Boom XB-1 supersonic demonstrator aircraft
Posted by RLoret@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 137 comments
Posted by RLoret@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 137 comments
ncbluetj@reddit
I will be seriously surprised if they ever turn out a commercial product of any kind.
TaskForceCausality@reddit
Consider yourself surprised, since bullshit is an eminently marketable product.
I asked the Boom folks during their AMA how they planned to solve the environmental challenge of comfortably cooling the passenger cabin of an aircraft heated to over 200 degrees during supersonic cruise. Crickets.
I’m sure there’s a lot of hardworking people at Boom, but the available facts say it’s a scam.
The engineering realities behind building a two seat supersonic aircraft are daunting- to say nothing about building one that can safely carry over one hundred passengers, is maintainable by airlines (rather than militaries), can pass international certification standards, doesn’t require exotic fuels or hazardous materials to function, and can do all these things and then some while featuring a low cost of operation.
devildog2067@reddit
That one has a simple answer, though? It’s really cold at altitude, cooling a cabin is simple.
cattleyo@reddit
Aerodynamic heating (from air friction) is still a limiting factor at high altitudes
devildog2067@reddit
For the structure, not the cabin temperature.
cattleyo@reddit
Tackling engineering realities means solving all the problems not just one. Heating of the skin and structure is a major difficulty for sustained supersonic flight, a design challenge compounded here by extensive use of carbon fibre epoxy composite, a novel material for this application. That's just the most obvious problem that jumps out at me, no doubt there's other difficulties equally daunting.
Boom aim to build an aircraft that's efficient, economic both to build and operate. Historically supersonic aircraft have been designed & built for the military with cost being a relatively minor consideration. The task they've set themselves isn't just ambitious, it's impossibly unrealistic.
mrpither@reddit
The carbon fiber is not the limiter it’s the resin. Typical resins have a service temp of around 250F. You need more switch to BMI (Bismaleimide) to get you to 400F plus. BMI HT can then get you another 50F. Need even more? Polyamide will get you 600F plus but it’s a pita to process.
devildog2067@reddit
Yes… but that’s not remotely what we were talking about. This was a direct reply to a poster who said they asked about cabin cooling and took silence as some kind of “gotcha” answer.
PoliteCanadian@reddit
Adding insulation and providing cooling to keep a passenger cabin comfortable when you have a couple of gas turbines with enough power to propel you at mach 2 that you can bleed air from, is a pretty easy problem.
Handling the thermal expansion from those temperature extremes is a (relatively minor) engineering problem. Keeping the passenger cabin comfortable is firmly in the domain of solved problems.
cattleyo@reddit
Keeping the passenger cabin comfortable isn't the only requirement, you also want the aircraft structure and skin to survive the heat. We haven't seen seen supersonic aircraft made from composites before. Earlier supersonic types were metal and required years of design/build/test refinement. Trade-offs when choosing the best alloys include heat-resistance vs strength & weight & cost & machinability etc. Carbon-fibre epoxy composites are not known for their heat-resistance, quite the opposite, and nobody has experience using them in this kind of application. If you're going to knock out the design in 15 minutes I hope it's you who does the test flying of this thing yourself.
LordofSpheres@reddit
The clever engineer might then do what nearly every single other current composite-skinned aircraft does and use aluminum, steel, or other materials for the nose cone and leading edges where heating will be significant, then transition to composites when temperatures allow.
cattleyo@reddit
Of course, that's what Boom are doing, using both metal and composites with emphasis on the latter. However to my knowledge there aren't any other supersonic aircraft designed this way, only spacecraft.
Now borrowing from spacecraft design might be a reasonable way to meet performance targets provided you're given a long enough development period, but it's definitely not a good recipe for meeting cost targets.
LordofSpheres@reddit
The X-59 has composite materials, the F-35 does (most of the skin is carbon fiber reinforced, plus CNRP in low-load components), the F-22 has some level of composite in structure and skin, the X-32 was going to have a full composite wing structure... Composites aren't impossible, even in supersonic flight. Yes, not all of them are carbon fiber epoxy blends, but it's really not an unproven tech.
cattleyo@reddit
X-series aircraft I would lump with spacecraft in the sense that cost is not a major consideration, the F-35 program is estimated to cost somewhere between $400 billion and $2 trillion. I agree a composite supersonic aircraft is far from impossible, for a government of a wealthy country, but designing & building one on a commercial basis is impossible.
