A New Aerospace Company Enters the Race To Build Fastest Aircraft In the World (arstechnica.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, a U.S.-based company named Hermeus announced plans to develop an aircraft that will travel at speeds of up to Mach 5. Such an aircraft would cut travel time from New York to Paris from more than 7 hours to 1.5 hours. Hermeus said it has raised an initial round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, but it declined to specify the amount. This funding will allow Hermeus to develop a propulsion demonstrator and other initial technologies needed to make its supersonic aircraft a reality, Skyler Shuford, the company's chief operating officer, told Ars.
The announcement follows three years after another company, Boom Supersonic, declared its own intentions to develop faster-than-sound aircraft. As of January 2019, Boom had raised more than $140 million toward development of its Overture airliner, envisioned to travel at Mach 2.2, which is about 10 percent faster than the Concorde traveled. Officials with Boom Supersonic have said its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s, and they added that Virgin Group and Japan Airlines have preordered a combined 30 airplanes.
The announcement follows three years after another company, Boom Supersonic, declared its own intentions to develop faster-than-sound aircraft. As of January 2019, Boom had raised more than $140 million toward development of its Overture airliner, envisioned to travel at Mach 2.2, which is about 10 percent faster than the Concorde traveled. Officials with Boom Supersonic have said its planes could be ready for commercial service in the mid-2020s, and they added that Virgin Group and Japan Airlines have preordered a combined 30 airplanes.
Better make it a one way trip. (Score:1, Insightful)
Nobody wants to visit New York these days.
Re: Better make it a one way trip. (Score:1)
If that's all it takes for you to label someone a racist you might have some serious issues.
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And make it not need to land [wikipedia.org].
Why though? (Score:1)
The Concorde couldn't pay for itself even after its R&D costs were absorbed by France and the UK. The difference between then and now is that airplanes have internet so there's less of an urgency for things, and jet fuel is enormously more expensive.
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The Concorde was profitable for Air France and British Airways. It just wasn't profitable enough in comparison with cheaper/larger/slower aircraft.
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The Concorde was profitable for Air France and British Airways. It just wasn't profitable enough in comparison with cheaper/larger/slower aircraft.
It's not about profit these days . . . it's about market share. So all they need to do, is get more supersonic market share than anyone else, and then they can do an IPO like Über.
. . . um . . . wait a second . . . maybe not.
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It was profitable enough in comparison with other aircraft once British Airways was privatised - the new private management hiked up the ticket cost, and oddly enough the clientele continued to buy seats. As it turned out, the people flying didn't actually care about the ticket price, and the tickets were usually booked by their aides without much of a care to the cost - once British Airways worked this out, Concorde became a substantial profit centre for them until 2001.
The R&D costs were never recoup
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Pretty certain the supersonic boom issue and range are going to be considered in the design of these new planes.
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If I recall correctly, Concorde did make money once British Airways realised the price people were willing to pay to travel supersonic. However you are correct in that the pricing 'envelope' for profitable supersonic travel is small and possibly unstable.
Concorde was largely developed before computers became widespread.
Fuel is an enormous problem, apart from the cost, there will also be the environmental concerns (Climate change, pollution and even sound)
As far as I know, the only viable contender in the wa
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The experts, the really complex math, design work.
The parts had to be tested and made.
The best staff needed in France and the UK to work on the projects.
Where and when the flights got approval.
AC The "internet" can really help sell a service that is seperate from normal services.
Look at the first class flight reviews. People expect more opulence, well away from the ho
Mach 5 (Score:2)
White Elephant (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:White Elephant (Score:4, Insightful)
This will be another luxury item that the rich will indulge themselves in. The market has shown that for these sorts of goods, as long as they are branded and limited (read "keep the peasants out") correctly, the price points can be quite high and people will still happily pay.
Re: White Elephant (Score:3)
Considering all the atrocious bullshit Iâ(TM)ve seen (and often smelled) on my air travels, if I *could* afford to keep the hoi polloi out, I would.
Re: White Elephant (Score:2)
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This will be another luxury item that the rich will indulge themselves in.
I think this is more of a business play. Many business travelers already use business class to get actual good sleep and avoid blowing a day in a hotel recovering from jet lag or lack of sleep.
Even saving a few hours means you have more opportunity to meet with customers or business partners.
I'm sure "rich" people will use it, but they will be in the minority of passengers.
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The price of a Concord ticket was over $10,000 for a round-trip to London, do we really need another White Elephant
Damn Dude, playin' the aerospace race race card -- inapprops. :-)
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The price of a Concord ticket was over $10,000 for a round-trip to London, do we really need another White Elephant
No, it's going to be an Asian elephant. That's where the money is today.
