That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted.
The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1].
I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years.
With modern combat aircraft the easy part is the working airframe actually. The YF-22 first flew in 1989 and finally entered service as the F-22 in 2005. F-35 had a similarly long development time and while its technically been operational for years, its software is like a modern EA release. A lot of the good stuff missing and available as later DLC. They are still patching in drivers for weapons that legacy aircraft already support.
While its definitely good that NGAD has produced a flying prototype so quickly, it isn't proof that they have achieved the goal of faster development.
The primary hinderance has been and still is the software. The defense industry has been slow to adopt modern coding practices. Sometimes that's a good thing. But on the balance its bad. F-35's software development has all of the hallmarks of a project saddled with a great deal of technical debt combined with outdated practices and overburdened with compliance.
> With modern combat aircraft the easy part is the working airframe actually.
Is there such a thing as a “working airframe” for modern combat aircraft? Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability, I have the understanding that, for modern combat aircraft, you can’t consider the airframe to be separate from the software.
Yes, most notably the F-16, which had a really good four-channel redundant analog flight control system. But is that needed on a transport aircraft? Fighters have it for extreme maneuverability, which a transport aircraft does not need or want.
Transport category aircraft are inherently stable by their aerodynamic design, it's a certification requirement.
If you have normal wings and the right size horizontal and vertical stabiliser the basic design of an aircraft is self stabilising. Especially with the wings sloping upwards (as all airliners have) because that wing shape also contributes to stability.
Never flown one, but as far as I know that's only moving the center of gravity by moving fuel. The CG is very important to inherent stability, if it moves behind the center of pressure you lose all pitch stability. And for efficiency you want it to be as far aft as possible because that reduces drag from the tailplane.
Boom production models will use COTS avionics just like every other business jet manufacturer. They'll have to write custom flight control software but that will be much easier than on a military aircraft. No weapons, no external stores, no defensive systems, no tactical data link, no complex navigation modes, etc.
Except they'll need to write that flight control software themselves, for a plane so different from modern aircraft that there are literally no experts in software design for this class of aircraft. (Outside of anyone doing it for the military, and I can't imagine they'd be allowed to repurpose that work.) There will need to be a whole lot of new software development, along with the corresponding review process by the FAA. Simpler than a complex military fighter, but there's no COTS solution for the software and that's a huge part of this project.
Looking at the current state of open source software like ardupilot, and the fact that we've had supersonic jet fighters since the 1950s (F-100 Super Sabre) I don't think the control software is going to be a major bottleneck. If anything, not being tied to legacy control software may improve their velocity and testing. Navigation solutions should be drop in. Garmin, etc offer drop-in glass cockpit retrofit solutions for Cesnas from the 1960s.
If Boeing can't make the Max work without crashes, what makes you think a completely new supersonic aircraft can use a fork of Ardupilot with a few minor extras for supersonic flight?
Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think. There are compression and twisting forces on the fuselage and flight surfaces which have no analog in conventional airliners.
And you can't just take the flight characteristics of one shape/size of aircraft and tweak them a little for your new design.
'If X can't do it...' is a bad argument that doesn't take any consideration of real life.
Just because they are a huge company with big spending power does not make it impossible for their codebases to be a pile of hot steaming garbage that even the best engineers struggle with.
Either way, your rebuttal about Boeing doesn't address the fundamental differences between control of a traditional aircraft-- which is all that any existing software can handle-- and control of a fundamentally different type of aircraft.
> Supersonic flight has much less overlap with subsonic flight than you might think.
And every supersonic aircraft also has to fly subsonic. So you really need two sets of software in a supersonic aircraft. Or more accurately three, because the transonic regime is weird enough to be its own thing.
What about the airplane given in the original example, the F-100, whose design predated the integrated circuit by something like a decade? Presumably control software improves stability, but otherwise the aircraft behaves in a predictable manner above and below Mach 1 as supersonic control software is a relatively recent addition.
Stuff in civilian aviation is designed to be certified before its flown commercially, stuff in military aviation is designed to be adapted on an evolving battlefield.
Dassault did something similar like 10 years ago with one of their business jets. In that case, it was also to showcase the capabilities of Catia.
Still amazes me, on the one hand you have the Air Forces one-year project. On the other hand you have the German Air Force that needs more than that just ginish the first draft of the requirements document for an existing plane.
Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.
I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.
The F35 is a primarily a sink for public cash that happens to fly. There is literally no incentive to make these projects cheap, fast, and economically streamlined.
The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
For comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of $30bn in modern money.
> The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.
Tons of people are getting rich off that, and tons of people are being elected for the office. Military spending is one of the biggest government welfare programs in USA.
Sounds like a step that Tesla skipped. In the VFX world of movies, this is known as PreViz. I remember when the 3D rendering first came to CAD. One of the projects my dad was working on discovered that if they built it exactly to the plan's specifications, there would have been plumbing pipes running through other pipes. Lots of value in these kinds of looking at things digitaly before doing it physically
This is fascinating. This reminds me of a book I read about John Boyd [1] who fought the Air Force to develop theorems about aircraft performance, namely the Energy-Manueverability Theory [2]. He went on to mathematically prove why certain aircraft would fail to live up to their assigned missions and help design the F-15, F-16, and other aircraft. Albeit, the mathematics of a "perfect aircraft" lost when faced with the bureaucracy of the government.
