Dallas - Ask a harried air traveller about the
basics of modern flight, and you’ll probably elicit surprise when they
discover commercial airplanes fly only as fast as they did in
the 1950s. Given the range of aerospace advances in the past
half-century, plus the technological leaps in almost every other area
of human endeavour, it seems reasonable to ask: Why can’t we fly faster?
That’s the question driving a startup called Boom
Technology, which says it’s time to bring supersonic jet travel into the
mainstream—in a modern way. The company is pursuing speed with an audacious
idea: a 45-seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (1,451 miles per hour),
faster than the defunct Concorde and certainly faster than the standard 550
mph, with fares no more expensive than a current business-class round trip,
which ranges between $5 000 and $10 000.
Yet long before travellers can marvel at a quick
hop across the Atlantic, Boom will need to sell the airlines not just on a
technically disruptive aircraft, but also on one that can accomplish such feats
of velocity cost-effectively. It must earn a solid profit—no middling returns
allowed—and this, of course, has been a key reason the Concorde was an
aberration rather than the harbinger of universal supersonic travel.
Boom is likely to encounter deep scepticism in
a conservative industry that still relies heavily on a fundamental
airplane design devised 70 years ago. The major global airlines Boom will
court operate with two cardinal maxims: It’s really hard to make money with
small airplanes, and it’s really, really hard to make money with supersonic
airplanes, which are renowned for their fuel inefficiency.
“I have no problem seeing the demand for this airplane,”
says Marty St. George, a JetBlue Airways Corp. executive and industry veteran.
“The issue is can you do it and make the numbers work?”
Radical update of
the Concorde
Boom will face a numerical gauntlet as it seeks to sell
airlines on the advantages of a small, supersonic craft, with airlines posing
tough questions about weight, range, fuel burn, maintenance, dispatch
reliability, and dozens of other issues. The company also plans for its
aircraft to fly on three engines, a departure from the industry trend of
using two engines as the most efficient configuration.
In response to sceptics, Boom touts its design as a
radical update of the troubled Concorde, which was operated by only two
airlines over 27 years. (Braniff International and Singapore Airlines had
partnerships under which they also sold tickets on the Air France and British
Airways Concorde flights.) Airlines no longer abide such loud,
kerosene-gulping equipment, which means new engine designs must be fuel-efficient
and coupled with meagre emissions and low noise.
undefinedBoom has diagnosed Concorde’s operating flaws as twofold.
First, the plane had ferociously high operating costs, driven primarily by its
voracious appetite for jet fuel. “Grossly uneconomic,” in the words of a 1978
New York Times article summarizing critiques of the aircraft. Second, the
Concorde’s load factors were generally lean because of the steep fares Air
France and British Airways were forced to charge, typically around $15,000 to
$20,000 in current dollars.
Boom says it plans to address all of these shortcomings.
The startup’s signature city pairing is New York to London, which would take a
little more than three hours to fly and give a corporate traveller
the opportunity to make a day trip across the pond and back. “Leave New York at
6 a.m., make afternoon and dinner meetings in London, and be home to tuck your
kids into bed,” the suburban Denver-based company says on its website. A
flight from San Francisco to Tokyo could be completed in five and a
half hours, Boom says.
“It’s about making the economics work and then delivering
the aircraft we say we can deliver,” says Boom’s co-founder and chief executive
officer, Blake Scholl, a pilot and former app developer.
Boom has struck a deal with the Spaceship Co., the
manufacturing division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, to use that
company’s engineering, design, and flight-test support services. The Spaceship
also has options for Boom’s first 10 aircraft as part of the arrangement. “Richard
has long expressed interest in developing high speed flight and building high
speed flight R&D through Virgin Galactic and our manufacturing
organization,” Virgin Group spokeswoman Christine Choi said in an e-mail. “It
is still early days and just the start of what you’ll hear about our shared
ambitions and efforts.”
Another unidentified European airline has taken options
for 15 aircraft, Scholl says, and Boom is talking to carriers about
options for an additional 170 aircraft. An analysis by Boyd Group
International, an aviation consulting firm, suggested that Boom could sell
1,300 supersonic passenger jets over 10 years for a premium service on routes
frequented by corporate traffic. Boom’s aircraft would target such global
business centres as Hong Kong, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo,
where corporate travellers would likely pay for the time savings a supersonic
jet could afford.