LordofSpheres@reddit
The whole point of the X-32's intended composite wing skin was to cut weight and cost. The F-35A costs $80mn/plane and the majority of that is in systems and components that aren't the skin. It's absolutely not impossible to do composites cheaply and Boom has done a huge chunk of the design work and R&D already to develop the insight they'll need.
siddizie420@reddit
I mean the Concorde could already do a lot of those things and that was a 60-70 year old design at this point. I’m not saying you’re completely wrong but a lot of that sounds like issues that can definitely be solved.
As for the AMA I could see them being tight lipped about something they’ve spent hundreds of millions in R&D and under development. You expect they’ll just say yeah here’s our solution for everyone to copy?
Silver996C2@reddit
You are comparing two State organizations (France & UK) that spent (in 2024 money) £16B. I’ll say that again - £16B. (£2.1B 1976 money)
Boom has raised to date: $700M.
Do you SEE the problem?
egguw@reddit
the concorde was an economical disaster. it does not tick the box of "exotic fuels" nor "hazardous materials".
you are right it's for the elite only due to the price. which is also what caused the end of the concorde. a single crash may not even be your plane design's fault and will bankrupt your company cause of the ultrarich's insurance claims. even with jacked up ticket prices i don't think it ever made a profit considering the development costs associated with it despite flying for over the course of 30 years.
Known-Diet-4170@reddit
you are making a bunch of assumption without actually knowing what you are talking about
concorde did turn a profit (eventually) for BA and AF it didn't for aerospatiale and bac because they didn't sell enough
and finally the number one reason it was retired was because it got old, by 2003 they had been flying for 30 years without upgrades, the avionics were ancient and airbus simply refused to support the project further
the accident, increasing fuel prices, 9/11, the noise were all contributing factors but ultimately it was airbus that decided that an upgrade program was not viable
egguw@reddit
did you hear what i said?
they DID turn a profit. just to barely overcome the operating expense. they did NOT turn a profit over the course of 30 years to cover the r&d costs.
noise and economical pollution would plague any other supersonic aircraft (boom included).
how are you calling me not knowing what i'm talking about when you're the one spouting BS?
TaskForceCausality@reddit
…which was built under a two-nation , $14 BILLION program. Further, it launched in an era when the U.S. government (and other nations) subsidized airline tickets, guaranteeing a return on R&D investment.
Today, Boom’s pitching the most technologically advanced airliner ever on a $158 million market cap. In a cutthroat economic environment where low cost carriers are going belly up & established airlines fly modernized iterations of Boeing 707s to cut costs. Even IF Boom overcomes the massive technological obstacles - and IF they do it with significantly fewer resources- and they do it without getting killed by government certification - who exactly is going to buy tickets?
Joe and Jane consumer ? They’re flying Ryanair, or whatever’s cheapest. Tom Business? They’re booking a private jet. Anyone needing to transmit information or contact someone on short notice across an ocean will simply use a web call.
siddizie420@reddit
So we’ve just moved the goalpost from technically impossible to not possible with the current valuation.
Yes, Tom Business will pay for the ticket if it’s gets him to NY in 3 hours from London instead of an 8 hour flight in their private jet.
The last paragraph tells us that you clearly don’t understand R&D or you’re just being purposely obtuse. The Concorde solved the problem showing us it’s possible. Doesn’t mean they should just make a Concorde. There’s still development and there’s still IP.
TaskForceCausality@reddit
Physics & economics don’t care about your delusions and ad-homiems. We’re done here.
siddizie420@reddit
Big words to hide an empty argument
slpater@reddit
And with really no ad-hominem to speak of.
Cool-Acanthaceae8968@reddit
They probably don’t know because they weren’t the people who specialize in it.
It’s child’s play to do because the technology is decades old. Air cycle air conditioning system. That’s when you take bleed air that’s 350 degrees.. cool it with the 110 degree air in Phoenix.. and wind up with air so cold that you have to heat it up again.
The absolute temperatures don’t matter.. just the temperature differential—which abounds in supersonic flight.
mduell@reddit
How do you figure they’re going to be that hot at their intended speeds? I get a stagnation temperature of like 100F even at pretty low altitudes for their operation.
arvidsem@reddit
You may need to check your calculations then. The Concorde's skin sat at about 200°F during supersonic flight with the nose hitting 260°F. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/concorde/anat-nf.html) Cooling the cabin for passengers was a pretty serious chunk of it's engineering.
