10 ms·

Dude, where's my supersonic jet?

131 points by noleary 8mo ago

Analemma_ 8mo ago
I just don't see any pressing need for supersonic jet travel now that in-flight Wi-Fi, hi-res HMDs for your laptop and the Nintendo Switch all exist. And I think that trying to justify it in terms of "we have to end the stagnation and go back to a regime where plane speeds increase YoY" is silly: either it provides a compelling service for its high cost (there's no getting around that air drag and fuel consumption increases quadratically with speed) or it doesn't, and personally I don't think it will.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  There is such a huge market of ways to improve flights that are between "what we have now" and "high price supersonic" that aren't currently being done; indicating that there's not a terribly large market for it. Those who could easily afford supersonic can already afford other luxuries; the only one it gives is time; but if time is of the essence you can save it elsewhere by chartering your own jet.
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    > chartering your own jet Honestly, this seems like the place to start with supersonic technology. The very wealthy are price-insensitive and would be ok paying 3-4x as much to get somewhere 2x faster. A good place to prove the technology, infrastructure, and market opportunity before cost-optimizing to try to get interest from mass-market travellers.
    - jsrozner 8mo ago
      a good reason to tax the wealthy so hard that they can't own private jets <3
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      The thing is, if you can charter your own jet, you can make it travel on your schedule and suddenly cutting travel time in half isn't quite as important (even rich people sleep sometime). It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is "good enough" if not perfect.
- kibwen 8mo ago
  There's a powerful and outspoken modern cult that worships technological progress, but only for values of "progress" that meet a certain wow-factor/"shininess" threshold. The idea that such progress could ever falter is anathema to such a cohort (which, in their defense, have lived their whole lives in the most technologically anomalous period of the entirety of human history), making them susceptible to scams like Boom. Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more.
  - andrepd 8mo ago
    Would expect nothing less from someone self-styling as "rational optimist".
  - mlinhares 8mo ago
    Because these are not solutions, they're just fluff. If they were actual solutions these people would kill them because they'd diminish the power their real overlords have. Just look at the whole circus around the hyperloop instead of just building high speed trains.
  - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
    > Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more. Being able to do more with less is equivalent to being able to do much more with only little more.
    - kibwen 8mo ago
      And yet all that the aforementioned progress-cultists care about is being able to do a little more, even if it costs much more. The rate of return based on the effort invested is precisely the issue here.
      - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
        AI has some of the most stupidly high rates of return on effort and energy used out of all modern inventions, so I'm not sure what your point is.
- melling 8mo ago
  “ Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.”
  - BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
    It's been a while since I've flown. Are ~20% of seats really business class?
    - jsrozner 8mo ago
      Look at a 777-300 on [United](https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing-777-300er.html https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing-777...) - 60/290 biz/econ (~20%), but the biz seats take up probably 40% of the plane. Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back. Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40% of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz. Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60% revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way biz.
      - projektfu 8mo ago
        But biz will be half empty or more at full price, so it gets filled with upgrades of coach tickets to reward frequent fliers or full-fare users. The average has to be lower. The biz price may also be optimistic. United EWR-LHR is more like your $2.5k-$3k. Delta has an ATL-LHR option for first/business class with a bed that's more like $8k-$10k, and their Premium Select, which is more like United's business class, is $2.5k. Interestingly, they offer more beds than big seats. I remember pricing out the Concorde years ago, before it was grounded. BA's first class subsonic was $8k, Concorde was $12k. (2001 dollars) If you're paying those rates anyway, it might be worth it to go faster, if you don't mind the relatively small seat and limited food service. Coach was $400-$600.
  - VLM 8mo ago
- rtkwe 8mo ago
  Even with those conveniences IMO that only dulls the tedium of the flight and no matter how comfy the travel is I'm still losing about a whole day at least of just flying across the Atlantic going from the US to Europe and back for a vacation which is pretty valuable with US leave allowances. At the very least there's the market for business travel where workers don't lose whole days to travel.
  - strange_quark 8mo ago
    In the age of ubiquitous video conferencing, does it really make sense for business travel?
    - rtkwe 8mo ago
      My work just did a big moderately disruptive shuffling of all the teams to try to localize as many members of each squad as possible in one location and the trend since COVID stopped being as deadly has been a massive wave of RTO so management seems to believe there's benefit in in person meetings or at least professes and acts like they do. I can't assign all of the huge RTO pushes to just management justifying and propping up their office real estate portfolios.
      - strange_quark 8mo ago
        Sure, business travel is definitely still a thing. But every company I’ve ever worked at has sort of accepted that travel days are lost anyways because people come in from all over the country, get in at different times, have delayed flights, etc. My point being that I’m skeptical that companies are going to start paying 2x, 3x, 4x the cost so that their employees can get there a few hours faster, especially when, at least in my experience, it’s hard to get them to even pay for seats with extra legroom.
- Espressosaurus 8mo ago
  And also the negative externalities. Plane noise is irritating, sonic booms are far worse and spread farther.
- randerson 8mo ago
  IMHO digital entertainment doesn't make up for being stuck in a cramped cabin for up to 19 hours (the longest international flight) around people (with varying levels of considerateness, contagiousness, and personal hygiene). Not to mention the increased risks of DVT and radiation exposure. I travel each year to see family abroad, a minimum 2-leg trip totaling at least 27 hours. I can't sleep on planes so I arrive exhausted and am useless and cranky for the first 2 days after this trip. I would happily pay 2x the fare to cut that trip in half.
  - chrisweekly 8mo ago
    Deep Vein Thrombosis?
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    If you're flying half-way around the world, sleeping on the plane or a shorter flight isn't going to help much. I've done it twice and the jet lag is killer for the first 2-3 days regardless of how well you sleep on the plane (I usually sleep very well).
  - _fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
    If you can afford supersonic travel, then you could also afford first class. And supersonic travel will probably be like flying economy. The concord was pretty crammed compared to today’s first class.
- eleventyseven 8mo ago
  > I You are not the only consumer of air travel. Supersonic is not for you, it is for elites willing to spend 4x the ticket price for half the flight time. Concorde tickets were $6000 for D.C. to London in the mid 1990s, so about $12,500 today, and that was for an economy-style seat. It was very popular among a certain segment. East Coast US to Europe in 3-4 hours versus 7-8, West Coast US to Asia in 5-6 hours versus 10-12.... makes it more like a domestic flight.
  - ghaff 8mo ago
    My dad got upgraded to a Concorde once (for reasons I don't know) from First Class on (I assume) Pan Am. His reaction was basically meh. Got into London at rush hour and he really wasn't that impressed.
cromulent 8mo ago
> “Supersonic 2.0,” where anyone can catch a quick, affordable supersonic flight almost anywhere on earth. There is a proven middle ground, where you can pay the current price or x the price for 2x the speed.
