Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

https://airwaysmag.com/rolls-royce-boom-supersonic/

by theparanoid • 4 years ago

201 244 4 years ago

airwaysmag.com

bombcar4• 4 years ago

The semi-snide comments from the Boom side is, as the kids would say, "sus".

slater• 4 years ago

haha right?

"Boom meanwhile added, “We are appreciative of Rolls-Royce’s work over the last few years but have mutually concluded their proposed engine design and legacy business model is not the best option for Overture’s future airline operators or passengers.”

ssssssnap!

zardo3• 4 years ago

They should partner with a jet engine startup that has produced nothing but renders to match their business model.

650REDHAIR2• 4 years ago

“Legacy business model” = ???

bambax2• 4 years ago

Yeah that struck me as odd; it's unprofessional and weak; I think it's a very bad sign for the future of the company.

ulfw2• 4 years ago

Wait... does anyone believe they have a future? How?

If this was doable and there was a market for it, what on earth would stop Boeing and Airbus from building one with 1000x more experience in designing and above all manufacturing airframes. (Airbus even has the inherited legacy of Concorde through Aerospatiale/Sud Aviation)

kurthr• 4 years ago

That seems like it would slow things down a bit, which is a problem in a higher rate world. Not sure business travel is going to stay on the same trajectory either.

Of course weirder stuff is happening:

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israel-ba...

Banning 4 engine aircraft from Israel means no more 747 freighters or new leisure supersonics.

LadyCailin• 4 years ago

Or visits from US presidents.

paulgb• 4 years ago

I would have to assume that falls under the “special permit” allowance.

Operation of aircraft with four engines will be allowed in exceptional cases and only with a special permit.

jaywalk2• 4 years ago

Last sentence of the article:

Operation of aircraft with four engines will be allowed in exceptional cases and only with a special permit.

I'd imagine that Air Force One will not have any trouble obtaining the special permit.

solatic• 4 years ago

Actually, they carved out an exception for Air Force One.

kylehotchkiss• 4 years ago

This was probably to protect the flag carrier from a very attractive and more comfortable rival who were rumored to be considering a380 flights to the country

topspin10• 4 years ago

There are perhaps 3 companies on Earth that could conceivably provide engines for this application. RR was one of them. Where to now?

keepquestioning3• 4 years ago

Couldn't SpaceX or Rocket Lab's engine be repurposed for this task?

adastra22• 4 years ago

Those aren’t jet engines.

bombcar4• 4 years ago

SpaceX engines can clearly get you to supersonic speeds, but they're not "jets" and are much more expensive to run.

topspin10• 4 years ago

No.

echelon• 4 years ago

Jets vs rockets:

Jets breathe atmospheric air for combustion because they operate in an atmosphere where oxygen is readily available for combustion. They have an air intake nozzle.

Rockets carry their own oxidizer because they must. They only have an exhaust nozzle.

__m• 4 years ago

Boom is a competitor of SpaceX. Both plan supersonic international travel.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

The answer is in the article... the remaining contenders are General Electric and Pratt & Whitney

topspin10• 4 years ago

Yeah, that's the other two.

Supersonic jet engines are a rarified field. There are Russian "companies"... good luck getting that certified for Western commercial aviation.

hangonhn2• 4 years ago

What about CFM or Safran?

rjsw• 4 years ago

Safran could probably make an engine for this as well.

topspin10• 4 years ago

Eh. Maybe. They haven't developed a clean sheet supersonic turbofan since the 80's. This Boom "Overture" thing is going to need an entirely new design for long duration super-cruise; Boom needs engine people with a lot of depth.

trhway3• 4 years ago

Can they use for test demonstrator something like Mig-29 engines - those used planes are available including in US just for few millions. Once they are flying, GE or RR will probably be more interested.

topspin10• 4 years ago

It's true that a lot of aircraft development has occurred using substitute engines while the final engines where still being developed. The problem for Boom isn't getting airborne. It's convincing one of the few outfits capable of this to put billions of dollars into a clean sheet engine design.

