Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Booming Along

Earlier this year, in the March issue of Air and Space Magazine, I found the surprising story about a company called Boom Aerospace (or sometimes just “Boom”) that claims to be gearing up to build the fastest civilian aircraft in history. The company hasn’t revealed the name or model number of the design, but the airplane in question would apparently be a 45-seat airliner capable of about Mach 2.2 and a ceiling of around 60,000 feet. That’s about 1,450 miles per hour, or around 2.6 times the cruising speed of a conventional airliner – fast enough to go from New York to London in roughly 3 hours and 15 minutes. Even better, the company claims that its airliners will be efficient enough to make a transatlantic fare of $2,500 profitable for airlines flying that route – which is where things get really bizarre…

A quick check on Expedia shows that a business-class fare of $2,500 round-trip from New York to London is just barely possible, assuming you book well in advance, stay over a Saturday night, buy a non-refundable ticket, and so on. If you want a non-stop flight you will end up paying around three times more than that, but if you are willing to accept one of the 1-stop routes you will be in transit for 14 to 18 hours depending on how long the layover is. If the company’s claims hold up, travel on one of the Boom aircraft would be the greatest value in the air, giving a potential operator the option of maintaining price parity with other airlines on the same route and making far higher profits, or undercutting all of the existing competitors while making a similar level of profit, all while offering a highly superior service (at least in terms of transit time). Whether or not this will really work is a much bigger question…

Anyone familiar with commercial aircraft will probably remember the Concorde, an Anglo-French supersonic transport (SST) in service from 1976 to 2003. The aircraft was an amazing technical achievement, particularly considering the limits of 1970’s technology, but was never commercially viable, due in large part to the extremely high ticket price. Ranging as high as twice the cost of a first-class ticket on a conventional airliner, and twenty or more times as much as an economy-class fare, travel on the Concorde was beyond the reach of most flyers, and too expensive for most business travelers to justify. It certainly didn’t help that only a handful of units were ever produced, with the only buyers being Air France and British Airways (e.g. the national carriers of the countries that originated the project), or that due to noise concerns the Concorde was only allowed on flights over water…

Now, we might reasonably ask how a private company, without either the backing of a national government or decades of successful production of civilian or military aircraft, could hope to succeed where Aerospatiale and BAC failed. We might also ask how a private company would be able to successfully operate such a vehicle when the national carriers of two different countries couldn’t make a go of it. It’s possible that 40-plus years of technical advancement in the aerospace field, especially in advanced construction materials and computer-assisted production techniques, might make this new design cheaper to produce and more efficient to fly on a per-passenger basis than the Concorde. It is also possible that a private company will have an easier time selling the aircraft to various governments and their national carriers around the world. And it may be that as air travel has generally gotten slower, more drawn-out, and less comfortable than it has ever been before, that the idea of spending less than half as much time (or possibly less than one-sixth as much time) on an airplane will have a much greater draw than it did a generation ago…

Personally, I’m not going to plan on traveling on any Boom aircraft for the foreseeable future, at least not until they manage to get their financing worked out and their product actually available for purchase. But I have to admit that if the company goes public any time soon I’m going to be severely tempted to invest in at least a few shares. Because if they can actually build an airliner with these capabilities that is also economically viable, this will be the biggest change in the nature of air travel since the introduction of jet-powered airliners in 1952…

I have to admit, though, that’s still a pretty big “if”…

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