American Airlines announced yesterday that it planned to buy 20 planes from Boom Supersonic, whose Overture supersonic plane—currently in development and not scheduled to carry passengers until 2029—is alleged to fly about twice as fast as today's commercial jets.
That sounds great, of course, if they can pull it off, but then there's this:
Boom has said Overture will be able to fly over 600 routes in half the time those flights currently take—such as Miami to London in under five hours, and Los Angeles to Honolulu in three hours—at fares comparable with current business-class prices.
Hmmm. You may or may not be aware of this, but a typical business-class seat costs about five times more than a coach seat. So that's a pretty expensive way to save a few hours.
Among the vast vacationing middle class, this won't matter. They won't pay fares like this. Among the rich, it also doesn't matter. They'll pay the higher fare without blinking. Hell, they'll pay for a business-class Overture seat, and God only knows how much that will cost. The key, as always, is corporate executives and the upper tier of the middle class. They'll make up the bulk of the market, and it's unclear how much they'll be willing to pay for a squashed¹ but faster flight to Heathrow.
Based on the Concorde experience, which was mostly marketed to the jet set and eventually failed for lack of passengers, I have my doubts about this, especially since the Overture will almost certainly come onto the market late and with fewer features than promised. We'll see in 2029 I guess.
¹At least, I assume that a standard seat will be fairly squashed. This plane is likely to be right on the edge of being a moneymaker, and that means lots of seats and high prices.
I saw an AP article about this - reprinted in the Seattle Times this morning. There's some skepticism about the 2029 delivery date and whether that's realistic given Boeing's experience getting FAA approval. Granted, a good bit of that is self-inflicted wounds, but still... One other analyst was concerned that Boom (really?) Supersonic has not settled on an engine manufacturer:
"With a supersonic jet, you don't design a plane, you design an engine first."
The name was inspired by noted air pirate Michael Dukakis, famous for bombing planes during his futile run for president as the Democrat nominee in 1988.
There's a good Youtube video on this, by a former engineer. The engine was something he particularly pointed out as an issue of concern - there's no real good supersonic passenger engine out there, and unlike subsonic turbofans engines there haven't been many years of work in getting them to the fuel efficiency and reliability that a profitable passenger airline needs.
There are military engines, but they're designed for performance first and fuel efficiency and cost-effectiveness last.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0y8hV2kfJc&t=1s
Have to think that what could make it worthwhile would be special treatment on the ground at both ends of the flight. Expedited TSA, expedited check-in, expedited baggage pick-up, basically setting it up like a commercial version of flying private. Otherwise you'd still be getting there 2-3 hours ahead of flight time and jostling the same crowds and lines. Other than the novelty value, how significant would the gain be?
Maybe even air taxi to the airport?
I gotta say I agree with your analysis. The overhead/hassle of flying is so high that I'd preferably drive LA to Vegas (4hrs, absolutely), LA to SF (6 hrs, usually), or even LA to Phoenix (8hrs, at least sometimes). Each of those is nominally less than an hour flight, but throw in getting to/from the airport, general hanging around waiting, rental car hassle, etc and ...
Conventional business class gets you a lot of that, particularly expedited check-in, baggage and TSA Pre. A few times, I've hired private expediters to get me through customs and immigration, and it is much more pleasant, especially when one doesn't know the language.
I only knew a couple of people who flew on the Concorde. The big problem, they reported, was the heat. Flying that fast caused frictional heating, and the plane's cooling system wasn't really up to it. There are a lot of new materials being used in aircraft skins nowadays, so maybe they can avoid this problem.
The real problem with the Concorde was that it had limited range. It couldn't fly a trans-Pacific route. That left the North Atlantic and Europe to the Mideast and Mideast to Far East back when those latter routes were relatively sparse. If they don't have an engine lined up, they don't know the plane's range.
The real innovation in commercial flying has been the lie-flat sleeping pod. Sure it takes 14 or 18 hours to get somewhere, but for five or ten thousand dollars you can be comfortable. That rules out most of the middle class, but there is a markte above economy-plus but below private jets. Private jets cost at least $20K for a share and then $10K an hour to fly.
I can imagine the usefulness of having the option to fly supersonic when hours matter following an announcement that a catastrophic coronal mass ejection is headed straight towards Earth.
But other than that, meh.
Maybe it is just me, but it seems like accelerating a can of monkeys to these speeds _should_ be expensive.
Of course there are uses, but the situations where a getting a body to the other side of the planet is worth the energy consumption are few. The telephone killed most of them; the internet, most of the rest. So you're left with senior government officials, but not so senior they get military flights, hugeCo execs occasionally, and egos attached to very wealthy bodies as your market.