Klimov RD-33's (the Mig-29 engine) are not super-cruise engines and aren't capable of demonstrating the intent of the Boom design. And frankly I think even a retrofit like that is beyond Boom's means.

mshockwave• 4 years ago

It's not like GE and P&W are bad choices given the fact that they made some of the best military jet engines in this world. While comparing fighter jet with large aircraft might not be fair, I think B-1B Lancer will be a good analogy in this case (similar size, 4-engine layout, and twice the takeoff weight). And B-1B Lancer use engines from GE.

jaywalk2• 4 years ago

They're not bad choices at all, and I'm sure Boom would love to work with either of them. But the question is whether or not GE or P&W are interested in working with this vaporware company.

smachiz3• 4 years ago

There is no engine that will make economic sense for either the engine manufacturer or the airline operator based on the technology we have.

This was always a fools errand.

topspin10• 4 years ago

I know. No one that understands turbofans would imagine otherwise. This sort of thing need sovereign government budgets.

guhidalg• 4 years ago

No engine product ready for purchase or no engine that could ever be built? If the former, whatever tell R&D to go do their job. If the latter, maybe it was a scam.

Which is it?

ajross5• 4 years ago

Mentioned this elsewhere, but it belongs better here: If there's a market for a product that existing suppliers don't want to provide, that sounds like exactly what a startup should be doing.

Boom is wasting their time building an airframe but what they really need to win is an engine. They should have built the engine first.

bombcar4• 4 years ago

This is the main way you distinguish the grifters from the movers.

The grifters work on the final product, the movers work on the first step, having a plan to make that profitable, so they can build toward the final product. SpaceX is probably the example that comes to mind, even if they did borrow engines.

datavirtue2• 4 years ago

Spot on. If you build a more efficient engine P&W, GE, Honeywell, and a few other companies would be clawing eachothers' eyes for the chance to buy you out.

Boeing and other airframe mfgs would throw you a huge contract immediately if they thought you could actually build the engines and deliver them.

bell-cot4• 4 years ago

My understanding is that the only profitable part of being a modern commercial jet engine manufacturer is service contracts - on actually-in-service jet engines. Vs. Boom Supersonic has never built a plane which actually managed to take off. And even their 1/3-scale "technology demonstrator" plane is 5+ years behind its original schedule. (And has yet to taxi along a runway, if I read Wikipedia right.)

My guess - Boom wanted RR to sign a new money-losing or zero-profit R&D deal. RR wasn't interested in the "maybe, eventually, there might be some actual profit for us" economics of that.

nimbius• 4 years ago

mmm, yes, the 'legacy business model' of demonstrably competent business decisions at the interest of shareholders that produce quantifiable return on investment and further industry growth through innovation strikes again.

benj1112• 4 years ago

Yes I liked that quip too. It's was 'mutually agreed' to which I infer it wasn't.

ajross5• 4 years ago

Which is to say: Boom is aimed at the wrong product. The High Tech part of efficient supersonic transport is the engines, not the airframe. If there was an off the shelf engine solution, they could just buy it on investor money. The dirty truth is that there isn't.

pclmulqdq4• 4 years ago

The engines are actually hard to design, though. Most startups (even hard tech ones) try to avoid doing the hard part.

nickff2• 4 years ago

Engine manufacturing is much more profitable, and seemingly challenging than airframe manufacturing. The engines they'll use are unlikely to be very different from those in other applications, so I'm not sure there's room for a new entrant. Keep in mind that the R&D and capital costs of becoming a turbine engine manufacturer are immense, and likely much higher than the costs to develop a new aircraft.

jjk1665• 4 years ago

Well all planes that haven't been developed yet are not in service, and development cycles for jet engines are always long. Investing in engine R&D is standard practice. While Boom doesn't have a fleet of aircraft at the moment, it didn't 2 years ago either, but it does have orders. While of course those orders don't mean much if Boom can't ultimately deliver and sunk cost is not a good reason to continue a venture, the fact that RR entered into the agreement in the first place suggests they believed at some point it made business sense.

Indeed, supersonic business jets are ideal for the service contract based market. Supersonic engines need much more frequent maintenance than subsonic engines, business jet owners are much less price sensitive than mass-market airlines, and its not like you can just swap in a different supersonic engine, operators are completely locked in.

