Boom Supersonic Engine Program.
The Real Story Is The Media Reaction.
The usual suspects in the all-knowing luddite corner of the media are jumping into their water dishes in a frenzy after the announcement that Boom Supersonic has formed a consortium to create a new engine for its planned Overture airliner.
Yikes! Don’t mess with consensus thinking. “Everybody knows” this is lunacy. As far as Boom goes, Rolls-Royce wasn’t interested. Nor was Pratt & Whitney or GE. The reasons for the lack of interest – like maybe the financial issues at Rolls for just one to consider – are not to be investigated.
So, that means it’s game-set-match for this upstart aircraft manufacturer.
Gee, Boom seems to disagree. But what’s at hand here is how a lot of the media – from the veneer gadfly hobbyist websites to writers at supposedly prestigious financial publications – tend to write first and learn later.
Boom is not a favorite among the status quo thinkers. It has openly denied the dogma that supersonic air travel is not economically possible. The consensus knows that this was proven conclusively by the failure of the Concorde, which first rolled out of the hangar when TV vacuum tubes were still being sold at drug stores.
Outrageously to the consensus thinkers, Boom has now lured two major US airlines into being dogma deniers, too.
The denial movement is expanding. According to the tone of some in the media cognoscenti, Boom has used its siren call to lure some sort of combination of companies to develop a new powerplant. This insulting heresy to the consensus is after established engine companies apparently had no interest in such a project.
As a typical response, we have the prestigious Financial Times, posting a tome outlining how business travelers won’t pay a premium just to save time across the Pond. ‘Course, the writer had no idea of what that premium would be, nor the intent of the Boom project to have economics commensurate with business class fares. Facts not needed.
Then, the Financial Times played the environmental card. It confidently stated that business travelers would stay away in droves from the Boom aircraft, as they morally would not cotton to flying on an aircraft that had many multiples of carbon emissions compared to traditional airliners.
That, naturally, was without any knowledge of the characteristics of the engines being developed. Facts not needed.
Caveat Reader. This is not about Boom. It’s about the ethical and moral cesspool that some of the media has descended into. We are seeing it with the stories about “shrinking airliner seat width” which are fake news, We’re seeing it with unverified stories that it’s just a pilot shortage that’s responsible for major airlines not wanting to lose money at some smaller communities.
Most of the Fourth Estate is professional, but dimbulb stories like this are way too common. They state it and we are expected to believe it.
We covered this in the latest Touch & Go newsletter. If you are not on our complimentary subscription list, hit the contact button and request.
The point is that it is important to be informed. But some of the traditional sources are no longer reliable.
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