But it is obviously not insurmountable since we did it 60 years ago. It just costs money
mduell@reddit
Concorde went faster.
arvidsem@reddit
Huh. I hadn't realized how much they had scaled back on projected speed. The last time I really paid attention to their plans, they were planning on Mach 2.2, 10% faster than Concorde.
mduell@reddit
Yea, 2.2 vs 1.7 (which let’s be real will probably settle around 1.6) is a big difference in heating.
Astroteuthis@reddit
Only on Reddit is doubling the Mach number just a simple little oversight.
Gronkers@reddit
Shouldnt we have the equivalent of the space shuttle tiles in a spray on form nowadays?
Competitive_Plum_970@reddit
What part of it is a scam? Everyone realizes it’s daunting but investors are willing to take the risk
NoPhotograph919@reddit
Investors were really into WorldCom too.
joseycuervo@reddit
The part where they get FAA conformity.
studpilot69@reddit
Say more about this? What do you mean?
TaskForceCausality@reddit
Not the poster, but regulatory certification for a normal airliner can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s a big , green reason why Boeing and their airline customers hatched the 737 Max line. Which is based on the existing 737 type certification.
Safe to say if certification cost of a new airliner is enough to make Boeing catch sticker shock, Boom won’t be able to handle it either. Not when their whole market cap isn’t even $200 million.
smarmageddon@reddit
Don't know why people are down-voting his FAA comment. Regulatory hurdles are probably the hardest thing they will have to deal with to get a real product to market. Not to mention noise issues, environmental impact reports, etc. that will severely limit where it can be flown. It's a neat test-bed, but the cost of development and the reg hurdles are probably going to be insurmountable. It's crazy to develop a supersonic plane just for rich people to feel special and blow up their carbon footprint.
ParcelTongued@reddit
You can dump the heat into the fuel.
PoliteCanadian@reddit
You don't even need to do that. You can use an engine bleed and a slightly beefier pack to produce cooling air that you run between the exterior skin and the passenger cabin as part of your overall cabin pressurization and ECS system.
PoliteCanadian@reddit
With insulation and an engine bleed driven air conditioner system like is currently used?
You're aware Concorde existed, right? The problem you're talking about is neither new nor particularly difficult to solve. They're at the phase of engineering where they're trying to figure out how to solve hard problems, not easy problems.
So perhaps they didn't answer your question because it was silly.
Wyoming_Knott@reddit
Just look up aircraft ECS. 200F is pretty simple in terms of an ECS heat sink. You don't even need fuel cooling at that point.
RAAFStupot@reddit
Unless they're deliberately trying to defraud people, I wouldn't say that it's a scam.
sofixa11@reddit
As others already mentioned, Concorde already did all of this decades ago, and it was designed by hand and manually tested in wind tunnels with scale models.
The only point from your list it wasn't good at was low operating costs, but the tons of technological advancements since then should help; and even then, Boom are explicitly targeting business class-priced travel. If they make it, nobody will expect their plane to have the economics of an A321.
watanerd@reddit
Commercial? Probably not. Military variant? Highly likely.
mechabeast@reddit
...we already have those. Like, a lot of them.
mrpither@reddit
Supersonic troop/cargo transports? Which one is that?
mechabeast@reddit
This thing aint hauling more that 2 people and a pack of gum between them
Guysmiley777@reddit
More like another way for billionaires to have dick measuring contests. No airline is going to be in on it, it'll be a rich boy's toy.
RBR927@reddit
Frankly I’m surprised they’ve made it this far.
Avime2003@reddit
I don’t understand all this pessimism. Boom has my full support and I believe the Overture will be a worthy successor to the legendary Concorde. Aviation is becoming better and more promising every single day.
RBR927@reddit
Yes, the Concorde truly was a legendary success financially….
Silver996C2@reddit
Only if you bought all the airframes and spares for 1 £…
NoPhotograph919@reddit
It's not pessimism. It's realism. Sure, you can hope they succeed. And you can tell every kid out there that they too can be an astronaut if they just keep working hard. But the reality is that they 99.9% won't succeed, and that kid won't be an astronaut.
Guysmiley777@reddit
Toxic positivity doesn't change the laws of physics. Drag increases at the square of velocity even before you get into supersonic wave drag effects.