Far more likely, RR wanted Boom to use one of the supersonic engines it already has developed with minimal modification but Boom needs either heavy modification or a clean slate design to reduce fuel consumption (the second biggest issue for commercial supersonic aviation).

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

It may be that they DO actually have some talented engineers and some interesting IP (such as a much better engine design) but were hoping to also generate additional revenue or get bought out by a bigger company. The fact that we are also seeing lots of companies come out with smaller turbojet engines (made for retrofitting older small planes that run on regular style ICE engines) makes me wonder if material science or other advancements have gotten us to the point where we are going to see some big improvements in turbojet and turbofans.

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

What are some of these lots of companies working on retrofitting older small planes with turbojet engines? (That seems like a terrible idea all around from a functional standpoint.)

keepquestioning3• 4 years ago

At this point I'm convinced the only way industry can actually produce something game-changing is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

On the other hand, scrappy SaaS startup could parse your logs and send alerts for cheaper, yes.

MisterTea• 4 years ago

is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

This is how it has always worked.

jeffreyrogers4• 4 years ago

Only for a few industries, mostly the ones that took off around WWII.

panick21_11• 4 years ago

I think you are underestimating the interplay between industry and government.

Government come in and sometimes push forward the technology industry already has, mostly by just given those industries more investment money.

But industry still invests gigantic amount of money to push technology forward and those innovations are constantly and consistently changing the game.

Government invests something in X and then for the next 100 years people in forum can say 'see this only happened because of X'. But that ignores a lot of the work before and after to actually make it game changing.

And what we also need to consider is that very often that huge government investment fails and goes nowhere. And at the same time large private investment can also fail.

To conclude from this no private investment can ever be game-changing doesn't really follow.

Starlink is a recent example that is pretty game-changing. Government didn't invest in it directly. Sure in the last 100s government invest in rocketry and electronics and antennas but so did private industry at a much larger overall rate (outside of rocketry).

So I think, at the end of the day, government will always have its fingers in almost every pie and will always talk about their success and never talk about their failures. If Boom isn't successful, well you can't innovate without the government. If Boom is successful, well Boom profited from government investment in supersonic military technology so they couldn't have done it without government.

So these kinds of arguments all circle in on themselves. At the end of the day, if you invest lots of money in something game-changing most of the time its gone go to shit, no matter who does it.

trollied• 4 years ago

Just last month they were saying they'd be manufacturing the first aircraft in 2024. This company just looks like another huge investor scam at the moment.

purim2• 4 years ago

Think I remember lot of comments here criticizing Boom being downvoted and flagged. Is Boom part of YC by any chance?

randtrain342• 4 years ago

YC '16 https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5Q-on-starting-and-scali...

dang2• 4 years ago

That's a clever insinuation, and since you've had many HN accounts in the past, and used them to abuse the site in similar ways, I'm going to be a notch less charitable than usual and conclude that you meant this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771519 as an innocent-sounding smear.

For anyone worried about this kind of thing: what the commenter is insinuating is, in fact, just what we don't do. Here's tons of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

In particular, we flagged zero comments in this thread and unkilled a bunch of comments that users had flagged.

asciii• 4 years ago

Weird. This article states 2029 but their own site says 2024.

https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/post/its-about-time-for-a-b...

objclxt• 4 years ago

This article states 2029 but their own site says 2024.

The article says they intend to carry passengers in 2029, which isn't incompatible with going into production in 2024 (of course, they will do neither).

randtrain342• 4 years ago

they've raised 250m, assuming they lose money at the current rate of 111m in H1, wouldn't they run out of money before then?

the_duke• 4 years ago

That loss if for Rolls Royce ...

lacker• 4 years ago

I'm rooting for you, Boom. The world needs supersonic planes and you're so close. Good luck.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

I want it to work but, the hard part is the engines and without a partnership it's going to be difficult to get off the ground.

it_citizen• 4 years ago

Genuinely asking: Of all the possible efforts that the aeronautic industry can make in 2022, do you think supersonic planes is making the top of the list of what the world need? If so, why?

mchusma• 4 years ago

Not OP but I think advancements are not exclusive.

