I do think there is a need and market for faster than sound air travel. We have the technology to even minimize the sonic booms for over land travel.
Still, it would take an enormous amount of capital to get a new company up and running. I would love to see an innovated tesla-like company in the aerospace industry though. It's badly needed, IMO.
I hope in 10 years or so we say: yeah 10 years back we laughed at Boom but now they are booming business.
I know several people (starting by my brother) who build their own plane (granted, it was a two-seater several several times louder than a grass-mower and seemingly slower, but you get the idea). One plane feels fairly doable as far as hard- to-predict financial issues go — if you have engineers who know super-sonic, and I can’t imagine having the idea without.
Commercial requirements literally start at "one aircraft that gets the wings overstressed (if not actually snapped off) during destructive testing" and the requirements continue steeply onwards from there. You can figure on having it built by FAA-certified mechanics as well.
The FAA likes having a paper trail if the wings fall off (an extremely common problem with ultralight/sport aircraft built by non-certified personnel). Not OK when you're carrying passengers for hire.
I can completely see the expected extra cost of having to make two prototypes — and, yes, my first reaction to the article was: “please, please, let them have a billion in VC money”. But the truth is, the success ratio of projects about “we want to make a plane that goes that fast” seems far higher than success ratios of any company.
The business side sounds a lot more doable, given how many people fly those destinations and would like to do it faster.
I suspect they intend to become a bigger company.
[edit] As someone who flies LA/DC fairly regularly I do have to mention my favorite record of the SR-71 doing that flight in under 65 minutes.
So, I think that high-altitude sparse-population daytime routes could be developed that would admit supersonic flight over much of North America.
Of course being a little no-name company won't help matters much here, but I expect that actual production of this would involve a partnership (or probably buyout) with one of the big name companies that have a lot of congressmen on their payroll.
There has also been a lot of research into minimizing Sonic Booms since the 70s. Military jets typically don't care, but passenger jets could definitely benefit.
It's a good way to kick everyone in a large region out of their zone. If this was a constant occurrence, work may quickly cease, or become greatly diminished.
And I do wish humans where mindful about the noise pollution the dump where 'nobody lives'. The noise emitted by shipping vessels is having a harming effect on sea life.
Concorde was really, really loud --- a lot of that was due to being a really old plane with old engines (aircraft have gotten way quieter since the 1970s), but even back then it was considered loud:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3581192.stm
It was exempt from the usual noise regulations and on takeoff it'd set of car alarms in the airport carparks.
I still miss it, despite the noise. I'd hear the noise and look up, and there'd be this beautiful delta-wing shape slipping through the clouds...
...yeah, yeah, I know, being dull is an accomplishment in itself, and the duller aircraft are the better they are, and the one thing that every passenger pilot in the world wants is a thoroughly uninteresting flight. But, dammit, they're still so dull.
I miss Concorde.
Boom's Kenrick Waithe worked on that same project when he was at Gulfstream and when he was at NASA.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
This whole "engineering vs physics" question reminds me of the misunderstandings people have of modern radio technology. Yes, in the 1920s they had to divide the spectrum into exclusive-use bands so that any particular use could transmit and receive clearly, but that was a limitation of engineering, not of physics. In the 2010s that is not a limitation we face, in general. Likewise, I expect that with modern materials and engineering software, progress can be made on the sonic boom issue.
If - via engineering, physics, magic or whatever - sonic booms can be minimized to the point of being indistinguishable from general background noise (or even only as intrusive as current subsonic airliners), I could be convinced that an SST project has a bright future. Until then, I don't think that they will - your first post mentioned that "the whole house shaking" didn't really seem to be hardship when it happened during the day; I'm merely commenting that there are some studies that indicate society as a whole isn't so accepting.
I think any design that literally goes "boom" over land, even a little, isn't going to work. It's too much of an open legal target.
The design really does need to be damn near silent, or at least closer to a mild and unobjectionable "whomp", to have any hope of commercial success.
Cruising above 60000 ft the boom from a larger aircraft might be noticed but not be objectionably loud.
Transonic (approximately Mach 0.80 - 1.2) flight uses significantly more fuel than subsonic flight does. Business jets like the Gulfstream G550 burn more fuel at M0.9 than regional Boeing 717(MD-95) at M0.75 with 4 times more passengers.
The F-22 Raptor can supercruise at M1.6, with half the range compared to cruise at M0.85 similar to other fighters.
If Boom can optimize an aircraft for supersonic transport it would still be expensive to operate. For comparison, no US operator has all business class scheduled flights from LA-NY, and British Airways flies their all business class NY-London flights in an VIP A320 series jet that cruises at M0.7 which is slower than most airliners on the route.
There has never been a supersonic passenger aircraft built with modern turbofan engines.
Test pilots have reported that a Gulfstream G550 airframe can handle supersonic flight, and the BR710 turbofan engines can handle it. The limit is the engine intake design.
With an optimized intake, its entirely possible the fuel consumption at M2.2 would be comparable to ~M0.98
that is one of the major issues here. Modern turbofans on large passenger planes like 787, 380, etc... are that efficient in major part because of high by-pass ratio. Which is not really an option for 2Mach+ speed.
As somebody mentioned, more comfortable 0.85Mach flight would be preferable in many situations to uncomfortable and very expensive 2Mach. If i were starting something like this i'd go straight for suborbital SFO to Singapore in under couple hours. Technology-level wise not that different, money is no issue in that segment (Branson's $200K is not that far from super-premium-business class for your priceless CEO) and there is always large money-no-issue fallback customer - military.
That remains to be seen. They don't even have an engine yet, so this is still firmly in the "we'll see" category.
