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Transportation

Boom Supersonic XB-1 Breaks Sound Barrier During Historic Test Flight (cbsnews.com) 61

The XB-1, a civilian supersonic jet developed by Boom Supersonic, successfully broke the sound barrier during a test flight over the Mojave Desert. It reached an altitude of 35,290 feet before accelerating to Mach 1.22, the company said in a press release. CBS News reports: It marks the first time an independently developed jet has broken the sound barrier, Boom Supersonic said, and the plane is the "first supersonic jet made in America." The sound barrier was broken for the first time in 1947, when Air Force pilot Capt. Chuck Yeager flew a rocket-propelled experimental aircraft across the Mojave Desert -- taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port just as the XB-1 did. [...]

The company will next focus its attention on Overture, a supersonic airliner that will ultimately "bring the benefits of supersonic flight to everyone," Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl said in a statement. The XB-1 jet will be the foundation for Overture, Boom Supersonic said, and many features present on the jet will also be incorporated into the supersonic airliner. The airliner will also use Boom Supersonic's bespoke propulsion system, Symphony, to run on "up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel."

The company said the goal for the plane is for it to be able to carry between 64 and 80 passengers at Mach 1.7, or about 1,295 miles per hour. Existing subsonic airliners fly at between 550 and 600 miles per hour, according to charter company Bitlux. About 130 Overture planes have been pre-ordered, the company said. Airlines including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines have placed pre-orders. The company finished building a "superfactory" in North Carolina in 2024, and will eventually produce 66 planes per year.

Boom Supersonic XB-1 Breaks Sound Barrier During Historic Test Flight

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  • What an unfortunate name.
  • by tsqr ( 808554 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @06:17PM (#65126405)

    What does "independently developed" mean? Independently of what? Government subsidies, maybe? I seem to recall a couple of supersonic airliners (Concorde, Tupolev Tu-144) that saw some commercial use.

    • Concorde was paid for by the UK and French governments and then sold to the airlines for (certainly in the UK) £1 each.

      Richard Brandon wanted to buy the UK planes from BA for the original price they paid -- £1 each.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Branson's bid for the Concordes was never really about the money though. It was BA not wanting a competitor to have their flagship aircraft.

        To be successful Boom need to reduce operating costs (the aircraft need a lot of maintenance and burn a lot of fuel), and reduce the amount of noise they make. Concorde was very loud even at sub-sonic speeds, as was the first supersonic passenger jet, the TU-144.

        Random fact. The French caused a TU-144 to crash by flying a spy plane too close to it. It's not clear which

  • The "Concorde" also had lots and lots of "pre-orders", but turned out to be flown by only 2 state-owned airlines that had to do it for prestige reasons. "Boom" has little chance to fare better than the "Concorde" did. But enjoy trying.
    • Boom has press releases on their website about government orders. They've covered their assets.

      Uses for this would have for the government would be VIP transport, recon/intel/weather/etc., and to carry a quick response force for military or disaster areas. NASA has a collection of interesting and unique aircraft for various science stuff, they might buy a couple to experiment with. The thing has a flight deck fitted out like a F-35 by having helmet mounted displays and force feedback fly-by-wire. I doub

    • Since one of the pre-orders is to Japan Airlines, I assume that they are at least claiming that trans-Pacific flights will be possible. Concorde only had the range to do trans-Atlantic flights so if that's true it opens up a large market that Concorde didn't have. Cutting the 12hr LA-to-Tokyo flight in half would be worth a more expensive ticket price for a lot of people.

      • by necro81 ( 917438 )
        People in Japan fly to places other than the United States. For instance, Tokyo-to-Singapore is about 5000 km and almost entirely over water. Tokyo-to-Taipei is just 2000 km. To Beijing is 2000 km, to Shanghai is about 4000 km, although a lot of those are over land. I know Boom is trying to get their plane quiet enough to permit overland travel, but we'll see. Tokyo-to-LA is about 9000 km.
  • by Striek ( 1811980 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @06:30PM (#65126437)

    Personally I don't see the allure of supersonic passenger flight. Let's not forget the the Concorde program was eventually scrapped instead of new supersonic jets being developed was not because it was cost prohibitive to fly (and at $10k+ per ticket, it sure was), it was because there just wasn't enough interest in shortening an 8 hour flight to a 4 hour flight, and it's basically impossible to fly supersonic (and civilian) over the continental US, so it will likely never help with New YorkLos Angeles travel.

    Between the jet lag and the fact that it still eats up an entire workday, nobody in the end really cared for the faster trip. Now, it was a horribly uncomfortable plane to be a passenger on, and credit to Boom if they solve that as it might make some difference, but I just don't see that being the "killer app", as it were.