Sounds like Concorde II to me.
Boom! --one crack up and that's the end of it.
As a former aerospace engineer, I can tell you: Nah.
The average speed of a commercial jet has gone *down* in the past decades, because efficiency matters more than speed. The laws of aerodynamics haven't changed since the Concord.
Yep, this thing is going to be a fuel hog. Not as much as the Concorde (it's not going to go as fast), but much worse than a Dreamliner.
On the other hand, they're planning to carry 65-80 passengers on each Overture. If they're all Business-class seats and they can fill them up, then that's about double what a 787 can carry in Business-class passengers. Maybe the math pencils out - a couple airlines have placed orders.
And that fuel usage is going to drive up the cost beyond current business class prices. Think current 1st class prices.
Even if that 787 were configured in an all business class layout?
Thank you. As another former Boeing engineer:
1. As you say, still more drag at supersonic speeds
2. Still true that supersonic aerodynamics work poorly in subsonic region, so lost of fuel burned taking off
3. Also true what another poster said, that sub-sonic engines ahev evolved a lot through iteration, but supersonic passenger jet engines are way different
The new part is global warming. It will guzzle fuel. Why does anyone think this is OK just to pamper rich people?
Actually the main thing that matters is the sonic boom and how much that ends up impacting people who live with 100 miles or so of a major airport. Anyone who has ever been on the ground anywhere in the vicinity of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier can tell you that it is no little thing. Your whole house shakes. Half the state of Florida shook every time the space shuttle landed.
Unless they can solve the sonic boom problem (which they can't) getting permission to fly these jets in or out of most US airports on a regular basis will be difficult.
There is work being done in that regard: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/x59-nasa-supersonic-plane-scn/index.html
They're only planning on trans-oceanic routes for now, which means they'll have to fly out to sea a bit before picking up speed.
NASA is actually testing supersonic jets designed to have little or no sonic boom, but that won't be the Overture (a low- or no-boom plane is basically long and thin).
If we taxed CO2 emissions properly (i.e., as a disincentive, perhaps with proceeds going to carbon capture) we would expect see a move toward slower rather than faster air travel and a general decline in passenger-miles.
Probably true. OTOH, the article says these planes will be using carbon-neutral fuels. Not sure quite how that works, but that's what they say. Also not sure why that plan would make sense of these plans.
Market speak. Whatever fuel it uses could be used in regular planes to displace fossil fuel.
They know it will guzzle fuel, they know that will be a criticism, so they use weasel words.
We've been seeing a move to slower air travel. Modern jets are slower than 1960s era jets. No one flies mach 0.85+ anymore.
We haven't seen a decrease in air travel. The new slower jets are also a lot cheaper to run with high bypass turbofan engines. My first cross country flight was a $287 Apex 21 day advance purchase fare, round trip in 1977. That was one of the discounted fares under regulation. You can find fares for that same route for around $280 nowadays. Granted, they included seat selection, a larger seat, meals, baggage check and other amenities, but still, that's pretty amazing.
(The $300 transcontinental price point dates back to the 19th century. That's what it cost to book a boat to Panama, cross-isthus travel and a boat north to San Francisco. That's what it cost on the transcontinental railroad. That's what it cost in the 1930s when regular air service started. Weird, huh?)
The issue with concorde (well, one of them) was that going Paris-NYC was a nice time saver: 3h15 minutes so you arrive *before* you depart (leave Paris at noon, arrive at 9:15am at JFK). That's amazing for your productivity.
But in the other direction, you would leave at 9pm and arrive at 6am and be 3 hours in the plane - no time to sleep. Or waste the whole day, leave at 9am arrive at 6pm. So people would fly West on concorde, and return with the good old business class in a 747 in much more comfy overnight flight.
And having planes empty in one direction is very suboptimal for your business...
Concorde was single-class seating. I wouldn’t expect this aircraft to be any different.
There might be a market for it if it's actually at a price comparable to existing business-class seats, but I'm skeptical they'll get either that price point or that there's a decent-sized market for this.
Concorde at least had utility back when being on a flight meant a business traveler couldn't do anything work-related while in the air, so getting the flight done quick was very useful. Nowadays business class on conventional jets have fully reclining seats and on-board WiFi, which means that business travelers can work on the plane and time flights so they can sleep for much of it.
The rich won't pay for this because they've got private jets.
Handy for sending your assistant to London to pick up the watch you left on the nightstand and have it back by dinner.
Or, ferrying your au pair to a legal abortionist, & still having her home in time to get the kids from school & not leaving the wife any the wiser.