- mrec 8mo ago
  This was the bit that caught my eye: > Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.” And now most of the profit for the 300-seater is gone. What does this do to flight pricing for those who were flying economy?
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    Yup, it's a bad pitch. Let's say the economy airplane without the business seats can now accommodate 400 economy seats. You now need two air crews and twice as much maintenance (or more) to transport 480 people (~60% increase) with a smaller percentage of those passengers being business class fares. What really kills this though is the value proposition for the business class passengers. I think I'd rather pay extra to sit in a comfortable seat for 16 hours, where wifi is now a standard feature, than cram into a smaller (likely noisier) seat for 8 hours. The cases where that 8 hours matters - especially when you can work from the seat if you have to - are fleetingly few. In the 70s, you couldn't do much in an airplane seat so it was wasted time. This is no longer the case and is steadily getting better.
    - fragmede 8mo ago
      Depends on how well the wifi actually works. I flew Lufthansa from Europe to the US and paid for wifi that didn't actually work of most of the flight. If I could have just gotten there quicker, I would have paid for that instead.
    - mrec 8mo ago
      > a smaller (likely noisier) seat Reminds me of that description of the Tu-144 as "so loud you couldn't hear the person next to you screaming".
lovegrenoble 8mo ago
The Russian Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969, four months before Concorde, and on 26 May 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo ago
  In 1973, it became the first supersonic passenger transport to crash into a town during an airshow.
- ricw 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - sonofhans 8mo ago
    Pasting LLM output is against HM guidelines.
  - buildsjets 8mo ago
    Absolutely no one cares what Claude has to say about anything. Are you completely incapable of forming and sharing an independent idea?
  - techbrovanguard 8mo ago
    > i asked claude nobody cares about the output of your favorite industrial quantity slop generator. try using your brain next time.
nluken 8mo ago
> Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing and taking off and later in the article: > Remember, Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway. Setting aside that these are completely different claims, the author does not cite this claim at all and it fails my personal gut check. Where is this information coming from?
- wat10000 8mo ago
  It used about half of its fuel for taxiing, takeoff, climb, and acceleration to cruising speed. Maybe that's where the number came from originally and it got mangled in translation.
  - saalweachter 8mo ago
    When I looked into this in another context (not supersonic jets), while "a lot" of fuel was used just getting the jet up to speed going down the runway, "most" of the fuel was going from 1 foot off the ground to N0,000 feet. (I was curious if there was any opportunity for some sort of system to power take-off from the ground, be it catapults like on air craft carriers or just power-transmission for electric planes, and the numbers I found were that while a surprising amount of fuel was used by the time the plane lifted off, it was more like 5% than 50%.)
- vablings 8mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 They did burn a crazy amount of fuel on getting up to supersonic speeds though.
- masklinn 8mo ago
  Yes, it sounds like the repetition of a mangled version of the SR71 stories. Burning 45 tonnes of fuel on the runway would be completely insane. Checking various links on taxiing burn yields about 2 tonnes which is a lot more realistic and reasonable (a previous HN comment indicates the 767 burns about a tonne taxiing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 concorde burning twice that sounds fair) The OP might have gotten confused reading articles like https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/ https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/ stating concorde burned half its tank from the gate to cruise (mach 2 at FL600)
elbci 8mo ago
We need supersonic airports, not planes. Spending 2h to board a plane for a 1h flight is just wrong
- andrepd 8mo ago
  1h flights are just wrong period. Just build a train.
  - Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
    Does your opinion change if the flight speed is 2500km/hour for most of the flight?
    - andrepd 8mo ago
      ? No, because (1) the distance is still short and (2) 2500km/h flight is uneconomical so it's never going to happen anyway.
  - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
    I used to take the train from Orlando down to Miami (well... Ft Lauderdale) and it was about 3 hours, vs a simple 1 hour flight, or a 3 hour drive. The train ride was worse on holidays though, sometimes it took 6 hours or even way longer. I think I'd much rather be on the plane overall.
    - prof-dr-ir 8mo ago
      good train > plane > bad train
      - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
        Driving is cheaper than all of those options when its more than one person, at least here in Florida. The more people involved in your travel, the cheaper driving starts to get.
recursivecaveat 8mo ago
It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and approach removed. If you cut it in half, 1h15m saved. On the flip side, how long does it take to get to the airport, park, though security, board, deboard, massive buffer time because flights are expensive and you don't know what might delay you, god forbid you have baggage to check and pick up. Flying at twice the speed might reduce the time to fly by less than 20%. Taking small on-demand supersonic flights from regional airports as suggested is definitely not a solution btw, because it's a pipe dream.
- melling 8mo ago
  He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example? Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?
  - pixelesque 8mo ago
    LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's not comparing realistic flight times anyway.
  - filleduchaos 8mo ago
    1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time. 2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
    - ghaff 8mo ago
      And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO. At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.
WillAdams 8mo ago
Left unstated is that the Concorde was designed at a time when aviation gas EDIT jet fuel ENDEDIT was priced at pennies per gallon. That said, it might still be flying if its recertification flight hadn't happened on 9/11.
- sidewndr46 8mo ago
  I'm relatively certain that neither Concorde nor any passenger jets burn aviation gas. It may be physically possible, but would be extremely ill advised given the lead additive
  - rounce 8mo ago
    I'm pretty sure they weren't referring to 100LL, but either way even back in the 90s Jet-A was around USD 0.50 per gallon, in the 60s it was nearly 1/5th of even that.
  - WillAdams 8mo ago
    Fair. Edited my comment to note that both sorts of fuels were in that price range, but didn't look up the specific fuel specification used by the Concorde.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    Some version of Aviation Turbine Fuel (the other ATF) is used in passenger jets, which is either Jet A or Jet A-1 for colder, non-American flights. It is a kerosene-based fuel which does not contain any lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
- wat10000 8mo ago
  I'd guess not. It was aging, maintenance was getting ever more expensive, Airbus didn't really want to support it anymore, and it faced ever more competition from better first-class amenities on regular planes, and from the internet reducing the need for fast business travel. It was modestly profitable in its heyday once the capital costs were written off, but it didn't have a lot of headroom. Jet fuel cost about $1/gallon when Concorde retired. Five years later, it would hit $3/gallon. I have to imagine that would have ended it if nothing else had by that point.
jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
Notably Boom's big pivot a month ago was to start selling their supersonic designed engines to data centers for power. I struggle to imagine this is a very efficient design, that something designed for going mach 1.something breathing significant air is ideally suited for being at sea level not moving running a generator. Just feels like the stupid timeline having it laughs at us all again. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-power-ai-data-centers-with-superpower-natural-gas-turbines-adds-300-million-in-new-funding https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-... Update: also, I was surprised in the first place because I thought the big challenge for boom was they were trying & failing to get engines. They eventually got Kratos to sign up but I thought it'd mostly be a Kratos engine... https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-details/kratos-selected-engine-design-team-boom-led-collaboration https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