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If they have 30 pre-orders it suggests that they think they can make it more affordable than Concord.
The company is claiming seat prices "similar" to business class. Their claims of 25% the operating costs of Concord are... Ambitious.
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You have to remember that Concorde is 1960's technology. The flight computers alone where valve driven and had considerable mass. You could replace them with a Raspberry Pi today. It was perfectly feasible to design a replacement that has twice the range and twice the passenger numbers for the same operating costs by the late 1980's. You would expect a modern replacement to be considerably more cost effective.
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They are talking about under 100 people on the flight, with the main efficiency improvements coming from the engines and from the use of more modern (lighter) materials.
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Re:White Elephant (Score:5, Interesting)
The Concorde's big problem was that it came at the wrong time. It was a luxury good created at the end of a long period of expanding middle class prosperity and heavy taxation of the rich. Now we have the opposite situation; the ultra-rich are getting richer at the expense of the rest of us. It's the perfect time to be focusing on things that will benefit the ultra-wealthy.
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Concorde would probably have got cheaper, or been replaced by cheaper supersonic aircraft, if it hadn't been banned on some key routes.
Re:White Elephant (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted it's a questionable statistic. Let's try again. The global inflation-adjusted GDP has roughly tripled since 1980, and the share of global income of the top 1% has increased from 16% to 21% in the same time.
Also, "The Forbes 400's total value in 2013 is $2 trillion, five times the inflation-adjusted total of the list back in 1982."
https://gailtheactuary.files.w... [wordpress.com]
https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/d... [nymag.com]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/a... [forbes.com]
Small, Light Grey Elephant (Score:4, Interesting)
We now have the technology to build far more efficient supersonic aircraft which generate a far smaller shockwave. This should make a new supersonic aircraft far more sensible than Concord ever was. That does not mean that it might not turn out to still be a white elephant but even if it does it should not be as big or as white as Concord was and perhaps it might even turn out to be successful.
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We now have the technology to build far more efficient supersonic aircraft
Where did you get this from? The Olympus 593 engines ran in dry thrust - afterburner was only needed for penetrating the sound barrier. Concorde used super cruise 20 years before Lockheed marketing invented that term for the F-22 which flies 20% slower than Concorde did. It is still the benchmark in Mach 2.0 propulsion. How exactly would a new development be "far more" efficient?
Only by flying far more slowly, right?
Price isn't the problem (Score:2)
Concord turned a good profit in the end, much better than anything else in the air. Until 11/9 that is. Then the airport processing times made it impossible for any quick flights.
There is lies the flaw in any future ideas too. Guns killed off any hope of fast air travel.
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Rich people don't stand in the same lines poor people do. They don't spend so much time getting "processed" at the airport.
If you don't stand in the line, it's perfectly possible to breeze through airport security in a few minutes.
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Private jets often land at smaller private airports, not the big commercial hubs so there is no waiting around.
Even the big airports usually have separate facilities for business and first class passengers, while an economy passenger might have to arrive a few hours early to stand in a long check-in queue, followed by a long passport control queue, followed by a long security check queue and then a long boarding queue the first class passengers will usually sit in a lounge sipping champagne while they're ch
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That's an entirely separate group of travellers but yet another example why price isn't the problem.
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I'd imagine that most people who buy one of these planes will buy it for their own private fleet.
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First class New York to London is currently $9k - $13k. That's a bit less than Concorde price with inflation, but not that much. Rich people will pay stupid prices for things. They don't care what it costs.
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Even $2000 for coach seems a bit steep. I was recently looking at flights only about a week later in the month (17 Sep departure, 24 Sep return) and found a non-stop round trip between LAS and LHR for $550. If you were willing to deal with one or more layovers, the same trip was as low as $515. Those were just wha
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Yeah, I don't think you were looking at first class.
Wrong choice, wrong time (Score:1)
Concorde had two main things against it
a) It burnt fuel like there was no tomorrow
b) It couldn't go supersonic over land which rules out many potential profitable routes
Nothing has changed with (b) and whilst newer engine should be more fuel efficient - wanting to go a Mach 5 isn't and with environment concerns ever increasing this isn't going to fly.
Shame really - I would love to travel on it
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Shame really - I would love to travel on it
. . . as long as someone else pays for your ticket, correct?
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Fuel efficiency could be improved by a significant degree using modern engines, even right after the Concorde started flying they had designed an upgraded version (which was never built due to lack of demand) that was able to operate at sub-cruise speeds without the afterburners, improving fuel efficiency by 25%.
