Boom Supersonic raises $33M to build the fastest airplane for passenger flight
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The cost of an uncrewed scale model isn't even noise in the cost of a full-size passenger-rated project, and its success isn't particular predictive of the actual project.
The sonic boom problem isn't trivial. You need to be able to land the vehicle near cities, because that's where the customers are. That means you have to spend a good chunk of time (maybe a long chunk of time if you have to orbit waiting to land) flying low and slow---a vehicle designed to use fuel efficiently when high and supersonic is almost by definition going to be less efficient than traditional vehicles when forced to fly in that regime. Which means it has to carry a lot of fuel, which means weight, which means ... etc.
As other commenters have noted: shaving an hour or two off of time spent at the terminal will generally be much more effective in speeding up travel. There is another city a three-hour drive from where I live, and it is faster for me to drive there than fly. And replacing the aircraft with a missile wouldn't change that.
In doing research for a project, I came across some Annual Reports for the company Sabre. Some might recognize the name, as they were an in-house tech / logistics / travel operations company for American Airlines that got spun off into its own entity years back. Point being, they have a vested interest in air travel, and over and over, the CEO was concerned and frustrated by the lack of modernization in flight systems and overall system improvements. A very consistent theme, and I can't disagree with him.
Looking at it another way, the scale of persons affected by system upgrades and improvements drastically overshadows those who would, uh, gain from supersonic travel. Just makes sense.
Looking at the quad copters I have some doubts regarding navigation and/or performance during a catastrophic failure where others might be put at risk. That's not an unreasonable concern for life and property.
As you noted, again, there are high thresholds regarding crew and passenger parameters. I think those also extend to functional operations. For commercial aviation, there is a good 50+ years of accident records and ways that companies have paid out for tragedies and whatnot. Adding in a new component - the quad copter model - is most definitely outside of the norm and I think will be viewed as high risk at first, even if there are great financial rewards to be reaped down the line pending success.
I suspect there would be even more demand for flights to Asian business hubs.
If advanced physical simulations could produce a wing 20% more efficient than the concorde, with engines 20% more efficient, and the weight of control, actuation systems, and cabin interiors were all reduced by 20% the gains in operating cost and range would be substantially more than 20%. Gains in aircraft are typically non-linear because they all affect each other.
It's exciting to think about what might be possible with 50 years of materials science, _computers_, simulation, electronics, and propulsion technology.
[1] http://www.atag.org/component/downloads/downloads/59.html [pdf]
With that said, if they can pull off a 1/3 scale prototype with current funding as they claim they can, one nice ancillary benefit would be the kick to the ass of the Lockheed Martins of the world, for whom $33mm is a rounding error when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars on next-generation aviation platforms.
"VC's never fund anything but social media apps and advertising companies" -- HN.
"Yes of course SpaceX is going to make Musk money" -- HN.
"Funding a supersonic plane is a stupid idea" -- HN.
(And yes, also "$41M funding for color.com is stupid" --HN.)
Well, they also occasionally fund stupid shit like uBeam.
> "Yes of course SpaceX is going to make Musk money" -- HN.
Isn't it? Except that money is wisely reinvested into the Mars transportation project.
> "Funding a supersonic plane is a stupid idea" -- HN.
Supersonic passenger plane is not a smart idea for various technical and economical reasons. I don't think that's just "HN opinion".
AFAIK, the technical and economic reasons boil down to: "Too expensive to build, too expensive to fly, people object to the sonic booms".
I don't know if there is a way around the sonic boom problem, but for the first two there's an "easy" fix: make it cheaper. I don't have a clue how to do that, but and I have no particular opinion on Boom, but if someone came up with a way around that "small" problem then everything else falls into place.
E.g. taking 5 hours to go to a place (2h flight + airport overhead on both sides) by a plane vs. 12+ hours by bus makes many destinations suddenly accessible to people to visit for a weekend. Except maybe on intercontinental, I don't see a supersonic passenger plane enabling another quality class of travel.
If the price point comparison is (more plausibly) between business class in one of several A380/777 flights, chartering a flight and leaving exactly when and where you want if there's a group or coach class in a Boom, I think the choice is rather less straightforward. I'm not saying there's no demand - obviously Concorde filled seats - but I am saying it might not be sufficient to make a viable commercial aircraft programme even without restrictions on where they can fly.
That said, the concord was much closer to a prototype than what economical supersonic aircraft will look like. But, nobody is trying to build thousands of 400 passenger supersonic aircraft which makes your comparison more realistic.
But I'd imagine there's a reason that jet doesn't exist even in the realms of the most hyperbole-filled press releases of supersonic jet ventures...
So.. the case for it is arguable? Which no longer makes it a "not a smart idea" - it might be a very smart idea, depending on numbers which we don't know but presumably investors have seen.
I dunno - maybe it'll end up a stupid idea. But I just don't see it being so obviously crazy as all the initial comments were making out.
So their quality of life may go up if they could take a super sonic, but I'm not sure it would expand the market much: either way it's a crappy day and you only do it if you absolutely need to.
Even with no other improvements, I would probably take reliable in-flight wifi over a 25% improvement in flight times.
Even experts like Dassault and Sukhoi, with more supersonic experience than any current company, have shied away. And Dassault is reknowned for its biz-jets; if anyone could do it I'd bet on them.