- positron26 8mo ago
  That is not a pivot I would have expected. Aviation turbines are not good utility turbines. If you just need to beef up your turbine engineering, drone turbines are probably the place to go. Less competition from GE etc.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    I don't think they expected it either, but it's building expertise in that general area, the question is if that expertise will transfer back over to supersonic jet engines, or if they're different enough that they can't.
  - notahacker 8mo ago
    It's a VC fundraising oriented pivot I think.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
juujian 8mo ago
> Three reasons: noise, regulation and cost. So the environmental impact isn't even worth mentioning?
- nomel 8mo ago
  The environmental impact won't prevent their use unless something like a carbon tax is present, where environmental impact directly results in cost. People "need" to travel, in a convenient way, regardless. Same with ICE cars. They'll go away when they're superseded by both cost and convenience. The environment doesn't really matter to the mass population that travels.
  - Schiendelman 8mo ago
    I've had an EV (Tesla model 3) for almost 3 years now. I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good it is. I don't think you could pay me to go back to an ICE. Or you'd have to pay me a lot! I think more and more people are having this experience. It's just not cheap enough yet, and hasn't penetrated the used market far enough yet. But I think it's just a matter of time.
- snowwrestler 8mo ago
  I believe that fits under “regulation” from the perspective of people building these things.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
_petronius 8mo ago
Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read). The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.
- notahacker 8mo ago
  tbf whilst the lower cost travel we've got accurately represents what the market wants, it isn't exactly unusual to find industry insiders that want flight to be faster (they're just a little less likely to gush about how startups are "cleverly" working with regulators or describe Douglas as the last successful US airframer...)
  - projektfu 8mo ago
    One could say Douglas is the only successful US commercial airline manufacturer. (Last remaining, after Boeing bought MD but inherited MD's culture)
b3lm0nt 8mo ago
Necessary link to Maciej Cegłowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100 Years:" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords... Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day! Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight. The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”
- bawolff 8mo ago
  I dont know i agree. Trans-antlantic flights kind of suck. If i was doing tourist things (and the cost point was right) i would definitely prefer a 3 hour flight. Not sure i would pay double for it, but i do think there is a market for this.
  - ghaff 8mo ago
    You'll pay double (or more) for it. You can have a much better experience today if you fly business.
    - bawolff 8mo ago
      Well that's the question right? What is the price point. All products have a price where people won't buy it. But i suspect even if its double, that would still be enough to attract business class peeps, which might make it economically viable.
      - Panzer04 8mo ago
        The issue concord had was also that a lot of people would rather a luxury seat on a conventional airliner rather than be squished in on a supersonic airliner. I kinda doubt that dynamic changes.
stephc_int13 8mo ago
Except the title, a large part of this article seems to have been written by an LLM.
- riversflow 8mo ago
  Crazy that you are the only comment that noticed this. I stopped reading at, > Translation: Building airplane engines is hard There are many hints previous to that, but that gave it away for me. If I want LLM output I’ll request it from the model myself, thanks.
jelder 8mo ago
> You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price. What does that end up doing to the cost of a seat in coach?
zaxioms 8mo ago
> Blake embodies the “bits to atoms” shift underway in America. Before founding Boom, he was designing internet coupons for Groupon. What is this? I can't find easily the meaning of "bits to atoms." Is this meaning that US is going away from digital "exports"?
- Towaway69 8mo ago
  From virtual goods to physical goods I assume. Never heard before either so you're not alone. EDIT: the reference to America is, again I assume, the trend to bring manufacturing back to the US from mainly China.
- skrebbel 8mo ago
  No the meaning is that there's a wave of hardware innovators who started as software innovators. Musk (Paypal) is the most obvious example. The Boom CEO featured here is another. There's a fair bunch more, I agree with the author that a weirdly high % of founders of cool hardware / deeptech companies have a software engineering background. Like, you'd expect that space to be dominated by mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and physicists etc but somehow it isn't.
  - snowwrestler 8mo ago
    Because people who led software companies (which have insanely high margins) have access to the vast capital needed for serious heavy hardware development. They then hire the engineers they need to succeed.
    - notahacker 8mo ago
      Yep. I suspect they're also better at getting warm intros to and selling their vision to Silicon Valley CEOs than your average aerospace engineer with a dream.
voxleone 8mo ago
Regarding the “supersonic is now viable because LNG” argument, but for a different reason than usual. Even if supersonic flight becomes cheaper via new fuels or propulsion, that doesn’t reset the baseline. The same advances (materials, engines, fuel handling, manufacturing) will also apply to subsonic aircraft, where the physics are already far more energy-efficient. So if supersonic gets “cheap,” traditional jets will get much cheaper. Airlines will always arbitrage toward the lowest energy-per-seat-km for most routes, and supersonic flight is structurally disadvantaged there (drag, noise, routing constraints). Historically, faster transport doesn’t replace slower transport wholesale; it creates a premium tier while pushing the mass market down to a lower cost/energy equilibrium. Concorde didn’t kill widebodies, widebodies got cheaper. My intuition: supersonic may of course exist as a niche (time-sensitive, premium), but its biggest impact would be indirect, accelerating efficiency gains that make conventional aviation even more dominant and cheaper.
- MattGaiser 8mo ago
  And even then, it is only so premium. As you could have a speedy economy seat on the Concorde or a lie flat bed on a widebody by the time Concorde left service. The speed benefit largely goes away if I can travel while sleeping.
  - bobthepanda 8mo ago
    Halving travel times would be really good, the problem is that supersonic never had the range to make the difference meaningful. JFK-London in 3 hours vs 6 is pretty tolerable if you’re more comfortable for the 6 hours. SFO to Shanghai in 7 hours vs 14 would be a lot more compelling but Concorde could not do transpacific range.
    - thesumofall 8mo ago
      I actually prefer a 10+ hrs business class flight over a 6-7 hrs flight. At least you can get a full night of sleep
      - 8mo ago
foota 8mo ago
At first I thought this was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
slackfan 8mo ago
"The last successful US airplane manufacturer was Douglas Aircraft, founded in 1921." Nice (misleading) buried lede re: Boeing I suppose.
nenadg 8mo ago
[flagged]
stephc_int13 8mo ago
The technology of air travel may seem counter intuitive when your frame of reference is the Moore's Law. But in practice, what happened with semiconductors is the exception, not the rule. We are still often making wild predictions about the future of technology based on some kind of exponential take-off, it may turn out to be a lot more constrained by physics and energy density. Supersonic commercial air transport is one such technology, possible and proven, yet not viable. Mars colonies or interstellar travel could be in a similar bucket.
senordevnyc 8mo ago