Drag means fuel burn and fuel is expensive. On top of that you have the carbon emissions crowd against you. And then you're still not able to fly supersonic over land.
Early testing of the "shaped sonic boom" x-plane (using F/A-18s to simulate a reduced sonic boom) showed that people are not going to accept the level of reduction they're expecting.
Imagine a pallet of empty cans dropping in the next room versus dropping in your driveway. It's still too loud to not startle people.
ChillZedd@reddit
FR I’ve always been a huge boom hater but I’m starting to turn around on them just cause I never thought they’d even get this far and they proved me wrong
penelopiecruise@reddit
The Oklahoma skyscraper of the aviation industry
adjust_your_set@reddit
I’m excited for them and hope they succeed. Odds are stacked against them though.
Fantastic-Airline-92@reddit
I remembered reading that they change the direction of the sonic boom upwards so they can fly over residential areas now
ncbluetj@reddit
That is their stated goal, yes. This is an unproven concept, however. Nobody has ever designed and manufactured such a plane, and it is not clear that one will ever be able to achieve FAA approval to fly over land.
Even if they do reach their goal, the aircraft's operating cost will still be far in excess of a normal airliner. Ultimately, this is what doomed the Concorde. Even as a trans-atlantic only airliner, it was just too cost prohibitive to be profitable. The only people who could afford to fly on it were the ultra-wealthy, and even at those ticket prices, the airliners operated them at a loss.
Fantastic-Airline-92@reddit
Thank you for clarifying. I vaguely remembered the issue. Make since now why I haven’t heard anymore about it.
megaduce104@reddit
isnt this the same thing people said about space X? people laughed at them, and now they're worth over a quarter-trillion dollars. it'll take some time, but im not discounting anyone.
ncbluetj@reddit
I think the real difference here is that Boom Supersonic is not really breaking new ground here. The Concorde solved all the technical problems of a supersonic airliner. It was a really fantastic aircraft.
What they also learned was that supersonic airliners are absurdly expensive to operate, and civilian populations do not like sonic booms over their homes. I have yet to see how Boom realistically expects to solve these issues. If Boom aircraft have similar operating costs as other supersonic aircraft (it will), very few people will be willing to spend the money to fly on it (think $25,000 trans-Atlantic tickets). Nobody has yet demonstrated the ability to make a “quiet boom”, and they certainly have not secured FAA approval to fly over land.
SpaceX set out to achieve technically difficult things that, when realized, dramatically reduced the cost of space flight. I just don’t see the same dynamic at play here.
WizTachibana@reddit
SpaceX would have been toast if they didn't get a billion and a half dollars from NASA.
Give that much to Boom and maybe I'll be optimistic!
NoPhotograph919@reddit
Do you want me to ruin the surprise for you?
xignaceh@reddit
I hope they will. I don't wanna be a hater
The_Crass-Beagle_Act@reddit
Just looks like a fighter jet prototype. Serious question: what does this aircraft “demonstrate” specifically that’s novel and interesting to what this company is developing?
Seems like creating a supersonic fighter jet-type thing isn’t that hard, since numerous manufacturers around the world have been doing that for 75+ years. What’s more interesting is demonstrating an airliner-sized supersonic aircraft design that flies cost-efficiently
Wyoming_Knott@reddit
Would you give billions to a company to start an aircraft production line if they've never flown or built a plane?
If you had to build and fly a plane to prove to investors that you can do something, would you build a difficult tech demonstrator at the same time that you're building a company, or would you build the simplest supersonic aircraft that you could?
mrpither@reddit
With Boeing do such a great job of late maybe another option would be good. When Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas the drop off began with no one to compete against. They said it needed to happen to allow the US to be able to compete with subsidized Airbus, but the result has been a combined company that became less and less innovative.
SuperFrog4@reddit
I suspect it is the engine system and technology as well the general shape of the aircraft. If both work well it will be upscaled to transport size. It’s a lot cheaper to do this size then a real life size transport.
likeAgoss@reddit
The engine they're using here is the same one used by the F-5/T-37. I don't think they're going to gather any new or interesting data about its performance.
