Twirrim3 days ago
> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range.
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
I share your skepticism, especially with their timeline. It has been some time since I looked at them closely, but they originally pitched developing their own supersonic capable turbofan to power their eventual production model. Especially with such a small team that seemed overly ambitious to me.
"This flight we're validating our model by pushing the real world to the limit. It should explode about 38s into the test and crash. We've cleared the expected area"
That being said, I share your skepticism of Boom as a company. As far as I know, they still don't have an engine for their production aircraft design.
The demonstrator was to validate some basic concepts they were promoting about being able to achieve supersonic flight without supersonic booms. It achieved that at relatively low cost, and gave them something to brag about, an indication of baseline competence at certifying airframes and possibly ticked off some investor boxes. There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform, so its not surprising they haven't gone to the expense of continuing to fly it. It's not going to be useful for most other stuff they might want to test, apart from perhaps their intended custom engines which are probably years away from being certified for flight tests, never mind hitting performance and reliability targets.
This is key to me.
I'm a layman in Aviation, so I'll unpack that.
The Boom XB-1 demonstrator (1) uses GEJ85: the General Electric J85 engines, as seen on military jets (2).
This is not the desired production jet's "Symphony" engine (3), which at a guess has to be both larger and more efficient?
So whatever is to be learned from the demonstrator, it doesn't tell us much about the final engine design.
In fact, all I know about this desired engine, is that Rolls-Royce isn't making it. (4)
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house? If they're making good progress, why are we hearing about how they're replacing excel as a design tool.
As I said in the other comment:
I'm not an expert, but this seems like the engine is on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure. i.e. Without engines, they have nothing but a glider.
And if Rolls-Royce thinks that it's either not technically or commercially feasible, then who can do it?
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Symphony
4) https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-split
So Rolls sank several years of investigation into it before cutting their losses.
From [3]: > Boom aims for production of the engine to begin in 2025 at the Overture factory at Greensboro, North Carolina
Mark your calendar ...
But Boom has a bunch of propulsion engineer openings so it looks like they're really going for it.
Sure there are counterexamples, but they have good reasons to think that this is more than double the difficulty of developing one of these parts. And that the engine will take longer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Delta_2#BAC_221
Airlines can optimise for this. Digital ID virtually eliminates security lines. Paying up for gate, t/o and landing spots takes care of the latter. There is a cost tradeoff for service in the airline business. An all-business airline flying Booms would almost necessarily have to pay up to negate these issues. (That or fly out of the FBO terminal.)
You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money. It doesn't matter, unless you're going to make flights from nowhere to nowhere. Doesn't sound like a business strategy to me.
Airlines absolutely choose whether to participate in various programs. Digital ID was cited for a reason.
And in some cases, the airlines have substantial control—Delta One has a separate security line at JFK.
> You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money
You don’t. You outbid someone else for the existing ones.
I'm actually surprised more airports don't have VIP level gates that the airlines can pay a premium for allowing them to charge a premium to their passengers. It'd be interesting to see where the price could be that would guarantee enough passengers willing to pay the premium for much reduced airport headaches.
The classist risk is already there with the pricing they have for first class seats. By making first class only planes, you can have economy only planes like Spirit. Then nobody would be complaining about first class since nobody would see first class. I see no downsides with this concept!
They all do. Delta’s is branded VIP services. They’ll meet you at the curb and shuttle you behind security and in a car to your plane.
But at that point, in most cases, fly private.
No such restriction exists upon private jets
I was once on a short internal US flight. We recognised an "elder statesman" politician, a Senator who owned property in the area of the city that we were going to.
He was seated at the front, and was given the opportunity to leave the aircraft a minute before anyone else - no luggage beyond a briefcase. Of course, by the time we deplaned he was nowhere to be seen, by then he was likely in the back his car already. Who needs a separate gate when the VIP can be guided through ahead of the rest, through some usually-closed door?
So when Boom makes a commercial airliner that hits 1000+ mph with the same availability and turnaround time as a typical passenger plane then I'll pay attention. Until then, it's for rich people who can buy their own plane.
Rich people can already buy private jet that is much more comfortable than supersonic one.
https://boomsupersonic.com/overture
What is the market for Boom?
The XB-1 made use of an atmospheric trick to minimise boom propagation to ground level on one test flight, so well-known in fact that Concorde sometimes used it to accelerate as it coasted-out without an audible ground-level boom. Unfortunately that trick runs out at about M1.17.
In fact the chase plane for the Boom XB-1 is a T-38, derived from the N-156F. It can outrun the XB-1.