    The "killer app" would be turning a LondonNew York flight into a commuter flight - as in, fly there in the morning, and back in the evening, so a meeting on the other side of the pond takes only one day instead of two. Shortening the flight to 3 or 4 hours doesn't accomplish that.

    Now, if we could get to mach 3 or 4, now THAT would be something. Now it's a 2 or 3 hour flight.

    Now, all that said, it has been twenty years since we had supersonic transatlantic flight, so perhaps someone can come along and do it better. But I'm not holding my breath. I don't see this service as ever being economically feasible.

    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Boom's whole reason for existing is to minimize sonic booms.

    • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @07:31PM (#65126565)

      SpaceX wants to get rockets that will take people from any point on Earth to any point on Earth in less than an hour.

      That sounds great but there's no rockets taking off from inside a major city like aircraft would. They'd be launched from a platform out at sea like some oil drilling rig. People would have to get there by a helicopter, boat, or maybe a train. Then every passenger would have to file in, get strapped down, luggage loaded, the pad cleared of boats or whatever, then they can launch. They might not have a countdown like a rocket headed to some specific orbit since they aren't trying to hit a point in space that is moving, the point they want to hit is back on Earth. They'll have a launch window, I assume, as they'd need to let aircraft and such in the area know they will be coming through so they will have a kinda-sorta countdown. They might have a mock countdown regardless for the amusement of the passengers because that's what people expect from a rocket launch.

      Where can a SpaceX Starship land? Can they land at an airport? Maybe technically but to take off again they'd need to be fitted to another booster and hauled out to sea. They'd have to land at the same kinds of facilities that they took off from, so not quite a point to point service.

      Maybe if everything is planned out well they can make a rocket flight from arrival at the spaceport to exiting at a distant spaceport under 3 hours. I'm keeping the actual flight to the advertised one hour but I'm taking into account the process of getting packed in the tuna can, prized out (gently) at the destination, and any paperwork or such for customs or what not.

      • by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @05:19AM (#65127227)

        Yeah but the SpaceX concept is way beyond our technological capabilities right now. Sure they can make it happen on a prototype, which is definitely a huge achievement, but to do it regularly at a safety level required to match passenger aircraft is an insanely harder problem.

        It is incredibly hard to make even a very simple system reliable to the level needed for passenger safety. The cascading of probabilities just destroys you. For things like aircraft, the issue of the environment they operate in, which cannot be fully controlled, in many cases puts a limit on how far you can drive down risk levels. The almost universal approach to reliability engineering is that you have to have redundant systems. This massively fixes the problem of cascading probabilities, but even then you have to spend huge effort to ensure that shared risks are dealt with properly.

        With propulsive landing, the failure matrix is insane. You have forward flap actuator failures, relight failures, gimbal failures, control system failures (sensor, computers, actuators for all flaps and engines), general structural failures of a lightweight highly stressed airframe, fuel system issues (contamination, blockages, valve issues). Then you have the general problem of the huge amounts of energy within the propulsion system that can easily destroy the rocket. For example, I suspect they cannot practically contain a turbo pump or combustion chamber failure due to the massive energy levels involved. It's the same with jet engines - if a turbine disc fails, the shrapnel is going where ever it wants - it's not practical to shield against such an event, and these events do happen every few years, and unlucky passengers have been killed. But it's hard to see how they can design a rocket that can survive all possible high engine energy failure events. At that point then you have to make the engine so reliable that it will not fail in this way, which is an insane problem.

        I think that with a lot of rigorous design, they can get it reliable enough for space craft (NASA only requires 1:270 loss of crew rate). But for passenger transport they are dreaming for now.

        In 10 or so years when passenger rocket transport hasn't happened, I expect we will all get to hear Musk tell us about how, now that he 'knows more about reliability engineering than anyone else', he has 'discovered' that 'making things reliable is really hard'.

      • For point to point(earth to earth) the booster is not needed for journeys up to 10,000km(with payload up to 35 tons) just Starship.
        Still unlikely to be practical but who knows in a decade or two the situation may be different.

        • If Starship can get Earth-to-Earth without a booster then that adds some to the practicality. There's still likely to be some severe limits on this being practical for airports as we know them, more suited to a spaceport even if they don't technically enter space. They must still produce a lot of noise in taking off without a booster, too much noise to be allowed to operate from most every existing airport.

          While not likely practical for a quick business trip overseas it might be something people take for

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The G forces experienced alone would make such flights unsuitable for many people, and it's not clear how they could do medical screenings before selling tickets or boarding the rocket.

        It's more bullshit in the same vein as Hyperloop.

      • SpaceX wants to get rockets that will take people from any point on Earth to any point on Earth in less than an hour.

        Considering that Musk couldn't get his much ballyhooed hyperloop running faster than 60 kmh I'm just going to have to regard this ballistic uber tall tale as mere bullshit for the gullible.