Especially since, for Overture, they say they're going to design, develop, and produce their own engine. That's going to be a fundamentally different problem than using an off-the-shelf model of engine that's been flying for 70 years. That presents a more difficult(and expensive) challenge than the rest of their design challenges put together, and this demonstrator does less than nothing to move the needle towards that end.
mrpither@reddit
T-38
PoliteCanadian@reddit
What killed the Concorde program was that the sonic booms were enough of a problem that it was quickly banned from going supersonic except over the ocean. That meant it was only profitable to operate on a handful of routes, which meant they couldn't sell enough aircraft to offset the development costs.
NASA did a bunch of research on mitigating sonic booms via aerodynamics. Boom has built a design based on that research and this scale prototype will evaluate whether their design can reduce sonic booms enough for it to be worth building a full-scale prototype.
Direct_Witness1248@reddit
Supposedly a greatly reduced sonic boom, and I would guess probably greater efficiency focus also.
d-mike@reddit
Yeah Boom is, or at least for years was planning to ignore everything X-59 and everything else NASA has done on low boom research.
X-59 will have flown over populated areas before Boom shows a viable concept of a plan for a passenger prototype.
Direct_Witness1248@reddit
Haha well they'd better hope they know more than NASA. I guess it's possible, but it does sound cocky.
d-mike@reddit
They were basically loudmouth dicks mocking everyone at a NASA press conference related to X-59, either announcing it or who won the prime contract.
I worked on boom research for a few years and, well, I never really had a high opinion of Boom
Mountain_Hospital40@reddit
As an external observer, I do like what I see in terms of progression with their flight test phase, i.e achievable milestones and it doesn't seem rushed.
My main question is however, just how much data are they able to collect on this aircraft that is actually useful for the aircraft they actually want to produce. It has a lot of difference in shape for one and a different engine (is the current engine just a smaller scale test engine for the real thing or just a random engine they got their hands on?). Data from a smaller aircraft doesn't necessarily translate well or at least not easily to a scaled up version.
In my opinion the thing that makes it breaks the super sonic commercial aircraft is the engines and specifically the efficiency. And so I do wonder what its engine development program looks like. If it's not enough of an improvement from Concorde, it won't be taking anyone anywhere.
start3ch@reddit
Their main goal is to get the sonic booms quieter, so people will allow them to fly over land. This demonstrator will test that
Evancb91@reddit
Per the founder Blake Scholl, they don't have any intention of making a quiet boom for their first production airliner.
Standard_Might_4957@reddit
That’s not true. The X-59 from NASA/Lockheed is intended to study quite supersonic. XB-1 is really just something to try to get money from investors to show “we built an airplane that went supersonic” even though it has basically nothing in common with Overture.
PoliteCanadian@reddit
British Airways and Air France made money operating Concorde, It's just the development program itself didn't make money for BAC and Aérospatiale since they didn't sell enough aircraft to offset the R&D costs.
Concorde's biggest problem was that the sonic booms it produced limited it to only a small number of routes. Limiting the number of routes limited the number of aircraft that they could sell.
Boom's problem isn't the engines, the engines are largely a solved engineering problem. The problem Boom is trying to solve is in their name. They're trying to engineer an aircraft that aerodynamically does not produce the powerful sonic booms that doomed the Concorde to exclusively transatlantic flights.
There's a market for supersonic air transportation, but not if it's restricted to only transatlantic routes. That's the challenge.
nasa1092@reddit
I see this mentioned often, but I think it's being conflated with the unrelated X-59 quiet supersonic demonstrator that's also being developed nowadays. There doesn't seem to be evidence that Boom intends to incorporate sonic boom reduction technologies into their design. Everything I've seen suggests they're envisioning the same types of transoceanic routes as Concorde.
WarthogOsl@reddit
They are at least trying to lower take off noise (which was another issue with the Concord) by not having afterburners in the full scale version.
Astroteuthis@reddit
Boom is not trying to make low boom aircraft. Concorde was restricted by its low range and also its extremely loud takeoff noise. Overture is designed to overcome these two issues and enable a lot more transatlantic and even some transpacific routes to be flown.
mduell@reddit
Milking funding before the whole thing implodes. I don’t think they can even get to the place that someone acquires them.
LeatherRole2297@reddit
Completely agree. This is a ten-year “good deal” for a small group of engineers and marketers. It will go nowhere, they’re all gonna get sued.
TheGuyWithTheSeal@reddit
The engine is just a J85 of F-5 fame, but they have custom variable geometry inlets
Astroteuthis@reddit
I believe they meant for Overture.
studpilot69@reddit
3 of them, in fact.
