Faster air travel.
COLORADO FIRM WILL HAVE TO WIN OVER SKEPTICAL AIRLINES
Colorado’s Boom Technology wants to bring back the era of supersonic air travel.
Ask a harried air traveler 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 endeavor, it seems reasonable to ask: Why can’t we fly faster?
That’s the question driving a Colorado 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 mph), faster than the defunct Concorde and certainly faster than the standard 550 mph, with fares no more expensive than a current businessclass round trip, which ranges between $5,000 and $10,000.
Yet long before travelers 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 skepticism 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,” said Marty St. George, a JetBlue Airways Corp. executive and industry veteran. “The issue is can you do it and make the numbers work?”
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 skeptics, Boom touts its design as a radical update of the troubled Concorde. Airlines no longer abide such loud, kerosene-gulping equipment, which means new engine designs must be fuel-efficient and coupled with meager emissions and low noise.
Boom 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. 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 traveler 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 Centennial-based company says on its website .
“It’s about making the economics work and then delivering the aircraft we say we can deliver,” said Boom’s cofounder 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 Co. also has options for Boom’s first 10 aircraft as part of the arrangement.
Another unidentified European airline has taken options for 15 aircraft, Scholl said, 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 centers as Hong Kong, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, where corporate travelers would likely pay for the time savings a supersonic jet could afford.
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.”
“With the operational costs they are expecting for this airplane … current business-class fares could make this airplane profitable,” said consultant Michael Boyd. “It passed the smell test on this end. This wasn’t like a group of Star Trek geeks.”
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 modeling with software these days before the thing flies … but until you actually see it, you never really know,” he said.
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 Inc., a Californiabased charter service and scheduled airline. Would the Boom aircraft siphon off most or all of a carrier’s businessand first-class passengers? If so, what happens to that space on the current aircraft fleets?
“You’d have some interesting pricing discussions,” Wilcox said. “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 businessclass cabin can become a comfortable den in which to be productive, rested, and well-fed on the kind of 15- to 20hour 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,” said Wilcox. “But it’s just very, very hard to do.”