Building a flying airframe is relatively easy now. The slow expensive work tends to be in weight reduction, software development, and systems integration. But hopefully the Air Force has learned something from the problems in the B-2, F-22, and F-35 programs.
Sure, but how many people USAF has and how many billions did it cost? Compare that to Boom. Also, USAF does not have to comply with civil aviation regulations.
Military aircraft don't have to go through the FAA certification process but the actual requirements are generally even more rigorous. So that doesn't save anything. Most of the work is typically done by the manufacturer's employees.
Like it or not, the term "defense" to mean something military-related is all over the Department of Defense, the defense budget, and defense contracting. While you are welcome to write off all these sources as ideologically contaminated, I think there must surely be better reasons to do so than their use of the term "defense". And, of course, you'll deprive yourself of news about specific technological developments.
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying.
We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
Hm. Significant delays and missed timelines aren't normal you say? Let's see (aerospace only):
• all SpaceX projects so far (USA)
• Virgin Galactic's space tourism plans (USA)
• Boeing's 787 and 777X (USA)
• HAL's Sukhoi-30-, Jaguar Darin III-, and Tejas LCA projects and production (India)
• BAE Systems Plc/TAI TF-X project (UK/Turkey)
• EADS's MRH-90, Tiger, and A400M (EU)
• Airbus A380 (EU)
• Comac’s C919 project (China)
• ...
TBH, it'd be easier to list projects that actually finished on schedule and didn't face significant delays, such as the Airbus A350XWB.
And most of the companies listed aren't even money-starved start-ups that required investor attention and media hype. It's almost as if developing, testing, and certifying cutting edge aerospace projects is kind of hard and just as easy to predict and schedule as large software projects...
Interesting comment about the XWB. The hype-driving is obviously necessary - nothing is ever more than ~5 years away, because that is the limit of VC/consumer patience.
How real of a commitment is this announcement? General Motors announced all that stuff with Nikola and then was able to pull out of it pretty quickly when it turned out Nikola had faked a demo.
Theranos isn't really the same thing though, they didn't pretend that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, they said they had already had the breakthrough and the tech was working and deployed. That's less "hype" and more just straight up "fraud".
Boom Supersonic is obviously overly optimistic in their deadlines, but they at least aren't pretending that they're meeting them when they aren't.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that Boom is Theranos, I wish them well. I merely pointed out that your reasoning of not holding people to account to deadlines that are 10 years over the initial estimate. Maybe it's time to address this at a VC level, because some things absolutely do need 10 years and the current VC culture absolutely gives rise to fraud at different levels.
They are a lot more similar that you like to admit though. Both of their hype descriptions are to support the hype culture that powers the environment they live in, namely silicon valley(even if they're not physically there).
It's just that at some point Theranos decide to resort to lying to keep the whole thing going. The scope that Theranos promised was actually physically infeasible, some subsection of it might have been possible. Boom will hopefully not do that.
But in terms of engineering, Boom also has yet to produce even a prototype of their plane. A test version is scheduled to testflight in 2021. We'll see about that, I don't think it will happen. Although 7 years for a supersonic jet from scratch would have been quite impressive.
Theranos could have chosen to build a bigger machine with a more limited amount of tests once they realized it's not possible, but they decided to tackle too many problems at once and double down on them. But what we conveniently like to ignore is that investors, politicians and media perpetuated the whole lie. It wasn't just Holmes, it was an entire culture of VC's and politicians that had a vested interest in perpetuating the lie and to some extent helped silence critics.
Besides the obvious scammy and blatant lies that Theranos leadership did(down the line). There was also the aspect of feature creep (i.e. 200 tests per tiny blood vial) and ignoring both leadership and biochemical specialists(i.e. sample size and machine size).
In the case of Boom I like to think that at least Josh Wilding seeing that he has been an Aerospace engineer for 20 years has mentioned the issues with the timeline, and was overruled probably by either his peers or VCs, but we won't really know for sure. But if the engineering cofounder is already not involved at this point, let's hope that other issues won't follow.
It was authorized by the board in 2005, first flight was planned for 2008, entry into service was planned in 2010. First flight was 2013, it entered in service in 2018 (January, but still).
I agree that it is wrong to give companies a pass on this behavior, but, with respect, this is in fact pretty normal in the aviation industry. In fact, given the ambitions of Boom, I’d argue they’re doing quite a bit better than any of us might have expected.
2020 was not normal for the travel industry. Would not be surprising if they went into hibernation, and/or all of their order book was paused while covid uncertainty persisted.
The optimistic timeline may have been based on "if we get the money and customers we expect, and they don't have any special requirements". When the above isn't true you're likely to see a slower rollout. The company is projecting the optimistic form of their current plan to attract investors/customers who will help make that timeline a reality.
300+ deaths seems like a very tough lesson to learn to prove the rule, though. Sorry, you comment struck me as rather macabre. This isn't a software update that caused people a temporary bit of inconvenience.
