I'd really like to see proper numbers on the fuel economy of these proposed solutions. Because whilst it's nice to throw your hands in the air and say 'Ah well it'll be like first class' - there are many problems with that.
Firstly, all the big commercial investment has gone into sub-sonic planes, so they've gotten much cheaper. So to just have the same cost-ratio as concorde between supersonic vs. Standard flight is a big ask today. Secondly, Concorde wasn't just expensive -it was uneconomical because they couldn't fill the plane at those prices. Concorde was built in an era before deregulation - flights are far more cost competitive today. Thirdly, removing the sonic boom seems to imply inefficient shapes for the aircraft in terms of fitting numbers of passengers in. So even if the engines were far more efficient, you still have the fuel efficiency per passenger to worry about. For example Boom Supersonic are planning a 55 passenger plane. That is laughable as a commercial proposition.
I'm certain that companies working on this have concrete expectations of the cost o f a flight per person and the expected demand, I would just love to know what those are.
Current aircraft are significantly slower vs 50 years ago due to fuel economy issues. At 30,000 feet airlines could fly just under 678 mph, but they actually ~575 mph. This pushes up the benefit of supersonic flight.
On top of that the top 0.1% is both larger and more wealthy making filling ~50 seats a flight at 30,000+$ a pop easier than you might think. Drop that into $5,000 territory and some people would this every week.
IMO it's actually business jets that are the best market. They fly fewer trips making fuel less of an issue.
”Boom Supersonic are planning a 55 passenger plane. That is laughable as a commercial proposition.”
Do you feel that is too big, or too small? The market for supersonic travel is likely to align with the very high-end, private jet market. Those who want to get somewhere fast and don’t care what it costs.
It may be easier to overcome noise issues with a smaller design, too.
This reminds me of a Wendover video I've seen. The author discovers that airplanes used to fly much faster in the 1960s than they do today. So our flight times have actually gone up! He then explains the reasons behind it.
There is also another Wendover one explaining the economics or airlines classes and it talks about specifically why supersonic flights went into oblivion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc
But I would LOVE it if we could find a way to speed up the time spent at the airport. The amount of time I spend traveling to the airport, dropping off bags, queuing for security, getting pulled aside because I forgot I was wearing a belt that day, waiting for the gate to open, getting on a train to the gate, queuing to board the gate, getting on a BUS to the plane, queuing to get on the plane, waiting to put my overhead bags in the bins, waiting on the tarmac for the plan to find a free slot on the runway.
In the future I still have to do all this before we finally take off and travel at supersonic speed (yay), but then I land and basically have to do it all again.
Most of the time spent traveling by air is spent on the ground.
This is exactly the reason why I usually prefer a 6-hour train ride to a 1-hour flight (at least in Germany, Austria, Switzerland).
Train: Go to the station (near city center), arrive 10 mins before train departs, get on the train, read/work/eat/drink for 6 hours, get off the train. And then you are already at the city center of your destination!
The total time spent when flying might be shorter (4.5-5 hours), but that is not worth the hassle.
Just the normal airport designs could be improved a lot, with no added technology. It doesn't take a genius to see how many airports have very long walking distances or oddly placed stairs etc.
Also, airlines for some reason don't want checked in luggage, since they price it so high. This means everyone travels with maximum hand luggage, and boarding takes a long time. The last people boarding usually can not find space in the overhead bin close to their seat. I wonder if they really are at the global optimum point with this.
Checked in luggage is also notoriously unreliable (it travels to the wrong country or is thrown around with such force that everything is broken) which can ruin your trip.
Airports make a fair share of their money by passengers hanging around and spending money in shops and restaurants. This video is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdU1WTBJMl0
It's the uncertainty that leads to longest wait times.
If I have no suitcases to drop off, and it's at a quiet time, then I can arrive half an hour before departure, breeze through security, and get on the plane.
But if I have cases, or security _might_ be long, then I'm having to leave at least an extra half an hour in case of big queues, if not an hour. And that's a time-killer.
The "automated bag drop" that some airports do now has really sped things up, but I'm sure some more time could be cut there. Security is the main bottleneck nowadays.
The good news is most of the changes you want are political rather than technological. There's no law of physics or even of economics that prevents us from having airports where, once you have a ticket, you hand your luggage to a machine then stroll over to your departure gate and board the plane as soon as it is ready.
The bad news is that political changes need the cooperation of large groups of your fellow citizens.
Some airports make a significant portion of the revenue from the long wait between security and take off (e.g. Heathrow where they only show departure information 45 mins before leaving and you are surrounded by shops).