It’s already booked 130 orders. I really don't believe this. Even the Boom website says that most of these are "options" to purchase, but I'm guessing the "firm" orders are basically just non-binding letters of intent that effectively say "Sure, if you build it with these specs, we'll buy some at price X. Unless we change our mind." And I'm further guessing that the terms include dates that Boom has zero chance of hitting. The author estimates that these won't be in commercial service before 2033, but I think that's still optimistic. My understanding (could be wrong, not an expert) is that new regular airliners take many billions and 10+ years to design, build, and certify, and that's without the complications of supersonic and brand new engine designs. The Boom stories have been circulating on HN for a decade now [1], and they originally were claiming two years to have a manned prototype, which was obviously untrue. I guess they are like the Tesla of the sky in that regard. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
- notahacker 8mo ago
  tbf United and JAL did put in a non-trivial deposit, but yeah, the orders won't be binding on them (I remember having an exchange on here with one of their investors on here about that). Frankly I think they've done well to get where they are, but where they are is a basic demonstration of their supersonic boom suppresion technology on a small testbed aircraft (a few years behind schedule!), and having to design their own engine because they can't get one of the major OEMs to work with them.
obblekk 8mo ago
One big reason supersonic can be economic now is the increase in wealth in Asia since the 80s. Transpacific flights from California have no sonic boom population issues for 90% of the flight, and there’s already a large market of people spending $10k on business travel. Reducing travel time from 12hrs to 4hrs would be a product with a lot more demand than 7hrs to 3hrs to Europe.
snowwrestler 8mo ago
I'm excited for progress in supersonic flight because fast things can be qualitatively different. I first remember hearing this idea from Linus Torvalds, talking about developing Git. He said he works differently, not just faster, when merges are instant and easy. Since hearing that, I see the effect in other areas of life, and transportation is one. I travel differently when the flight is 3 hours as opposed to 7 or more. Shorter trips, less luggage, less advance planning, less exhaustion, etc. At first it will be available only at a premium, but that's how innovation usually goes. When the market finds something people love, capital seeks opportunities to lower the cost and increase the quantity. The real price of travel by aviation has declined dramatically over the last 50 years, for example. I've got friends and family all over the world... I would for sure go visit more often if it wasn't so darn long just to get there and back.
pacifi30 8mo ago
Why are we not focussing on rocket based travel so we can finally do 90 mins from Seattle to London :) Spacex and blue origin has already demonstrated heavy payload transport, why can we just move to this than work on supersonic
joelthelion 8mo ago
Not a word on the environmental impact. We need to be flying less, not faster. And yes, I know flying only makes roughly 5% of world emissions. It also turns out that these are some of the most avoidable emissions. We should be cutting them first.
- koops 8mo ago
  We're all of us speeding towards a cliff that ends in environmental disaster. And if you point that out, you get downvoted to invisibility on Hacker News and elsewhere.
- Schiendelman 8mo ago
  I spent a lot of my 20s and early 30s as an environmental activist. I'm now in my mid 40s. One of the biggest things I've learned is that the vast majority of people will never make that trade. We are going to heat up the Earth. And then we are going to deal with the consequences.
class3shock 8mo ago
Boom I swear boom spends more on puff pieces than any other aerospace company. They continuously make claims they will do things by certain dates that are unrealistic. They claim they will be delivering airplanes to United that would be in service in 2029: https://boomsupersonic.com/united https://boomsupersonic.com/united https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast-airplanes-from-start-up-boom-supersonic.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast... However new aircraft take 5-9 years to certify and they have not yet even built one! Not to mention new engines take a similar amount of time and they are supposedly building their own brand new engine, which is a substantially harder task. Now they are claiming the first "test" flight will be in 3 years despite the fact that they still don't have a plane or an engine built. I hope someone over their let United know they are going to be a little late. Their website hasn't amended to article to say they were wrong. I wonder if we can look to history to see how long it takes between when they say they will fly something and when it actually flies? Oh right, we can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1 "The original design was unveiled at Centennial Airport in Dove Valley, near Denver, Colorado, on November 15, 2016,[6] and it was initially intended to make its first subsonic flight in late 2017" "The XB-1 performed its first flight test on March 22, 2024, flown by test pilot Bill Shoemaker from Mojave Air and Space Port.[1]" They were only 7 years off but we all make mistakes. Astro Mechanica - LNG isn't used because weight needed for fuel tanks that will keep it cold enough to stay liquid cancels out any benefits. For anyone interested in a famous failure of a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan - I don't know what analysis they are doing that makes them think reducing the number of passengers and going to supersonic is possible while maintaining current ticket prices... but it's not. - Engine and plane makers are not allowed to run airlines. Anyone unfamiliar with the field can look up United Aircraft. - Their engine does sound like it's trying to do some cool things. I kinda suspect it's just a fun way to pass the time on the governments dime given all the other unrealistic stuff they are talking about though. Hermeus These folks are legit. Don't know if they will be successful but outsourcing the jet engine and focusing their work on the ramjet and the integration of the two makes alot of sense.
- tim333 8mo ago
  I was a bit disappointed with the Boom XB-1. They originally announced - designed to maintain a speed of Mach 2.2, with over 1,000 nautical miles. I thought cool. Then 7 years late they fly and - Mach 1.1 and no long–range. Then rather than develop it they say it's retired, we'll take orders for Overture now. I wonder what's going on there?
CivBase 8mo ago
> using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions What is this even supposed to mean? To me this comes across as "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed by a supersonic jet that can surpress sonic booms, so I shoehorned AI into the description to jazz it up." It makes me wonder why the author doesn't think the former is impressive enough on its own.
- projektfu 8mo ago
  Every data model is now AI.
dzonga 8mo ago
just for sake of clarity - people need to remember it took about 2 years to get the finest plane ever built i.e SR-71 (Blackbird) in the air. there's thing we lost we i.e skills, grit, creativity we might never recover from
- deleted 8mo ago
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starkeeper 8mo ago
Also don't forget saftey as one of the things holding this back. It's pretty major.
bamboozled 8mo ago
I just think regular flying shouldn't suck so so so hard and I'd be happy to spend 24 hours flying. Economy is an absolute nightmare these days, premium economy is where economy should be. I'd love to be able to afford business or beyond but I honestly don't even want to try it because I know I won't want to go back.
aprilfoo 8mo ago
With all those fantastic claims defining "the future", it feels more like PR hunt for venture capital in those start-ups than a serious article.
kylehotchkiss 8mo ago
Why make planes faster when you can make them more uncomfortable and upsell more items mid-journey?
pdntspa 8mo ago
"Noise problem solved" from the "Rational Optimist Society" Sorry can't help but chuckle at this....
leopoldj 8mo ago
I just wanted to point out that Boom Aerospace is now mainly focused on delivering a Gas Turbine for power generation [1]. In an interview with CNBC Mr. Scholl talked about this pivot [2]. 1. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-power-ai-data-centers-with-superpower-natural-gas-turbines-adds-300-million-in-new-funding https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw
nephihaha 8mo ago
Concorde was extremely loud. I remember it flying over. But its main sin was being a European product not an American one. That said the US used to have the space shuttle and that has gone the same way.
4ndrewl 8mo ago
The 1973 sonic boom regs were there to protect the US airline industry, not citizens.