Aviation has very high visibility of fatal crashes but a low overall rate. The car fatality rate is much higher but we treat it as routine because they are lower severity events at much higher frequency.
When you want to sell, you should be overly optimistic in your presentation.
When you have sold, you can now explain the real picture and explain that actually... everything will take 3 times longer than when you were trying to sell.
How is it fraud if they actually deliver a product, but late? Wouldn't fraud be never delivering a product after taking money for it? Granted, the IF in the first sentence is still looming over them.
I hate super positve PR propaganda too, and a skeptical eye should always be applied. Fraud is still used when talking about Tesla, yet they clearly have developed products. Yes deadlines were missed. I'm willing to give Boom a bit of leeway.
Delivery time is a feature of the product you are selling.
Say I'm looking for a bike. Person A is selling one I like and promises to deliver after two weeks. Person B is selling one I like a bit less, but promises to deliver after one week. I might now choose to buy from person B, even if I like the bike a bit less.
If I buy from person B and they deliver after three weeks, there's a problem. Why did it take three times as long? Did they ever intend to deliver after one week? Should they have known they wouldn't be able deliver after one week? They got the order based on a feature they didn't deliver. If that was intentional, that's fraud.
“Could be ready” falls pretty short of making a promise. I’m not sure what giving them a pass really entails. If they’re late to market it costs them money. Are you going to boycott using their product if it is good but late?
>> We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
You don't have to. It it not a government project.
The only pass that matters is their ivestor's. And most of the time as long as the progress is made and the outcome overweights the delay, everyone will be happy to wait.
Same with cures and vaccines. Who cares if they are delayed? It is not on purpose. Would you rather have it delayed or never?
>That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
It is only in US and Silicon Valley that it is called Super Optimistic. Many parts of the world look at the difference in projected TimeLine from 2020 to 2029 ( A difference of 9X ) and we call that BS or flat out lying.
Yeah it's not surprising. I'm kinda disappointed since I'd be excited about faster flights to Europe and Asia, and I would pay for it
Since they're telling me it's 2029, what I really hear is 2030 or 2035, or never. So that means I'll probably be stuck on the same slow flights for more than a decade :-( It doesn't feel like this is a space where there is a lot of competition.
Let me rephrase then: it will be decades before putting a human into orbit is cheaper than flying from one point to another on the surface (which can be done for a little more than a thousand dollars) if ever. So maybe SpaceX has said that, but the first part of my sentence still holds. SpaceX isn’t going to be competitive with air travel probably in my lifetime.
> press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
I disagree. The job of IR communicators (employed within the company) is not to hype up a stock - its to give correct information regarding it.
Every nudge up has a subsequent nudge down, and every nudge down has a subsequent nudge up.
If that doesnt make sense, if a positive effect is seen upon a shares price, right after you are almost guaranteed to see a downwards correction explained by a bit of depression at the end of a mania. (stock markets are sometimes referred to as being manic depressive - iirc Warren Buffet said this amongst others).
Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) famously said that entering the stock market is like peeing yourself: "first it becomes warm, warm. then it becomes cold, cold"
And vice versa with dips -people seem to momentarily go "well it cant be THAT bad" and at the end of a dip the share price often goes up a little bit.
And no corporation wants to have a volatile stock. They want a stable stock that big investors can put money on.
That is why the IR communicators jobs are to stabilize the dtock by NOT hypeing anything up in the PRs as they know that if they do, they contribute to the stocks volatility.
And this is why we have profit warnings - the IR department saying before a report goes out that "hey - the report is gonna be better than forecasted" or REVERSE profit warnings for the opposite case. (im not an expert so those terms might be reversed)
In other words, profit warnings have the sole purpose of stabilizing the stock as do the whole IR depts operations. So a serious publicly noted company would not benefit from doing what you say - "press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines".
To be fair most people were calling even that scale model test timeline hopelessly optimistic. That they didn't deliver on their impossible timetable is not a huge surprise.
That said, a lot of people also expected them to fold by now and were definitely not expecting a fairly major order from a large airline.
I'm firmly in the camp of when people ask how old we are, we get to --actualAge (as long as you birthday is after lock downs). It's like the old drinking adage, if you can't remember it, it didn't happen.
Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?
Which means they find some senior technical person to actually be part of the announcement, to give it more credibility. They're reading off a C-suite script, yes, but they are putting their names to it.
For sure, but it also means that they aren't getting to add their own part to the script either, which is probably a lengthy and detailed "yes, but..."
> That's to be expected - press releases focus on super-optimistic specs and timelines.
No, they don't. I don't know how much Elon Musk has tricked people into thinking it is normal for companies to be perpetually late, but it is definitely not normal.
After reality kicks in and unforeseen issues arise (remember 2020? me neither), plans need to be adjusted.
The scale model was initially expected to fly in 2018 even [1].
I expect further delays to be realistic as well. They either going to deliver sometime in the next decade or go bankrupt/sold out within the next couple of years.
[1] https://blog.wandr.me/2017/11/false-hope-boom-supersonic-tra...