New Supersonic airliner
Discussion
Ayahuasca said:
Wow, the future is here!
There is also the Aerion AS2 supersonic bizjet:
https://gizmodo.com/325751/first-supersonic-privat...
Oh, hang on, that article is from 10 years ago.
The future clearly is not here yet.
Sometimes the future is slightly delayed.There is also the Aerion AS2 supersonic bizjet:
https://gizmodo.com/325751/first-supersonic-privat...
Oh, hang on, that article is from 10 years ago.
The future clearly is not here yet.
GE’s Affinity: The first civil supersonic engine in 55 years – launching a new era of efficient supersonic flight
GE said:
Affinity will power the Aerion AS2 supersonic business jet with first flight in 2023
djc206 said:
Virgin and JAL have invested and ordered aircraft I believe.
Denver Colorado although some parts for the prototype are being built in NC.
But who is actually building it?Denver Colorado although some parts for the prototype are being built in NC.
Is this the first aircraft ever built by this company? I've certainly never heard of them up until they made this announcement.
It's like as if Boeing suddenly emerged from nowhere in 1966 never having built a single aeroplane before and said, "Hey, we're going to build the largest airliner in the world".
It just doesn't make sense to me.
Eric Mc said:
But who is actually building it?
Is this the first aircraft ever built by this company? I've certainly never heard of them up until they made this announcement.
It's like as if Boeing suddenly emerged from nowhere in 1966 never having built a single aeroplane before and said, "Hey, we're going to build the largest airliner in the world".
It just doesn't make sense to me.
I’ll let you go on their website and read about them. They seem to have a lot of people who have worked on other aircraft for other manufacturers.Is this the first aircraft ever built by this company? I've certainly never heard of them up until they made this announcement.
It's like as if Boeing suddenly emerged from nowhere in 1966 never having built a single aeroplane before and said, "Hey, we're going to build the largest airliner in the world".
It just doesn't make sense to me.
I’m pretty skeptical too, when my friend invited me to the event I laughed and said I’d go for the canapés before they went bust. To be honest I just hope they succeed because I never got to fly on Concorde and I’d love to see supersonic passenger flights return to the skies.
djc206 said:
I’ll let you go on their website and read about them. They seem to have a lot of people who have worked on other aircraft for other manufacturers.
I’m pretty skeptical too, when my friend invited me to the event I laughed and said I’d go for the canapés before they went bust. To be honest I just hope they succeed because I never got to fly on Concorde and I’d love to see supersonic passenger flights return to the skies.
I'm not saying it won't be done - but getting a fully functional ground breaking aircraft into service without even having built a more normal type of aeroplane, ever, does seem a tad ambitious.I’m pretty skeptical too, when my friend invited me to the event I laughed and said I’d go for the canapés before they went bust. To be honest I just hope they succeed because I never got to fly on Concorde and I’d love to see supersonic passenger flights return to the skies.
djc206 said:
Eric Mc said:
But who is actually building it?
Is this the first aircraft ever built by this company? I've certainly never heard of them up until they made this announcement.
It's like as if Boeing suddenly emerged from nowhere in 1966 never having built a single aeroplane before and said, "Hey, we're going to build the largest airliner in the world".
It just doesn't make sense to me.
I’ll let you go on their website and read about them. They seem to have a lot of people who have worked on other aircraft for other manufacturers.Is this the first aircraft ever built by this company? I've certainly never heard of them up until they made this announcement.
It's like as if Boeing suddenly emerged from nowhere in 1966 never having built a single aeroplane before and said, "Hey, we're going to build the largest airliner in the world".
It just doesn't make sense to me.
I’m pretty skeptical too, when my friend invited me to the event I laughed and said I’d go for the canapés before they went bust. To be honest I just hope they succeed because I never got to fly on Concorde and I’d love to see supersonic passenger flights return to the skies.
Their business model is a design it and they will come model, similar to Aerion, they will work the design themselves until such a point that they show enough progress to rope in an established manufacturer which will partner to certify and manufacture the aircraft.
I did just have a look on their website they haven't released any press releases for 5 months, but there was some jobs posted within a month or so.
I personally doubt that they will be successful, the fundamental issue is that once you fly for more than 3 hours the task you are accomplishing on that day is flying somewhere. The value of the saved time is pretty minimal for most people.
For all the talk of it being able to displace business class passengers to a smaller aircraft I suspect that:
1: Airlines will be able to offer business flights for considerably less than a Boom ticket and the route map of destinations will always be higher.
2: The environmental negatives will always be much higher than flying subsonically
3: Environmental negatives plus elite travel will attract negative press, public opinion and public policies.
The particular negative is that by the time it is flying the bottom end of flying may well be electric which will make the optics even worse.
I could well see this aircraft being banned by Germany, Norway, Sweden, most of europe minus UK and France.
WRT price and displacing business class passengers; if they can achieve their target ticket prices they will compete and people will pay to sit on a smaller aircraft if it serves the route. I doubt that too many routes would be viable but your big business routes like London-NY sure would be. There’s also an element of doing something to say you’ve done it or because you can do it! I dare say if they restarted supersonic flights tomorrow a lot of us aerosexuals would fly on it just to say we had and for the experience.
If they fail at least I got to see Concorde lowering its nose and my wife got to sit in the captains seat with a glass of free champagne so she’s happy!
If they fail at least I got to see Concorde lowering its nose and my wife got to sit in the captains seat with a glass of free champagne so she’s happy!
djc206 said:
WRT price and displacing business class passengers; if they can achieve their target ticket prices they will compete and people will pay to sit on a smaller aircraft if it serves the route. I doubt that too many routes would be viable but your big business routes like London-NY sure would be. There’s also an element of doing something to say you’ve done it or because you can do it! I dare say if they restarted supersonic flights tomorrow a lot of us aerosexuals would fly on it just to say we had and for the experience.
If they fail at least I got to see Concorde lowering its nose and my wife got to sit in the captains seat with a glass of free champagne so she’s happy!
I think the answer is a big "if", business class only airlines haven't worked one of the reason for this is that the whole 3 class structure lets airlines charge different rates for what is fundamentally the same product. If they fail at least I got to see Concorde lowering its nose and my wife got to sit in the captains seat with a glass of free champagne so she’s happy!
You can optimise the cost of the business class seat and ultimately if someone decides not to fly business you can put them in economy or premium economy or upgrade them if business isn't selling and sell the premium economy to someone else.
With the SST if someone decides that they don't like your price they just fly some other time with someone else.
The key issue is that hitting the price targets will be difficult, it is obviously going to use more fuel but that is less of a problem considering how much the tickets cost and how often it flies. The big issue will be producing a very advanced plane for substantially less than Airbus or Boeing would produce it and amortizing the cost over what may end up being a pretty short production run.
The interesting things which might change the equation:
1: They have no competition - they have to hit range targets but they don't have to beat another manufacturer, this means they can probably afford substitute good enough for perfect during the dev programme. See Tesla as a good example of this.
2: They have a CF fuselage - this gets around the life limiting issues with the Concorde. It also appears that in rocketry small companies are actually finding that composites are now cheaper to produce than aluminium as the work content is lower due to fewer fasteners. Also industries like high performance yachts and wind turbines have made some significant gains in .ower cost CF fabrications since the first CF airliners were designed.
3: They don't carry the overheads, processes and sunk cost of existing aircraft manufacturers.
What might swing it the other way is than on any large complex design project the devil is in the details and many of those details aren't even fully theoretically understood by the incumbents they just work, a new company is likely to make many of those same detailed mess ups on seaming insignificant aspects.
In short you'd be brave to invest.
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