Boom Supersonic has picked Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina, as the site for the “superfactory” that will build its Overture supersonic airliner. The company announced last week that the 400,000-square-foot facility will be built on a 65-acre site at the airport, which is also home to Honda Aircraft. Boom founder Blake Scholl has big plans for the airplane and for Greensboro. “With some of the country’s best and brightest aviation talent, key suppliers, and the state of North Carolina’s continued support, Boom is confident that Greensboro will emerge as the world’s supersonic manufacturing hub.”
Boom says construction will start this year and the first 65- to 88-seat aircraft will come off the line in 2024. Boom has 70 orders worth 14 billion for the aircraft from United and Japan Airlines and the U.S. Air Force is looking at military applications. The company is predicting it will have 1,750 workers by 2030 and 2,400 by 2032.
But the Denver area has much talent too?
Perhaps not as many wanting production work, college students are short-timers, Boulder is a hike on the other side of Denver (I don’t know about other colleges).
Boom is now at Centennial Airport near Denver, KAPA, longest runway 10,000 feet but at high altitude which greatly increases runway required.
(You have to dig around Boom’s mediocre website to find that, blog page covering ground testing of XB-1 demonstrator has it, contact page does not.)
First one or more Overtures will need to depart safely for Mohave California for flight testing.
XB-1 will blast out of KAPA using afterburner, which Overture will not have.
Subsidization by host cities would be surprising given Blake’s background.
I claim “First Dibbs on the factory building after the bankruptcy!”
A stretch to succeed, but Boom has actually built pieces and ground tested a flying machine, and has airlines as partners.
Question is how much demand there is to pay for production facilities.
That depends on actual cost of airliner, airline strategy, and eco-goons masquerading as elected officials. Aviation is high profile, supersonic is assumed to be more expensive but one has to divide cost by occupied seats flown per unit of calendar time.
XB-1 demonstrator should help with structures, systems including synthetic vision to help pilots, and engine inlets.
But is engines are very different from what is needed for Overture, XB-1’s are from F-5 fighters and have afterburner.
Aerodynamic configuration may be similar (very slender delta wing like Concorde) but I have not compared XB-1 and proposed Overture including wing-body junction.
XB-1 proves Boom can build something real, apparently ground testing well underway, first flight ‘any day now’ in lingo Blake is familiar with.
(Software industry lingo, I expect he is wiser than Vern Raeburn, whose Eclipse 500 project had to switch engines as maturing design outgrew Williams’ engine and Williams stopped supporting the project. Costs were way up as typical with wannabe projects. Eclipse went broke even after investors shoved Raburn out, avionics development was part of the problem. Did produce a few hundred flying airplanes. But distracted himself and funds by starting to develop a single-engine VLJ before he had a viable company.)
Amazing how easy it must be to pay yourself a big salary and spend lots of other people’s money. I just hope that Avweb will publish the progress and eventual downfall. Here is a idea for Paul’s next review article: Go through all the ra ra articles AVweb has published and give us a report on the history and current status of all these startups, especially the electric ones. We are just dying to know how they are doing or how they did until they went tango uniform.
Good idea.
Way too early to judge Boom yet, first flight of XB-1 demonstrator will be a major benchmark.
(Ground testing has been underway including full thrust all engines (tethered for safety).
Richard Aboulafia’s post-mortem on Eclipse is interesting. And I say bad start to project as weight estimates bad so it grew beyond engine Williams was willing to produce, they split (Williams had been helping with engineering). Development and integration of avionics was a huge delay as well, most suppliers changed. And market for VLJs at realistic price level did not materialize, much higher price than forecast of course. Plus Cessna quietly built its Mustang so received quite a few orders.
‘Friction-stir welding’ was fussed over by pundits in advance, but Boeing and others had already proven it could be done, and Eclipse did so.
Somehow I missed the in-flight demonstration of greatly-reduced sonic signature, but they are gonna build production airplanes?
By who?
Boom expects to fly its XB-1 demonstrator soon.
Concorde was especially noisy due use of afterburners.
Boom’s Overture airliner should have higher bypass ration engines, using three engines also allows reduced thrust for takeoff.
A couple of things here – according to Boom’s own web site FAQs right now “Overture (the commercial plane) is slated to roll out in 2025, begin test flights in 2026, and carry passengers by 2029.”
Even this sounds optimistic, so I am not sure where this article’s “the first 65- to 88-seat aircraft will come off the line in 2024.” Maybe (??) the first test prototype will be available for actual flight tests two years later (2026) as they currently plan. I find it hard to believe it would “come off the line” – I’ve never seen a prototype test article that came off a factory line, and it most certainly would not be configured in a 65-88 seat setup for testing – it will likely have a handful of engineers and a ton of sensors for data collection filling the cabin.
Could I again beg AvWeb to stop with just copy/pasting from press releases without giving even a hint of analysis or rational skepticism. AvWeb is indeed The Best as far as aviation news and my big thanks for all your work. I am asking you all to take pride in your standards and just say no to these hype press releases or at least add a sentence or two of reality. i.e. in the transport aircraft industry, if something is not a Firm Order, it is not an order, and no stockholder or industry analyst would pretend it is.
There may be $14 billion in “orders” but these are in fact “soft” orders with no real commitments and of course with the extremely devastating performance clauses which essentially render them meaningless. These agreements were signed as a PR boost and contingent on actual production certification and authority to operate over land and exact specs for emissions, sound profile, endurance, fuel burn, pax capacity/ payload, range, dispatch reliability that Boom’s original paper dreams envisioned. In the history of commercial aviation I can not think of anyone who actually met their original performance metrics on the inaugural production article, and getting a new supersonic aircraft certified and authorized to operate over land seems to be a not a small challenge for a million reasons, many of them social and political.
Keep in mind that the Concorde had 75+ orders on the books from 15+ major airlines, many of them “firm” at an asking price of $60m in 1972 dollars (a staggering $400m in today’s money). So Concorde, a real project bankrolled by two huge governments paying all the bills for more than a decade, also had an “full” order book (equivalent to $30 billion) before reality set in. In the end, only those two national airlines ever purchased the 14 produced and the project never came close to braking even. So let’s just call Boom’s “orders” what they are: Letters of Potential Interest, shall we?
Greensboro is an interesting choice. The FSDO is right on field and of the many FSDOs I’ve had to deal with, they were the most stereotypical government (cringe flashback). If I was the Big Boom, I would put up a big fence 🙂
I sincerely hope these folks at Boom get this done despite the obvious challenges. I just wish we could avoid false optimism and look at their project factually as it hopefully comes into being.