I have been very critical because the environmental impact of possibly affordable supersonic flight is very concerning. The fuel usage per airplane should be much higher than conventional flights (due to extra drag and extra km flown per day), and they want to have 1000 airpalnes of those one day.
Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight.
Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering.
Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad.
Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland.
Booms own calcluations [1] show that there is 2-3 fuel consumption per seat compared to conventional airplanes, but that's multiplying the conventional seats with a factor that corresponds to the relative floor area of business class vs economy class. I guess compared to economy class, the factor is probably more like 6-10x. But you'd have to take into account induced demand of such an offering and the long distances involve. It's literally possible for people to blow through their whole annual carbon budget in a day, possibly even in a single flight.
Even their talk of sustainable aviation fuels is pretty much bullshit. The greenhouse-effects (radiative forcing) of flying is generally around 3x the co2-emission alone. I doubt the effect is reduced for a supersonic airplane. So even if you removed the co2-emissions itself due to flight, you still get all the extra emissions - which are multiplied in this offering.
Further, consider that sustainable aviation fuels are still hot air at this point, that they use either too much energy, are too expensive, or don't sufficiently reduce co2 consumption in their production (or even two or three of those), it appears that their talk about environmental concerns is really just hot air. I mean read the executive summary of their fuel consumption document: 4 long paragraphs about how they're super environmentally conscious, then one short paragraph where they admit, oh well, even our own calculations show we're 2-3 times worse than flying conventionally, which is already super bad.
Some back of the envelope calculation show that those 1000 Boom planes may emit 300 Mio Tons of Co2eq emissions, representing about 1% of global emissions. Or the emissions of countries like the UK, Italy or Poland.
[1] https://boom-press-assets.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Boom_SS...