Ten years after Sonic Cruiser, slow is still green

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Ten years after Sonic Cruiser, slow is still green By

Jon Ostrower  on March 28, 2011 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0) | A milestone of great note passed last week with hardly a notice. 
The Sonic Cruiser, which would have accelerated air travel from Mach .84 to Mach .98, turned ten years old, according to the March 22, 2001 date on its patent filing. Its life as a conceptual product was brief, but notable, eventually transforming its design elements into what we know today as Boeing's 787.
The market demise of the composite canard delta wing design, was in part driven by the fifty-year erosion of the need for "higher, faster, farther" aircraft to those that delivered "faster, better cheaper" results, as reflected in Piepenbrock's Toward a Theory of the Evolution of Business Ecosystems. The Sonic Cruiser's market reception - or lack thereof - was ultimately the result of the market reality to compete on cost (efficiency) rather than speed (performance).

In short, going slow is much cheaper than going fast. In a business where time is money, going fast on the ground and slow in the air pays tangible dividends.

This week's Flight International features a flight test aboard the new stretched Bombardier CRJ1000, the 100-seat latest evolution of the original Canadair Business Jet design, that builds on the CRJ700 and 900. As our pilot Mike Gerzanics set out to demonstrate the fuel burn of the new jet's General Electric CF34-8C5A1 engines, he found the CRJ1000 could keep up with faster traffic, but at a price:

Once level, I established M0.78 cruise point, Bombardier's recommended normal cruise speed. I found the airspeed tape's trend arrow allowed me to expeditiously set and hold the desired speed. A total fuel flow of 1,480kg/h was needed to hold M0.78/262kt with a resultant true airspeed of 454kt.

Next, the power was increased and an M0.80 cruise speed was established. Total fuel flow increased to 1,740kg/h with a resultant true airspeed of 473kt.

My back of the napkin calculations revealed an interesting set of figures. For a 2.6% increase in Mach number, fuel flow had to increase 17.6% at cruise. Translating these figures into dollars and cents, a flight from Chicago O'Hare, where Jet A is $7.47/gal today (according to AirNav), pulling back that throttle to M.78 saves $638 an hour in direct operating cost. ($4,275 vs. $3,637/hr)
My intent is not to single out the CRJ1000 as an example of neither high nor low fuel burn, but rather to provide real-world data point about the big impact small changes in speed can bring. While the CRJ1000's trans-sonic wing is optimized for a M.78 cruise, it offers a good example for how slowing down can improve fuel efficiency and direct operating cost.

The Sonic Cruiser is the extreme example of when the market doesn't want a product that flies higher, faster or farther, it just wants a product that arrives off the production lines faster, of better quality and cheaper to operate.

Yet if all the airframers, engine makers and airlines are looking to spend billions to deliver a 15% improvement in fuel burn that satisfies the need for "faster, better, cheaper" with a new aircraft and engine combination, are we perhaps looking in the wrong place?
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24 Comments By Jon Wilson
on March 28, 2011 1:57 PM | Reply

As an Airline captain that frequents ORD frequently I think your fuel cost for ORD are WAY off! I have yet to see fuel costs per gallon above $3.00 per gallon any where in the country! Just thought I would throw it out there!!!!

By Jon Ostrower
on March 28, 2011 2:08 PM | Reply

Jon,

Thanks for your comments. The $7.47 figure comes from the AirNav record for KORD as the price for Jet A at the pump at Signature Flight Support. It's entirely possible the price is significantly lower for airlines operating to O'Hare, though the 17% figure still stands and is a significant change in the fuel flow for such a small change in speed.

http://airnav.com/airport/KORD

Best,

Jon

By iceman
on March 28, 2011 2:09 PM | Reply

Jon,
The laws of physics always prevail. Managers who don't know this get reminded every now and then.
Iceman

By Hem
on March 28, 2011 2:41 PM | Reply

Good article Jon,

What you are referring to is cost indexing, which is a ratio between time cost and fuel cost. So an airplane that goes faster burns more fuel, but incurs a lower engine and airframe cost. Conversely, an airplane that slows down burns less fuel but has a higher time costs. Thus slowing down is not always the best course of action.

