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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Dude, where's my supersonic jet?
4ndrewl wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
The 1973 sonic boom regs were there to protect the US airline industry,
not citizens.
nephihaha wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Concorde was extremely loud. I remember it flying over. But its main
sin was being a European product not an American one.
That said the US used to have the space shuttle and that has gone the
same way.
leopoldj wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
I just wanted to point out that Boom Aerospace is now mainly focused on
delivering a Gas Turbine for power generation [1].
In an interview with CNBC Mr. Scholl talked about this pivot [2].
1. [1] 2.
URI [1]: https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-po...
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw
pdntspa wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
"Noise problem solved" from the "Rational Optimist Society"
Sorry can't help but chuckle at this....
kylehotchkiss wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
Why make planes faster when you can make them more uncomfortable and
upsell more items mid-journey?
aprilfoo wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
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.
bamboozled wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
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.
starkeeper wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
Also don't forget saftey as one of the things holding this back. It's
pretty major.
dzonga wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
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
CivBase wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
> 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.
projektfu wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
Every data model is now AI.
class3shock wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
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: [1] [2] 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! [3] "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: [4] - 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.
URI [1]: https://boomsupersonic.com/united
URI [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast-a...
URI [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1
URI [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
tim333 wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
I was a bit disappointed with the Boom XB-1. They originally
announced - designed to maintain a speed of Mach 2.2, with over 1,000
nautical miles. I thought cool. Then 7 years late they fly and - Mach
1.1 and no longârange. Then rather than develop it they say it's
retired, we'll take orders for Overture now.
I wonder what's going on there?
joelthelion wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
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.
Schiendelman wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
I spent a lot of my 20s and early 30s as an environmental activist.
I'm now in my mid 40s. One of the biggest things I've learned is that
the vast majority of people will never make that trade. We are going
to heat up the Earth. And then we are going to deal with the
consequences.
koops wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
We're all of us speeding towards a cliff that ends in environmental
disaster.
And if you point that out, you get downvoted to invisibility on
Hacker News and elsewhere.
pacifi30 wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
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
snowwrestler wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
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.
obblekk wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
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 thereâs 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.
senordevnyc wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Itâs 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.
1.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
notahacker wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
tbf United and JAL did put in a non-trivial deposit, but yeah, the
orders won't be binding on them (I remember having an exchange on
here with one of their investors on here about that). Frankly I think
they've done well to get where they are, but where they are is a
basic demonstration of their supersonic boom suppresion technology on
a small testbed aircraft (a few years behind schedule!), and having
to design their own engine because they can't get one of the major
OEMs to work with them.
stephc_int13 wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
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.
nenadg wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
>no flying cars
>no back to the future hoverboard
>no concorde
millennials bros we've been tricked
slackfan wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
"The last successful US airplane manufacturer was Douglas Aircraft,
founded in 1921."
Nice (misleading) buried lede re: Boeing I suppose.
foota wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
At first I thought this was a reference to [1] .
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc
voxleone wrote 1 day ago:
Regarding the âsupersonic is now viable because LNGâ argument, but
for a different reason than usual.
Even if supersonic flight becomes cheaper via new fuels or propulsion,
that doesnât 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 âcheap,â 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 doesnât replace slower transport
wholesale; it creates a premium tier while pushing the mass market down
to a lower cost/energy equilibrium. Concorde didnât 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.
K0balt wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
Surprisingly, at least in theory, and probably in practice with
better technology, supersonic travel can be as efficient or even more
efficient than subsonic flight. Supersonic travel opens up higher
altitudes, higher altitudes means less air resistance.
The ultra high altitudes of LEO satellites showcase the steelman
example, traveling effortlessly through the vanishingly thin
atmosphere at hypersonic speeds with extreme efficiency even though
the fuel expenditure to get them there was high.
For more reasonable hypersonic travel, at 100k feet, the âwindâ
force at 3375mph is only as much as you would feel at 400 mph at sea
level⦠so you can exert the force needed to fly at 400mph, but for
that same energy you are going 3375mph.
Of course there is a lot of tech needed to take advantage of these
efficiencies, but itâs not a matter of faster = less efficient. As
for economies, a jet that can fly LA to NY in 70 minutes, with an
hour of turn at each end, could make 10 trips a day, potentially
cutting the number of aircraft needed to cover a given route or route
rotation by a factor of 4.
Obviously this is not currently practical on so many levels, but
there is nothing fundamentally stopping us from achieving that level
of service, given enough knowledge and technical capability.
If we ever want to achieve that level of understanding and
competence, we will have to work on it when it seems impractical.
Remember, it was in a single persons lifetime between flying
precariously in glorified kites and supersonic flight.
tw04 wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
> Historically, faster transport doesnât replace slower transport
wholesale; it creates a premium tier while pushing the mass market
down to a lower cost/energy equilibrium.
If that were true, weâd all be taking trains and boats everywhere.
We arenât.
Manuel_D wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
The difference between a supersonic jet and and a subsonic jet is
about 2x. Between NY and London that's a 3.5 hour flight vs a 7
hour flight (plus the overhead of security, traveling to and from
the airport, boarding, taxiing, etc. which brings down the
proportional cost).
By comparison, a boat would take 7-8 days. The disparity in time
saved between supersonic and subsonic flight is pretty trivial in
comparison to the time saved between a boat and a subsonic plane.
tw04 wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
Presumably there are no flights from Paris to Munich then?
There are. A flight is about an hour and a half, a train is about
5 hours. Far more people fly between the two every day than take
a train.
nottorp wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
Isn't the flight cheaper as well?
Manuel_D wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
A 5x disparity is still a lot more than a 2x disparity. In
fact, considerably less than 2x given the overhead time of
traveling to the airport, security, boarding, etc.
How many people would pay 8x the ticket price for a 45 minute
flight from Paris to Munich (The Concorde was ~8x the ticket
price of economy subsonic flight tickets)?
credit_guy wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
That is not quite true. The advantages of LNG are much more important
for high supersonic jets (Mach 2.5 and higher) than for subsonic
jets. There are disadvantages too, and they are quite significant for
all jets, but altogether the tradeoff is worth it at high speed long
endurance supersonic jets.
Here's why. LNG offers 2 main benefits. The first is the higher
energy density (53.6 MJ/kg vs 43 MJ/kg, so 25% more [1]). Airplanes
are subject to the rocket equation, even if they are not rockets. The
rocket equation says that the mass of the fueled vehicle is the mass
of the vehicle at the end of the trip times the exponential of
delta-v divided by the exhaust velocity. For airplanes, it is not
exhaust velocity, but "effective exhaust velocity", because they
borrow a lot of reaction mass from the atmosphere (the air used as
oxidizer, and more importantly, the bypass air). The effective
exhaust velocity is very high for subsonic airplanes, and much lower
for high supersonic airplanes. The delta-v for subsonic airplanes is
lower than the delta-v for supersonic airplanes because of the lower
drag (although not as much lower as one would expect, because they
need a higher attack angle). Overall, the benefit from the high
energy density LNG is much more pronounced for high supersonic jets.
The second benefit is the use of the cryogenic LNG to cool off the
engine. For very high speed engines, this is huge. So huge that the
famous (but never materialized) SABRE engine was supposed to use
liquid hydrogen, which is stored at much lower temperatures.
The disadvantage of LNG is, surprisingly, not the need for cryogenic
storage. It is the lower volumetric energy density. It is 22% lower
than that of jet fuel. The rocket equation does not care about
volumes, only about mass, but larger volumes means bigger airplanes,
so more drag.
So, for subsonic airplanes the advantages of LNG are not all that
important, while the bulkier tanks are a pretty big downside. For
high supersonic jets, the advantages of LNG are so high that they
simply open up possibilities that are not there with jet fuel. The
fact that the LNG is cheaper is a nice thing to have, but it's really
not that important, since the economics of high supersonic jets are
more impacted by the construction cost and very high maintenance cost
than by the fuel cost.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...
fooker wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
You are missing an important factor in the baseline here, the cost of
time.
Right now, a cheap 7 hour each way round trip between NYC and London
is ~500$.
Halve it to 3.5 hours each way with a supersonic plane, saving a
total of 7 hours.
Now, the real question is then, what's one hour of your time worth to
you or whoever is paying for your flight?
If improvements to subsonic aircrafts bring down the price to 200$
instead of $500, people would still be willing to pay 200$ + 7 *
$HOURLY for a faster flight.
Even with a low-ish estimate of $HOURLY = 50, it would make sense to
take the supersonic fight if the price was $500, which it could
conceivably be brought down to, and the market has already validated
to be willing to pay.
scythe wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic.
An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour
flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a
tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even
for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the
range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change
that.
fooker wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
I think weâll eventually have some technology to make this
realistic.
Supersonic flights powered by jet/rocket engines might not be it
for all we know. IMO we are still pretty early in the history of
aviation as a technology.
dotancohen wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
If you are already mentioning rocket propulsion, then you
should know that Gwen Shotwell foresees Starship flying E2E
(point to point on Earth) flights with paying passengers,
competing with airlines. One hour to anywhere on the planet.
mrguyorama wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
Which is nonsense. Not only will rockets never have airplane
reliability and safety for basic physics reasons, but that
rocket profile looks exactly like an ICBM and nobody wants to
let that confusion happen.
robotresearcher wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
> One hour to anywhere on the planet.