131 points by noleary 8mo ago

I just don't see any pressing need for supersonic jet travel now that in-flight Wi-Fi, hi-res HMDs for your laptop and the Nintendo Switch all exist. And I think that trying to justify it in terms of "we have to end the stagnation and go back to a regime where plane speeds increase YoY" is silly: either it provides a compelling service for its high cost (there's no getting around that air drag and fuel consumption increases quadratically with speed) or it doesn't, and personally I don't think it will.

bombcar 8mo ago
There is such a huge market of ways to improve flights that are between "what we have now" and "high price supersonic" that aren't currently being done; indicating that there's not a terribly large market for it. Those who could easily afford supersonic can already afford other luxuries; the only one it gives is time; but if time is of the essence you can save it elsewhere by chartering your own jet.
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  > chartering your own jet Honestly, this seems like the place to start with supersonic technology. The very wealthy are price-insensitive and would be ok paying 3-4x as much to get somewhere 2x faster. A good place to prove the technology, infrastructure, and market opportunity before cost-optimizing to try to get interest from mass-market travellers.
  - jsrozner 8mo ago
    a good reason to tax the wealthy so hard that they can't own private jets <3
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    The thing is, if you can charter your own jet, you can make it travel on your schedule and suddenly cutting travel time in half isn't quite as important (even rich people sleep sometime). It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is "good enough" if not perfect.
kibwen 8mo ago
There's a powerful and outspoken modern cult that worships technological progress, but only for values of "progress" that meet a certain wow-factor/"shininess" threshold. The idea that such progress could ever falter is anathema to such a cohort (which, in their defense, have lived their whole lives in the most technologically anomalous period of the entirety of human history), making them susceptible to scams like Boom. Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more.
- andrepd 8mo ago
  Would expect nothing less from someone self-styling as "rational optimist".
- mlinhares 8mo ago
  Because these are not solutions, they're just fluff. If they were actual solutions these people would kill them because they'd diminish the power their real overlords have. Just look at the whole circus around the hyperloop instead of just building high speed trains.
- TeMPOraL 8mo ago
  > Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more. Being able to do more with less is equivalent to being able to do much more with only little more.
  - kibwen 8mo ago
    And yet all that the aforementioned progress-cultists care about is being able to do a little more, even if it costs much more. The rate of return based on the effort invested is precisely the issue here.
    - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
      AI has some of the most stupidly high rates of return on effort and energy used out of all modern inventions, so I'm not sure what your point is.
melling 8mo ago
“ Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.”
- BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
  It's been a while since I've flown. Are ~20% of seats really business class?
  - jsrozner 8mo ago
    Look at a 777-300 on [United](https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing-777-300er.html https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing-777...) - 60/290 biz/econ (~20%), but the biz seats take up probably 40% of the plane. Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back. Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40% of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz. Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60% revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way biz.
    - projektfu 8mo ago
      But biz will be half empty or more at full price, so it gets filled with upgrades of coach tickets to reward frequent fliers or full-fare users. The average has to be lower. The biz price may also be optimistic. United EWR-LHR is more like your $2.5k-$3k. Delta has an ATL-LHR option for first/business class with a bed that's more like $8k-$10k, and their Premium Select, which is more like United's business class, is $2.5k. Interestingly, they offer more beds than big seats. I remember pricing out the Concorde years ago, before it was grounded. BA's first class subsonic was $8k, Concorde was $12k. (2001 dollars) If you're paying those rates anyway, it might be worth it to go faster, if you don't mind the relatively small seat and limited food service. Coach was $400-$600.
- VLM 8mo ago
rtkwe 8mo ago
Even with those conveniences IMO that only dulls the tedium of the flight and no matter how comfy the travel is I'm still losing about a whole day at least of just flying across the Atlantic going from the US to Europe and back for a vacation which is pretty valuable with US leave allowances. At the very least there's the market for business travel where workers don't lose whole days to travel.
- strange_quark 8mo ago
  In the age of ubiquitous video conferencing, does it really make sense for business travel?
  - rtkwe 8mo ago
    My work just did a big moderately disruptive shuffling of all the teams to try to localize as many members of each squad as possible in one location and the trend since COVID stopped being as deadly has been a massive wave of RTO so management seems to believe there's benefit in in person meetings or at least professes and acts like they do. I can't assign all of the huge RTO pushes to just management justifying and propping up their office real estate portfolios.
    - strange_quark 8mo ago
      Sure, business travel is definitely still a thing. But every company I’ve ever worked at has sort of accepted that travel days are lost anyways because people come in from all over the country, get in at different times, have delayed flights, etc. My point being that I’m skeptical that companies are going to start paying 2x, 3x, 4x the cost so that their employees can get there a few hours faster, especially when, at least in my experience, it’s hard to get them to even pay for seats with extra legroom.
Espressosaurus 8mo ago
And also the negative externalities. Plane noise is irritating, sonic booms are far worse and spread farther.
randerson 8mo ago
IMHO digital entertainment doesn't make up for being stuck in a cramped cabin for up to 19 hours (the longest international flight) around people (with varying levels of considerateness, contagiousness, and personal hygiene). Not to mention the increased risks of DVT and radiation exposure. I travel each year to see family abroad, a minimum 2-leg trip totaling at least 27 hours. I can't sleep on planes so I arrive exhausted and am useless and cranky for the first 2 days after this trip. I would happily pay 2x the fare to cut that trip in half.
- chrisweekly 8mo ago
  Deep Vein Thrombosis?
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  If you're flying half-way around the world, sleeping on the plane or a shorter flight isn't going to help much. I've done it twice and the jet lag is killer for the first 2-3 days regardless of how well you sleep on the plane (I usually sleep very well).
- _fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
  If you can afford supersonic travel, then you could also afford first class. And supersonic travel will probably be like flying economy. The concord was pretty crammed compared to today’s first class.
eleventyseven 8mo ago
> I You are not the only consumer of air travel. Supersonic is not for you, it is for elites willing to spend 4x the ticket price for half the flight time. Concorde tickets were $6000 for D.C. to London in the mid 1990s, so about $12,500 today, and that was for an economy-style seat. It was very popular among a certain segment. East Coast US to Europe in 3-4 hours versus 7-8, West Coast US to Asia in 5-6 hours versus 10-12.... makes it more like a domestic flight.
- ghaff 8mo ago
  My dad got upgraded to a Concorde once (for reasons I don't know) from First Class on (I assume) Pan Am. His reaction was basically meh. Got into London at rush hour and he really wasn't that impressed.

cromulent 8mo ago

> “Supersonic 2.0,” where anyone can catch a quick, affordable supersonic flight almost anywhere on earth. There is a proven middle ground, where you can pay the current price or x the price for 2x the speed.