Agreed. I think self driving technology can help here. I imagine a lobby area where you check-in, go through passport and baggage control, then board a pod that securely takes you right on the tarmac, to the mobile ladder adjacent to your half of the plane.
The whole duty free forced march -> endless tread mills -> gate -> bus routine is harrowing busy work. It creates multiple choke and synchronization points, thus multiple queues: you queue to enter the gate, than wait for everybody to board the bus, then queue again as people take their seats and place the luggage in the overheads.
It's a telling sign of how bad the current system is, when boarding on a single front door is considered a large speed up. A pod can take you to the right door in real time, gradually, as people arrive and clear passport control, overlapping multiple activities and allowing tighter turnaround. Why should the gate close 40 minutes before take off? If a passenger just checked in, and it takes 10 minutes for the pod to get to the plane, that's the minimal effective cutoff (with a larger official cutoff for safety).
As for passport and baggage control, those can be automated and sped up to a large degree using new technologies. And of course, the will of people in charge to change anything - I've spent to many hours waiting long queues while only 30% of the desks were manned, to know they just don't see queues as a problem. As for the duty free revenue this whole circus brings in, it must be massive.
The title is a bit silly -- sonic booms weren't what killed the Concorde, it was cost -- but I'm glad to see the article goes into the need for fixing both problems.
True, though the inability to do transcontinental flights exacerbated this by effectively eliminating any hope of recovering development costs or achieving any other economies of scale.
Noise around airports was also a very contentious issue - low-bypass jet engines and, especially, the use of afterburners on the takeoff roll. This will become an issue again even if the sonic boom problem is solved. Smaller aircraft may be quieter, but they are unlikely to be welcome at airports that cater primarily to business jets, if they are any louder than those in use now - and the trend is towards quieter.
Nope, killing Amdahl's Law is the key to supersonic air travel.
If it takes me 45 minutes to get to the departure airport, where I have to be one hour ahead of time to get through baggage check and security, and it takes 2 hours to get to my destination from the landing airport, then cutting a 4 hour flight to 2 hours is only 34% faster.
Like, fix the transportation and traffic problems around the airports and the logistical delays first, then brute-force the actual flight time.
> fix the transportation and traffic problems around the airports and the logistical delays first, then brute-force the actual flight time
Why this sequence and not the other way around, or both at the same time?
The two don't seem to be competing for any resources, other than the highest-level ones like money. In some cases, the airport logistics problem may be intractable or take too long (witness BER).
I also suggest your times are slightly off, in the context of the target market. I doubt someone paying that much would need the full hour (though as little as 30 minutes might be a stretch if we're counting departure time not boarding time).
I also think, however, that lowering a 4 hour (gate-to-gate) flight from 4 hours to 2 hours is unrealistic, and is too short a flight to make sense for supersonic, anyway. IIRC, Boom was looking to halve the 7-hour JFK-LHR hop, comparable to Concorde.
Where it would seem to be far more attractive is the much longer flights, such as trans-Pacific, where the overall time is much longer, a higher portion of gate-to-gate (and door-to-door) time is at maximum cruise speed (shaving 8 hours off a 14+ hour SFO-SYD could save a full day of travel). Even Europe to the US West Coast would be significant, which relates to the premise of the article.
I think the only way to kill the boom is to change the aerodynamics of the plane at different flying conditions. The only way to do this is to change what the air "sees" when it hits the planes wing surfaces by changing the turbulent and laminar regions. Unfortunately most methods are not quite there yet.
To get to low cost you need a lot of routes to fly on. Without a sonic boom can fly over land which opens up more routes. Therefore, the lack of a sonic boom does contribute to the comeback of supersonic air travel.
I suspect that the solution to the problem may look very different to the planes and drawings of planes shown in the article.
I know nothing of aerodynamics but what I do know is that innovation in aerodynamics is more likely to come from the world of F1 than the bowels of Lockheed Martin these days. This has actually been the case since the 'Gurney Flap' that was the first innovation in aero to come from motor racing to make its way to regular aerospace.
In 2017 at the Singapore Grand Prix the Force India F1 team surprised the fans with a new gadget to get extra downforce. In 2017 F1 cars had a 'sharkfin' engine cover and on top of this Force India had what looked like a hedge trimmer, this was 30 or so very small wings that worked together to create two powerful vortexes with the mini-winglets reinforcing the same vortex created by the mini-winglets at the front of this 'hedge trimmer' arrangement. From this they were able to get good downforce from an area of the engine cover/sharkfin that was not supposed to be downforce creating. The innovation obviously had to be banned and this is no longer a feature in 2018 cars.
