Can it achieve its certification schedule goal?
The article talks about trans-Pacific city pairs, but I have trouble believing it will have that kind of range.
Can it achieve its certification schedule goal?
The article talks about trans-Pacific city pairs, but I have trouble believing it will have that kind of range.
The article is good, but it understates the certification hurdles Boom must meet. In addition to airworthiness certifications for the engine and airframe, they must meet production certification by proving they can consistently produce everything. There will be training requirements for pilots, cabin crew, ground crew, and maintainers. They need some company to build the flight simulators needed to train the pilots.
The old saying is that when the paperwork weight equals the weight of the aircraft, the plane is ready to fly. Getting even a private plane with a proven engine through the certification process takes years.
The process for airliners is vastly more challenging.
Aviation history is filled with cases where combining a brand new engine with a new aircraft failed. Perhaps Boom will defy aviation history and succeed with developing their engine and plane. It won’t be entering service by December 31, 2029. If history is any guide, it’s going to be 2035 or later.
The ’29 question is simple. Do they have prototype engines thousands of hours into life and performance testing? Do they have a full size air frame undergoing fatigue testing? If not, the answer is negative.
How do they develop and certify an engine without a supersonic test bed? It’s not like they can just strap one to an old airliner. How do they flight test the air frame without working engines?
Best of luck to them but they don’t seem very far up some pretty tall mountains.
Your questions about inflight testing are good ones. Sure, they can build ground generators based on 80% of their inflight testing and gain a lot of experience. Testing the remaining 20% will be difficult. For subsonic testing, there are several examples of planes adapted for the purpose. Some of them replace an existing engine on an old airframe. Others mount the engine being tested on a separate pylon, leaving the original engines in place. An airframe like an old 707 or 747 is a good, albeit expensive choice.
Your point about supersonic testing is a good one. There are few supersonic airframes available that hold the engine physically and can duplicate the flight envelop up to the planned Mach 1.7. Even if they could lease a B-1B airframe (very fat chance), it can’t go that fast. It’s possible they’d need to do all of the supersonic testing in their own aircraft. In the history of aviation, testing an unproven engine in an unproven aircraft seldom ends well.
It is just fast enough to be useful Sydney to LA and back. Don’t know how it can fly for 8 hours non stop though.
I haven’t paid much attention to Boom and did not know it was also developing its own engine. Mad props on that. Nice diversification into the stationary power business too. That could well buy Boom the extra time it seems it will need to jump through all of the bureaucratic hoops ahead.
Bucking decades of industry tradition by doing both an engine and an airframe reminds one more than a bit of a certain rocket company that did – and continues to do – likewise and has established that as the new standard of normalcy in its industry.
The order options by the three airlines can be extended if sufficient technical progress is made by 2029. It isn’t as though there are a lot of other supersonic options likely to appear before Overture eventually completes certification.
I’ve got it. Use the Adaptive Cycle engine meant to give the F-47 long range.
Something tells me that adapting military engines for civilian use is not new–the jet engine on the Convair 880 and the same engine with a fan for more fuel efficiency and takeoff thrust were both J-79 deriviatves after the engine on the Phantom, the Hustler, the Vigilante and the Starfighter?
My point was directed mostly toward the timeline aspect. That’s a long list of, literally, moving parts to get turning with the factories to produce them, with a government bureaucracy required to sign off on every piece, part and step of the process; in three years? Not in this universe. Not that clean sheet development of a plane and engine wouldn’t be enough challenge for most people on any timeline.
I’m confident that whatever airline commitments, however tentative, have been made are contingent on numerous representations of the performance of the finished product. I’m equally confident that among those is fuel consumption per seat mile considerably less than Concord, let alone B-58. This is probably a big reason why all the existing engine builders gave them a hard pass. The engine builders are pursuing bigger and bigger bypass ratios which is a non starter for trans-sonic/supersonic flight.
All it takes is money, lots and lots of money. God’s speed and fair winds but none of it’s going to be my money.