Will Boom Bring Supersonic Back?

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Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus

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[4] Page 75

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Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.

Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung

[mikulaszach]

That Ryan George reference was something i never expected on this channel, but I love it!

[ariuss]

Putting "super easy, barely an inconvenience" into script is tight

[dematrsinba]

The concorde looks really like a marvel of engineering. I mean being able to develop a supersonic plane without modern technology and still being copied years after because your design was very good is like one of the biggest testamnent.

[jimsackmanbusinesscoaching]

One tiny correction. The Concorde actually flew to Washington DC and on to Miami 3 times a week for many years. I worked in Miami and we used to watch the Concorde land if we were bored.

[CC-gtro]

Concorde was such a beautiful plane. I was living close to Orly. I could see it everyday going to work to Paris. One was in permanent position in front of the airport. I think it was the most marvelous non military plane of all time. The other being the sr71 to my opinion, that we can see at New York, on the naval museum carrier.

[GURken]

There is one reason that somehow wasn't often mentioned: 50 years ago any type of transport and flight in particular was considered as a time waster, you just sit and wait. Now you have Wi-Fi on your average jet so you can be as productive as in the office. Not to mention modern portable entertainment systems. So there is no need to pay extra to skip 3 hours, especially if you wouldn't even notice it.

[dylanminett]

0:26 I think you got confused. Concorde definitely was *NOT* still flying in 2006. The final passenger flight was from New York JFK to London Heathrow on October 24 2003, and the final ever flight of a Concorde was from London Heathrow to Bristol Filton airport on November 26th 2003.

[epikgamerwmp]

Note, the Concorde's final flight was in November 2003, 18 years ago yesterday. Not 2006 like it says in the video.

[GuardsmanBass]

It's come up a bit already in the comments, but I think "Business Class plus WiFi" and "private jets" basically killed the market for supersonic passenger travel. The former means you can work on the plane in comfort (not possible in the 1970s) and even time your flights on a red-eye flight to sleep for much of it, and the latter means that the really wealthy aren't going to fly supersonic passenger travel when they can fly on their own private jets.

All that's left are people who are really super-time sensitive, can't work remotely by WiFI in business class, and have lots of money, and I think that's too niche for it to survive (incidentally, "too narrow niche to survive" is what also kills the occasional giant airship revival that pops up every few years).

[rushtestecho]

I really appreciate the level of scrutiny you're providing. Seems like many of their advertised claims simply aren't feasible. Looks like a good start and lots of the Concorde's drawbacks are being solved with today's tech advances, BUT:

- They need an engine that doesn't exist and usually takes the better part of a decade to produce, yet they want it in a couple of years from scratch.
- They haven't significantly decreased the boom
- They haven't significantly increased range



I guess this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, which as you pointed out probably still won't be economically feasible.

[humanbeing]

never knew ryan would collab with a science guy. unfortunately he didnt do a backflip to kill the bad guy.

[mxg]

Pinning the hopes of your new airliner on a yet-to-be-designed Rolls Royce engine? I hope it works out better than it did for the L-1011.

[ethanc]

As an engineering student, your videos are extremely helpful to have something in the background while I’m playing Minecraft avoiding studying for my final test.

[RedactedATS]

As a Brit, I have a special place in my heart for concorde. I've been underneath its flight path when I heard the sonic boom, it's quite something! I remember feeling awed, but if I lived under the flight path, i guess it could have become irritating, obviously can't say for sure. I was very sad when I heard it was being decommissioned

[lostcoast]

I remember hearing sonic booms as a kid in the early 80's living on the California coast. I loved them. Its one of the things that started my interest of wanting to become a fighter pilot...then Top Gun came out and that sealed the deal. Unfortunately I was in a major accident in '89 at 14 that dashed those dreams. Still love sonic booms though.

[Johnny]

0:50 "Super easy, barely an inconvenience" SCREEN RANT WANTS TO: 📍 KNOW YOUR LOCATION 😂😂

[setaindustries]

"Droop snoot"
Thank you for knowing that reference!

[paulroling]

Another caveat is that developing a new (state of the art) engine costs many billions of dollars, which they would never be able to recover due to the limited market size. This leaves (older) off-the-shelf engines, which are fine for a prototype, but are going to be suboptimal for the speeds and/or amount of thrust required. And then there is the issue of using military technology, which is often required for the engines...

[Tornadospring]

Thanks for doing this video!
I've always been skeptical with Boom's claim. Even though 60 years of engineering improvements have brought many technologies that Concorde's engineers didn't have, supersonic jet engines haven't improved much since then. Only a few aircrafts can reach supersonic speeds without afterburner, and the pinnacle of that kind of engines was basically the Olympus and the PW J58, that have both been developed 60 years ago. So I always wondered how they would manage to beat the engineering prowess of 3 of the largest engine builders in the world.
I feel like that partnership with Rolls-Royce should have been made much earlier in the process.
To give a nowadays comparison, Space x didn't start building starship without Raptor's engine development being already well advanced. It feels like they started building an F1 car but planned to use a motorcycle engine

[JohnDoe-ypzv]

In case anybody watches the video and thinks 105 dB can't be much louder than 75 dB, it's worth noting that decibels are a logarithmic, not linear, unit. 20 meters, a linear unit, is twice as long as 10 meter. 20 dB is 10 times louder than 10 dB. 30 dB is 10 times louder than 20 dB and so is 100 times louder than 10 dB. In other words, 105 dB is 1000 times louder than 75 dB.