✈️ Why supersonic flight went away and why it’s coming back.
How Boom Aerospace plan to bring back supersonic travel
When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, people realised that the essential business meetings they travelled for could be done just as well online.
Zoom became the tech stock of the moment, and it appeared we were all going to spend the rest of our working lives in virtual meetings. But two years later, travel for work is coming back.
Virtual meetings are not going anywhere, but people still have a deep need to spend time together in person. That will continue to be the case - at least until Mark sorts out the metaverse.
Yet air travel remains a dreadful experience, and one which has got worse rather than better over the years. Airlines have cut down on free food, reduced legroom, and even tried to charge you to go to the toilet. Not to mention the security circus/ordeal.
You can of course pay huge amounts of money to fly business or first, which means they will give you a normal human-sized seat and almost regular food. Otherwise, flying is a mediocre experience at the best of times, and absolute hell the rest of the time.
So not only is flying rubbish, but it still takes about the same amount of time to fly from London to New York today as it did in 1950. Almost every other form of transport has gotten better. Cars are more fuel efficient or are electric. Trains are faster. E-bikes and e-scooters are transforming last-mile travel.
So today I am going to explore why air travel is not any faster, and one company looking to change that.
Let’s get to it. ✈️
The late 1940’s to the 1960’s were known as the golden age of air travel.
People used to dress up to fly; a shirt and tie for men was standard, and the early jumbo jets even had a cocktail bar.
But it wasn’t all bow ties and martinis. Flying might have been more comfortable, but it was much less safe, and significantly more expensive.
By 1958 commercial air travel was growing fast, and you could fly from New York to London in about 7 hours.
Today the journey time from New York to London is……still about 7 hours.
Why should it be the case that sixty years later, we are unable to cross the Atlantic any faster than in 1950?
Paypal founder Peter Thiel has this idea that technological progress stalled in the 1970s, and that even though computers and the internet have changed our lives digital lives in many ways, the world of atoms has hardly changed at all.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” – Peter Thiel
Thiel argues that although many believe we live in an age of accelerating innovation, in fact the rate of innovation has slowed dramatically. This topic deserves a post of itself to fully unpack, but whether or not it is true more generally, it certainly seems to be the case for air travel.
We might not be returning to the glamorous air travel of the 1960’s any time soon - hoodies and sweatpants seem to be here to stay unfortunately - but why can’t we at least get there faster?
The irony is that for a while at least we were able to travel faster - a lot faster. The infamous Concorde supersonic aircraft was introduced all the way back in 1976, and made faster than sound passenger travel a reality.
Unfortunately it was very expensive even for business travellers, so commercially was never successful. A fatal crash in 2000 proved to be the last straw, and it flew it’s last flight in 2003.
Though Concorde was an incredible aircraft, the huge fuel requirements made it extremely expensive and eventually proved to be economically unviable.
But at some point if we want to speed up air travel, faster than sound travel has to come back again.
Boom Aerospace wants to do just that.
It believes that a combination of better design, materials and fuel efficiency will make their aircraft, called the Overture, a commercial success in a way that Concorde never was.
It’s a hugely ambitious project. To give you an idea of just how ambitious, the original Concorde cost over $2.8 billion to develop, with 1.4 billion coming from both the British and French governments.
In contrast, Boom has so far raised $600 million from private investors so far, and will likely need a lot more.
It has also recently reached a big milestone, successfully building a ‘demonstrator’ plane the XB-1 which should fly before the end of this year. The XB-1 is a third of the size of the final passenger plane, and will allow Boom to refine and test key aspects of their design and technology.
But if Boom is to succeed, it will ultimately because they are able to make it cheaper per passenger than Concorde was. Whether this is possible is still an open question.
As Delta CEO said “Until we’re confident that we can actually generate a reliable return from the aircraft, that’s not where we’re investing.” Ok so Delta are not convinced, but several other airlines have been convinced to make preorders, and Boom claim to have identified over 600 routes that could be profitable with their aircraft.
London to New York in 3.5 hours.
Tokyo to Seattle in 4.5 hours.
Miami to Madrid in 4.5 hours.
Bringing their plane to market would start to change what people believe is possible for the future of air travel. It would remind us all that faster than sound passenger travel is possible, and could be the future of air travel.
This is the type of company that really excites me, one that will change our concept of what is possible in future. With enough companies like Boom, perhaps we can move out of Thiel’s ‘age of stagnation’, and enter a new era of extraordinary change.
Until next time,
Jamie
Boom Aerospace
💰 $600m
📍 Denver, Colorado
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