Going faster is one of the big advancements, but probably not the biggest.

Going 2x faster is obviously a good thing, everything else being equal. Costs can potentially go down as you can run 2x the flights per day. People enjoy flights more. The difference between a 2.5 hour and 5 hours flight is a lot. A 6 hour and 12 hour flight, a lot.

Making flights cheaper is something people consistently prefer. The main flight costs are fuel, pilots, staff, and airport capacity. Electric flights are interesting for short hauls but are a long way away from long haul use (much further away than supersonic). Automating away pilots is something that technically is easier than driverless cars, but hasn't seemed to be a priority yet. Progress there would be helpful. Removing staff on planes is a legal requirement and seems harder to do for larger flights for human reasons. Airport capacity is probably best helped by increasing turn time.

Honestly, the easiest way to improve the flight experience is to (effectively) get rid of all security on flights. Once planes can't be made into missiles (door locks were a good post 9-11 change), they are no higher risk than many other enclosed spaces that have no security. This would help speed of travel AND cost, and really means "just do less". But it's a political issue.

lyind• 4 years ago

I would like to travel like this, assuming they have wifi and tickets are affordable:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/15/eco-airship...

Maybe they could fly fully autonomous when used as freighters.

hef198987• 4 years ago

Supersonic freight is not economical. You can get air freight from any airport to any other airport in the world in max. 24 hours flight time. Customs clearance on either end alone takes longer than that.

MichaelCollins13• 4 years ago

The more references to 'green' and 'eco' a tech startup has in their proposal, the more likely it is to be smoke and mirrors. Not because green and ecological aren't laudable, but rather because they are. Proudly announcing such laudable goals and motivations is a cheap and easy way to build up wishful thinking and suspension of disbelief. It also makes people who see your bullshit hesitant to call you out, for fear of 'diluting the message.'

lm28469• 4 years ago

The world needs supersonic planes

Yeah idk about that part, I doubt we need more of anything that enables more pollution

rocket_surgeron3• 4 years ago

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach:

1. They are a Theranos-style operation

2. They are a Madoff-style operation

I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does.

Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build, or maintain a supersonic passenger airplane, and it doesn't demonstrate any new technologies or materials.

The bloatiest of bloated old-school defense contractors can throw together a supersonic prototype for less than $100 million, in fewer than 7 years.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

As an aerospace engineer do you know what kind of thrust they'd need and why they can't just use something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58#Specific...? My guess would be that the military engines are not at all designed to be economical on either fuel or unit cost.

MichaelCollins13• 4 years ago

Those haven't been made for a long time and there's nothing presently in use like them. Also those were turbojets; Boom wanted to use turbofans for fuel efficiency.

MichaelCollins13• 4 years ago

1. They are a Theranos-style operation

If they were that, they'd be lying about having their own engine in development that is an order of magnitude better than the competitions but won't show it to anybody.

rocket_surgeron3• 4 years ago

My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

I just can't believe people keep falling for it.

I'm willing to bet most of the $100m+ they've raised went right into executive compensation and that their engineers have been making do with peanuts since the beginning.

And I eagerly await the dueling Netflix/HBO documentaries to come.

bell-cot4• 4 years ago

That would not be a credible lie - it is too widely known how very difficult & expensive the technology needed to produce any such engine is.

rollinggoron3• 4 years ago

Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical supersonic jet, then surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, airplane design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

chadash3• 4 years ago

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to:

Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.

nfw23• 4 years ago

I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?

klintcho2• 4 years ago

This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years.

- Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google)

- Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla)

I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing;

- An unexpected insights,

- A new research breakthrough from some other field

- Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc.

But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).

samatman• 4 years ago

I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened.

That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.

deepnotderp• 4 years ago

Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s

rockemsockem• 4 years ago

The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.

pbreit2• 4 years ago

"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper"

How could you possibly think that?

bri3d2• 4 years ago

Isn't there a third kind of operation, maybe a Magic Leap-style operation, where employees are earnestly developing against a goal which is fanciful but appealing to VCs? And in that case, what's the difference between that and the "usual" VC funded company?