Anywhere they can take off from, which is a decent distance
from a population center. The last (forty?) mile problem
bites again.
inglor_cz wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
I can imagine Starship landing on a sea launchpad (in
coastal cities), and the last 30 miles can be taken by a
speedboat in half an hour. The sea usually isn't as
traffic-jammed as land communications, and boats, unlike
high-speed trains, don't require that much infrastructure.
fooker wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
Hopefully we discover some sort of gravity physics/tech that
makes chemical rockets obsolete!
I don't see Starship being useful for civilian transport use
cases, but for military operations sure! But there's not much
to distinguish a starship from a nuke launch during a war, so
it remains to be seen whether that risk is worth it.
kachapopopow wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
the argument breaks down when the cost of these flights will be at
minimum in the range of $10000
fooker wrote 19 hours 33 min ago:
Read the article
kachapopopow wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
unrealistic expectations or double decker economy where you
can't even sit down. I believe that overvalue their time -
there's a lot of things you can do during flights including
sleeping and SpaceX providing near gigabit of Ethernet over the
Atlantic further reduces the need for these solutions. VR is
also being heavily used to review designs 'in person', anyone
that genuinely needs to be at the right place at the right time
probably has a private jet already.
I might be an outlier as someone who is never in a rush to live
their life.
mkoubaa wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
7 hour to London is actually 10 hours when you factor in the
commute to the airport, security, planing, flight, deplaning,
shuttle to hotel.
Cutting it to 3.5 hours isn't a 50% overall decrease, because those
3.5 will turn into 6.5 of real time.
So the marginal value of faster flight goes down the shorter the
trip is, and these supersonic airplanes can't do the super long
Pacific flights because physics.
It's a much smaller niche than is often imagined. But it's still a
niche, I guess.
rootusrootus wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
Also, the same plane can now make twice as many revenue flights.
panick21_ wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
With Starlink and better wifi, the time on board can also be used
better. So if you end up on the internet answering mails and so on,
you can do that on the plain or in the hotel-room.
j1elo wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
That's a reasonable argument for businesspeople, but it doesn't
apply for the greater public. Because chances are that except in a
minority of situations, they are on holidays and during that saved
time they wouldn't be working at all anyways.
People who could perfecty afford a $2,000 plane ticket still fly
with $400 ones (as long as they are within reasonable standards),
for example because they have a desired budget for a given trip,
and the expensive option would blow it away, so they don't mind the
extra time.
ghaff wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
Even most businesspeople aren't really that hyper-scheduled on
trips--especially the ones that can't book whatever class they
want.
And to your latter point, I can afford higher-class tickets but
it comes back to what I could do with the money instead like a
nice dinner. I don't tend to have a budget per se but I do
recognize tradeoffs.
fooker wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
Have you ever picked a slightly more expensive nonstop flight
instead of one with a layover for a vacation?
This is similar. 3.5 hours vs 7 hours is a pretty good
difference.
You can take a 3.5 hours flight in the morning and have energy to
see a city the whole day after that. Maybe not after a 7 hour
flight unless you are a pretty experienced and motivated traveler
who can sleep the entire flight and have the mental energy to
enjoy new things after that.
jedberg wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
I do actually think you're right, but the counterpoint is that
airlines have slowed down all their flights to save money, and
no one has come in offering a faster flight in exchange for
more money.
Maybe the delta just isn't enough to matter? Or maybe people
aren't willing to pay for it.
fooker wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Iâd say the tech isnât there yet.
Remember weâre still pretty early in the history of
aviation.
jedberg wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
We know the tech is there. It used to take 45 minutes to
fly from LAX to SFO. Now it's 70 minutes. That's not a
tech problem, it's a logistics/fuel problem. But if people
really valued the difference, they would offer a 45 minute
flight for more money.
Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and
we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's
because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the
tech to go faster.
So why can't I buy a BOS->SFO flight that is one hour
shorter for more money? Probably because of a lack of
willingness to pay.
seanmcdirmid wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
> Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco,
and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time,
it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly
have the tech to go faster.
Catching favorable winds and burning more fuel. It is in
the airlines best interest to have the plane in position
for the next flight, so they will burn the fuel when they
need to. However, committing to a tighter schedule would
cause a lot of problems if they were late too often,
kinds of problems that means they would make less money
than with the current schedule.
jedberg wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
> However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause
a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of
problems that means they would make less money than
with the current schedule.
There is always a price where this isn't the case. My
overall point is that that price is still too high and
people aren't willing to pay, and we don't really know
if that's the case (but maybe the airlines probably
do).
seanmcdirmid wrote 14 hours 26 min ago:
They arenât going to make that flight time very
often so even if it was offered at a premium, they
just could not deliver that product consistently.
csoups14 wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
That depends entirely on how much "slightly more expensive" is.
For the vast majority of the travelling public, they'll choose
the cheaper option and we know that because that's what they
choose already.
fooker wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
If that was the case, most nonstop flights between non-major
cities would not exist at all.
csoups14 wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
Most major airports are at their physical limit in terms of
both airfield and gate traffic and are charging extremely
high gate fees. I'm not in airline logistics but I would
bet my bottom dollar that is the true constraint in having
more traffic fly into hubs.
kibwen wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
Business passengers aren't out here paying for their own tickets.
Their employers are paying for those tickets, so the question is
whether or not companies care about the time their salaried
employees spend in the air, when those employees can be just as
productive on the business-class wifi.
fooker wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
Most employers book the most convenient flight for their
employees, and not really care much but saving a few hundred
dollars.
ghaff wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
Assuming they're even micro-managing employee productivity to the
degree that they really care about working on a plane.
Personally, I never purchased plane wi-fi even when I could have
expensed it.
atoav wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
Want to reduce the time it takes to get somewhere? Reduce the
security circus at airports. This will cut off way more of the travel
time for the majority of flights, wothout the downsides of supersonic
planes.
ghaff wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
You're going to have some security in any case and have since at
least the 1970s. And it typically takes me <10 minutes even if I
allow some extra time for the potential that it could be longer if
it rarely is with pre-check.
atoav wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
Yes but compare it to trains or busses. If I want to take the
train/bus I make sure I am at the station 10 minutes before the
vehicle departs.
In my experience the good time to arrive before a flight (with
luggage to check in) is roughly 1 hour before (and this nearly
wasn't enough in some cases).
If we talk about a short flight that can add more than 50% to the
flight duration on the ground for (1) putting the luggage
somewhere, (2) going through the security funnel and (3) getting
to the plane.
Sure I get why things are shaped the way they are, but if I
wanted to cut travel time I would first have a long deep look at
that.
ponector wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
If you are flying to/from popular destination like Europe in
August, you can stuck for two hours just in the luggage drop
queue. Extra hour for security check queue and one more for
border/customs check queue. Another 20 minutes just to walk to
the gate.
Depends on the airport and your luck, of course.
46493168 wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
TSA in the US is a jobs program
c_o_n_v_e_x wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
I agree with your market analysis. Private jets are often referred
to as "time machines" given how much time HNW / exec travelers can
save. There's a market segment that's willing to pay a high premium
for reduced travel time.
expedition32 wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
Private jets don't go faster. They can just land closer to your
destination and make you skip all the annoying airport stuff.
gerad wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
For most of my trips, a huge % of the travel time is outside the
actual flight time. Trip to the airport, security, boarding,
waiting to take off, and reverse on the other side (with addition
of potentially getting a rental car). This can be solved without
supersonic solutions (e.g. flying private), but adoption is low for
business travel â is it too expensive?
Separately, I wonder if a lot of the demand is also obviated by
in-air wifi.
vdqtp3 wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
> adoption is low for business travel â is it too expensive
Yes. Most companies won't even spring for business/first class,
which is 10-20% the cost of a charter. Unless your time is both
limited and worth 4 digits per hour, it's not worth it.
masklinn wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
> Airlines will always arbitrage toward the lowest energy-per-seat-km
for most routes
That's a second order effect from fuel being the primary cost, and
thus the primary lever to either make more profit or improve
competitivity.
If airlines could triple their profits by doubling their fuel burn
they'd happily do that.
HPsquared wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Aeronautical engineering isn't that linear. A technology suited to
one application may not be helpful in another. It's one of those
"hardware is hard" fields.
foota wrote 1 day ago:
Hm... I don't know that I buy your argument, since just as you point
out, traditional jets are already very optimized. One would assume
there's less slack to pick up.
paganholiday wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Traditional jets have a long inventory and regulation cycle but for
example retrofitting a A320 to LNG appears to save 20%: [1] Which
still puts it behind the 787 let alone the generation that comes
next.. But you aren't going to succeed at making any new inventory
without every possible efficiency improvement to drive sales and
retirement of older inventory.
URI [1]: https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:63b89022-ac68-42...
api wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
Fuel is a huge component of the cost of operating an airline,
sometimes the largest component. LNG is a much cheaper fuel, so I
can see it being adopted for mainstream aviation eventually.
