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 the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
That said, Boom's customers - if they ever exist - will be a new business class pay extra for supersonic flights category anyway.
People aren't usually paying 4x for first, but they will pay $10 more for Y, $30 for Z, etc.
The future of airlines is fully adjustable planes!
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
Aurornis•2h ago
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?
jandrese•2h ago
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.
exabrial•1h ago
"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"
_moof•2h ago
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.
notahacker•1h ago
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.
sidewndr46•1h ago