National-Giraffe-757@reddit
Concorde’s engines were actually extraordinarily efficient - around 43% overall thermodynamic efficiency in supercruise, better than even large marine diesel engines of the time (today the latter can reach 50%).
The high-bypass logic doesn’t really apply at supersonic speeds and ram compression and low ambient temperatures lead to high pressure ratios. I’m not sure a modern engine would be that much more efficient.
Lighter materials might help, allowing the plane to flight higher in even thinner air.
GrabtharsHumber@reddit
The only business case that pencils out for this project is providing an extra hour and a half that oligarchs and CEOs can spend with their mistresses. They might as well call it the Sugar Daddy Express and be done with it.
HumorExpensive@reddit
Tigra and Bunny like the Boom.
Liamnacuac@reddit
They just posted this video yesterday : https://youtu.be/Rzve8JVmBfc?si=ZB_p2JSVKnJenuIk
NoPhotograph919@reddit
This must be the latest revision of Iran's plywood stealth fighter.
runwayace@reddit
Ahh, the baby boom! It's impressive how much funding they have received and I hope it works out. It would be cool to fly on some day.
HawkeyeTen@reddit
Rather interesting design, to say the least.
TaskForceCausality@reddit
Behold, the hipster MiG-28.
Toebean_Assy@reddit
"Gentlemen...BEHOLD!!!
CORN!!!"
airfryerfuntime@reddit
Let the mating... begin!
AWildMichigander@reddit
I’m intrigued by the perception of Boom in the comments here.
They’ve had some serious investors to raise enough capital to fund this moonshot. It’s worth noting that while it’s a new competitor in the aviation space, we have done supersonic travel in the past with the Concord.
They’re just hoping to leverage existing NASA research and with their capital hire a team of top aerospace engineers to make a quieter (not silent) version of the concord.
Think of it as the Space X of supersonic planes. They already have commitments with multiple airlines to sell their supersonic planes to and currently have working prototypes. It’s similar to Archer aviation.
Known-Associate8369@reddit
I think the reason people treat SpaceX and Boom differently is that SpaceX had a realistic plan for progression, where each step informed the next one.
Falcon 1 - get something into space, develop engines, develop the systems for launching
Falcon 5 - bigger Falcon 1, iterate on the engines, get more experience with a bigger rocket (ultimately skipped because they felt they could move directly to the Falcon 9)
Falcon 9 v1.0 - bigger again, more iteration on the engines, getting more experience with a bigger rocket
Falcon 9 v1.1 - new engine layout to facilitate landing legs, bigger first and second stages
And so on - they had a goal and every thing they produced directly contributed to the next step in the plan.
Theres little evidence of that with the XB-1, it bears little to no relation to the intended product - doesnt inform as to the engines or engine technology, doesn't inform as to the airframe design etc.
Basically SpaceX is "watch us develop a rocket with each launch" while Boom is "watch us parade a cool aircraft around, fly it very occasionally, and then make a huge leap to the production airframe".
PDXGuy33333@reddit
Why are the corners of the air intakes on this airplane squared instead of round. Same as the F-15.
Chairboy@reddit
What is this, a supersonic airliner for ants?!
akriti12_@reddit
I remember being so hooked to them for their youtube AD a couple years ago lmao
the_real_hugepanic@reddit
I would rather have the MIG-25 business jet...
agha0013@reddit
doing what it does best, sitting there.
NiceoneA350@reddit
Why do you hate them so much for trying lmao? They’ve made it pretty far. Classic Redditor
ChaLenCe@reddit
For every Boom employee working hard to make something new, there are 100 angry Redditors with diapers full of opinions doing nothing.
agha0013@reddit
they, like a great many other companies, have promised the sun and moon only to water down the promises multiple times until there's almost nothing left.
People who are not optimistic about Boom and many other companies have seen this happen a lot over the decades. We're tired of being overly optimistic only to see things fizzle out and die.
Boom is several years behind all their schedules so pessimism is settled in, it's natural for people who've been watching the industry for a long time.
Doesn't mean you have to be a pessimist too, that's entirely up to you.
NiceoneA350@reddit
What exactly have they watered down tho?
agha0013@reddit
the performance specs for Overture got watered down twice in the last five years. It is now projected to be slower than Concorde, and have it's range has been reduced as well.