A lot of research has gone into reducing the sound level of the sonic boom to allow them to operate over land. You can't eliminate it, but NASA's X-59 project is expecting to get it down to the leve
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Even the first concorde could cruise without afterburners, the engines were most efficient at the cruising speed of just over mach 2... They used the afterburners to give it an extra push accelerating through mach 1, allowing it to achieve cruising speed faster.
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Most of Concorde's flight across the Atlantic was super cruising (without afterburners) and it was and is the only civilian aircraft with this capability. I didn't actually realise this until I started looking around.
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Very few military aircraft are capable of supercruise at mach 2 either, and most supersonic military aircraft are a lot smaller than concorde.
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The biggest problem was that development stopped as there were so few aircraft built... There were plans for a second model concorde with more efficient engines and a longer range but it was never built. Had development continued, there would have been gradual improvements over the last 40 years instead of having to almost start again now.
If the BFR is real, no one will fly in this plane (Score:1)
If SpaceX delivers the BFR anywhere near 2025, 90 minutes coast to coast will pale when compared to 90 minutes from San Francisco to Shanghai.
Of course none of it will matter as it'll still take 2 hours for TSA and 2 hours for customs.
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I'm on the fence on whether BFR will work for orbital launches (but I really hope it will). However I don't believe the "Earth to Earth" mass transportation idea will work any time before, say, 2050:
The safety challenges are enormous. Reentry (for such a large vehicle, and without ablative shields) and propulsive landings leave much less margin for error than even current spaceflight. Compared to current commercial aviation, it is many orders of magnitude more dangerous.
The noise of launch means spaceports
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I dunno, I never thought Boeing (BOING!) was a great name for an airplane company...
Technology? Economics? (Score:3)
Even supersonic aircraft don't seem to be economical viable. A hypersonic aircraft is almost certain to be less efficient (max lift / drag decreases with increasing mach number), and much more expensive due to the exotic materials required for the air frame and engines. Its not clear that a sub-orbital ballistic rocket isn't a better technology overall at these speeds.
All that aside, one of the things that killed the Concord is that in a lot of ways a very large comfortable seat / cabin on a subsonic airliner is better than a cramped seat on a supersonic one. Time zone changes limit the places where a supersonic plane really provides significant value, especially when the multi-hour end effects on the travel are included. Often its better to have an overnight cabin of the sort on Emirates and work and sleep for the trip.
Don't get me wrong - a hypersonic plane sounds awesome - but there are not a lot of people who could afford it (I certainly couldn't), and at a not much higher price point private jets offer a lot of advantages.
Order of Magnitude not Incremental from Concorde (Score:2)
Even supersonic aircraft don't seem to be economical viable. A hypersonic aircraft is almost certain to be less efficient (max lift / drag decreases with increasing mach number), and much more expensive due to the exotic materials required for the air frame and engines. Its not clear that a sub-orbital ballistic rocket isn't a better technology overall at these speeds.
Completely agree. This doesn't seem like a simple incremental technology and engineering question from a Concorde or other supersonic aircraft - this feels almost like an order of magnitude jump in propulsion, thermal management, and other complex technologies. Governments are struggling to build single, one way missiles that move at these speeds. These guys are talking about creating a reusable, human-rated platform that can be safely turned around in minutes for commercial travel. If we really are going
Didn't passenger planes become even slower? (Score:2)
Nowadays it's about fuel efficiency. The bulkier "high bypass" LEAP engines (that didn't fit under the wings of the 737) are more efficient at slightly lower speeds.
But of course you could always make it a luxury thing as long as you find the clientele.
Now here is the catch: Fuel usage equals CO2 footprint, and while some people may have no problem with shelling out top dollar for significantly lower flight times (and VIP treatment at the airport), many of just those customers able to pay that price will at
Technology is not the problem. (Score:2)
Boeing had a SST design in the late 60s. The reason we don't have supersonic commercial transport has nothing to do with the technology. Rather, most countries do not allow supersonic flight over their territories because of the boom and its destructive nature. Add to this that no supersonic aircraft will ever be as economical to operate as a subsonic transport and you have the conditions that killed the Concorde and keep us subsonic to this day.
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Rather, most countries do not allow supersonic flight over their territories because of the boom and its destructive nature.
Wat? What "destructive nature"? You realize thunder is a sonic boom, right? Literally. It's the same physical phenomenon. A bunch of countries banned supersonic flight over land because they thought the booms would be too annoying to the populace, not because it does anything. Thunderstorms are far more destructive than supersonic aircraft, but it's the lightning strikes that are the problem, not the boom that follows.