Existing jets could technically be converted, though the
conservative nature of aviation would demand many years of testing
before use on commercial flights.
It's also a pathway to incremental decarbonizing of aviation. LNG
releases less CO2 per unit energy than oil, and methane can be
produced biologically or synthetically which offers a path to total
(net) decarbonization.
masklinn wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
> Even if fossil LNG is used, it releases less CO2 per unit
energy.
However released methane has a significantly worse greenhouse
effect than CO2 (80x over 20 years, 28 over 100, 8 over 500 â
this decreases because methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12
years and decays to CO2). So leakage in the LNG chain is a
massive problem.
api wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
A major difference is: there is an economic incentive to not
leak methane since a leak is wasted fuel, while the economic
incentive for CO2 is to make more of it.
masklinn wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
> A major difference is: there is an economic incentive to
not leak methane since a leak is wasted fuel
That economic incentive only goes so far given the entire
point of the discussion: LNG is cheap. Per the IEA's recent
"Assessing Emissions from LNG Supply and Abatement Options":
> Our analysis estimates total GHG emissions from the LNG
supply chain are around 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
equivalent (Mt CO2-eq) (this excludes emissions from
combustion of the natural gas at the point of use). Around
70% of this is in the form of CO2 emissions which are either
combusted or vented, and the remaining 30% is methane that
escapes, unburnt, into the atmosphere.
> ...
> Globally, the average GHG emissions intensity of delivered
LNG is just under 20 g CO2-eq/MJ, compared with an average of
12 g CO2/MJ for natural gas supply overall.
akoboldfrying wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
Right, but are leakage rates high enough to make this a
concern? Every methane molecule leaked is a methane molecule
not burnt, so there's already a strong profit maximisation
incentive to leak as little as possible (even before
considering loftier goals like workplace safety or externally
imposed regulation).
masklinn wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
> Right, but are leakage rates high enough to make this a
concern?
According to a recent IEA report, 30% of the LMG supply
chainâs greenhouse impact is methane leaks.
> there's already a strong profit maximisation incentive to
leak as little as possible
That runs against the stronger profit maximisation incentive
of doing as little maintenance and being as cheap as
possible.
mr_toad wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
Jet engines donât release the methane, they burn it, and
theyâre very efficient. And jets donât leak fuel, that
would be very hazardous.
masklinn wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
LNG is not a nice liquid at room temp, so more use means more
in transit and more complicated supply chains, meaning more
leaks.
MattGaiser wrote 1 day ago:
And even then, it is only so premium. As you could have a speedy
economy seat on the Concorde or a lie flat bed on a widebody by the
time Concorde left service. The speed benefit largely goes away if I
can travel while sleeping.
nonameiguess wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
Highly depends on the person. Over 6 feet tall with screws and rods
holding my spine together, even a lie flat is not very comfortable,
and not having to spend my first day or two at my destination
decompressing before I actually enjoy the trip would be pretty
valuable to me. The only way to achieve that is less travel time,
but even so I'm not sure reducing the time in air would be enough
when you add in travel to and from the airport, plus taxi time on
the runway. It wouldn't be nothing, though, and I'd definitely pay
for it if it made a difference.
Problem is broad market trends don't care about me personally.
There have to be a lot of people like me with both sufficient
injuries and sufficient money and there probably are not.
b112 wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
Some planes used to have lounges and bars and such.
Would maybe have helped? I know I'd pay more for that.
masklinn wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
Some planes still do e.g. Emirates A380 has a bar, Qantas' has
a lounge (though apparently it's not very good).
fragmede wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
Is it actually not very good, or did you read an online
review by someone who got miffed for some petty reason so
they're magnifying the tiniest things?
XorNot wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Cutting 22 hours Sydney to London to 12 would make a big difference
though.
There's no real way to make that much time on a plane bearable even
if you had a lie flat bed: that's just a ton of time in the air.
Australian international travel would be the premier market if you
wanted to travel supersonic (also our coastal cities mean most
departures could accelerate immediately).
javiramos wrote 20 hours 39 min ago:
Having done Dallas<>Sydney a few times, going from 17 hours to
~8.5 hours would be huge.
kibwen wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
The irony is that supersonic jets don't have the range to realize
the time savings over such long routes.
bobthepanda wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Halving travel times would be really good, the problem is that
supersonic never had the range to make the difference meaningful.
JFK-London in 3 hours vs 6 is pretty tolerable if youâre more
comfortable for the 6 hours. SFO to Shanghai in 7 hours vs 14 would
be a lot more compelling but Concorde could not do transpacific
range.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
That's the just flight time, but you've also got travel to/from
the airport, parking, maybe shuttle bus/monorail, and
checking/security/wait time at the airport as well.
So, add an hour for door-door travel to airport, and 2-hr before
flight check-in, and now the comparison isn't 3 vs 6hr but 9 vs
12hr, which doesn't sound so worthwhile, although no doubt there
are customers for it.
For longer flights it'd be much more attractive, but this is
never going to be an affordable service for the masses.
ekelsen wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
But for the private jet market, the reduction would be huge.
They're already paying a premium to save time. The top end will
pay an even larger premium to save even more time.
I agree with you that for commercial, anything other than super
long haul (which is technically very hard), the time saving
advantages are much less compelling.
Animats wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
A service where your limo drives out to the aircraft, with all
searches and paperwork pre-done, would have about the same time
gain as going Mach 1.7 vs. Mach 0.85.
pinko wrote 21 hours 52 min ago:
Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the
office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on
each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin,
security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the
time-sinks worth optimizing.
Animats wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
That's a real service.
Some airports, including LAX and London Heathrow, allow a
"tarmac transfer", where the limo goes directly to the
plane. [1][2] Cost is $200 to $1000. That could save an
hour or more at each end.
VIP Terminal Access: Skip the standard queues and enter
exclusive VIP terminals where youâll receive expedited
passport control, security checks, and personalized
services, all while enjoying luxury amenities. Avoid long
security lines with expedited security processing, ensuring
you spend minimal time in the airport. [1]
URI [1]: https://limossist.com/tarmac-transfers/
URI [2]: https://airssist.com/airport-tarmac-transfer-servi...
ekelsen wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
private jets already solve these problems.
mrguyorama wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Which already is a bad signal for the article's argument.
We already have a way to significantly reduce that travel
time and it's a niche.
Could Boom Supersonic or whoever actually survive selling
only to a hundred Taylor Swifts? How are they going to
keep the lights on for the 30 years those jets fully
saturate the market?
notahacker wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
And probably fewer regulatory hurdles (and I don't mean that
because they wouldn't be considerable...)
thesumofall wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
I actually prefer a 10+ hrs business class flight over a 6-7 hrs
flight. At least you can get a full night of sleep
hdgvhicv wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Depends on the time zone change. From Europe to with Africa
sure a 12 hour figggt is great. If I travel business London to
singapore i get far worse jet lag than if I fly via the Middle
East and break my journey for a few hours.
zaxioms wrote 1 day ago:
> Blake embodies the âbits to atomsâ 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"?
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
No the meaning is that there's a wave of hardware innovators who
started as software innovators. Musk (Paypal) is the most obvious
example. The Boom CEO featured here is another. There's a fair bunch
more, I agree with the author that a weirdly high % of founders of
cool hardware / deeptech companies have a software engineering
background. Like, you'd expect that space to be dominated by
mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and physicists etc but
somehow it isn't.
snowwrestler wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
Because people who led software companies (which have insanely high
margins) have access to the vast capital needed for serious heavy
hardware development. They then hire the engineers they need to
succeed.
notahacker wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
Yep. I suspect they're also better at getting warm intros to and
selling their vision to Silicon Valley CEOs than your average
aerospace engineer with a dream.
Towaway69 wrote 1 day ago:
From virtual goods to physical goods I assume.
Never heard before either so you're not alone.
EDIT: the reference to America is, again I assume, the trend to bring
manufacturing back to the US from mainly China.
jelder wrote 1 day ago:
> Youâre 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?
stephc_int13 wrote 1 day ago:
Except the title, a large part of this article seems to have been
written by an LLM.
riversflow wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Crazy that you are the only comment that noticed this. I stopped
reading at,
> Translation: Building airplane engines is hard
There are many hints previous to that, but that gave it away for me.
If I want LLM output Iâll request it from the model myself, thanks.
b3lm0nt wrote 1 day ago:
Necessary link to Maciej CegÅowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100
Years:" [1] 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, âwhat
are we building this for?â
URI [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords.c...
bawolff wrote 1 day ago:
I dont know i agree. Trans-antlantic flights kind of suck. If i was
doing tourist things (and the cost point was right) i would
definitely prefer a 3 hour flight. Not sure i would pay double for
it, but i do think there is a market for this.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
You'll pay double (or more) for it. You can have a much better
experience today if you fly business.
bawolff wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
Well that's the question right? What is the price point. All
products have a price where people won't buy it.
But i suspect even if its double, that would still be enough to
attract business class peeps, which might make it economically
viable.
Panzer04 wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
The issue concord had was also that a lot of people would
rather a luxury seat on a conventional airliner rather than be
squished in on a supersonic airliner.
I kinda doubt that dynamic changes.