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Boom says the plane would work on more than 500 routes.
The company won’t disclose a delivery date publicly but says
it expects its first airplane to be ready in “the early 2020s.”
One potential tool to attract buyers will be the prospect of penalty payments,
which are widely used by manufacturers to compensate customers if engines or
aircraft fall short of guarantees. “If [airlines] were guaranteed the numbers,
someone will try it,” says JetBlue’s St. George.
“With the operational costs they are expecting for this
airplane … current business-class fares could make this airplane
profitable,” says consultant Michael Boyd in a telephone interview. “It
passed the smell test on this end. This wasn’t like a group of Star Trek
geeks.”
Proving the
economics
The company will be forced to demonstrate that whatever
positive performance data its models yield in computer simulations, the planes
will hold up in the real and very brutal world of airline economics. That will
require extensive flight testing so that Boom can move beyond the “paper
airplane” stage, according to St. George. “You can do a lot of modelling with
software these days before the thing flies … but until you actually see
it, you never really know,” he says.
Boom plans to fly a one-third-size demonstrator
version of its airplane called the XB-1 late next year, working with General
Electric Co. It’s aiming to initially fly GE’s J85 engines, a model
that dates to the 1950s, on the XB-1. Flights will begin at subsonic
speeds and then get progressively faster. Boom has hired Honeywell
International Inc. for avionics and environmental control systems.
The biggest technical challenge, however, will probably
be the engine, as noted in a recent analysis by Bjorn Fehrm, an aerospace
consultant and a former fighter pilot in the Swedish air force. Fehrm estimated
that the Boom design is likely to use about three times the amount of fuel per
seat-mile than current flights between London and New York.
“Would some [airlines] buy some as flagship aircraft for
high-yield routes?” asks Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at Teal
Group. “L.A.-Tokyo, New York-London? Sure, I imagine they would. But, again, it
comes down to seat-mile costs, and until we see anything resembling engine
specifications, you can’t even begin to guess at that.”
For development work on the production model’s engines,
Boom is talking with “all the usual suspects,” Scholl says. The company plans
to use a proven commercial engine core—the GEnx and Rolls Royce Trent 1000
power plants on Boeing’s 787 are among “multiple good options”—and then modify
that engine’s turbofan and composite blades, he says. That approach will
require regulatory certification as a new engine, which adds to the overall
development cost.
“In essence, you’re taking an engine that has a big fan
and putting a medium-size fan on it that’s more appropriate” for the Boom
design, Scholl says. Still, all of Boom’s engine work involves “refinement” of
components that have been proven and flown and carry “a known certification
path” for regulators, he says. “There’s nothing technically impossible here.”
Scholl declined to say how much research work an engine
manufacturer would have to invest in this project, but the market is
almost 4 000 engines, based on the Boyd analysis. Major engine makers
would probably be drawn to a business that size.
Beyond the engine performance, another issue for airlines
would be how to market an upscale supersonic service alongside the premium
cabins on existing jets, according to Alex Wilcox, CEO of JetSuite, a
California-based charter service and scheduled airline. Would the Boom aircraft
siphon off most or all of a carrier’s business- and first-class passengers? If
so, what happens to that space on the current aircraft fleets?
“You’d have some interesting pricing discussions,” Wilcox
says. “How do you price it vs. your first-class product into
London? Into which you have invested quite a lot, by the way.”
Being up in the air is fast becoming the same as being in
the office, with robust internet communication a priority for carriers, thus
reducing the biggest attraction of supersonic flight—speed. Mix that with
the flat beds and premium dining, and the business-class cabin can become a
comfortable den in which to be productive, rested, and well-fed on the kind of
15- to 20-hour flights that are quickly becoming routine.
“You used to be stuck in a tube,” says Teal Group’s
Aboulafia. “Now it’s an office in the sky. Everything has gotten way more
comfortable.” Many people now flying for the better part of a day adopt a “Who
cares?” attitude.
Despite the challenges Boom faces, and they are many,
aviation experts expect that at some point, years from now, the economic
challenges of commercial supersonic travel will be overcome. “I hate to
sound cynical here, because I actually want to see this airplane,” says Wilcox.
“But it’s just very, very hard to do.”
BLOOMBERG