alt Hacker NewsDude, where's my supersonic jet?
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It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and approach removed. If you cut it in half, 1h15m saved. On the flip side, how long does it take to get to the airport, park, though security, board, deboard, massive buffer time because flights are expensive and you don't know what might delay you, god forbid you have baggage to check and pick up. Flying at twice the speed might reduce the time to fly by less than 20%. Taking small on-demand supersonic flights from regional airports as suggested is definitely not a solution btw, because it's a pipe dream.
> Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing and taking off
and later in the article:
> Remember, Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway.
Setting aside that these are completely different claims, the author does not cite this claim at all and it fails my personal gut check. Where is this information coming from?
Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read).
The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.
The technology of air travel may seem counter intuitive when your frame of reference is the Moore's Law.
But in practice, what happened with semiconductors is the exception, not the rule.
We are still often making wild predictions about the future of technology based on some kind of exponential take-off, it may turn out to be a lot more constrained by physics and energy density.
Supersonic commercial air transport is one such technology, possible and proven, yet not viable.
Mars colonies or interstellar travel could be in a similar bucket.
Necessary link to Maciej Cegłowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100 Years:" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords...
Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!
Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight.
The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”
With all those fantastic claims defining "the future", it feels more like PR hunt for venture capital in those start-ups than a serious article.
One big reason supersonic can be economic now is the increase in wealth in Asia since the 80s.
Transpacific flights from California have no sonic boom population issues for 90% of the flight, and there’s already a large market of people spending $10k on business travel.
Reducing travel time from 12hrs to 4hrs would be a product with a lot more demand than 7hrs to 3hrs to Europe.
I'm excited for progress in supersonic flight because fast things can be qualitatively different. I first remember hearing this idea from Linus Torvalds, talking about developing Git. He said he works differently, not just faster, when merges are instant and easy.
Since hearing that, I see the effect in other areas of life, and transportation is one. I travel differently when the flight is 3 hours as opposed to 7 or more. Shorter trips, less luggage, less advance planning, less exhaustion, etc.
At first it will be available only at a premium, but that's how innovation usually goes. When the market finds something people love, capital seeks opportunities to lower the cost and increase the quantity. The real price of travel by aviation has declined dramatically over the last 50 years, for example.
I've got friends and family all over the world... I would for sure go visit more often if it wasn't so darn long just to get there and back.
Not a word on the environmental impact. We need to be flying less, not faster.
And yes, I know flying only makes roughly 5% of world emissions. It also turns out that these are some of the most avoidable emissions. We should be cutting them first.
> Blake embodies the “bits to atoms” shift underway in America. Before founding Boom, he was designing internet coupons for Groupon.
What is this? I can't find easily the meaning of "bits to atoms." Is this meaning that US is going away from digital "exports"?
> You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.
What does that end up doing to the cost of a seat in coach?
Left unstated is that the Concorde was designed at a time when aviation gas EDIT jet fuel ENDEDIT was priced at pennies per gallon.
That said, it might still be flying if its recertification flight hadn't happened on 9/11.
The Russian Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969, four months before Concorde, and on 26 May 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2
> Three reasons: noise, regulation and cost.
So the environmental impact isn't even worth mentioning?
At first I thought this was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
> “Supersonic 2.0,” where anyone can catch a quick, affordable supersonic flight almost anywhere on earth.
There is a proven middle ground, where you can pay the current price or x the price for 2x the speed.
Boom
I swear boom spends more on puff pieces than any other aerospace company. They continuously make claims they will do things by certain dates that are unrealistic.
They claim they will be delivering airplanes to United that would be in service in 2029:
https://boomsupersonic.com/united https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast...
However new aircraft take 5-9 years to certify and they have not yet even built one! Not to mention new engines take a similar amount of time and they are supposedly building their own brand new engine, which is a substantially harder task.
Now they are claiming the first "test" flight will be in 3 years despite the fact that they still don't have a plane or an engine built. I hope someone over their let United know they are going to be a little late. Their website hasn't amended to article to say they were wrong.
I wonder if we can look to history to see how long it takes between when they say they will fly something and when it actually flies? Oh right, we can!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1
"The original design was unveiled at Centennial Airport in Dove Valley, near Denver, Colorado, on November 15, 2016,[6] and it was initially intended to make its first subsonic flight in late 2017"
"The XB-1 performed its first flight test on March 22, 2024, flown by test pilot Bill Shoemaker from Mojave Air and Space Port.[1]"
They were only 7 years off but we all make mistakes.