I don't really think Boom are a Theranos style operation, because they aren't claiming to have an operational product when no such item exists. A Theranos style scam would be flying a known-unsafe airframe, or parading their demonstrator around claiming "it totally has engines and is ready to fly lol! we just haven't tested it yet." But so far, Boom have just honestly said "we're delayed" instead.

It's surely not a Madoff style operation as they employ staff who are earnestly working towards their goal, however fanciful it may be.

adolph2• 4 years ago

Wasn't Theranos sending lab tests to other vendor and passing it off as their results? That would be difficult for Boom to pull off--send someone blindfolded on a regular commercial flight, reset the time on their watch and pretend supersonic happened.

johnbender• 4 years ago

As an aside Madoff Industries did employ people who earnestly worked outside the Ponzi scheme. I know because I met a few of them when I worked on a database architecture audit for them around 2008.

carabiner2• 4 years ago

Lol you're too harsh. I was an aerospace engineer at an aviation startup you've probably heard of. We built a jet and received a type certificate, and sold ships. The company still went bankrupt. Boom is trying something harder, but it's not Theranos, or cold fusion. It's still just an engineering problem. They have aerospace engineers and facilities. It doesn't look more like a scam than SpaceX did in its early days when they were constantly blowing up rockets. It's just they're trying something very hard stretching what any manufacturing startup could do.

3. They're a startup in a manufacturing-oriented, highly regulated industry and dramatically underestimated capital needed.

leecb• 4 years ago

Eclipse?

ghaff2• 4 years ago

Engineering and economics problem--although properly speaking the former should imply the latter. Given that engineering isn't "We can build something that costs $X to build and operate but there's only a market for $X/5." That's still an engineering failure even if it works outside of cost constraints.

cmdrriker• 4 years ago

Unless some government(s) steps in and dumps a ton of money into SST development and production nothing is going to happen.

The Concord showed this by shouldering the burden of research, development, prototyping, and then production. Turns out SS's don't have the load factor & associated economics to make it a viable mode. That revelation was before environmental and political challenges made those economics worse.

Unless unobtanium can me mined, tooled, and manufactured cheaply into airframe parts and power such as scram-jet or super cruising turbofans can push a plane at Mach 2 with 200+ seats behind the pilot, methinks its just a pretty artist's conception on a Pop Mechanics or Science magazine cover.

yabones• 4 years ago

Well, the problem was never technological to start with. The problem with supersonic transports was and will always be economic. There's a reason that there were only two SSTs in the 20th century instead of the five or six that were planned, and it's because the bean counters at Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, and Lockheed-Martin wouldn't let their companies bankrupt themselves over a vanity project.

So, you take that and couple it with 21st century VC-appeal and you have a fantastic money-losing-machine whether it works or not. Hell, it probably does work with enough R&D, but that was never the problem in the first place.

sidewndr464• 4 years ago

To be technical, I'd actually argue there were four. The first Concorde reached production & was later redesigned to include an afterburner (or reheat). Why I forget, but it apparently did actually save some fuel since it was used while accelerating to supersonic then shut off.

The Tu-144 went the opposite direction. Introduce with military engines which require full time afterburner. Later it was redesigned and re-engined with a non-military engine not needing afterburner all the time.

So two airframes, but with four distinct airplanes produced as a result.

None of these were particularly economical, to your point.

NovaVeles• 4 years ago

John Michael Greer summarized it wonderfully in the book 'Dark Age America'. Don't confuse technical capabilities with economic realities. Argued that Boeing never getting the SST off the ground was probably one of the better disasters to befall them.

Vaclav Smil was right in pointing out that passenger jets have gotten much more fuel efficient since 1967 but they travel no faster. The fuel savings were passed onto passengers and that made flight more appealing. Economics ultimately rule over what lasts long term.

Super sonic flight is a marvel of engineering but an economic nightmare. It is this lens by which a lot of technologies should be judged long term.

tlogan• 4 years ago

I have very simple way of figuring if something will succeed ir it is a scam.

