Peeking at Boom's Wikipedia page - their 1/3 scale "technology demonstrator" test aircraft, which they originally said would fly in 2017, has been changed & pushed back & changed & pushed back... And it still has not managed to even taxi down a runway.
It doesn't much matter what is/isn't possible, or what could/couldn't be economical, if the company & engineers who say they are working to develop it...are not actually capable of shipping even a puny nerfed toy version of their supposed product.
My guess: the RR engineers concluded "maybe it's possible, but these idiots will never achieve it". Then quietly shared that with their colleagues at other engine makers.
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.
Probably Boom only delivers at this point CAD drawings and scale-models. They get some limited wind tunnel time to test their models. Probably if they can show they have something, they will partner with an manufacturer (Airbus? Saab?) to build a prototype.
There are Boom engineers lurking around HN, probably one of them can pitch in and comment.
The point is that there isn’t progress on the most critical part of a viable aircraft - the engine.
Some of us who weren’t born yesterday have seen this rodeo
before, and when a startup aircraft manufacturer switches engines it tends to indicate their concept isn’t viable. The fact that Boom are proposing to build their own engine, rather than partnering with an established engine manufacturer, tends to suggest that the engine manufacturers don’t think it’s doable either.
Sometimes the establishment gets it wrong, but jet engine manufacture is a very mature field, and Boom isn’t proposing to do some radical new engine design. That makes me pretty suspicious.
I trust Boom has smart people working on these things, but... model aviation doesn't scale up[1].
It's interesting they're going with a scaled-down model instead of a full-scale testbed. The article seems to incidate they're wanting to go from the scaled-down model as a PoC, then onto an actual airline that JAL want's to fly. I'd think they'd need a full-sized PoC first...
> “They want to enjoy a first-mover advantage in supersonic and have invested 10 million dollars.”
That's chump change for an airline. Doesn't really signal strong support or anything - more of a curiosity I think. A Boeing 737-800 costs around $100 million, for comparison.
How can they discuss cost and dates when it sounds like they don't even have firm plans on the engine? The promise of Boom is very compelling and good luck to them, but it's just a dream right now.
If it was as easy as the founder makes it sound, Boeing would already be doing it.
That's just the "off the shelf" argument. Which has just fallen apart because RR doesn't have the product and doesn't want to build it. You're right, that if Boom could just buy their engine it would be better for Boom. Boom can't just buy their engine though, and now it looks like their company is going to fail because they decided to build the easy part and not the hard part.
I would agree that the big three didn't think they could make it work, be that for technical reasons, money reasons, limited market reasons, etc. the end result is the same.
Where I would disagree is that Boom can make it work. The amount of specialized knowledge you need in design and analysis as well as test and manufacturing facilities makes it near impossible for an outsider get in the game. Which is why there aren't any in the commercial jet engine space. GE, PW, RR and I guess Safran is pretty much it. You can't just decide you are going to do the R&D yourself and pop out a new engine in 5 years.
As far as I've heard so far, they aren't planning to develop a low-boom design any time soon. Their first planes will be conventional from that perspective. (That's confirmed by a post by their founder, Blake Scholl, in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329634.)
Just want to reply to my own post here to add that most people don't realize that the Cirrus SR22 is the world's best selling single engine piston aircraft and has been for the past 20 years. And it's wholly owned by the Chinese government. I'm aware this is a different market, but I want to illustrate how we're losing our lead in some critical areas, while we focus on creating solutions looking for a problem.
Incidentally, Boom is 5 minutes from my office here in Centennial, Colorado and where I fly out of KAPA. I'd like to see innovative US aerospace companies succeed, but I feel like these guys are chasing the wrong idea.
I will be amazed if they actually even get a working prototype aircraft flying with this amount of money.
That's not the point of this funding round. When you work on insanely ambitious projects you have to do things incrementally.
This is their 3rd round - the first was $120k, the second was $2.1m. Each round enables them to do enough of the tasks that demonstrate to investors that they're capable of doing the next set of tasks. I have no clue how you design a plane but I would guess the first round was entirely spent on modelling the financials and market research to see if there's even a business opportunity. The next round would be something like the really broad brush ideas for how you'd make a plane like this. This round will be spent digging in to the technology itself, figuring out what capabilities you need to have in an electric plane, and finding which parts you can buy off the shelf. If Boom are successful at that then there'll be future rounds that are spent on actual design and manufacturing.
By the time anything real takes off from a runway they'll probably need to have raised billions.
No one thinks you can design and build a plane for $120k+$2.1m+$33m.
The one in the picture is a reduced scale prototype. Then they hope to build a full scale plane. And then roll that out five years from now.
Given how many years we've been hearing about this, I wouldn't hold my breath. I personally give it less than a 50/50 shot at even getting the prototype into the air.
I thought Boom had a smaller plane in the works. Trying to design a big 4 engine plane sounds daunting to me. A smaller craft with two engines sounds somewhat easier. Something able to transport 25 people maybe.
You can have an idea, but getting it into production, especially if the entire design hinges around it, is an entirely different story.
From the article, the new engine is to wide to fit a number of existing planes.
The article we’re commenting on specifically says they’ve started assembling a 1/3rd scale model that they hope to fly this year.
I disagree with the rest of your comment, but I see where you’re coming from. But almost every failed aerospace company has a bunch of people with industry experience. Doesn’t stop nearly all of them from crashing and burning. And even the unicorn that succeeds is very late and way over budget.
An engine maker waits for Boom to go into liquidation and buys their airframe innovation to sell engines they have control over the design costs and process. Think how Honda is an engine maker that happens to sell cars to sell their engines. Existing engine makers don’t want to be left holding the bag for Boom’s dev costs if they don’t succeed, something engine makers have little control over. Boom is a startup, and most startups fail.
Some nation state sponsors this as a vanity project. Think Emirates. Not as likely as the first option imho considering geopolitics and macro economics, but there are folks with exceptionally deep pockets who prefer a return of something other than monetary (status, etc).
Boom can’t go the SpaceX route and vertically integrate (airframe, engines, etc), including selling directly to customers, because of the capital costs necessary to get there and the passenger air market volatility.
How a company begins to how it gets to sell products for $100m is fascinating. Boeing built their first plane soley because they had bought another plane, subsequently crashed it and then posited that it would be faster to build a brand new plane instead of waiting for parts. They sold a couple to the navy who then said "Yeah we'll take 50".
Obviously Boom is doing something orders of magnitude more technically complex than a simple bi-plane but maybe, if they're scrappy enough, they can pull it off.
It doesn't much matter what is/isn't possible, or what could/couldn't be economical, if the company & engineers who say they are working to develop it...are not actually capable of shipping even a puny nerfed toy version of their supposed product.
My guess: the RR engineers concluded "maybe it's possible, but these idiots will never achieve it". Then quietly shared that with their colleagues at other engine makers.
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