_petronius wrote 1 day ago:
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.
notahacker wrote 21 hours 50 min ago:
tbf whilst the lower cost travel we've got accurately represents what
the market wants, it isn't exactly unusual to find industry insiders
that want flight to be faster (they're just a little less likely to
gush about how startups are "cleverly" working with regulators or
describe Douglas as the last successful US airframer...)
projektfu wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
One could say Douglas is the only successful US commercial airline
manufacturer. (Last remaining, after Boeing bought MD but
inherited MD's culture)
juujian wrote 1 day ago:
> Three reasons: noise, regulation and cost.
So the environmental impact isn't even worth mentioning?
snowwrestler wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
I believe that fits under âregulationâ from the perspective of
people building these things.
nomel wrote 1 day ago:
The environmental impact won't prevent their use unless something
like a carbon tax is present, where environmental impact directly
results in cost. People "need" to travel, in a convenient way,
regardless. Same with ICE cars. They'll go away when they're
superseded by both cost and convenience. The environment doesn't
really matter to the mass population that travels.
Schiendelman wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
I've had an EV (Tesla model 3) for almost 3 years now. I'm kind of
flabbergasted at how good it is. I don't think you could pay me to
go back to an ICE. Or you'd have to pay me a lot!
I think more and more people are having this experience. It's just
not cheap enough yet, and hasn't penetrated the used market far
enough yet. But I think it's just a matter of time.
jauntywundrkind wrote 1 day ago:
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.
[1] 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...
URI [1]: https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-po...
URI [2]: https://ir.kratosdefense.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
positron26 wrote 1 day ago:
That is not a pivot I would have expected. Aviation turbines are not
good utility turbines. If you just need to beef up your turbine
engineering, drone turbines are probably the place to go. Less
competition from GE etc.
notahacker wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
It's a VC fundraising oriented pivot I think.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think they expected it either, but it's building expertise
in that general area, the question is if that expertise will
transfer back over to supersonic jet engines, or if they're
different enough that they can't.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
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.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
I'd guess not. It was aging, maintenance was getting ever more
expensive, Airbus didn't really want to support it anymore, and it
faced ever more competition from better first-class amenities on
regular planes, and from the internet reducing the need for fast
business travel. It was modestly profitable in its heyday once the
capital costs were written off, but it didn't have a lot of headroom.
Jet fuel cost about $1/gallon when Concorde retired. Five years
later, it would hit $3/gallon. I have to imagine that would have
ended it if nothing else had by that point.
Schiendelman wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
I don't think the Internet has reduced the need for fast business
travel. I think business travel has grown along with the Internet.
sidewndr46 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm relatively certain that neither Concorde nor any passenger jets
burn aviation gas. It may be physically possible, but would be
extremely ill advised given the lead additive
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Some version of Aviation Turbine Fuel (the other ATF) is used in
passenger jets, which is either Jet A or Jet A-1 for colder,
non-American flights. It is a kerosene-based fuel which does not
contain any lead.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
Fair. Edited my comment to note that both sorts of fuels were in
that price range, but didn't look up the specific fuel
specification used by the Concorde.
rounce wrote 1 day ago:
I'm pretty sure they weren't referring to 100LL, but either way
even back in the 90s Jet-A was around USD 0.50 per gallon, in the
60s it was nearly 1/5th of even that.
recursivecaveat wrote 1 day ago:
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.
hermitcrab wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
I am guessing this is really aimed at the 1%, who don't have to get
to the airport 3 hours before a flight.
Rory Sutherland commented that, insteading of spending billions on
high speed trains, why not spend a few million on making the
experience nicer. Better carriages, more staff, nicer stations.
Schiendelman wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
I don't think you have to be a member of the 1% to get to the
airport an hour before a flight. Precheck is like $20 per year.
JasonADrury wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private
terminals and have a completely different airport experience
while flying commercial.
This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available
at most big airports elsewhere.
I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll
be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will
have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been
loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off
the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private
terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car
waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded.
At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this.
Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few
hundred dollars at less fancy airports.
nine_k wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
LA to Seattle is not worth it. The real gains are in London to NYC,
or Tokyo to LA, or maybe Rio de Janeiro to Miami.
GenerWork wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
South America to Miami and vice versa will absolutely be a market
for supersonic flight. It may be slow to takeoff (hah), but as soon
as the South American elite pick up on it, it'll 100% be utilized
to its maximum potential, especially during events like Art Basel.
zamadatix wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
The one note about Astro Mechanica towards the middle is referring to
long haul flights from smaller airfields because they'll have a
smaller private jet sized plane. It was not referring to short haul
flights, nor was the rest of the article.
I don't believe the economics for that will at all work out the way
they are pitching, but it has no relation to how much supersonic
makes sense for a domestic short haul.
seanmcdirmid wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
Seattle to Beijing is like 12+ hours now that Russian airspace is
closed. There is a lot of time to save.
charcircuit wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
So save it using a Chinese airline who can fly through Russian
airspace?
seanmcdirmid wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Chinese airlines arenât allowed to use Russian airspace for any
flight to/from the USA approved after 2021 or so, which, because
of COVID, is basically most of them. You could maybe fly to
Vancouver and get a quicker connection.
My last trip was on Hainan, which didnât over fly Russia.
elicash wrote 1 day ago:
Being on the actual plane is the most uncomfortable part of the
entire experience, for me at least.
Others may disagree, but I'd rather cut an hour from the flight than
the entire commute/parking/security/airport waiting. (Assuming
conditions on the actual plane were the same.)
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
The whole experience nowadays is horrible. The airplane is a bus,
the airport is a shopping mall. Passengers are just cattle.
satvikpendem wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
Of course it's a bus, what do you expect? If you want it to be
like the 1950s golden age, you can get that, but for a price.
nine_k wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
When you can fly e.g. London to Barcelona for something like $59
(if you time your ticket purchase right), it is a bus, for the
price of a long-range bus ticket.
(There is even a big aircraft company named "Air Bus", or
something, did you hear about them?)
joshstrange wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
I've flown business class, it's still a bus, a nicer bus where
you are treated marginally better, but it's a bus. Maybe
private planes would change things (I've never been on one) but
I can't imagine airplanes as being anything but a means to an
end that I wanted to spend the least amount of time on.
red-iron-pine wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
being on the plane is the easy part. put bags up top -- and check
the big ones so this is a simple process -- and then buckle-up and
snooze.
it's the everything-else part of air travel that is fucking awful.
40+ minutes of security theater even with NEXUS and other
fast-passes, lost bags, massive PITA airports, delays, and the
hoards of dumb fuckin rubes who have no idea how to travel and need
to haul their comically huge carry ons that somehow got through
sizing + emotional support chihuahua -- a far cry from even the
worst subways I've been on.
charcircuit wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
>40+ minutes of security theater
This is such an exaggeration. Usually it's like 3-5 minutes.
devilbunny wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
If you live in the right areas - mostly the western US - try JSX.
Runs about equal to maybe 20% more than commercial domestic first
class. Regional jets, all 1+1 seating, fly out of (effectively)
an FBO, show up 20 minutes before domestic and 40 before
international flights. Light screening, no terminal, no carryon
(all bags brought off immediately at end of flight for collection
planeside). Free WiFi on board and 120V power outlet at every
seat.
anon84873628 wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
I feel the need to praise the (relatively) new SFO terminal 1
somewhere. The design is a breath of fresh air.
Always my smoothest airport experience by far. No checked bag,
Clear + Pre Check, fill your water bottle after security, get a
coffee at Ritual, buy a banh mi for the plane, use a pretty clean
bathroom, sit in one of those swivel chairs, get on the plane.
kakacik wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
Nah, its quite opposite for me. It becomes real chore with small
kids on non-short flights, but the thing is - I travel normally
only for vacations. Time spent in airports is literally vacation
wasted on bureaucracy without even moving, since in ideal situation
I would spend 1 minute giving them big luggage, if at all, and
stepping in the plane just about to take off. Flying is actually
moving me towards the goal, feels more acceptable.
Overall when I started traveling I loved all of it, exciting, new.
Now I hate this part as a whole, necessary evil of wasted life to
get what I actually want where I actually want.
anon84873628 wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
I try to find absurd humor in counting the different steps that I
had to go through from leaving my house to getting on the plane.
Or analyzing the legibility & usability of the systems. Or just
being proud of myself for being able to be so patient and let it
all go. Sometimes you can even strike up a good conversation with
a stranger. But with kids, oof, yeah... :-)
elicash wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
I expected that others would have opposing experiences and tried
to reflect that in my comment. People are different sizes, flying
different class, frequenting different airports, traveling with
families or solo, for longer or shorter periods of time, more or
less luggage, etc. So of course it won't be universal.
My main point is that all time is not created equal, that it
matters WHERE you shave the minutes/hours off, not just what
percent of overall travel time is removed. And while we disagree
on how to apply this, we seem to agree on that main point.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
Unless you pay the sort of money (or more) that supersonic flight
would realistically cost. Even without going private,
business/first seating (along with expedited service through
security, airport clubs, and arranged private car to your hotel)
deal with a lot of the issues that many economy travelers have with
air travel.
anon84873628 wrote 1 day ago:
Funny, for me it's the opposite. It's uniquely relaxing to be
locked in with nothing but a book or some movies (I purposely avoid
connecting to the internet during a flight.)