Gulfstream looked at it from the other direction, potentially moving-up from big subsonic biz-jets to an even more exclusive and expensive aircraft. They too decided against it, even with Sukhoi's input into supersonic design.
Beyond the big companies there have been a string of smaller dreamers. Jane's "All the World's Aircraft" from through the 1980s is testament to that.
Can Boom do it? Possibly so, but given that they're building on the same technology as the rest of the aerospace industry then I don't see why they're any different. This isn't a problem that software can solve ( unlike Space-X ).
There are some things I know a little about that I haven't commented on here about, and I've seen where people are quite clearly googling and getting not the right answer but the answer that is most likely to show up on Google.
Just something useful to keep in mind.
I work in energy and the hivemind on HN on this topic is quite subject to these fallacies. ("Solar energy can't be profitable" and "thorium is the answer" spring to mind.)
Other industries have a much higher resistance to hype and estimates that sound like they're based on what people want to hear than software.
That's not the point of this funding round. When you work on insanely ambitious projects you have to do things incrementally.
This is their 3rd round - the first was $120k, the second was $2.1m. Each round enables them to do enough of the tasks that demonstrate to investors that they're capable of doing the next set of tasks. I have no clue how you design a plane but I would guess the first round was entirely spent on modelling the financials and market research to see if there's even a business opportunity. The next round would be something like the really broad brush ideas for how you'd make a plane like this. This round will be spent digging in to the technology itself, figuring out what capabilities you need to have in an electric plane, and finding which parts you can buy off the shelf. If Boom are successful at that then there'll be future rounds that are spent on actual design and manufacturing.
By the time anything real takes off from a runway they'll probably need to have raised billions.
No one thinks you can design and build a plane for $120k+$2.1m+$33m.
From the article:
>“This funds our first airplane, all the way through flight tests,” explained Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl in an interview.
So the $30Bn sticker for the Dreamliner gets you not only a new wide-body airliner, but a whole new global airliner manufacturing supply chain (you bet they'll use it — or a development thereof — for the next airliner they design, too), and the capacity to punch them out like pick-up trucks.
This $33M funding round is to build a one-third scale flight demonstrator. Not an actual Boom airliner, or a Concorde equivalent, but something like like the HP.115 — a research aircraft with similar flight properties in some parts of the flight regime of the planned final aircraft, for test purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115
(Significant difference: the HP.115 was used to investigate low speed stability and handling of delta wings. The Boom XB-1 is to investigate supersonic low noise flight.)
It also lets them build up their engineering team to the point where they're actually able to get a full grasp of the magnitude of the problems they're facing.
But a real Boom supersonic transport? That's going to cost at a minimum multiple single-digit billions (even if they don't go all-out and budget for a production line and supply chain for 2000 units) to develop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350_XWB
(On the other hand, Airbus already had a lot of experience with composites in airliners, so the A350 was an evolutionary development, not a revolution: and they'd been working with international airliner component supply chains for decades already — it's what they do — so they didn't have to start from scratch.)
My point is, the $30Bn sticker on the 787 is misleading because it covers not only a new wide-body airliner type but also a whole new supply chain management approach and a (for Boeing) revolutionary change in materials technology (from mostly-Al to mostly-carbon fiber composites).
Airbus also had the same kind of experience and expertise in house already built up. So, that doesn't challenge the GPs contention that for someone without that, the cost would be substantially more.
That would be, well, most of the regular startups too. The problem is, you can't tell everyone you're aiming for an exit, because exit == fucking over your existing customers, and you need those customers to be able to exit. So, startups lie about how they care about the users and their product.
That's why nowadays I assume by default that a startup is just done for exit, unless proven otherwise.
> cabin comforts
If they can actually deliver on those two, then they can succeed where Concorde failed (couldn't compete against first/business class given the tickets cost far too much and offered economy-esque seating).
That's a big “if”, though.
Passenger don't care about saving time transatlantic because the people who can afford it can now sleep in a bed in business or first.
Airlines don't want it because super sonic capable engines take way more fuel than current day engines and therefore the costs would be high.
If there was a demand for supersonic planes Boeing or Airbus would be building them already.
Boom's business model relies on this, obviously, but so do their passenger-seat-mile economics. Boom claims that the per seat fuel consumption (and ultimately the ticket prices) would be same as for business class seats currently. This is possible because making a currently-seven-hour flight in three hours enables them to replace a full flat bed with a recliner seat, saving 2/3 of the floor area per passenger.
Black in the 80's I worked at a place where they looked at chartering a plane for one project - doing some R&D in a deep coal mine.
As the cost of the senior engineers at our > 600% oh rate for them to drive to the site was more expensive than a plane charter - we where based at an airfield
People stopped using Concorde and started using the new comforts of business class on larger albeit slower planes.
The per seat fuel consumption is perhaps optimistic on their part.
The comfort onboard Concorde was fine. I miss it each and every time I fly transatlantic. But with British Airways and Air France allotted just seven aircraft each, obviously it could never be a mainstream product, no matter how compelling it was from a passenger perspective.
http://interestingengineering.com/real-reason-why-supersonic...
I know venture investment is risky, but is there any limit on how stupid VC partners can be? Can banks who lended them money, sue them?
Banks don't lend VCs money.
Might want to consider the feasibility of the real economics of jet fuel per passenger/cargo before raising a bunch of money to ignite. And also disappointing investors and losing their confidence when they ask for $5 billion more to continue development and are turned down.