    • Let's not forget the the Concorde program was eventually scrapped instead of new supersonic jets being developed was not because it was cost prohibitive to fly (and at $10k+ per ticket, it sure was), it was because there just wasn't enough interest in shortening an 8 hour flight to a 4 hour flight

      The two facts you state above are not independent. The reason it failed was precisely because few people were willing to pay so much more for a ticket that only cut the travel time from 8 hours to 4 hours. Had either the cost or the travel time been half as much far more people would have been interested. The problem was that Concorde was developed at a time when fuel was really cheap. What killed Concorde was OPEC significantly increasing the cost of oil in the 1970s so arguably it was the increase in cos

      • by evanh ( 627108 )

        Concorde was economically very successful on the transatlantic route until 2001.

        The huge increase in security requirements meant the flight time saving mostly evaporated into early check-in times to deal with all the security congestion that followed. It became easier to stay in the office and rely much more on teleconferencing.

        You are right about the price though. Only those with lots of money to spare would use Concorde. But there was always plenty of those customers as long as the route truly saved ti

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          These days it would be hard to justify flying over the Atlantic when we have fairly well developed video conferencing and online collaboration tools. Aside from the cost, the emissions were pretty bad. Boom area talking about being carbon neutral, but offsetting schemes are usually scams.

        • by Sique ( 173459 )
          Let's put it like this: If you got the Concorde for 1 pound, as BA got it, and you only have to pay for the operation, it might have been economical.

          The real problem of the Concorde was the Boeing 747 and its competitors, like the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, which were so cheap to operate, that the prices of long distance flights tumbled. Yes, the Concorde was able to do a roundtrip every day, but the 747 was hauling more passengers in the same time for only a sixth of the fuel. And the wide-body planes coul

    • You are right. This is a solution in search of a customer. I hear a lot about the company Boom. and I suspect it is because they spend a lot of $ on public relations and marketing. I doubt the airline industry takes them seriously.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The "killer app" would be turning a LondonNew York flight into a commuter flight - as in, fly there in the morning, and back in the evening, so a meeting on the other side of the pond takes only one day instead of two. Shortening the flight to 3 or 4 hours doesn't accomplish that.

      Huh. My uncle did exactly that, often: early morning flight from the East Coast, in London for a late lunch meeting, return home by dinner. So, yes, 3 hours NYC to LON does do what you posit, and there were, according to my uncle, a fair number of people who were doing it.

      When I asked him about the cost, he said that it was entirely worth it to the company he was CFO of to have him not wasting his time on slower transport. That company is now a Fortune Global 500, so I'm guessing he was right.

    • by locofungus ( 179280 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @04:12AM (#65127145)

      Let's not forget the the Concorde program was eventually scrapped instead of new supersonic jets being developed was not because it was cost prohibitive to fly (and at $10k+ per ticket, it sure was), it was because there just wasn't enough interest in shortening an 8 hour flight to a 4 hour flight, and it's basically impossible to fly supersonic (and civilian) over the continental US, so it will likely never help with New YorkLos Angeles travel.

      What killed concorde (and SST in general) was that the US decided that supersonic passenger travel over the continental US wasn't going to be allowed.

      The US Federal Aviation Agency banned supersonic flight over land in 1973 with Regulation 91.817 (something that still stands today). The regulation was proposed in April 1970, and took effect in April 1973.

      Most options to purchase Concorde were cancelled in 1973 *before* the Tu-144 crash in June. So while this crash is often cited as a reason SST development didn't continue, it's not a explanation for the cancelling of most of the Concorde options to buy.

      https://www.heritageconcorde.c... [heritageconcorde.com]

      • It's worth remembering that "sonic boom hysteria" in the US, and the subsequent federal ban on supersonic civil aviation over land, only occurred after Boeing cancelled their own SST project.

        The Concorde order-book crashed (pardon the pun) due to the 70s oil crisis, which in turn stopped work on the Block 2 version of Concorde.

        • There are regular sonic booms over Macon, GA area, and over many other areas of US. Those military jets have to be tested...

    • The economic environment is changing though. The planes don't have to make economic sense at all - the giant super yachts plying the med, or gold plated supercars clogging the streets of Dubai don't make any economic sense either, but if you have enough money and it is the cool thing to do, then the economic system says go for it.

      Personally I think that if wealth inequality continues to grow, at some point there will easily be enough customers for a plane like this. It will just be the ultimate private jet

      • The economic environment is changing though. The planes don't have to make economic sense at all - the giant super yachts plying the med, or gold plated supercars clogging the streets of Dubai don't make any economic sense either, but if you have enough money and it is the cool thing to do, then the economic system says go for it.