F1 max speeds are lower than a plane and the aero is not about getting airborne, however, due to the rules there is constant innovation. Regular planes look as aerodynamically sophisticated as F1 cars from the 1980's. I suspect that to do supersonic without the boom then aerospace will have to borrow more than just the Gurney Flap from F1. Furthermore, incentives have to be better than pork barrel politics or else the Lockheed Martins of this world will be on this gravy train forever.
The key point you're missing is that subsonic and supersonic flows are very different - in terms of fluid dynamics, supersonic planes are not just faster than subsonic planes. Commercial jets and F1 cars are optimised for subsonic flows. To handle supersonic flight, you need to do things which are strange and suboptimal for subsonic travel. This is partly why subsonic planes don't look like concorde.
That's not to say cars won't have an effect on the design. Two avenues I can think of in particular are:
1) Concorde's shape made it _extremely_ noisey upon take-off. That's subsonic travel, so other subsonic vehicles might provide design inspiration (even though in some cases going supersonic may mean the inspiration has to be ignored)
2) Projects like Bloodhound SSC might provide inspiration.
[+] [-] slivym|7 years ago|reply
Firstly, all the big commercial investment has gone into sub-sonic planes, so they've gotten much cheaper. So to just have the same cost-ratio as concorde between supersonic vs. Standard flight is a big ask today. Secondly, Concorde wasn't just expensive -it was uneconomical because they couldn't fill the plane at those prices. Concorde was built in an era before deregulation - flights are far more cost competitive today. Thirdly, removing the sonic boom seems to imply inefficient shapes for the aircraft in terms of fitting numbers of passengers in. So even if the engines were far more efficient, you still have the fuel efficiency per passenger to worry about. For example Boom Supersonic are planning a 55 passenger plane. That is laughable as a commercial proposition.
I'm certain that companies working on this have concrete expectations of the cost o f a flight per person and the expected demand, I would just love to know what those are.
[+] [-] Retric|7 years ago|reply
On top of that the top 0.1% is both larger and more wealthy making filling ~50 seats a flight at 30,000+$ a pop easier than you might think. Drop that into $5,000 territory and some people would this every week.
IMO it's actually business jets that are the best market. They fly fewer trips making fuel less of an issue.
[+] [-] Reason077|7 years ago|reply
Do you feel that is too big, or too small? The market for supersonic travel is likely to align with the very high-end, private jet market. Those who want to get somewhere fast and don’t care what it costs.
It may be easier to overcome noise issues with a smaller design, too.
[+] [-] ckocagil|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1QEj09Pe6k
[+] [-] caio1982|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabricexpert|7 years ago|reply
But I would LOVE it if we could find a way to speed up the time spent at the airport. The amount of time I spend traveling to the airport, dropping off bags, queuing for security, getting pulled aside because I forgot I was wearing a belt that day, waiting for the gate to open, getting on a train to the gate, queuing to board the gate, getting on a BUS to the plane, queuing to get on the plane, waiting to put my overhead bags in the bins, waiting on the tarmac for the plan to find a free slot on the runway.
In the future I still have to do all this before we finally take off and travel at supersonic speed (yay), but then I land and basically have to do it all again.
Most of the time spent traveling by air is spent on the ground.
[+] [-] struppi|7 years ago|reply
Train: Go to the station (near city center), arrive 10 mins before train departs, get on the train, read/work/eat/drink for 6 hours, get off the train. And then you are already at the city center of your destination!
The total time spent when flying might be shorter (4.5-5 hours), but that is not worth the hassle.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|7 years ago|reply
Also, airlines for some reason don't want checked in luggage, since they price it so high. This means everyone travels with maximum hand luggage, and boarding takes a long time. The last people boarding usually can not find space in the overhead bin close to their seat. I wonder if they really are at the global optimum point with this. Checked in luggage is also notoriously unreliable (it travels to the wrong country or is thrown around with such force that everything is broken) which can ruin your trip.
[+] [-] janlaureys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|7 years ago|reply
If I have no suitcases to drop off, and it's at a quiet time, then I can arrive half an hour before departure, breeze through security, and get on the plane.
But if I have cases, or security _might_ be long, then I'm having to leave at least an extra half an hour in case of big queues, if not an hour. And that's a time-killer.
The "automated bag drop" that some airports do now has really sped things up, but I'm sure some more time could be cut there. Security is the main bottleneck nowadays.
[+] [-] dsr_|7 years ago|reply
The bad news is that political changes need the cooperation of large groups of your fellow citizens.
