Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]

> you are not going to be able to buy a ticket

You probably want to say i cannot buy a ticket and fly on it as a commercial passenger? . I agree second part is impossible to achieve in <5 years.

Just buying a ticket though, on long delayed products or vaporware is quite common nowadays. Tesla has been selling deposits on vehicles which are years behind schedule, Star Citizen famously has raised > $750m and is under development for 10 years and no release date in sight and there are many other examples in crypto and others that sell tickets like that.

I don't disagree that it's proof they will succeed, it is however proof that they can build a supersonic aircraft. That is no small thing.

Given that they can, they now need to build a larger one, which with more surface area will be more difficult than this one.

In terms of 'risk stacking'[1] they are definitely a big step closer to being in successful.

[1] Risk Stacking is the set of risks a company faces between the current time and being operational. Technology risk is always level 1 (can they build what they say they can build), after that comes market risk (will people buy it with enough margin for both continued operation of the company as well as further development), and the third is execution risk (can they operate efficiently enough to create a net positive economic product.)

Concord was actually a cash cow for all airlines who had them. The only reason why airlines stopped using Concord was because of the crash and the inherent safety issues that were found. But the actual business model worked - limited in scope but it was highly profitable.

“That said, the airlines that flew the Concorde did make a profit. Concorde was only ever purchased by two airlines: BA and Air France. While the concept of the Concorde might not have been a worldwide hit, it was certainly a good market fit for these two airlines at the time.”

Overall it was obviously a money looser because of the high development costs (paid for by the governments).

It only needs to be economically viable for billionaires bored with collecting yachts and $100 millionaires who want to flex with charter flights. Scheduled commercial service is a pipe dream but not a requirement for success.

I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.

It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.

You also have to make it environmentally sustainable like they did when they talked about a partnership with Prometheus fuels back in 2019, even then what's the point compared to regular planes if these "are likely to burn between 4.5 and 7.5X more fuel than subsonic aircraft in 2035." [0]

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/rutherdan.bsky.social/post/3lgstwvv... -> 2021 NASA assessment https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205009400

Basically, the critics: "unless you build a 100B company, we are not wrong"

I mean, yeah, sure.

Not that I care as much these days, but would I have liked routine Mach 2 flight that my company would have paid for when I was traveling a lot? Absolutely. But that wasn't in the cards.

And the relatively fewer flights I take today for relatively longer trips in general, I mostly look at paying an extra $5K and think "I could do a lot more interesting things with that money than be more comfortable for some hours" (or hypothetically, save a few hours). And I suspect most people here would be in the same boat if it came to putting cash down on the barrel.

Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.

Extremely generous investors?

I really don't think that will be competition at all. People like to travel and the demand is there for faster international flights. For business travel, people either prefer to go in person or have to be in person. Also with time zone differences, virtual meetings require one party to often have to meet at odd times. The ticket price probably will be higher than what most people want to spend for vacation, but there will still be plenty of people willing to pay.

> paired via Starlink

What advantage does Starlink provide here? Isn't it a higher-latency, slower connection than most people have access to at home?

Silly question, but would it be feasible to just equip a plan with a telescoping nose merely for this effect that could be deployed prior to supersonic flight?

There are residents for sure in that corridor, but the residents are on Edwards AFB, and are fairly used to sonic booms. When I was on Edwards, there was still the last operating SR-71, and that boomed any time it flew.

GP was asking about this flight's sonic boom. That's the whole point of Boom: to make supersonic airplanes with small sonic booms.

Right, and making an improvement is a big part of Boom's marketing. (It's in their name?!) I'm surprised I didn't hear them make any comments about it in the video during the flight as they crossed the sound barrier each time. Unless I missed it?

This doesn't say anything about today's flight though?

Until they make it at least three times bigger, yes.

> Until the FAA oversight and permitting regs are updated, it's far too cost and time prohibitive to bring anything (aside from avionics) truly innovative to the GA market.

Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.

Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan

Perhaps for Jared Issacman type of billionaire .

Rich people prefer the Rolls or Bentley when being a passenger, Sport/ performance vehicles are only fun if you are driving, I would expect the G650/800 style jets would be the preferred plane even if it is slower when you can travel in style and with your entourage.

Also range would be a consideration to this type of jet for passenger travel. Travel times makes difference only for long distance over the ocean flights, these jets tend to be quite short ranged.

XB-1 is only designed for 1000nm at 2.2 Mach compared to the 7000nm of G650 with cruise speed of 0.92 Mach. Basically XB-1 can fly for 40minutes at a time at its cruise(top?) speed of 2.2Mach

There's zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year, when zero of the market leaders want their business.

Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation.

Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about building and iterating new engines hundreds of times until you've made enough iterations that things stop melting in corner cases. It's about finding out, the hard way, every single way your assembly could possibly fail, melt, explode, wear too fast, or otherwise fail.

Understand that making modern engines often requires significant innovation in non-destructive testing to ensure the actual parts you are buying/making are up to spec.

Understand that Russia has a portion of decades of experience building, designing, and INNOVATING in jet engines and still struggles to build modern jet engines.

Understand that China struggles to produce economical modern jet engines despite massive funding, huge incentive, and literal national security concerns. The C19 jetliner currently uses an American engine.

Empirically, building modern jet engines seems HARDER than building modern rocket engines! It seems to require maintaining literal decades of raw engineering experience and patience, and now scale all that effort to a company that in 9 years has been told by all existing engine manufacturers "Nope, we won't make a profit on this plan", and has instead spent their time building a single demo plane that does not demonstrate any experience in building engines.

I'm in WS myself now, going on 12 years.

They have some interest in a "special mission" version, a common aerospace euphemism for militarized.

They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.

That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...

Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.

I can't think of a single aerospace company that is not dual-use. I doubt Boom is building with that in mind but if they're around in 50 years, I'd be shocked if they did not have a thriving defense business.

(which I think is good but ymmv)

The military has had supersonic aircraft since the 1950s, why would they care about this?

Is there a shortage of those?