Astro Mechanica
- LNG isn't used because weight needed for fuel tanks that will keep it cold enough to stay liquid cancels out any benefits. For anyone interested in a famous failure of a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan - I don't know what analysis they are doing that makes them think reducing the number of passengers and going to supersonic is possible while maintaining current ticket prices... but it's not. - Engine and plane makers are not allowed to run airlines. Anyone unfamiliar with the field can look up United Aircraft. - Their engine does sound like it's trying to do some cool things. I kinda suspect it's just a fun way to pass the time on the governments dime given all the other unrealistic stuff they are talking about though.
Hermeus
These folks are legit. Don't know if they will be successful but outsourcing the jet engine and focusing their work on the ramjet and the integration of the two makes alot of sense.
Why make planes faster when you can make them more uncomfortable and upsell more items mid-journey?
It’s already booked 130 orders.
I really don't believe this. Even the Boom website says that most of these are "options" to purchase, but I'm guessing the "firm" orders are basically just non-binding letters of intent that effectively say "Sure, if you build it with these specs, we'll buy some at price X. Unless we change our mind."
And I'm further guessing that the terms include dates that Boom has zero chance of hitting. The author estimates that these won't be in commercial service before 2033, but I think that's still optimistic. My understanding (could be wrong, not an expert) is that new regular airliners take many billions and 10+ years to design, build, and certify, and that's without the complications of supersonic and brand new engine designs.
The Boom stories have been circulating on HN for a decade now [1], and they originally were claiming two years to have a manned prototype, which was obviously untrue. I guess they are like the Tesla of the sky in that regard.
Notably Boom's big pivot a month ago was to start selling their supersonic designed engines to data centers for power.
I struggle to imagine this is a very efficient design, that something designed for going mach 1.something breathing significant air is ideally suited for being at sea level not moving running a generator. Just feels like the stupid timeline having it laughs at us all again. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-...
Update: also, I was surprised in the first place because I thought the big challenge for boom was they were trying & failing to get engines. They eventually got Kratos to sign up but I thought it'd mostly be a Kratos engine... https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
Also don't forget saftey as one of the things holding this back. It's pretty major.
I just don't see any pressing need for supersonic jet travel now that in-flight Wi-Fi, hi-res HMDs for your laptop and the Nintendo Switch all exist. And I think that trying to justify it in terms of "we have to end the stagnation and go back to a regime where plane speeds increase YoY" is silly: either it provides a compelling service for its high cost (there's no getting around that air drag and fuel consumption increases quadratically with speed) or it doesn't, and personally I don't think it will.
Except the title, a large part of this article seems to have been written by an LLM.
Why are we not focussing on rocket based travel so we can finally do 90 mins from Seattle to London :)
Spacex and blue origin has already demonstrated heavy payload transport, why can we just move to this than work on supersonic
"The last successful US airplane manufacturer was Douglas Aircraft, founded in 1921."
Nice (misleading) buried lede re: Boeing I suppose.
We need supersonic airports, not planes. Spending 2h to board a plane for a 1h flight is just wrong
I just think regular flying shouldn't suck so so so hard and I'd be happy to spend 24 hours flying. Economy is an absolute nightmare these days, premium economy is where economy should be.
I'd love to be able to afford business or beyond but I honestly don't even want to try it because I know I won't want to go back.
"Noise problem solved" from the "Rational Optimist Society"
Sorry can't help but chuckle at this....
> using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions
What is this even supposed to mean?
To me this comes across as "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed by a supersonic jet that can surpress sonic booms, so I shoehorned AI into the description to jazz it up." It makes me wonder why the author doesn't think the former is impressive enough on its own.
>no flying cars
>no back to the future hoverboard
>no concorde
millennials bros we've been tricked
just for sake of clarity - people need to remember it took about 2 years to get the finest plane ever built i.e SR-71 (Blackbird) in the air.
there's thing we lost we i.e skills, grit, creativity we might never recover from
Regarding the “supersonic is now viable because LNG” argument, but for a different reason than usual.
Even if supersonic flight becomes cheaper via new fuels or propulsion, that doesn’t reset the baseline. The same advances (materials, engines, fuel handling, manufacturing) will also apply to subsonic aircraft, where the physics are already far more energy-efficient. So if supersonic gets “cheap,” traditional jets will get much cheaper. Airlines will always arbitrage toward the lowest energy-per-seat-km for most routes, and supersonic flight is structurally disadvantaged there (drag, noise, routing constraints).
Historically, faster transport doesn’t replace slower transport wholesale; it creates a premium tier while pushing the mass market down to a lower cost/energy equilibrium. Concorde didn’t kill widebodies, widebodies got cheaper. My intuition: supersonic may of course exist as a niche (time-sensitive, premium), but its biggest impact would be indirect, accelerating efficiency gains that make conventional aviation even more dominant and cheaper.