The scandalous, for its era, bestseller "Airport" had payroll deduction for pilots who paid for stewardess's abortions back in the 1960s. It was listed as Miscellaneous.
Or a circling airborne abortion clinic, flying above the temporal authority of the state.
It will always be a small market. Low plane count to amortize huge R&D expense. Concorde eventually delivering modest operating profits, but it never paid for th R&D cost, which was subsidized because it was a national pride thing.
The big financial dividend was that Airbus grew out of the Concorde cooperation.
Hasn't Zoom removed much of the need to haul meat around the world for business purposes?
I would rather see a greater investment in train travel in the US. Faster trains. More destinations. More extensive schedules, with more frequent routes. Better on-time records. I'm omitting my unfortunate Amtrak stories; you're welcome.
Airplane flights are super carbon generators, and hyper speeds are hyper generators. We really don't "need" this at this time. A good, reliable train system with the conveniences noted above could easily replace many air routes, and ideally, what with the TSA thing, be just as fast but maybe even less costly.
For luxury world travel experiences, why not cruise zeppelins? They'd have the added advantage of many, MANY fewer cabins than the floating tenements of the sea that call themselves "cruise ships."
Zeppelins? Even when using helium as the lifting gas, so no Hindenburg, they still have insufficient structural strength to handle “weather”
The Hindenburg was much more about the flammable coating on the fabric than the hydrogen.
Don't care much about saving a few hours in flight for an extra $5-10K per ticket, if they can't finish the construction project on the Van Wyck, which has been going on for multiple decades. Driving into /out of JFK is a fucking nightmare, especially if you are on the other side of any NYC bridge or tunnel. 2 hours in the car followed by 2 hours in the terminal (to get through TSA) and assuming you are not delayed/cancelled. Lets fix this before spending a whole lot more jet fuel per passenger mile than current modern aircraft. The Boom is years and $billions in the future, assuming they can get someone to build the engines.
I remember taking the Van Wyck to Rockaway Beach from northern Queens when I was a kid in the 1960s. Sometimes we'd stop at Idlewild to watch the jets take off and land. The Van Wyck was ALWAYS under construction. You mean to say it is STILL under construction. Wow, some things never change.
Business travel is tax-deductible so we all get to subsidize it.
If you are a high level executive or attorney who charges $1000 per hour or more I can see them paying for high ticket prices, especially heading East as the commentator above stated. My recollection for the Concorde is that it was marginally profitable though it took forever (and inflation) to pay for the capital costs.
ahhh...but they bill for travel too--so shorter times mean less billable hours.
😉
Ongoing operation was modestly profitable, but R&D was written off. Including R&D it lost money. R&D was subsidized so taxpayers took the loss.
But the Concorde cooperation taught the European aerospace firms they could work together and that led to Airbus. In that sense it worked out financially.
The Vox article on this had a "bless their hearts" moment at the end:
"“If they do it — God bless them — they’ve really accomplished something,” Bednarek said. “It’s going to prove to be a lot more challenging than some of the celebratory advertising that’s coming out right now would seem to suggest.”"
https://www.vox.com/recode/22508975/united-supersonic-plane-concorde-boom-hermeus-virgin-nasa
To save fuel, catapult launches.
Or just fling people with a trebuchet.
Why do I have the feeling Elon Musk must be behind this?
Nah, he’ll want to put Hype-your-loops in instead…
No, paedo-free submersibles.
Concorde was a joint French British development. The contract stipulated that if one party abandoned the program they would pay stiff penalties, so the French and the British found themselves trapped in a badly overbudget development project. The result was that the governments sucked up the development cost and it was up to the airlines (Air France and BOAC) to run operating profit. Even this was not achievable. In the end the Concord was scrapped because it struggled to turn an operating profit and there was significant danger from tire failures sending shrapnel into the fuel tanks on take-off. I have been on Concordes in various museums and the effect is similar to being on a submarine; narrow fuselage with tiny windows.
Britain and France thought they would finally dominate commercial aviation with the Concorde. Instead, the US cancelled its SST and Boeing built the 747 which became the new queen of the skies. Years later the French finally built the A380 to top the 747, except Boeing built the 787, an ultra-efficient twin jet much better suited for the new point to point flight paradigm (as opposed to hub and spoke). The 787 would have been a world beater except for Boeing CEO’s Jim McNerney and Harry Stonecipher. Advocates of Jack Welsh and Milton Friedman they thought keeping the stock price high was more important than building a good airplane. McNerney outsourced the design and the production (hey, it worked for him at 3M where he outsourced post it notes) only to discover he had abandoned the world foremost airplane designer and manufacturer (Boeing) to go with a bunch of inexperienced vendors. The result was a great airplane which was years behind schedule and will never make money for Boeing. The badly bungled development of the 787 was the prequel to the even more disastrous development of the 737 MAX (hey, we don’t have time to test all this new software, call it good and ship it, if we don’t meet the schedule the stock price might drop, what’s the worst that could happen?).
