Well, Boom is not any aerospace company, they want to make supersonic planes.
Supersonic travel is expensive and environmentally unfriendly, and it will probably always be, because it requires more energy, because physics. All that for the minor advantage of saving a couple of hours on select flights. What it means is that it is a privilege for the wealthy (because it is expensive for what you get), at the expense of everyone else (because of the environment). So of course it is going to be unpopular, except to the wealthy in question.
It doesn't mean Boom can't be successful because the public opinion is negative, if the rich can pay. I am still not convinced though, after all, Concorde didn't fail technically (and it still flew after that one accident), it failed commercially. Boom is not taking the easy path here, since it is a technically hard problem with a dubious market.
As I am currently sitting on a flight from Tokyo to SFO I would greatly appreciate the flight taking half the time. Boom should be as efficient current aircraft. They will operate at 60K feet where the drag is much less and fly for less time. Their engines are being designed to run on 80% biofuels. But let's see how it turns out in the end.
If you are not, then you are probably not making the right comparison. Supersonic travel will absolutely not be for those who are flying economy right now and complaining about reclining, legroom, and crying babies. The kind of things that make flights feel very long, and yet, that's how most people fly despite much superior alternatives, because it is cheaper.
Judging by how much it cost to fly on Concorde, it is reasonable to assume that a supersonic ticket will be equivalent in price to first class, or at least a very good business class.
It means a seat that can recline 180°, good enough to sleep on, an internet connection suitable for remote work, as I expect it to become standard in the near future, a decent meal and some privacy. In these conditions, saving a few hours may not be as desirable as it is in economy class. Knowing that in order to shorten your trip, you will be sacrificing some of that comfort, or pay even more, maybe getting close to private jet territory.
In this case, yes, upgraded with miles to first. I have made this fight ~500 times over the last 15 years, in coach, premium, business and first. While first is nice, the hours back are still worth more.
I have always traveled coach, and should I fly first class, I would definitely want my flight to last as long as possible, for the experience, but I guess the novelty wears out.
But 500 flights is crazy, one flight every 10 days for 15 years... I certainly understand why you would want to fly supersonic. But now I am curious... why would someone fly that much with the remote communication abilities we have now? I heard that in order to do business in Japan, it is important to be there, so I guess that if you want to come back home sometimes, it is hard to avoid, but still, that's a lot of time flying.
One bit of clarification, I am counting the flight both ways. On average I would fly to Japan from SFO one a month, sometime twice. I would always have some work in Japan then half the time I would need to also fly to Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, NZ, etc.
1. The remote calls have gotten better but 15+ years ago not so much.
2. Timezone and remote calls are hard.
3. Face to face is very important to be able to build understanding and also judgement (you need to read the room, which you cannot do over a call).
4. Building relationships requires time not in a meeting, dinner or drinks with a client.
5. Having a relationship with your local team requires the same.
6. In Asia the foreigner flying moves the needle. It is a sign of respect for the customers that you value and will support them.
7. Languages. Unless you are fluent in the local language remote meetings are difficult.
8. Nature of the company. Im my case all 3 companies were startups. They are a risk for the customer. Your willingness to be there helps them feel more comfortable with the risk.
Durning the pandemic there was no flying of course and it was great to be home. I now have a new startup and we just started doing business in Japan at the start of this year. I have hired the same local team that I have worked with at 3 companies. They are amazing! However by the end of this year I will have visited 6 times. Reestablishing the connections lost durning the pandemic has already moved the needle enough that it will materially affect the success of my startup. To be fair, come next year I do not feel I will need to visit every month, but once a quarter is going to be required.
For me cutting flights times in 1/2 is a major win.
As to first class, yes the novelty goes away. It is just another segment of a very long day.
> Boom should be as efficient [as] current aircraft.
Don't know where this so-called efficiency should come from, but this is a statement that doesn't seem to be based in reality.
Except for the techno-bro startup take that the incumbents are so imbued with themselves that they dropped the ball, which rational explanations are put forward to explain how the current manufacturers are doing a bad job?