NiceoneA350@reddit
The speed is because they need to use medium-bypass turbofans to meet noise requirements
agha0013@reddit
yeah, like I said, as reality sets in they've had to reduce specifications to more realistic levels.
engine noise isn't their only problem. Baby boom, nor Overture have any tech to mitigate the sonic boom. The speed restrictions will hurt Overture just as much as they hurt Concorde. Flying subsonic over large chunks of land will ruin whatever fuel performance they have, sticking to supersonic over oceans... and it's range won't allow it to fly non stop across the pacific on most major routes.
Drewski811@reddit
I'd love it if they get it right.
Problem is they won't.
ChaLenCe@reddit
My buddy works at Boom, very excited with what's to come
twarr1@reddit
Guys living their dream on investors’ tab. Genius.
joshak@reddit
Considering how much money they’d need to make this a commercially viable company he’s probably spending all his time desperately pitching potential investors. Not exactly fun
djsnoopmike@reddit
I'll be watching their efforts with great interest
SwitchedOnNow@reddit
Has Boom backed off on the affordable "Boomless" supersonic aircraft? That was their initial goal that I laughed at because, well, physics.
d-mike@reddit
I don't think they ever tried for a low boom approach.
"Boomless" may not work but a boom lower than residential ambient sounds like a car door closing is a thing.
JMGurgeh@reddit
I don't think Boom was ever pursuing a boomless design; there was another company that got started around the same time, now defunct, that was looking at trying to build a boomless supersonic business jet (Aerion).
Codex_Absurdum@reddit
What an elegant beauty
KingKudzma@reddit
So this looks very close to the propeller driven Mach Buster for the 80’s. I guess that design is good for trying to go over Mach 1.
CASAdriver@reddit
Subsonic*
It's fasted speed so far is Mach 0.82, which is what I can comfortably cruise at in the Challenger 350 with 9 pax and their golf bags
everydave42@reddit
Shit on them trying this all you want I guess, and it's entirely possible that like MANY clean sheet aircraft designs they ultimately fail. But this kind of "AAAACCKHUALLLYY" slight is disingenuous at best. It's a test vehicle that goes through a whole protocol to work its way up the performance envelope to see what works and what doesn't.
But yeah, ok...go cherry pick the testing flights all you want as they work their way through it, because that's totally where they're going to stop and it's 100% comparable to your golf bag hauler.
So, you can appreciate that they're trying to do something that no one has been able to manage so far, or you can shit on it while you putter about.
Cool-Acanthaceae8968@reddit
Oooorrrrr like so many grifters of the same strain they know that the promise of high performance sells more shares and generates more hype than actual performance which may not be supersonic at all or may only be supersonic for a few hours until there is irreparable airframe damage or the loss of the aircraft.
everydave42@reddit
That might be the case, because it's a hard problem to solve. Or to what you're implying, maybe Boom IS a grift. But the fact is that they are actually doing a progress flight program, which is exactly what you do for something like this. If they are doing a grift, they sure are putting a lot of resources into it to make it seem that much more legit.
Time will tell. But they are progressing, and for that alone I'm going to cheer them on.
CASAdriver@reddit
I was making a point how they shouldn't call it "supersonic" as it hasn't actually gone Mach 1. And yeah my comment was cheeky, but geez don't take it so personally
everydave42@reddit
It's called a "supersonic demonstrator". It's a supersonic proof of concept. I don't take it personally, but I call a bullshit reddit comment when I see it.
Screeching "but actually it's not supersonic!!!!" while ignoring the fact that your kind of thinking implies that first flight it must go supersonic is ridiculous, and you know this (or you should). It shows that you have no appreciation of how real world engineering works, but instead just want to throw shit around while other folks try to do the hard things.
GrapefruitCrush2019@reddit
These are the same people who 2 years ago said the demonstrator would never fly. I don’t understand why this sub has such a hard on for hating on someone trying to develop novel aviation tech.
Danny8400@reddit
I'm waiting for the X-59 first flight
Nordy941@reddit
Can’t wait till it actually breaks the sound barrier.
oldguykicks@reddit
Ahem...
🎶 🎵 They call him Mr. Boombastic 🎶 🎵
zen1995z@reddit
Boombafantastic
No-Argument3922@reddit
Thought I was looking at a tsr2 for a second