        While you're right, this launched my brain into a fictional universe where the ultra-wealthy stay up in supersonic jets 24/7 for what they call 'security puproses,' and danger-seekers are hired as fuel haulers, refueling in flight with a chance of death somewhere around the 65-70% mark during connection and disconnection simply because of the extreme conditions and the fact the air yachts have enough protections that it simply shatters the fuel haulers if they collide. Thanks for the inspiration. This one m

    • To all this, I would like to add that the need to commute, especially such long commutes, has been almost eliminated by teleconferencing (am I showing my age by using this word?). Maybe the cost doesn't matter for the target group of this craft, but time is money and nothing can beat a web meeting when it comes to that (I'm trying to learn new words...).
    • Let's not forget the the Concorde program was eventually scrapped...because there just wasn't enough interest in shortening an 8 hour flight...nobody in the end really cared for the faster trip.

      No. The Block 2 Concorde was scrapped due to the oil crisis in the 70s, but it was a tragic accident caused by runway FOD from a Boeing that took the original fleet off the flight-line after 30-some years of service. Branson/Virgin even offered to buy and operate BA's planes, but due to past animosity they declined.

      If you discount the R&D paid for by the French and British governments, on a day-to-day basis Concorde was operationally a profit-maker for their respective flag-carrier airlines as, it turne

    • I believe an important key phrase here is "disruptive technology". It'll spend loads of time being subpar, until one day it ain't.
    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      There are plenty of routes which are entirely or mostly over the ocean where the noise simply doesn't matter.

      It's perfectly possible to build an aircraft capable of mach 3, the USAF had the XB-70 in the 1960s which would have been large enough to carry passengers had it been designed for it.

      The problem Concorde had was that development was stopped. Otherwise you'd have 50 years of incremental improvements. There was already a model B Concorde designed that would have had slight improvements all around. Even

  • Manhattan to JFK by helicopter 5 minutes, TSA line JFK 2H, Boom to LHR 4H, LHR to city 45 mins
    • Zoom beats Boom

      For many things and many people this is true, but some things require physical presence and for some people the Time=Money equation will work out in Boom's favour.

      TSA line JFK 2H

      Nah. Just like Concorde had, Boom will have dedicated passenger-handling rolled into the ticket price. I mean, why not?

      LHR to city 45 mins

      Unless you get a helicopter, or can land at City Airport instead of LHR.

  • by pygalge ( 3630427 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @07:36PM (#65126585)
    Standard marketing hype. I suspect the builders of the F-100, F-101, F-102, etc, might take issue with the statement.
    • If I remember correctly, the Bell X-1 was also made in America. WP says the manufacturer was, of all things, Bell Aircraft.

    • by bgarcia ( 33222 )

      The quote in the press release is "the first civil supersonic jet made in America." Which is true.

    • I have seen the text from the article on different news sites. Some have the word "civil" or "civilian" before "supersonic jet", whereas some are leaving it out. For example, the CBS article linked in the /. submission does not have either, whereas the press release from Boom also linked above says "first civil supersonic jet made in America". Blame the mainstream news outlets?
  • These calculations came from Grok, take them with a grain of salt:

    - Assume a suborbital Starship hop from NYC to London.

    - A Starship could cram in 500 passengers but 300 would be more realistic. This is 4X or 5X more than Boom's proposed 60 to 80 passengers.

    - Per flight fuel, maintenance, and operational costs, would add up to between 1 and 1.7 million dollars. This is $3500 to $5700 per passenger and in the same ballpark as Boom's proposed pricing.

    - Flight time would be 30 minutes. Boom's would be a far lo

    • Starship will never carry anything close to 300 people.

      More importantly, I fear it will be a loong time before it is human rated. I think it will be used for cargo, while Dragon 2.0 and then winged rockets shuttle the people to and from space, and I hope people see P2P rockets as a gross waste of resources.
  • remote work is a thing, zoom/facetime is a thing. the only transportation that needs to be THIS time sensitive that i can think of, are organs for transplant, and those don't happen cross-atlantic anyway.
    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      For something like an organ you could put it on the second seat (recon officer) of an SR-71 if you really needed to get it somewhere fast.

  • Concorde - 1969.

    More than 50 years ago, Concorde did the same in Europe. Boom Supersonic is not really a pioneer in this field...

    Instead of increasing the speed of transportation, which, after all is not that difficult, we should invest in finding an alternative to the combustion engines used today. The engines (over) used today are polluting our environment, destroying our habitat, and, yes, will kill our children.

     

  • No one wants to hear artificial thunder. Perhaps Boom's staff needs to be Dox'ed so that people with only the loudest stereos can visit their houses nightly.
  • First supersonic jet made in America? Besides not knowing any aviation history, those dudes are into to many desert drugs to be trust worthy.

  • "What is the Concorde?"

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