My biggest dilemma is whether to sit in the aisle or window. The
former you can get up whenever you want but are bumped by passers
by and neighbors exiting the row. Versus being the one doing the
disturbing.
And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would be
priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and the
full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest discomfort
is the dry sinuses.
But in getting to/from the plane you are cattle moving through a
logistical labyrinth with countless possibilities for something to
go wrong.
TulliusCicero wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
100% agree with you. Actually being on the plane is fine, I don't
have many complaints there. Yes, there are various compromises
around space and comfort, but they're all understandable given
the cost/efficiency concerns.
Getting through the airport is just a huge pain in the ass
though. At least some airports now let you keep your shoes on
again, hopefully soon we'll have scanners that don't need you to
remove electronics (I tend to bring too much of this and it's
always a pain), or even let you keep liquids again (!).
anon84873628 wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
Look for the "Smiths" brand scanners and go in that line if
possible. Those don't have to remove items from the bag.
joshstrange wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
> And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would
be priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and
the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest
discomfort is the dry sinuses.
Lay-flat chairs and business class are nice and a massive upgrade
for long flights but better than being off the plane? Nope.
> restaurant quality
The food is mid-tier at best, I would not return to a restaurant
that served food like what they serve in business class. It's
only amazing when compared to the alternatives and the fact you
get treated like half a human for a minute.
> full recline
Ehh, I find them claustrophobic and they only really "lay flat"
if you aren't 6'+. They are approximately 1 billion times better
than normal airplane chairs but you are still in an airplane.
hbosch wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
>And if you can afford business class [...] The meals are
restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to
disembark!
Let's settle down. This kind of biz class experience is almost
certainly unique to international travel. Flying "business class"
from ATL to SFO might get you a plate of microwave slop and an
extra 15deg of incline on almost all domestic jets. Once in a
blue moon you'll get a modern plane with the diagonal seats. One
less person in the row, though.
Paying for business class domestically is almost always a sham by
my experience.
anon84873628 wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
I was specifically thinking of my experience flying Emirates to
the UAE :)
Other threads are discussing what range is actually practical
or worthwhile. The article is very optimistic saying Australia
can be a weekend trip. For me it's much more beneficial to cut
a 16 hour flight in half than a 6 hour one. I don't really mind
an itinerary 9 hrs or less, which includes all US domestic
travel. But of course it will be different for a business
commuter vs the occasional getaway.
zamadatix wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
ATL to SFO would almost certainly top out at first class, not
business class. This is true of most all domestic routes. First
class on international also just gets you the 15 degrees and 1
or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that gets you the lie
downs and such.
The food will probably still be worse than a first class
international flight though. Not as many people paying as much
and not enough air time to really force all of them to want to
eat airplane food in the first place.
sokoloff wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
> First class on international also just gets you the 15
degrees and 1 or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that
gets you the lie downs and such.
This is not my experience at all. First class is better than
business class on international (and domestic, of course,
though relatively few domestic routes have true three cabin
service [counting all the slightly different economy levels
as one cabin]).
zamadatix wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
For ATL<->SFO the directs are Delta, Frontier, and United:
Frontier doesn't have a business class nor long haul
international flights (they are an ultra-low cost carrier).
Delta calls their highest tier "Delta One" their business
class offering. It's mostly available in mid & long haul
international flights, though there are a few select
domestic routes with it IIRC. A tier below is First, which
is available for both domestic and international flights.
[1] United's highest is called "Polaris", representing
their international business class. Confusingly, they have
"United First and United Business" as the next class. I.e.
it's the same class but on domestic flights they call it
"United First" and on international flights the same seat
would be sold as "United Business" despite having Polaris
for that already. Regardless of that oddity, the First
class can't be higher than itself named Business class even
compared directly instead of with the actual business class
Polaris - it's the same seat. [2] .
Other airlines label and order things differently of
course. E.g. American has Flagship First above Flagship
Business above First/Business (shared much like United on
that 3rd class) and maybe that's where your experience is.
To my knowledge though, no such airlines operate the
ATL<->SFO route originally described though.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines#Cabi...
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines#Cabi...
sokoloff wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Can you find any three-cabin service where First class is
the middle tier of cabin? (In a two-cabin service,
whether the one that's not economy is called Business or
First is not helpful in determining whether business or
first is higher; we both agree they're better than
economy.)
Here are airlines offering three-cabin services on a
single aircraft where First is the highest tier:
Air France - La Première (First), Business, Economy
American Airlines - First, Business, Economy
Cathay Pacific - First, Business, Economy
Emirates - First Class suites, Business Class, and
Economy
Etihad - First Class private suites, Business, Economy
Japan Airlines - First, Business, Economy
Lufthansa - First, Business, Economy
zamadatix wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
Happily, here's one from Delta as I described above [1]
. Sadly (for me, at least), I've never flown above
"First" on such a configuration from Delta though :).
Like you had noted, they call it 4 cabin classes... but
the economy classes ("Main" & "Comfort") are both
treated as a single cabin in terms of service and the
difference in economy seats is an inch or two of leg
room. So it's really a 3 cabin of: business, first,
economy.
Again, hbosch said ATL<->SFO... and you aren't going to
be flying Air France or Japan Airlines for that route.
My list, as far as I'm aware, was exhaustive for that
route. It was not a cherry picked search of airlines
which do it that way or global claim of what all other
airlines do, only a response to the particular claim.
On other routes/airlines the statement could, or rather
"would", certainly have been true. Honestly, I think
those airlines have it the right way around, but,
having flown the exact route and the same airlines
internationally, it did not match my experience for the
route - which agreed with the labeling for all airlines
for that route according to the links above. Unless,
perhaps I'm missing that American or similar does
actually have a ATL<->SFO to be compared with?
URI [1]: https://i.imgur.com/wwYQXy1.png
sokoloff wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
Where is the label of âfirstâ anywhere in that
image or in Delta marketing on that flight?
joncrane wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
It literally says "first" in the upper right hand
corner of the image indicating the red seats, which
are clearly not as nice as the purple seats, aka
Delta One?
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
I don't love being on a plane for a very long stretch, even in
business class. And IMO food is very mid-tier restaurant. But I
don't necessarily disagree with your comment. Even with transport
and airport conveniences that a relatively modest amount of money
can buy, there's plenty that can go wrong and you can avoid all
the other people to only a certain degree.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
No one is flying supersonic over land at least in the US. Going over
the oceans is where it would happen.
hermitcrab wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
Wasn't that just an act of spite because Europeans were the first
to deliver commercial supersonic flight? I'm sure it will be
reversed if the US becomes the leader.
plorg wrote 1 day ago:
The author of this slop seems to believe Boom's pitch deck that
they can use AI to only boom into space and thus do supersonic
overland. The only thing his article suggests though is that you
could do it under certain atmospheric conditions, and more likely
this is just cover for "do it all the time and blame the computer
when we rattle peoples' windows".
kllrnohj wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Saying it requires or uses AI seems to be just... modern
marketing bullshit. But the technique itself seems sound enough.
NASA studied the phenomenon already:
URI [1]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/download...
labcomputer wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
But if you actually, you know, read that NASA study, it
mentions that the maximum practical speed (from theory) for
âboomlessâ flights is less than Mach 1.3, and they only
demonstrated âboomlessâ flights at Mach 1.1.
That would result in far, far less time savings that what is
posited by the commentary on HN. Compared to Cessna Citation
X, for example, that would reduce time in the air by just 15%.
Total travel time savings would be even less⦠so a private
Citation X at M0.95 would still be beat a commercial M1.1
flight in door to door travel time.
nomel wrote 1 day ago:
That's because there was a dumb ban in place, with an executive
order [1] and bill that just cleared to lift it [2]. The ban was
"dumb" because it's indirect, trying to control loudness by
limiting speed, which is an incorrect [3] assumption based on old
tech of the time. [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/le...
URI [2]: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-su...
URI [3]: https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise
filleduchaos wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Bear in mind that despite carefully worded PR, "Boomless cruise"
is 1) not guaranteed to be "boomless" 2) is much slower than
would make all the rigmarole of supersonic flight worth it even
when it is "boomless".
gosub100 wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
I don't trust it. They will get approval and then when sonic
booms disrupt nature from coast to coast they will say "it's just
because the weather/it only affects a small number of people/the
3rd party contractor who supplied the data was wrong, they are
gone now/the benefits outweigh the downside/think of all the
jobs". Basically they'll say anything other than "oopsie we were
wrong, no transonic flight for you".
seszett wrote 1 day ago:
The ban was specifically to hinder the Concorde, so it made sense
to base it on supersonic flight rather than noise in case the
Concorde would have managed to mitigate its noise level one way
or another.
nomel wrote 1 day ago:
Reference? There was an "Anti-Cordorde Project" [1] but its
purpose was to ban all supersonic flight, for environmental
reasons. Concorde being the only in regular service, thus the
targeted name.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project
melling wrote 1 day ago:
He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example?
Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?
filleduchaos wrote 1 day ago:
1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct
flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24
hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to
show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight
time.
