25519, ChaCha20, and plenty of other cryptographic primitives haven't been comprised (and there's a good chance they never will be). You can absolutely communicate over the internet without others reading your messages.
SpaceX announced the plan for cross-world rocket flights cheaper than a business class ticket in 2018, by 2028, and Musk doubled down on the timeframe in an interview in 2020. Boom doesnt have a chance of earning back its investment if it will only be able to operate for a few years before Musk comes through on his aggressive timeline. Passengers will need to be fitted for spacesuits and there is no launch abort system.
Musk’s service will never fly, it’s pure fantasy. There’s no way that governments are going to allow an ICBM through their airspace just because some businessman is willing to risk his life to get to a meeting on time. To say nothing of the environmental costs.
Boom hasn't solved the shockwave issue, have they? The Concorde didn't do overland routes over populated areas because of this. For example the NYC <-> Mexico City route overflew Florida for a time, and it would slow down to subsonic speeds over land. So even if Boom launches you likely wouldn't get cross-Europe routes.
Even if there was a business case, the bigger issue with Concorde was the sonic boom. This seriously limits the number of routes for any supersonic plane, essentially limiting it to NYC-London. Building a plane for one route is never going to make any sense. Boom never had any real plans that I know of to fix the… boom
When you buy a plane for 1 pound/franc, and don't have to worry about paying any development or manufacturing costs, you should be able to make money. If you can't, it's a serious problem!
And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.
The Concord practically defines "small niche." Entirely possible it made money, but less money than could be made charging Concorde fares for First Class seats on normal flights.
The backlash only matters if you get caught. Low key charter is a luxury good. I've never done it, but I know a lot of younger co-workers who have "splurged" on chartering for destination vacations/weddings/etc. at $10k each or whatever.
That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.
Constraints on the customer base:
- Absolutely must have face-to-face meetings on another continent
- Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights
- Can't do any productive work on a normal flight, so important to reduce flight time
- Not staying for a long visit, so cutting a couple of hours from the flight is important (Edit: added this item)
- Not rich enough to fly charter
That's a tough set of criteria, especially with CFOs looking to cut unnecessary business travel. Zoom is a lot cheaper than business-class travel.