[+] [-] bauc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cornholio|7 years ago|reply
The whole duty free forced march -> endless tread mills -> gate -> bus routine is harrowing busy work. It creates multiple choke and synchronization points, thus multiple queues: you queue to enter the gate, than wait for everybody to board the bus, then queue again as people take their seats and place the luggage in the overheads.
It's a telling sign of how bad the current system is, when boarding on a single front door is considered a large speed up. A pod can take you to the right door in real time, gradually, as people arrive and clear passport control, overlapping multiple activities and allowing tighter turnaround. Why should the gate close 40 minutes before take off? If a passenger just checked in, and it takes 10 minutes for the pod to get to the plane, that's the minimal effective cutoff (with a larger official cutoff for safety).
As for passport and baggage control, those can be automated and sped up to a large degree using new technologies. And of course, the will of people in charge to change anything - I've spent to many hours waiting long queues while only 30% of the desks were manned, to know they just don't see queues as a problem. As for the duty free revenue this whole circus brings in, it must be massive.
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloudblockchain|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] phyzome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|7 years ago|reply
Noise around airports was also a very contentious issue - low-bypass jet engines and, especially, the use of afterburners on the takeoff roll. This will become an issue again even if the sonic boom problem is solved. Smaller aircraft may be quieter, but they are unlikely to be welcome at airports that cater primarily to business jets, if they are any louder than those in use now - and the trend is towards quieter.
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
If it takes me 45 minutes to get to the departure airport, where I have to be one hour ahead of time to get through baggage check and security, and it takes 2 hours to get to my destination from the landing airport, then cutting a 4 hour flight to 2 hours is only 34% faster.
Like, fix the transportation and traffic problems around the airports and the logistical delays first, then brute-force the actual flight time.
[+] [-] mmt|7 years ago|reply
Why this sequence and not the other way around, or both at the same time?
The two don't seem to be competing for any resources, other than the highest-level ones like money. In some cases, the airport logistics problem may be intractable or take too long (witness BER).
I also suggest your times are slightly off, in the context of the target market. I doubt someone paying that much would need the full hour (though as little as 30 minutes might be a stretch if we're counting departure time not boarding time).
I also think, however, that lowering a 4 hour (gate-to-gate) flight from 4 hours to 2 hours is unrealistic, and is too short a flight to make sense for supersonic, anyway. IIRC, Boom was looking to halve the 7-hour JFK-LHR hop, comparable to Concorde.
Where it would seem to be far more attractive is the much longer flights, such as trans-Pacific, where the overall time is much longer, a higher portion of gate-to-gate (and door-to-door) time is at maximum cruise speed (shaving 8 hours off a 14+ hour SFO-SYD could save a full day of travel). Even Europe to the US West Coast would be significant, which relates to the premise of the article.
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
No. Cost is
[+] [-] geertj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazy_monkey|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
I know nothing of aerodynamics but what I do know is that innovation in aerodynamics is more likely to come from the world of F1 than the bowels of Lockheed Martin these days. This has actually been the case since the 'Gurney Flap' that was the first innovation in aero to come from motor racing to make its way to regular aerospace.
In 2017 at the Singapore Grand Prix the Force India F1 team surprised the fans with a new gadget to get extra downforce. In 2017 F1 cars had a 'sharkfin' engine cover and on top of this Force India had what looked like a hedge trimmer, this was 30 or so very small wings that worked together to create two powerful vortexes with the mini-winglets reinforcing the same vortex created by the mini-winglets at the front of this 'hedge trimmer' arrangement. From this they were able to get good downforce from an area of the engine cover/sharkfin that was not supposed to be downforce creating. The innovation obviously had to be banned and this is no longer a feature in 2018 cars.
F1 max speeds are lower than a plane and the aero is not about getting airborne, however, due to the rules there is constant innovation. Regular planes look as aerodynamically sophisticated as F1 cars from the 1980's. I suspect that to do supersonic without the boom then aerospace will have to borrow more than just the Gurney Flap from F1. Furthermore, incentives have to be better than pork barrel politics or else the Lockheed Martins of this world will be on this gravy train forever.
[+] [-] NLips|7 years ago|reply
That's not to say cars won't have an effect on the design. Two avenues I can think of in particular are:
1) Concorde's shape made it _extremely_ noisey upon take-off. That's subsonic travel, so other subsonic vehicles might provide design inspiration (even though in some cases going supersonic may mean the inspiration has to be ignored) 2) Projects like Bloodhound SSC might provide inspiration.
[+] [-] fabricexpert|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]