2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic
trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is
expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have
about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to
Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
TeMPOraL wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
RE 1. - the example still stands. Travel time is best understood
as falling into buckets. Roughly:
- < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some
errands;
- 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote
location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper;
- 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back
overnight or next morning;
- > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip.
(There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance
travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people
perceived travel in historical times.)
As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or
increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However,
going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one
people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy
to pay premium for.
So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle
travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport
overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting
down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means
it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in
person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't.
This is also why it's the business customers that are always the
target for such ideas - regular people are much more price
sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard
flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an
extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might
actually be worth it for a large company.
filleduchaos wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
Replying to point 1 (especially with this argument) while
completely ignoring point 2 makes very little sense to me.
TeMPOraL wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
Even with airport overhead, there's plenty of routes a
supersonic plane could drop from 4-8h bucket to 2-3h bucket,
and that is still something business flyers would pay for.
filleduchaos wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Like which ones? Bear in mind that despite carefully worded
PR, Boom has very much not somehow surmounted the laws of
physics to eliminate the sonic boom that caused the Mach 2+
Concorde to be banned from going supersonic over land.
fragmede wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
NASA seems to think it's possible though.
URI [1]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/...
filleduchaos wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
See the pesky thing is that if you actually read the
paper you've been linking as opposed to just running
with "NASA said it's possible", you'll notice that like
I alluded to, at Mach 1.3 (theoretically!) "boomless
flight" is much slower than Concorde's Mach 2+ cruise
that the company certainly wants you to think of when
you do your back-of-the-napkin supersonic flight time
savings maths. And that's on top of requiring optimal
atmospheric conditions, so not even a guarantee to
begin with.
The laws of physics funnily enough are not something
you can "move fast and break" or PR-speak your way
around.
labcomputer wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Yea, but only for speeds up to Mach 1.3â¦
theoretically. Not Mach 2.0 flights. And they only
demonstrated the effect up to Mach 1.1.
Saving only one hour on a transcontinental (US) flight
doesnât seem all that impressive.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty
for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself
isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO.
At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to
continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would
be trans-Pacific.
filleduchaos wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Yeah, in my opinion the point that "wouldn't it be nice if this
was faster?" becomes a real issue is the point that you would
feasibly need to get your day's sleep en route with today's
airliners, because it's difficult to sleep for more than a few
hours at a stretch on a flight even with business class
conveniences (and that's before getting into the degraded
quality of sleep). If I could catch a flight that's fast enough
to let me hold off on sleep altogether until I get to my
destination, then that's worth paying a premium even for
economy seats. Unfortunately, that's also the point that a
supersonic airliner becomes unworkable for airlines, because
the fuel-to-passenger ratio just stops making sense. You can
try to make it work with refuelling stops along the way, but
that really eats up the theoretical time savings and adds its
own operational overhead too.
I think we need an energy breakthrough with a denser and still
cost-effective fuel before really getting into the era of
supersonic transport. Maybe at some point someone will dust off
the nuclear-powered aircraft designs of yore...
pixelesque wrote 1 day ago:
LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's
not comparing realistic flight times anyway.
elbci wrote 1 day ago:
We need supersonic airports, not planes. Spending 2h to board a plane
for a 1h flight is just wrong
andrepd wrote 1 day ago:
1h flights are just wrong period. Just build a train.
Flavius wrote 1 day ago:
Sometimes itâs not that easy or cheap to build a railway. You
have mountains, seas, wetlands etc. But I agree that high-speed
trains should be the default option.
SoftTalker wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Even if you don't, you have property owners whom you'll need to
either convince to sell or you'll have to get eminent domain to
cross their land. Across multiple jurisdictions depending on
distance covered, any one of which could delay your project by
months or years with procedural objections or hearings. You'll
need environmental impact studies and accomodations for the
entire route. And for high-speed rail you'll need to build
underpasses/overpasses at every road crossing. And once you build
a rail line you're pretty committed to that route. Air travel
avoids all of that.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
I used to take the train from Orlando down to Miami (well... Ft
Lauderdale) and it was about 3 hours, vs a simple 1 hour flight, or
a 3 hour drive. The train ride was worse on holidays though,
sometimes it took 6 hours or even way longer. I think I'd much
rather be on the plane overall.
andrepd wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
Well duh x) because the "train" is dogshit, that's exactly my
point. If instead of a 28 lane highway there was a dirt road, or
instead of an intl airport and jets there was a grassy field and
biplanes, nobody would drive or fly respectively, either x)
melling wrote 1 day ago:
Correct, you werenât riding a bullet train.
There are these really fast trains that exist in a dozen
countries.
China has 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.
tazjin wrote 1 day ago:
I regularly take the train between Moscow and Kazan. It's 12
hours, you can get on in the evening, have dinner on the train
and then get a decent 8 hours of sleep before getting up, having
some coffee and arriving.
It's much longer than the equivalent flight, but also much more
comfortable. There's something annoying about airports - with the
train I can get to the station 15-20 minutes before departure and
it's fine.
Once the train rides get much longer than 12 hours it shifts, but
there's a sweet spot right around there.
prof-dr-ir wrote 1 day ago:
good train > plane > bad train
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
Driving is cheaper than all of those options when its more than
one person, at least here in Florida. The more people involved
in your travel, the cheaper driving starts to get.
melling wrote 1 day ago:
Some pretty bad traffic in Miami. Last month it took me an
hour to go 10 miles on a Thursday afternoon.
fragmede wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
Get a comma ai and it's just not a bother.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
Hehe, my wife is from there, for the first few years she
lived in Orlando I would crack jokes about how bad it is
down there, noticed she was getting offended so I pulled
back, but the last three times we've gone down there she
swears up and down Miami drivers are the worst. Of course
Orlando has I-4 as well, which is, its own special place.
Octoth0rpe wrote 1 day ago:
Does your opinion change if the flight speed is 2500km/hour for
most of the flight?
andrepd wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
? No, because (1) the distance is still short and (2) 2500km/h
flight is uneconomical so it's never going to happen anyway.
nluken wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
kens wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
The claim in the article, "Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just
taxiing down the runway", is completely wrong and kind of ruins my
confidence in the article. A Concorde used less than 1% of its fuel
taxiing down the runway, not 52%.
Source: Air France Flight 4590 Accident Report states that the plane
had 95 t of fuel on board when the aircraft started out and used 800
kilos of fuel during taxiing (page 17) and 200 kilos after taxiing
before takeoff (page 159). [1] (Since there's a bunch of discussion
about how to reduce taxiing consumption, I'll point out that one
tonne of aviation fuel is about $700, so there's not much money to be
saved by creating battery-powered tugs or whatnot.)
As far as takeoff, "at the start of cruise 20% of the total fuel
burnoff will have been consumed while only 9% of the total distance
will have been covered." From "Operation Experience on Concorde", a
paper by the Design Director. While 20% is a lot, it is much less
than 52%.
URI [1]: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/Concorde_Acc...
URI [2]: https://www.icas.org/icas_archive/ICAS1976/Page%20563.pdf
labcomputer wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
> (Since there's a bunch of discussion about how to reduce taxiing
consumption, I'll point out that one tonne of aviation fuel is
about $700, so there's not much money to be saved by creating
battery-powered tugs or whatnot.)
Probably the biggest win in aviation emissions would be converting
all the ground support vehicles to electric. Theyâre currently
classified as off-road vehicles, so donât have to adhere to the
same emission standards and normal cars and trucks. Additionally,
they already spend a lot of time parked at the gate, which makes
charging convenient and means that workers are never âwaitingâ
for the vehicle to charge.
consp wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
9% of the distance but 100% of the altitude. That statement
completely ignores the hardest part of the flight (with respect to
building potential energy) of getting at altitude.
prof-dr-ir wrote 1 day ago:
The article is just generally sloppy.
> .. my recent trip from Abu Dhabi to LA. 24 hours door-to-door. We
have the technology to reduce that to under 10.
The direct flight (by Emirates) takes 16h15 mins, so that leaves 7h45
mins not in flight. If we want to bring that down to 10 hours just by
making the flight supersonic then that would require a flight time of
2h15, corresponding to a (ridiculous) speed well over Mach 4.
notahacker wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
In fairness, Astro Mechanica and Hermeus claim to have a pathway to
Mach 5. Not saying I expect to see it, particularly not for regular
people flights to the Middle East, but believing in it is kind of
the premise of the article.
(I must admit I was more curious about Astro Mechanica's engine
tech before they also threw in the intention to operate Uber for
business jets...)
Reason077 wrote 1 day ago:
Not ridiculous if youâre flying above the atmosphere. SpaceX has
proposed point-to-point rocket-powered hypersonic flights that
connect New York to Paris in around 30 minutes.
Obviously the real problem with this idea is environmental:
emissions would be substantial and nobody wants an extremely noisy
rocket port near their city.
general1465 wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
And furthermore you would be able to start only in good weather
window for takeoff and landing and Gs on Gemini flights (which
were doing the same thing) weren't comfortable either.
jrjeksjd8d wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
Whenever I hear people talk about rocket flights I think of the
Stephen King short story "The Jaunt". Humans develop near-instant
transportation but you have to be unconscious while travelling. A
kid avoids being sedated and is driven insane by whatever
interdimensional stuff he sees in transit.
