Concorde 2.0

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TLDR: You wake up in London at a leisurely 8am, get to the airport at 9, you’re on the plane at 10:30, you land in New York for your meeting at 10am (New York time) after travelling at 1300 mph over the Atlantic ocean - you’ve just gained 30 minutes. This was once possible on Concorde but that dream died. 

Boom Technologies are on a mission to enable humans to do this once more.

For most of human history, we lived in tribes and communities where we’d be born, live and die within a relatively small area. Riding animals was the only way to travel faster, but this was still quite slow.

Even in the 1840s if you wanted to travel from the East Coast (New York) to the West Coast (California) the journey would take months in a horse-drawn cart. There was no tourism - you would travel to remain. People rarely came back.

Then the railway was developed and the journey was cut from months to days - people could start travelling between the two, but it still took considerable time.

The Wright Brothers then invented human flight, opening up another dimension. Check out the video below to see the first-ever video of a plane in flight.

In the 1940s, the first commercial propeller airliners were developed, cutting the journey from days to a single day.

Followed by jet airliners soon after cutting the journey in half.

Finally, supersonic jets (Concorde) were developed cutting the journey again to only a few hours - some people would be able to commute.

The path to ever-faster travel had a centuries’ worth of momentum, but then…nothing. The momentum stopped. In fact, it reversed - as you can see by the U-shaped bend in my graph after Concorde was decommissioned. The journey to faster travel ended with the death of Concorde.

Technology doesn’t simply evolve. It takes considerable focus, resources and time to achieve innovation. There is perhaps no better example of this than supersonic passenger air travel. In the last 21 years, there has not been a single super-sonic passenger flight. Progress doesn’t just happen.

Humans had gone backwards for the first time in centuries.

What happened to Concorde?

As the famous economist, Adam Smith, famously once said, the “invisible hand” of the market will guide all into creating products and services that are societally desirable. In other words, people are incentivized to make things other people want and can pay for. 

The issue with Concorde was that it was never manufactured by the free market. It was a joint project between the British and French governments, whose goal was not commercial success but geopolitical success to trump the Soviets - after all this was at the height of the Cold War.

The correct economic incentives were never in place for this to work. The ticket costs were exorbitant - over £20,000 for a trip from New York to London - and the supply chain wasn’t there to enable continuous R&D to bring costs down. Therefore the planes flying in the early 2000’s were the same as the ones flying in the 1970s - only 14 Concordes were ever built.

What’s changed?

*Boom Technology Enters the Chat*

Blake School (Founder and CEO) and the team at Boom Technologies saw this startling fact and realised they wanted to do something about it.

Over the last 25 years, despite us not going any faster, there have been incredible advancements in technology. Carbon fibre, significantly more efficient fuels, aerodynamic breakthroughs….the list could go on and on. But none of them has been applied to supersonic commercial jets and that’s the painstaking work that Boom Technologies are doing.

Here are the three stages Boom is going through in order to get us all flying faster again and continuing humanities quest for greater speed:

1. Their test aircraft: The XB-1

Nicknamed “baby-boom”, the XB-1 is a ⅓ scale version of what their full-size plane will be. It was supposed to make its first flight in 2016. 7 years later, it made its first flight just 1 week ago. It is a proof of concept.

Watch this Top Gun-esque 2-minute video of its first flight last month:

2. An entirely new jet engine - Symphony

One of the other issues with Concorde was how poorly it performed from an environmental perspective - it drank fuel. Compared to a conventional jet, Concorde used 4x as much when travelling from London to New York - it’s a core reason the tickets were so expensive. So a new type of engine is needed. Initially, Boom tried to outsource this to the usual suspects - Rolls Royce, General Electric, Honeywell etc - but they all declined. Why?

These engines cost hundreds of millions to produce and the manufacturer only reaps the rewards once their customer has success with them and then needs to buy more. 

None of these companies believe Boom will be successful enough to buy more….not exactly a vote of confidence.

So Boom has said they’ll do it themselves. Time will tell if they have the technical know-how and skill to do so.

3. The Big Daddy - Boom Overture

Combining the learnings from Baby Boom (XB-1) and the new symphony jet engine, Boom Overture is designed to be the world’s next step in supersonic air travel. I think it’s beautiful!

It will be able to hold 50-70 people - in a business class configuration - and is aimed to fly at 1.7 Mach or 1300 mph. This would mean London -> New York in 3.5 hours (instead of 8) and San Francisco -> Tokyo in 6 (instead of 11).

United Airlines and American Airlines have already placed orders for them. Up until now, Boom has been significantly behind schedule, but they are making progress. It will be a great company to track, and who knows one day you might be sitting on a Boom Overture thinking about how you once read a newsletter talking about its story and development.

Why I love Boom

Boom has shown complete disregard for the status quo. They’ve taken what is seemingly an insurmountable challenge and are chipping away at it. One component, one test, at a time. Supersonic passenger jets have been tried and have failed, but the Boom team don’t believe we have reached the end of the road in humanity’s quest for speed.

Humanity’s ability to progress is inextricably linked to humanity’s interconnection. Societies that are more closely connected enable the dissemination of ideas, cultures, technologies and experiences making us more tolerant and innovative.

Speed is one of humanity’s best tools to further integrate the world, and if all things go well, Boom Technologies will be leading the charge.

Some interesting resources:

[Watch] - YouTube video breaking down how the development is going
[Watch] - Vox 10-minute documentary on why Concorde failed