Yeah...going away from the engineers, moving their HQ away from their manufacturing and development, etc., really hurt the company. Now the HQ moved again, to DC..don't see that helping....
Defense companies try to spread the manufacturing over as many congressional districts as possible. Logistic and coordination nightmare--but gets you lots of support in Congress for your program. Not as viable in the "open" market....
I've long maintained Boeing should have been taken into government receivership. Those A-holes have essentially ruined a once great US firm—and that has played a critical role in national defense.
PS—Is the prognosis for the 787 really that grim? I realize the rollout was severely delayed and botched, but I was under the impression it's still a very good product...
Boeing makes money on every 787 it builds, but they will not recover the development costs.
By most accounts the 787 is a great airplane, but building the carbon fiber fuselage has proved challenging. The 787 just emerged from a year long production hold ordered by the FAA, a result of the poor quality of the fuselage sections produced by outside vendors and Boeing workers violating written procedures and using unqualified methods to assemble them. When the fuselage sections don’t mate the assemblers were supposed to carefully shim them. Instead they just turned up their torque wrenches and tightened the bolts till everything was snug.
There should be criminal penalties for cutting corners like that with something like an airplane, not just when it's revealed after a disaster.
I agree halfway. I don't think Boeing made the effort they needed to establish quality control in S. Carolina. They wanted to pay low wages.
At the same time I work in manufacturing and deep training is really hard. To use Parnell's example shimming takes a lot of work and finesse. Torqueing harder is easy and fast and seems OK to the eye.
The question of who is cutting the corner gets muddy. If the line worker was told to shim and not torque harder, but torqueing harder is easier and the damage is not obvious, is the line worker a criminal? Not necessarily. Did the supervisor watch closely? Was not over-torquing repeatedly emphasized? Did inspectors get suspicious when too few shims were used?
Same with the supervisors, I could write a similar paragraph.
Yes, intentionally cutting corners on safety critical assembly should be criminal, but in the practical world sometimes it is diligence when hyper-vigilance is needed, and no one had an intention to cut a corner.
The modest operating profit Concorde eventually achieved didn't stop the planes from aging, and maintenance was rising.
Concorde did teach the English and French aerospace companies they could successfully cooperate, it is not clear Airbus would have happened without Concorde. In that sense it worked out in the end. Europe now has a thriving passenger jet industry.
If they haven't figured out how to muffle sonic booms, they won't be allowed to go supersonic over land. That cuts into the time premium considerably. It's part of what killed Concorde.
On the other hand, what do you want to bet their main target customer is the Pentagon? A supersonic cargo plane has General written all over it.
The ad says it’s Optimized for Speed, Safety and Sustainability.
So there’s that.
All things being equal, the energy needed to get up to speed, and the energy needed to maintain speed both increase as the velocity squared.
Go twice as fast, use 4x the fuel.
Oversimplified, but it shows you can't go twice as fast without drastically increasing energy requirements.
For those inclined here is a less oversimplified version.
1. The velocity squared law is about drag, but aerodynamics is about more than drag, it is about the engines and the lift/drag of the wings, and how high you fly makes a big difference. So it is complicated.
2. Subsonic and supersonic aerodynamics are way different regimes. If you could magically launch a plane straight into the supersonic regime you could have a decently efficient supersonic plane. But it could not take off or land. A supersonic plane is an ugly compromise because it has to fly sub-sonically as well. So it does both poorly.
Engines that operate at supersonic speeds are quite different from ordinary engines. Suffice it to say that they don't have huge fans, as all modern passenger jet engines do. Jet engine development is hugely expensive - $1B+. An engine for Overture would have to be a derivative of an existing commercial engine, but still a costly development. Using an existing fighter jet engine doesn't sound plausible. Export and other controls on military hardware would present massive problems. Overture says that their aircraft will be able to "supercruise" - operate at supersonic speeds without afterburner. The F22 is the only operational aircraft that can do this. It's an easy claim to make when you don't have an engine OEM signed up, as is the case per Wikipedia. Until Overture has a commitment from GE, Pratt & Whitney, or Rolls-Royce to supply engines, this plane is vaporware.
Yes, from what I have read the Concorde had a good engine design, but it was way different from both jetliner and military designs.
Even if you spend the money there is no reason to expect it would be as refined as regular jet engines which have been tweaked for decades.