Likewise for every fit 20-something being launched at Mach 5
you'd have 10 octogenarians dying of cardiovascular
complications.
LargoLasskhyfv wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
How do you imagine that? First thing coming to mind is the
loudness of rocket starts and powered landings. Even for airports
that would be too loud. At least with current regulations. So
you'd probably waste time getting to some dedicated facility, far
out in the midst of nowhere to care about, and getting out of a
similar hole on the other side of the trip. And again regulations
regarding the closure of airspaces and seas for starts and
landings, as it's currently done. Which seems rather incompatible
with the current system of commercial flight ops, as it's
currently done. Other relevant regulations coming to mind are
evacution procedures/general survivability provisions for
conventional commercial flights, which are mandatory by law.
However I turn that idea, no matter from which point I'm looking
at it, I'm not seeing it going anywhere.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
Musk has proposed lots of things.
pixelesque wrote 1 day ago:
Roughly that figure (45%) was used to get to Mach 2.0 at 60,000 feet,
about 45 minutes after takeoff from LHR (normally over the Bristol
channel) to JFK.
Takeoff and climb / accel to Mach 1.7 was done with re-heat
(afterburners), which did use a lot of fuel. After that, normal power
(no re-heat) was used to get to Mach 2.0 and cruising (supercruise).
dwroberts wrote 1 day ago:
American coverage of the Concorde has to try and make out that it was
technically bad, otherwise they would have to face up to the fact
that their country squashed the possibility of supersonic travel,
through political bullying and protectionism of their own aircraft
industry
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Though, given the investment into the Concorde led to Airbus and
all of their planes, disrupting Boeings dominance of that industry,
I think they might have gotten the last laugh.
BobaFloutist wrote 1 day ago:
And also through supersonic travel being annoying as hell and super
expensive.
masklinn wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, it sounds like the repetition of a mangled version of the SR71
stories. Burning 45 tonnes of fuel on the runway would be completely
insane.
Checking various links on taxiing burn yields about 2 tonnes which is
a lot more realistic and reasonable (a previous HN comment indicates
the 767 burns about a tonne taxiing: [1] concorde burning twice that
sounds fair)
The OP might have gotten confused reading articles like [2] stating
concorde burned half its tank from the gate to cruise (mach 2 at
FL600)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386
URI [2]: https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/
Reason077 wrote 1 day ago:
> âthe 767 burns about a tonne taxiingâ
This seems incredibly inefficient. Is there a future for hybrid
aircraft, which would feature both traditional turbofans and large
batteries for energy storage?
Batteries would eliminate the need for an APU and power the
aircraft during taxi, allowing the engines to be started just
before actual takeoff, and shut down immediately after landing.
Either the batteries could power wheel motors directly during taxi,
or the aircraft could mix turbofans with e-fans (which could also
allow energy recovery during descent and help power the aircraft
during cruise, reducing fuel consumption further).
tetromino_ wrote 1 day ago:
> This seems incredibly inefficient.
Very inefficient but good for safety: if an engine is failing,
you hopefully might discover that while taxiing rather than when
you are in the death zone 25 meters up in the air.
Reason077 wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
Not an expert, but intuition suggests this probably isnât
true.
If an engine is going to fail spontaneously itâs almost
certainly going to happen at high thrust, not while at idle or
very low thrust values during taxi.
philipwhiuk wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
Your intuition is wrong.
Engines experience issues when changing speeds (especially
start-up) not when at steady thrust output.
jelder wrote 1 day ago:
eTAXI is just one such solution
URI [1]: https://www.safran-group.com/videos/e-taxi-safran-unveil...
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
I think they've looked at that kind of thing but not found if
practical so far. One innovation has been airbus jets taxiing
with just one engine which cuts fuel use a lot as it mostly goes
to just spinning the engines.
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
Airport tugs might be a better fit to improve ground operations
efficiency?
masklinn wrote 1 day ago:
Electric taxiing (on APU) has been in development for over a
decade, but it's mostly intended for single aisles (the shorter
the flight the more the taxi overhead), and the relatively low
fuel prices has led to these projects mostly dying off: L3
shuttered their effort in 2013, Honeywell and Safran's EGTS joint
venture was dissolved in 2016, and wheeltug... apparently still
lives (with no support from either boeing or airbus), though it
was initially supposed to enter service in 2018.
Reason077 wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Fuel saving would be only one of the benefits.
Airlines would also significantly reduce engine operating
hours, reducing engine wear and thus maintenance costs. Iâve
been on flights out of Heathrow that seem to spend almost as
much time taxiing as they do in the air (due to weather or ATC
delays or whatever), so for short-haul operations this seems
really significant.
Local air quality is also a concern for airports: the air in
the neighbourhoods around Heathrow often stinks of jet exhaust,
sometimes you can smell it from miles away. Presumably, much of
those emissions come from taxiing aircraft.
labcomputer wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
The limiting factor for most turbine engines isnât really
operating hours, but âcyclesâ, which is to say starts and
stops. From a maintenance perspective itâs not terribly
important whether you start the engine at the gate or the
runway.
Also, as far as maintenance goes, engine hours are weighted
by operating power. So, an hour at idle doesnât count as
much as an hour at cruise power. One of the reasons airlines
started using not-full power on takeoff when conditions allow
it is because of âpower by the hourâ maintenance
contracts, which incentivize that.
kamarg wrote 1 day ago:
> This seems incredibly inefficient. Is there a future for hybrid
aircraft, which would feature both traditional turbofans and
large batteries for energy storage?
I would assume the extra weight would make it not really worth
the added cost and complexity.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Because jet engines are notoriously simple devices to begin
with.
elmomle wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly it sounds like the "right" way to do it would be
electric ground vehicles pulling the planes into position, as
with tugboats in water. Plane never need carry batteries into
the sky and saves a literal ton of fuel.
masklinn wrote 1 day ago:
IIRC towing to and from the runway has two major issues:
- standard towing tractors are really slow when towing,
nowhere near taxiing speed, so you need a fleet of heavier
duty "fast tow", possibly dedicated (depending on price)
- more traffic around the runway, which creates more airport
complexity
Taxibot does exist tho, and is certified, and used in a few
airports. Though I think it's only hybrid not electric.
TylerE wrote 1 day ago:
Bigger issue is that the engines need to be idled for a
while anyway to get up to proper temps, etc. you donât
want to start the engines and jam them into full takeoff
thrust 5 seconds later.
masklinn wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
True, the engines need to be warmed up and the hydraulics
need to be pressurised, but given e.g. airbus recommends
single engine taxi without APU (SETWA) warming up the
engines probably doesn't take that long in the grand
scheme of things. Definitely not the 15~25mn of taxi.
From the sources I can find, "normal" warmup takes 2~5mn
depending how long ago the engine was shut down, unless
outside temps are exceptionally low, and you can do that
while reaching the end of your taxi.
KolmogorovComp wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
> but given e.g. airbus recommends single engine taxi
without APU
This is wrong, unless you have a source for it
Reason077 wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
The software in modern engines wouldnât let you do that
anyway. The engine startup process can be quite long -
several minutes in a 737 MAX - while the engineâs ECU
brings things to proper temperatures etc.
But with e-taxi, the startup cycle could be performed
while taxiing, potentially saving airlines time on
pushback as well as fuel/maintenance cost savings.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
It used about half of its fuel for taxiing, takeoff, climb, and
acceleration to cruising speed. Maybe that's where the number came
from originally and it got mangled in translation.
saalweachter wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
When I looked into this in another context (not supersonic jets),
while "a lot" of fuel was used just getting the jet up to speed
going down the runway, "most" of the fuel was going from 1 foot off
the ground to N0,000 feet.
(I was curious if there was any opportunity for some sort of system
to power take-off from the ground, be it catapults like on air
craft carriers or just power-transmission for electric planes, and
the numbers I found were that while a surprising amount of fuel was
used by the time the plane lifted off, it was more like 5% than
50%.)
vablings wrote 1 day ago:
[1] They did burn a crazy amount of fuel on getting up to supersonic
speeds though.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386
lovegrenoble wrote 1 day ago:
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
TheOtherHobbes wrote 1 day ago:
In 1973, it became the first supersonic passenger transport to crash
into a town during an airshow.
cromulent wrote 1 day ago:
> âSupersonic 2.0,â 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.
mrec wrote 1 day ago:
This was the bit that caught my eye:
> Blakeâs pitch to airlines is enticing: âYouâre 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.â
And now most of the profit for the 300-seater is gone. What does this
do to flight pricing for those who were flying economy?
dlisboa wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
Most being the operating word here. Economy class tickets still
make a profit if the airline wants it, just see the vast majority
of regional flights which have zero business class seats. Southwest
for instance has single-class layouts.
Some airlines "take" the marginal economy seat loss on larger
planes because those are the ones they can fill with business class
seats and make an even larger profit.