To fly at Mach 2 (or 1.8 as boom now seems to be targeting once they realised the difficulty of the task ahead) you still have immutable laws of physics you need to overcome, and that's going to cost an unreasonable amount of fuel.
If it's only for the rich then the prices will be high. Meaning the capitalist mechanism of resource distribution will be even higher (more paid by the rich received as income by the non-rich). It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else. It also employs people. It also drives technology forward. And ultimately it does let people travel in less time, and why wouldn't we want that? To some extent emissions are not as bad as you'd think since they are being emitted over less time in the course of a shorter journey. Success in this category will also drive competition in every metric and work to bring cleaner, shorter flights to everyone over time.
There is a lot to love about the idea of supersonic flight.
> It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else.
That's not how airline economics work. The first class passengers (the ones who could afford to leave for supersonic) subsidize the economy seats[1]. If they left you would probably see worse prices, worse amenities or both.
There are airlines that don't have business or first class seats (e.g. Spirit), and they're generally a terrible experience.
On the other hand demand for premium seats would be down, lowering their price and making a nicer ride more accessible. Overall this would net to lower prices for the same distribution of amenities on a given plane ride. Supply and demand theory would seem to suggest that equal supply with lower demand leads to lower prices overall. Supply could of course adjust as more people move to supersonic, but that means more people are now getting a better product than before. And if supply of regular jets remains (they're pretty expensive to just have sit there and not try to use for income), lower-end fares and seat availability invite people at the lower end of the resource spectrum to now buy more plane tickets.
Not fully convinced by the "will make fares lighter for everyone else" argument. The economics of planes are heavily weighted towards the passengers up front - business & premium economy make more profit per sqft for the airline than seats at the back. So I'd imagine that a reduction in demand for premium seats could actually increase prices.
The flipside of this is that the passengers in the back, while not as profitable in the "$/sqft" equation, are what merit the airline buying a 777-300 or A350.
If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with things beginning to approach JSX's (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.
Computers used to be very, very expensive. Residential telephone lines were acquired through mortgage a couple decades ago in my country so being expensive now doesn't mean expensive forever.
unlike with computers, there's some pretty obvious barriers that limit the efficiency of supersonic airplanes. your volume has a strict lower bound from the size of passengers and luggage, your engines have a lower bound since there's only so much air you can push against, and your drag has a lower bound of a perfectly smooth aerofoil that produces lift and can fit the people and luggage. Even if you take the most optimistic assumptions that didn't violate physics, your fuel burn isn't going to be reasonable.
That's a thing called a rocket. Those have different constraints (e.g. energy proportional to mgh to get out of the atmosphere, dramatically less efficient engines since you now need to carry your oxidizer, etc. It seems vaguely plausible that for very long distances (e.g. New York to China), a rocket could be more efficient than an airplane, but it does seem pretty unlikely that a rocket can be as efficient as a normal airplane.
A ballistic missile flight to go from New York to Sydney would take 40 minutes. The Concorde, travelling at Mach 2, if it had the range to do that flight, would take 7.5 hours, or 16 hours on a regular jet, if you can get a direct flight (except there currently aren't any).
Plus the added benefit of looking exactly like a ballistic missile attack on radar. :D Hope nobody with a twitchy trigger finger ever mistakes your flight for one! And also hope that no enemy will try to disguise their incapacitating strike as a scheduled flight.
No, but there are nothing I'm aware of changing the economics. Electronics were coming down in price for decades before computers reached the average house (of course when they reach the average house is debatable - on one extreme the Atari 2600 had a CPU, on the other there are still remote villages that are just adopting phones )
What’s expensive, largely, is the fuel to shove something through the air faster than the speed of sound. Short of sci-fi frictionless materials cheap enough to cover an aircraft, I don’t think you’re going to see a big breakthrough there.
I agree but not because "boohoo people aren't nice enough to us" – because it's a tough market to break into with (justifiably) high regulatory scrutiny, high R&D costs and few investors who know what they are doing.
It's very natural that any company be subject to scrutiny – this doesn't mean that you shouldn't set up a company or that the environment for setting up a company isn't favourable.