mrec 8mo ago
This was the bit that caught my eye: > Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.” And now most of the profit for the 300-seater is gone. What does this do to flight pricing for those who were flying economy?
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  Yup, it's a bad pitch. Let's say the economy airplane without the business seats can now accommodate 400 economy seats. You now need two air crews and twice as much maintenance (or more) to transport 480 people (~60% increase) with a smaller percentage of those passengers being business class fares. What really kills this though is the value proposition for the business class passengers. I think I'd rather pay extra to sit in a comfortable seat for 16 hours, where wifi is now a standard feature, than cram into a smaller (likely noisier) seat for 8 hours. The cases where that 8 hours matters - especially when you can work from the seat if you have to - are fleetingly few. In the 70s, you couldn't do much in an airplane seat so it was wasted time. This is no longer the case and is steadily getting better.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    Depends on how well the wifi actually works. I flew Lufthansa from Europe to the US and paid for wifi that didn't actually work of most of the flight. If I could have just gotten there quicker, I would have paid for that instead.
  - mrec 8mo ago
    > a smaller (likely noisier) seat Reminds me of that description of the Tu-144 as "so loud you couldn't hear the person next to you screaming".

lovegrenoble 8mo ago

The Russian Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969, four months before Concorde, and on 26 May 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2

TheOtherHobbes 8mo ago
In 1973, it became the first supersonic passenger transport to crash into a town during an airshow.
ricw 8mo ago
[flagged]
- sonofhans 8mo ago
  Pasting LLM output is against HM guidelines.
- buildsjets 8mo ago
  Absolutely no one cares what Claude has to say about anything. Are you completely incapable of forming and sharing an independent idea?
- techbrovanguard 8mo ago
  > i asked claude nobody cares about the output of your favorite industrial quantity slop generator. try using your brain next time.

nluken 8mo ago

> Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing and taking off and later in the article: > Remember, Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway. Setting aside that these are completely different claims, the author does not cite this claim at all and it fails my personal gut check. Where is this information coming from?

wat10000 8mo ago
It used about half of its fuel for taxiing, takeoff, climb, and acceleration to cruising speed. Maybe that's where the number came from originally and it got mangled in translation.
- saalweachter 8mo ago
  When I looked into this in another context (not supersonic jets), while "a lot" of fuel was used just getting the jet up to speed going down the runway, "most" of the fuel was going from 1 foot off the ground to N0,000 feet. (I was curious if there was any opportunity for some sort of system to power take-off from the ground, be it catapults like on air craft carriers or just power-transmission for electric planes, and the numbers I found were that while a surprising amount of fuel was used by the time the plane lifted off, it was more like 5% than 50%.)
vablings 8mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 They did burn a crazy amount of fuel on getting up to supersonic speeds though.
masklinn 8mo ago
Yes, it sounds like the repetition of a mangled version of the SR71 stories. Burning 45 tonnes of fuel on the runway would be completely insane. Checking various links on taxiing burn yields about 2 tonnes which is a lot more realistic and reasonable (a previous HN comment indicates the 767 burns about a tonne taxiing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 concorde burning twice that sounds fair) The OP might have gotten confused reading articles like https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/ https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/ stating concorde burned half its tank from the gate to cruise (mach 2 at FL600)

elbci 8mo ago

We need supersonic airports, not planes. Spending 2h to board a plane for a 1h flight is just wrong

andrepd 8mo ago
1h flights are just wrong period. Just build a train.
- Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
  Does your opinion change if the flight speed is 2500km/hour for most of the flight?
  - andrepd 8mo ago
    ? No, because (1) the distance is still short and (2) 2500km/h flight is uneconomical so it's never going to happen anyway.
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  I used to take the train from Orlando down to Miami (well... Ft Lauderdale) and it was about 3 hours, vs a simple 1 hour flight, or a 3 hour drive. The train ride was worse on holidays though, sometimes it took 6 hours or even way longer. I think I'd much rather be on the plane overall.
  - prof-dr-ir 8mo ago
    good train > plane > bad train
    - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
      Driving is cheaper than all of those options when its more than one person, at least here in Florida. The more people involved in your travel, the cheaper driving starts to get.

recursivecaveat 8mo ago

It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and approach removed. If you cut it in half, 1h15m saved. On the flip side, how long does it take to get to the airport, park, though security, board, deboard, massive buffer time because flights are expensive and you don't know what might delay you, god forbid you have baggage to check and pick up. Flying at twice the speed might reduce the time to fly by less than 20%. Taking small on-demand supersonic flights from regional airports as suggested is definitely not a solution btw, because it's a pipe dream.

melling 8mo ago
He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example? Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?
- pixelesque 8mo ago
  LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's not comparing realistic flight times anyway.
- filleduchaos 8mo ago
  1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time. 2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
  - ghaff 8mo ago
    And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO. At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.

WillAdams 8mo ago

Left unstated is that the Concorde was designed at a time when aviation gas EDIT jet fuel ENDEDIT was priced at pennies per gallon. That said, it might still be flying if its recertification flight hadn't happened on 9/11.

sidewndr46 8mo ago
I'm relatively certain that neither Concorde nor any passenger jets burn aviation gas. It may be physically possible, but would be extremely ill advised given the lead additive
- rounce 8mo ago
  I'm pretty sure they weren't referring to 100LL, but either way even back in the 90s Jet-A was around USD 0.50 per gallon, in the 60s it was nearly 1/5th of even that.
- WillAdams 8mo ago
  Fair. Edited my comment to note that both sorts of fuels were in that price range, but didn't look up the specific fuel specification used by the Concorde.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Some version of Aviation Turbine Fuel (the other ATF) is used in passenger jets, which is either Jet A or Jet A-1 for colder, non-American flights. It is a kerosene-based fuel which does not contain any lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
wat10000 8mo ago
I'd guess not. It was aging, maintenance was getting ever more expensive, Airbus didn't really want to support it anymore, and it faced ever more competition from better first-class amenities on regular planes, and from the internet reducing the need for fast business travel. It was modestly profitable in its heyday once the capital costs were written off, but it didn't have a lot of headroom. Jet fuel cost about $1/gallon when Concorde retired. Five years later, it would hit $3/gallon. I have to imagine that would have ended it if nothing else had by that point.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago

Notably Boom's big pivot a month ago was to start selling their supersonic designed engines to data centers for power. I struggle to imagine this is a very efficient design, that something designed for going mach 1.something breathing significant air is ideally suited for being at sea level not moving running a generator. Just feels like the stupid timeline having it laughs at us all again. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-power-ai-data-centers-with-superpower-natural-gas-turbines-adds-300-million-in-new-funding https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-... Update: also, I was surprised in the first place because I thought the big challenge for boom was they were trying & failing to get engines. They eventually got Kratos to sign up but I thought it'd mostly be a Kratos engine... https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-details/kratos-selected-engine-design-team-boom-led-collaboration https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

positron26 8mo ago
That is not a pivot I would have expected. Aviation turbines are not good utility turbines. If you just need to beef up your turbine engineering, drone turbines are probably the place to go. Less competition from GE etc.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  I don't think they expected it either, but it's building expertise in that general area, the question is if that expertise will transfer back over to supersonic jet engines, or if they're different enough that they can't.
- notahacker 8mo ago
  It's a VC fundraising oriented pivot I think.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

juujian 8mo ago

> Three reasons: noise, regulation and cost. So the environmental impact isn't even worth mentioning?