If CEO have some experience in the field then it might succeed (workday, salesforce, okta, etc.) If not, then it is probably a scam.

Of course, there are exceptions but these exceptions prove the rule.

_fizz_buzz_• 4 years ago

Harsh! I think Boom is trying to be SpaceX. A technology that is definitely possible, but pretty difficult to pull off as a start-up. But saying they are Theranos or Madoff is unfair. If they succeed to make the technology work and then succeed to make it profitable is of course not obvious at this point.

ghaff2• 4 years ago

I'd argue there's a significant market for the pre-SpaceX rockets--which are still used today. There's just a much larger potential market for significantly cheaper rockets given sufficient reliability as well.

There is on the other hand no apparent market for commercial supersonic passenger flight given the economics. That doesn't mean that some people wouldn't pay the freight but that there hasn't been enough apparent market to build an airplane program around that.

pbreit2• 4 years ago

Are any of your comments defensible?

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

Is it possible they had some insider knowledge of engines being developed at one of the big manufacturers?

Thinking out loud here - lets say you have a few senior engineers that know that GE or Boeing or RR or something is currently working on a smaller supersonic engine. You know you cannot yourselves design such an engine but if it is released maybe it would make sense to get a head start designing a product to take advantage of it?

galgot• 4 years ago

How surprising... Developing a specific supersonic jet engine for this kind of plane would not be cost effective anyway, the fleet would be too small to worth the investment. Even starting from a military jet engine, the way they are run and maintained is very different from civilian jet engines.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

On the maintenance side it's night and day, I used to work upstairs in the hanger building but not on the floor of a base with f-22's and before that f-16's and they rebuild those engines like clock-work there is always at least one being rebuilt if not a few.

hef198987• 4 years ago

Also good luck getting government approval for using a military engine derivate for commercial flight to Asia, or basically any country other than the origin of said engines. And even that will be difficult. Export control can be a bitch.

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

To put this in perspective, developing a modern high-efficiency supersonic engine requires an order-of-magnitude more money than the airframe itself.

namirez4• 4 years ago

Sadly Boom is doomed and it’s been a writing on the wall all along. They never had a good engine option. The military engines are not safe enough and developing a new civilian engine makes sense only if you make hundreds of them.

Their net-zero emission claim is also bogus. Their pricing model doesn’t make much sense either unless they’re willing to lose money for a decade or so. There is not much innovation in aerodynamics and shock wave shaping either. Their only innovation compared to Concorde is the use of composite materials which is just not enough to hit their targets.

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

Could be that they were hoping to get bought out and had made some actual improvements though no?

I would imagine that a plane using new advances in material sciences for the outer skin (maybe something like Quasi Crystals) might have significant advantages over an older design like the Concorde. Heat must be a big issue at those speeds.

namirez4• 4 years ago

I don’t know much about their long term business strategy but what bothers me is that they’re vague about how they intend to achieve the flight mission objectives. This is very different than SpaceX which focused on reusable rockets and landing them.

As for materials, the main advantage of composites is the strength to weight ratio but they’re more challenging to work with compared to aluminum and titanium. Heat is one aspect but there are many more challenges. It’s been done though for example B787 and A350 are mostly composite. So Boom has a genuine advance here over Concorde. But supersonic flight is inherently fuel inefficient due to wave drag so the economy doesn’t make sense.

phlipski• 4 years ago

Luckily for Boom there is a supersonic engine startup in the YC S22 batch!

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/velontra

namirez4• 4 years ago

Good luck to them but it sounds like an expensive solution. I’d be super excited to see a scramjet startup but scramjet is always decades away like the fusion reactor.

wahern• 4 years ago

More than hundreds, perhaps thousands, or at least hundreds in a much shorter time frame than in previous eras. Rolls Royce's firm rejection of requests to develop a new engine is the most immediate reason the A380 was canceled. IIRC, Emirates and Airbus decided to kill the A380 within days of the Rolls Royce announcement, and in any event Emirates was clear that it was Rolls Royce's decision that forced their hand. Emirates alone would have guaranteed to purchase hundreds of such engines, considering there were 4 on each plane, but in the end Rolls Royce simply had no appetite for new development of any kind, though presumably they were entertaining the idea for quite some time beforehand.