This is not a field that's amenable to "disruption". Cutting corners means that dozens of people plummet to their deaths, not to mention the abrupt end of your airline as their families sue you into oblivion. If you try to play this like Uber and flout the regulations, the FAA and EAA will ground and impound your gear so fast your head will spin, and rightly so. Even a test aircraft is a gigantic tank full of explosive fuel hurtling through the air on a couple flimsy wings. When things go wrong people die, and the FAA does not play games.
Airlines are an incredibly low-margin business in the best case, and supersonic airliners in particular are a very niche market and have immense operating expenses (to purchase and maintain the airplane and to slake its immense thirst for fuel). The Concorde's operators could never make it profitable.
Never say never, but this just seems like fantasy. Supersonic airliners are a problem domain that has been pored over by engineers for decades, six engineers are not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and solve all the technical problems, then get it certified, then start an airline. Each of those is a problem that requires a national-scale corporation to handle.
If you want to get and idea of the magnitude of the regulatory hurdles in a domain that most here will understand, google DO-178C. The mountains of documentation that you have to produce for the software will push any integrated avionics development effort well into the hundreds of millions, unless they plan on using bog standard off-the-shelf parts, and even then they'll have to deal with the flight control system, which will have to be custom by necessity. For some google food, search on 'wcet analysis', 'structural coverage analysis, 'MCDC analysis', 'requirements traceability', 'stack analysis', etc. There are huge hurdles to leap through to get certified, and that's just for the software.
I hate being a wet blanket :(.
OTOH, if they can get capital in the 5-10+ billion range, poach all the best folks from Boeing, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, GE, UTC, Gulfstream, etc. etc. etc. (which will involve setting up offices in Seattle, Phoenix, Cedar Rapids, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Savannah, the UK, France, etc. -- the aviation scene is a bit older, people have families, and are not so keen to move), then they might actually pull it off. Which would be awesome. And I'd totally be in (if they set up an office in my area, that is).
It also probably helps significantly that they could fly unmanned missions right away to make money while working out the bugs. You can't fly an uncertified aircraft for commercial purposes.
That's also the figure for just the Falcon-9 rocket. The Dragon cost another $800M. The engines were also developed in-house and may not be factored into that cost either (can't tell). So the total system is costing north of $1.1B.
The Boom model looks to be about the same size as a regional airliner, or a small narrowbody. For some recent points of comparison: the Bombardier CRJ1000 (developed 2007-2012) has a flyaway cost of $46M [1] and an estimated development cost of $300M [1]. A small narrowbody like the Bombardier Cseries costs $72-82M each and cost $5.4B to develop [3]. The Embraer E-jet E2 series (a second iteration on the E-jet airframe) is estimated to cost $1.7B [4].
It's much easier to develop iterations on a single airframe than to certify a new airframe from scratch. And those are all conventional construction, no carbon fiber or anything like that. And while you can develop components in-house - those need to be certified too. So much like any Not-Invented-Here syndrome - you really need to ask the question of whether you want to be a company who makes airplanes, or a company who makes airplane parts.
You can certainly do it some cheaper, but probably not a factor of 10. Overall I think Embraer tends to be one of the more budget-minded manufacturers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CRJ700_series
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/crj1000-takes-on-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CSeries
[4] http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/embraer-e-jet-e...
Seriously, I could start listing the things you can accomplish with one and not the other and I would never run out of steam.
Was the LON-NYC flight time the problem, though? I think that to go door-to-door right now you spend 50% of the time in the air and the other 50% on the ground.
With this company, you'll be spending 3.5 hours in the air and 8 hours getting to and from airports and through security.
[1] http://www.londoncityairport.com/travelandbooking/page/check...
That, I think, still is an open question. Someone must think there is a decent chance it will be, but if this were a no-brainer, there would be multiple players in this market. Also, oil price fluctuations, the bane of any airline company, will hit those running these planes harder.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/southwest-fuel-hedging-overvie...
Actually it's with the technology currently in use with supersonic flight that there is this large amount of noise. It's technically possible to reach supersonic without the boom and NASA is currently working on it with some contractors. I hope it pans out well; I would love to be able to fly between BWI and SFO in 2 hours.
http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-building-a-jet-that-brea...
As someone who travels to the south pacific every year (mostly in economy seating), I strongly disagree. 15h flights are no picnic, in any class. I'll stand if it would get me there in 6-7h - that is a dream.
Agreed. I spent 5 of the most uncomfortable hours of my life on an airplane from JFK to San Diego, being 6'1 and not particularly slim. Thereafter, I upgraded my seats on that flight to Economy Plus. I guess I could stand a 2 hour flight like that, but not too much more. Getting me there faster, but in a more cramped space won't make me feel better.
Security, etc. is worse of course--though that's largely outside of the airline's control.
(edit: maybe not much on the slow-down: see Concorde data via link below)
Granted, if the Concorde shows up and needs to circle the airport for 20 minutes then that's the same delay.
One of the reasons Concord "failed" is that it could never fly supersonic over land and had to start slowing long before the destination otherwise it would overshoot (along with fuel costs causing Concord to be more expensive than business class).
NYC-LON seems like the one market where this enables something fundamentally new (well, Concorde did); single-day business trips between two major business centers which were otherwise a full day apart.
Transpacific flights would be nice, too, but cutting an already absurdly long flight in half doesn't make as big a difference. I personally would generally prefer an F cabin + great Ka-band Internet for 14h, vs. a coach/Concorde sized seat for 7h.
I wonder how long until there's a Business Jet variant of this, or a Government/Military/Scientific version -- the operating costs of commercial aircraft tend to be much less than purpose-built government aircraft, so there's probably a mission/role for it.