nomel 8mo ago
The environmental impact won't prevent their use unless something like a carbon tax is present, where environmental impact directly results in cost. People "need" to travel, in a convenient way, regardless. Same with ICE cars. They'll go away when they're superseded by both cost and convenience. The environment doesn't really matter to the mass population that travels.
- Schiendelman 8mo ago
  I've had an EV (Tesla model 3) for almost 3 years now. I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good it is. I don't think you could pay me to go back to an ICE. Or you'd have to pay me a lot! I think more and more people are having this experience. It's just not cheap enough yet, and hasn't penetrated the used market far enough yet. But I think it's just a matter of time.
snowwrestler 8mo ago
I believe that fits under “regulation” from the perspective of people building these things.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

_petronius 8mo ago

Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read). The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.

notahacker 8mo ago
tbf whilst the lower cost travel we've got accurately represents what the market wants, it isn't exactly unusual to find industry insiders that want flight to be faster (they're just a little less likely to gush about how startups are "cleverly" working with regulators or describe Douglas as the last successful US airframer...)
- projektfu 8mo ago
  One could say Douglas is the only successful US commercial airline manufacturer. (Last remaining, after Boeing bought MD but inherited MD's culture)

b3lm0nt 8mo ago

Necessary link to Maciej Cegłowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100 Years:" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords... Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day! Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight. The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”

bawolff 8mo ago
I dont know i agree. Trans-antlantic flights kind of suck. If i was doing tourist things (and the cost point was right) i would definitely prefer a 3 hour flight. Not sure i would pay double for it, but i do think there is a market for this.
- ghaff 8mo ago
  You'll pay double (or more) for it. You can have a much better experience today if you fly business.
  - bawolff 8mo ago
    Well that's the question right? What is the price point. All products have a price where people won't buy it. But i suspect even if its double, that would still be enough to attract business class peeps, which might make it economically viable.
    - Panzer04 8mo ago
      The issue concord had was also that a lot of people would rather a luxury seat on a conventional airliner rather than be squished in on a supersonic airliner. I kinda doubt that dynamic changes.

stephc_int13 8mo ago

Except the title, a large part of this article seems to have been written by an LLM.

riversflow 8mo ago
Crazy that you are the only comment that noticed this. I stopped reading at, > Translation: Building airplane engines is hard There are many hints previous to that, but that gave it away for me. If I want LLM output I’ll request it from the model myself, thanks.

jelder 8mo ago

> You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price. What does that end up doing to the cost of a seat in coach?

zaxioms 8mo ago

> Blake embodies the “bits to atoms” shift underway in America. Before founding Boom, he was designing internet coupons for Groupon. What is this? I can't find easily the meaning of "bits to atoms." Is this meaning that US is going away from digital "exports"?

Towaway69 8mo ago
From virtual goods to physical goods I assume. Never heard before either so you're not alone. EDIT: the reference to America is, again I assume, the trend to bring manufacturing back to the US from mainly China.
skrebbel 8mo ago
No the meaning is that there's a wave of hardware innovators who started as software innovators. Musk (Paypal) is the most obvious example. The Boom CEO featured here is another. There's a fair bunch more, I agree with the author that a weirdly high % of founders of cool hardware / deeptech companies have a software engineering background. Like, you'd expect that space to be dominated by mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and physicists etc but somehow it isn't.
- snowwrestler 8mo ago
  Because people who led software companies (which have insanely high margins) have access to the vast capital needed for serious heavy hardware development. They then hire the engineers they need to succeed.
  - notahacker 8mo ago
    Yep. I suspect they're also better at getting warm intros to and selling their vision to Silicon Valley CEOs than your average aerospace engineer with a dream.

voxleone 8mo ago

Regarding the “supersonic is now viable because LNG” argument, but for a different reason than usual. Even if supersonic flight becomes cheaper via new fuels or propulsion, that doesn’t reset the baseline. The same advances (materials, engines, fuel handling, manufacturing) will also apply to subsonic aircraft, where the physics are already far more energy-efficient. So if supersonic gets “cheap,” traditional jets will get much cheaper. Airlines will always arbitrage toward the lowest energy-per-seat-km for most routes, and supersonic flight is structurally disadvantaged there (drag, noise, routing constraints). Historically, faster transport doesn’t replace slower transport wholesale; it creates a premium tier while pushing the mass market down to a lower cost/energy equilibrium. Concorde didn’t kill widebodies, widebodies got cheaper. My intuition: supersonic may of course exist as a niche (time-sensitive, premium), but its biggest impact would be indirect, accelerating efficiency gains that make conventional aviation even more dominant and cheaper.

MattGaiser 8mo ago
And even then, it is only so premium. As you could have a speedy economy seat on the Concorde or a lie flat bed on a widebody by the time Concorde left service. The speed benefit largely goes away if I can travel while sleeping.
- bobthepanda 8mo ago
  Halving travel times would be really good, the problem is that supersonic never had the range to make the difference meaningful. JFK-London in 3 hours vs 6 is pretty tolerable if you’re more comfortable for the 6 hours. SFO to Shanghai in 7 hours vs 14 would be a lot more compelling but Concorde could not do transpacific range.
  - thesumofall 8mo ago
    I actually prefer a 10+ hrs business class flight over a 6-7 hrs flight. At least you can get a full night of sleep
    - 8mo ago

foota 8mo ago

At first I thought this was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.

slackfan 8mo ago

"The last successful US airplane manufacturer was Douglas Aircraft, founded in 1921." Nice (misleading) buried lede re: Boeing I suppose.

nenadg 8mo ago

[flagged]

stephc_int13 8mo ago

The technology of air travel may seem counter intuitive when your frame of reference is the Moore's Law. But in practice, what happened with semiconductors is the exception, not the rule. We are still often making wild predictions about the future of technology based on some kind of exponential take-off, it may turn out to be a lot more constrained by physics and energy density. Supersonic commercial air transport is one such technology, possible and proven, yet not viable. Mars colonies or interstellar travel could be in a similar bucket.