According to Emirates and some other analysts, and contrary to popular narrative, the A380's biggest competitive handicap was the generation of engines, not the mere fact they had 4 instead of 2. The engines were nearly a full generation behind when the A380 debuted, and the gap only grew over time. Engines on a 4-engine plane are smaller, meaning less drag; have narrower power bands, running more optimally at all stages of flight; and have lower maintenance costs, even at twice the number, as they're both less stressed and subject to longer MTBF requirements--losing 1 of 4 engines is much less of a problem than 1 of 2. All considered a 4-engine configuration might still be nominally less fuel efficient, but the difference was negligible given these countering dynamics and in the opinion of some more than made up by other factors favoring the A380. The hub vs point-to-point model disfavored larger planes, but the air travel market was growing and in absolute terms so too was the potential A380 market. But the efficiency gap between engine generations was simply too large to overcome.

thetinguy• 4 years ago

Their only innovation compared to Concorde is the use of composite materials which is just not enough to hit their targets.

There’s been 50 years of commercial aviation development since the Concorde. Composite materials is only one thing on a list of differences between Concorde and boom.

aresant• 4 years ago

In 2020 COVID decimated Rolls Royce given their concentration of revenue associated with selling & servicing existing aero engines.

They have yet to recover from that era which saw a ~10x decrease in enterprise value and record losses.

That said I would interpret this news as a "cut the $!@$! R&D bleeding in anything that won't be generating revenue in the next 4 quarters" vs a reflection on the feasibility or health of Boom's very early but very ambitious plans.

(1) https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/rycey

(2) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/rolls-...

(3) https://simpleflying.com/rolls-royce-record-loss/

neximo64• 4 years ago

That's not entirely true, in the industry it's sort of known Boom still has a lot of work to do to get an engine made for those planes.

bell-cot4• 4 years ago

Perhaps 's/get an engine made for those planes/get a plane made for those engines/' ?

cromulent• 4 years ago

Supersonic is still banned over land, even if they can get the engines. We’ll see if overseas flights are a big enough market to be more than a loss leader.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/supersonic-flight (Read the last sentence).

Melatonic4• 4 years ago

This article says that they are also partnering with Northrup Gruman to develop a "special missions" version for the government. So they very well could be getting a big government investment that so many here are saying would be necessary to pull this off.

https://airwaysmag.com/boom-supersonic-refined-overture-desi...

ggm• 4 years ago

Doesn't this say more about the RR engines company than Boom?

6stringmerc• 4 years ago

Still have my money on Darkhorse showing promise to actually work at least.

panick21_11• 4 years ago

I think we will have supersonic planes, but they will be electric.

But to get there we first need normal conservative electric planes to make electric planes more normal. Battery have to be getting better for this to happen but I think we will get there, some people overestimate how large battery improvements we need by basically thinking they need to match chat fuel.

If you look at how far the currently in development electric plans can go you can see lots of improvements that can be made to increase that range considerably.

You can also build your air-frame out of batteries. The batteries themselves need to become structural members in the air-frame. Some manufactures are doing that already for cars but for plans it will be even more important.

Things like using a PRANDTL Wing and prop blade would make a large difference for example.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E

It of course makes sense for startups like Heart Aerospace not to try these things but I think eventually people will. Electric planes will be so operational efficient that there will be huge demand to increase the range.

benj1112• 4 years ago

So what's changed since Concorde?

Concorde didn't fail for technical reasons but AA have put down a deposit for 60. This is limited to < Mach 1 over land so it's going to be most useful on the routes that Concorde could have serviced.

Is it just the noise aspect opening more potential routes? But then I would have thought we would be more concerned about noise now than in the 60s making the improvements a wash.

Kukumber• 4 years ago

They should have done that a long time ago, Boom never reference RR in any of their PR documents, including their websites [1]

This partnership have been running for quite a while and no results in the end

Also it is interesting to see only negative comments about RR? i wonder why? :) [2]

[1] https://boomsupersonic.com/

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/boom

Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

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