Even then it's a complex math on whether economy is hurting those
flights' profit margins since those people buy things in-flight
such as Wi-Fi and extra bags. Base fare is not the only way
airlines make money.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Standing room only flights.
rzzzt wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
Which one, the "strapped to an upright stretcher" variant, or
just hold on to a handle or a metal pole like in a bus?
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
Yup, it's a bad pitch. Let's say the economy airplane without the
business seats can now accommodate 400 economy seats. You now need
two air crews and twice as much maintenance (or more) to transport
480 people (~60% increase) with a smaller percentage of those
passengers being business class fares.
What really kills this though is the value proposition for the
business class passengers. I think I'd rather pay extra to sit in a
comfortable seat for 16 hours, where wifi is now a standard
feature, than cram into a smaller (likely noisier) seat for 8
hours. The cases where that 8 hours matters - especially when you
can work from the seat if you have to - are fleetingly few. In the
70s, you couldn't do much in an airplane seat so it was wasted
time. This is no longer the case and is steadily getting better.
mrec wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
> a smaller (likely noisier) seat
Reminds me of that description of the Tu-144 as "so loud you
couldn't hear the person next to you screaming".
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on how well the wifi actually works. I flew Lufthansa
from Europe to the US and paid for wifi that didn't actually work
of most of the flight. If I could have just gotten there quicker,
I would have paid for that instead.
Analemma_ wrote 1 day ago:
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.
eleventyseven wrote 1 day ago:
> I
You are not the only consumer of air travel. Supersonic is not for
you, it is for elites willing to spend 4x the ticket price for half
the flight time. Concorde tickets were $6000 for D.C. to London in
the mid 1990s, so about $12,500 today, and that was for an
economy-style seat. It was very popular among a certain segment.
East Coast US to Europe in 3-4 hours versus 7-8, West Coast US to
Asia in 5-6 hours versus 10-12.... makes it more like a domestic
flight.
ghaff wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
My dad got upgraded to a Concorde once (for reasons I don't know)
from First Class on (I assume) Pan Am. His reaction was basically
meh. Got into London at rush hour and he really wasn't that
impressed.
randerson wrote 1 day ago:
IMHO digital entertainment doesn't make up for being stuck in a
cramped cabin for up to 19 hours (the longest international flight)
around people (with varying levels of considerateness,
contagiousness, and personal hygiene). Not to mention the increased
risks of DVT and radiation exposure.
I travel each year to see family abroad, a minimum 2-leg trip
totaling at least 27 hours. I can't sleep on planes so I arrive
exhausted and am useless and cranky for the first 2 days after this
trip. I would happily pay 2x the fare to cut that trip in half.
_fizz_buzz_ wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
If you can afford supersonic travel, then you could also afford
first class. And supersonic travel will probably be like flying
economy. The concord was pretty crammed compared to todayâs first
class.
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
If you're flying half-way around the world, sleeping on the plane
or a shorter flight isn't going to help much. I've done it twice
and the jet lag is killer for the first 2-3 days regardless of how
well you sleep on the plane (I usually sleep very well).
chrisweekly wrote 1 day ago:
Deep Vein Thrombosis?
Espressosaurus wrote 1 day ago:
And also the negative externalities. Plane noise is irritating, sonic
booms are far worse and spread farther.
rtkwe wrote 1 day ago:
Even with those conveniences IMO that only dulls the tedium of the
flight and no matter how comfy the travel is I'm still losing about a
whole day at least of just flying across the Atlantic going from the
US to Europe and back for a vacation which is pretty valuable with US
leave allowances. At the very least there's the market for business
travel where workers don't lose whole days to travel.
strange_quark wrote 1 day ago:
In the age of ubiquitous video conferencing, does it really make
sense for business travel?
rtkwe wrote 1 day ago:
My work just did a big moderately disruptive shuffling of all the
teams to try to localize as many members of each squad as
possible in one location and the trend since COVID stopped being
as deadly has been a massive wave of RTO so management seems to
believe there's benefit in in person meetings or at least
professes and acts like they do. I can't assign all of the huge
RTO pushes to just management justifying and propping up their
office real estate portfolios.
strange_quark wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, business travel is definitely still a thing. But every
company Iâve ever worked at has sort of accepted that travel
days are lost anyways because people come in from all over the
country, get in at different times, have delayed flights, etc.
My point being that Iâm skeptical that companies are going to
start paying 2x, 3x, 4x the cost so that their employees can
get there a few hours faster, especially when, at least in my
experience, itâs hard to get them to even pay for seats with
extra legroom.
melling wrote 1 day ago:
â Blakeâs pitch to airlines is enticing: âYouâre 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.â
pandemic_region wrote 1 day ago:
> Give those passengers a supersonic plane
Meaning a big price increase for us normal passengers?
rtkwe wrote 1 day ago:
The math doesn't scan out on that, it sounds good for pitches and
articles but is kind of nonsense once you think about it imo. It's
going to cost way more than just 2x to run the supersonic jet along
the same route per flight just in fuel and maintenance and you're
cutting out all the low fare passengers they cram in the back so
they need to make up even more money than just the fuel costs and
running additional flights per day doesn't address the issue
because the cost per trip is increasing so running more trips just
keeps incurring those same costs.
avidiax wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
It won't change the economics of the current class of aircraft.
They will still need to have business class seats to pay for the
economy cabin.
You will probably end up with 5 or 6 tiers of service instead:
Supersonic: Business + First
Subsonic: Economy + Eco+ + Business + First
Supersonic First will be a Veblen good that has a high price
floor (like $30k). Business for time sensitive business
passengers, and it's actually an Economy Plus seat for ~$15k.
It's very hard to resist marketing some service differences,
particularly when you have two classes of users with different
needs (speed vs. prestige).
rtkwe wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
The pitch quoted from the post I was responding to essentially
said it was going to siphon all the business class fliers from
normal flights: "Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut
the flight time in half, and charge the same price." There's no
way businesss travellers would choose subsonic travel if
supersonice was the same price for half the time.
We agree I think that there wouldn't be a similar price between
the sub and supersonic travel options. The economics of running
the routes can't work out to a similar price to existing
offerings.
VLM wrote 1 day ago:
Also by no longer providing service to non-business class customers
they save a lot of money on personnel, services, logistics.
Of course the disadvantage, is no more air service for non-business
class customers (that being most of us).
BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
It's been a while since I've flown. Are ~20% of seats really
business class?
jsrozner wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
Look at a 777-300 on [United]( [1] ) - 60/290 biz/econ (~20%),
but the biz seats take up probably 40% of the plane.
Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then
that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back.
Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40%
of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz.
Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60%
revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way
biz.
URI [1]: https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing...
projektfu wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
But biz will be half empty or more at full price, so it gets
filled with upgrades of coach tickets to reward frequent fliers
or full-fare users. The average has to be lower. The biz
price may also be optimistic. United EWR-LHR is more like your
$2.5k-$3k. Delta has an ATL-LHR option for first/business
class with a bed that's more like $8k-$10k, and their Premium
Select, which is more like United's business class, is $2.5k.
Interestingly, they offer more beds than big seats.
I remember pricing out the Concorde years ago, before it was
grounded. BA's first class subsonic was $8k, Concorde was
$12k. (2001 dollars) If you're paying those rates anyway, it
might be worth it to go faster, if you don't mind the
relatively small seat and limited food service. Coach was
$400-$600.
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
There's a powerful and outspoken modern cult that worships
technological progress, but only for values of "progress" that meet a
certain wow-factor/"shininess" threshold.
The idea that such progress could ever falter is anathema to such a
cohort (which, in their defense, have lived their whole lives in the
most technologically anomalous period of the entirety of human
history), making them susceptible to scams like Boom.
Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the
ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more
with more.
TeMPOraL wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
> Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the
ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more
with more.
Being able to do more with less is equivalent to being able to do
much more with only little more.
kibwen wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
And yet all that the aforementioned progress-cultists care about
is being able to do a little more, even if it costs much more.
The rate of return based on the effort invested is precisely the
issue here.
mlinhares wrote 1 day ago:
Because these are not solutions, they're just fluff. If they were
actual solutions these people would kill them because they'd
diminish the power their real overlords have.
Just look at the whole circus around the hyperloop instead of just
building high speed trains.
andrepd wrote 1 day ago:
Would expect nothing less from someone self-styling as "rational
optimist".
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
There is such a huge market of ways to improve flights that are
between "what we have now" and "high price supersonic" that aren't
currently being done; indicating that there's not a terribly large
market for it.
Those who could easily afford supersonic can already afford other
luxuries; the only one it gives is time; but if time is of the
essence you can save it elsewhere by chartering your own jet.
AlexandrB wrote 1 day ago:
> chartering your own jet
Honestly, this seems like the place to start with supersonic
technology. The very wealthy are price-insensitive and would be ok
paying 3-4x as much to get somewhere 2x faster. A good place to
prove the technology, infrastructure, and market opportunity before
cost-optimizing to try to get interest from mass-market travellers.
bombcar wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
The thing is, if you can charter your own jet, you can make it
travel on your schedule and suddenly cutting travel time in half
isn't quite as important (even rich people sleep sometime).
It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if
ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before
the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is
"good enough" if not perfect.
jsrozner wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
a good reason to tax the wealthy so hard that they can't own
private jets <3
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