senordevnyc 8mo ago

It’s already booked 130 orders. I really don't believe this. Even the Boom website says that most of these are "options" to purchase, but I'm guessing the "firm" orders are basically just non-binding letters of intent that effectively say "Sure, if you build it with these specs, we'll buy some at price X. Unless we change our mind." And I'm further guessing that the terms include dates that Boom has zero chance of hitting. The author estimates that these won't be in commercial service before 2033, but I think that's still optimistic. My understanding (could be wrong, not an expert) is that new regular airliners take many billions and 10+ years to design, build, and certify, and that's without the complications of supersonic and brand new engine designs. The Boom stories have been circulating on HN for a decade now [1], and they originally were claiming two years to have a manned prototype, which was obviously untrue. I guess they are like the Tesla of the sky in that regard. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286

notahacker 8mo ago
tbf United and JAL did put in a non-trivial deposit, but yeah, the orders won't be binding on them (I remember having an exchange on here with one of their investors on here about that). Frankly I think they've done well to get where they are, but where they are is a basic demonstration of their supersonic boom suppresion technology on a small testbed aircraft (a few years behind schedule!), and having to design their own engine because they can't get one of the major OEMs to work with them.

obblekk 8mo ago

One big reason supersonic can be economic now is the increase in wealth in Asia since the 80s. Transpacific flights from California have no sonic boom population issues for 90% of the flight, and there’s already a large market of people spending $10k on business travel. Reducing travel time from 12hrs to 4hrs would be a product with a lot more demand than 7hrs to 3hrs to Europe.

snowwrestler 8mo ago

I'm excited for progress in supersonic flight because fast things can be qualitatively different. I first remember hearing this idea from Linus Torvalds, talking about developing Git. He said he works differently, not just faster, when merges are instant and easy. Since hearing that, I see the effect in other areas of life, and transportation is one. I travel differently when the flight is 3 hours as opposed to 7 or more. Shorter trips, less luggage, less advance planning, less exhaustion, etc. At first it will be available only at a premium, but that's how innovation usually goes. When the market finds something people love, capital seeks opportunities to lower the cost and increase the quantity. The real price of travel by aviation has declined dramatically over the last 50 years, for example. I've got friends and family all over the world... I would for sure go visit more often if it wasn't so darn long just to get there and back.

pacifi30 8mo ago

Why are we not focussing on rocket based travel so we can finally do 90 mins from Seattle to London :) Spacex and blue origin has already demonstrated heavy payload transport, why can we just move to this than work on supersonic

joelthelion 8mo ago

Not a word on the environmental impact. We need to be flying less, not faster. And yes, I know flying only makes roughly 5% of world emissions. It also turns out that these are some of the most avoidable emissions. We should be cutting them first.

koops 8mo ago
We're all of us speeding towards a cliff that ends in environmental disaster. And if you point that out, you get downvoted to invisibility on Hacker News and elsewhere.
Schiendelman 8mo ago
I spent a lot of my 20s and early 30s as an environmental activist. I'm now in my mid 40s. One of the biggest things I've learned is that the vast majority of people will never make that trade. We are going to heat up the Earth. And then we are going to deal with the consequences.

class3shock 8mo ago

Boom I swear boom spends more on puff pieces than any other aerospace company. They continuously make claims they will do things by certain dates that are unrealistic. They claim they will be delivering airplanes to United that would be in service in 2029: https://boomsupersonic.com/united https://boomsupersonic.com/united https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast-airplanes-from-start-up-boom-supersonic.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast... However new aircraft take 5-9 years to certify and they have not yet even built one! Not to mention new engines take a similar amount of time and they are supposedly building their own brand new engine, which is a substantially harder task. Now they are claiming the first "test" flight will be in 3 years despite the fact that they still don't have a plane or an engine built. I hope someone over their let United know they are going to be a little late. Their website hasn't amended to article to say they were wrong. I wonder if we can look to history to see how long it takes between when they say they will fly something and when it actually flies? Oh right, we can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1 "The original design was unveiled at Centennial Airport in Dove Valley, near Denver, Colorado, on November 15, 2016,[6] and it was initially intended to make its first subsonic flight in late 2017" "The XB-1 performed its first flight test on March 22, 2024, flown by test pilot Bill Shoemaker from Mojave Air and Space Port.[1]" They were only 7 years off but we all make mistakes. Astro Mechanica - LNG isn't used because weight needed for fuel tanks that will keep it cold enough to stay liquid cancels out any benefits. For anyone interested in a famous failure of a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan - I don't know what analysis they are doing that makes them think reducing the number of passengers and going to supersonic is possible while maintaining current ticket prices... but it's not. - Engine and plane makers are not allowed to run airlines. Anyone unfamiliar with the field can look up United Aircraft. - Their engine does sound like it's trying to do some cool things. I kinda suspect it's just a fun way to pass the time on the governments dime given all the other unrealistic stuff they are talking about though. Hermeus These folks are legit. Don't know if they will be successful but outsourcing the jet engine and focusing their work on the ramjet and the integration of the two makes alot of sense.

tim333 8mo ago
I was a bit disappointed with the Boom XB-1. They originally announced - designed to maintain a speed of Mach 2.2, with over 1,000 nautical miles. I thought cool. Then 7 years late they fly and - Mach 1.1 and no long–range. Then rather than develop it they say it's retired, we'll take orders for Overture now. I wonder what's going on there?

CivBase 8mo ago

> using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions What is this even supposed to mean? To me this comes across as "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed by a supersonic jet that can surpress sonic booms, so I shoehorned AI into the description to jazz it up." It makes me wonder why the author doesn't think the former is impressive enough on its own.

projektfu 8mo ago
Every data model is now AI.

dzonga 8mo ago

just for sake of clarity - people need to remember it took about 2 years to get the finest plane ever built i.e SR-71 (Blackbird) in the air. there's thing we lost we i.e skills, grit, creativity we might never recover from

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starkeeper 8mo ago

Also don't forget saftey as one of the things holding this back. It's pretty major.

bamboozled 8mo ago

I just think regular flying shouldn't suck so so so hard and I'd be happy to spend 24 hours flying. Economy is an absolute nightmare these days, premium economy is where economy should be. I'd love to be able to afford business or beyond but I honestly don't even want to try it because I know I won't want to go back.

aprilfoo 8mo ago

With all those fantastic claims defining "the future", it feels more like PR hunt for venture capital in those start-ups than a serious article.

kylehotchkiss 8mo ago

Why make planes faster when you can make them more uncomfortable and upsell more items mid-journey?

pdntspa 8mo ago

"Noise problem solved" from the "Rational Optimist Society" Sorry can't help but chuckle at this....

leopoldj 8mo ago

I just wanted to point out that Boom Aerospace is now mainly focused on delivering a Gas Turbine for power generation [1]. In an interview with CNBC Mr. Scholl talked about this pivot [2]. 1. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-power-ai-data-centers-with-superpower-natural-gas-turbines-adds-300-million-in-new-funding https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw

nephihaha 8mo ago

Concorde was extremely loud. I remember it flying over. But its main sin was being a European product not an American one. That said the US used to have the space shuttle and that has gone the same way.

4ndrewl 8mo ago

The 1973 sonic boom regs were there to protect the US airline industry, not citizens.