Much of the details of this equation depends on how the time costs are structured (i.e. power by the hour, etc.).

Generally speaking, on shorter legs and flights with a headwind the bias is to go a little faster. The benefit in time costs outweigh the higher fuel penalty. The opposite is true on longer flights or flights with a tailwind.

Hope this helps...

By Paulo M
on March 28, 2011 3:44 PM | Reply

lol, convenient fuel price..

I was thinking about this too, earlier today. Settled on this piece, via Airliners.net, which has some great comments on the matter: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/144641/

By the way, just looking through some of my 747 thoughts/scribbles of some moons back, power-to-weight ratio for the Citation X is about 0.361. For the 747-8I, it is ~0.273, and for the 777-300ER, it is ~0.298. Higher requirement for twins.* The A380, with Trent 900, ranges from ~0.227 to ~0.233.

By Paul J
on March 28, 2011 4:20 PM | Reply

Wow, the Sonic Cruiser makes me feel old.

I've watched the whole project, from Sonic Cruiser to 7E7 to all plastic plane to 787 and on to the multiple delays to said aeroplane.

Hopefully I live long enough to see the first 787's retired from service :-)

By keesje
on March 28, 2011 4:28 PM | Reply

good topic / article.

The Sonic Cruiser was a good exercise in airline realities. The sun will turn blue before the folks at Boeing will admit, but the 787 looks much more like an A330 then a Sonic Cruiser. As an enthusiast its a pitty all aircraft started to look the same but apparently its an optimum. Bairs latest comments on a new narrowbody don't look promising in that respect.

I think that if the fuel price again doubles in this decade aircraft will get bigger, slower, cleaner, noisier, less comfortable and very efficient. I posted an concept, ECR-20, that follows these lines

By Tracy
on March 28, 2011 8:55 PM | Reply

Slow is the new fast. The Sonic Cruiser would have been a beautiful airplane. I am sorry it never flew.

By RC20
on March 28, 2011 11:18 PM | Reply

Well, that maybe is a + for a mini wide-body.

Go a bit slower, negates the extra fuselage drag and it works better for all concerned on the pax load, unload and moving around.

By JEB
on March 29, 2011 1:20 AM | Reply

Jon, great chain of articles bringing forward the complex questions of airplane manufacturing.

Dr. Piepenbrock is teaching aerospace insiders that while customers may desire the improvements promised in the Sonic Cruiser or the 787 they aren't willing to pay more for them. This ties back to the incremental versus step change product innovation question raised in your earlier articles. If the customer won't pay more for the airplane, operating costs are marginally better and the fixed costs of switching between airplane models are high then investing tens of billions of dollars in an all new product is quite the gamble. Boeing's strategy is unbelievably risky for a mature market but it appears they continue to fall back on the only thing they know.

By Paul
on March 29, 2011 10:04 AM | Reply

The missing piece is the buyer of the tickets and what their time is worth.

Someone who can afford a $30M private plane may not care about spending a few thousand dollars extra on a trip if it would save them enough time.

Faster will probably be on business jets first but I'm wonder what the tipping point is to spend more, e.g. is .1 Mach enough of a speed advantage for an executive or rock star? Maybe not, but if the time savings is sufficient they certainly will want faster.

The Concorde is a good example where there were enough people willing to pay for speed to make it work in its later years, but not enough for regular jets.

By Peet
on March 29, 2011 12:28 PM | Reply

The demise of supersonic travel has occured due to failure of all designs expected to compete with Concorde. Tu-144 crashed, and Lockheed and Boeing SST concepts never progressed beyond mock-ups. Had they come to market, they would have inevitably introduced a competitive price-war, and newer more efficient supersonic airliners would have been developed to fight that war.
This is what happened after the DeHavilland Comet went into service, the American OEMs fought back with bigger better airplanes. That didn't happen with supersonic airliners, because the competing concepts never matured, Concorde looked like an extravagent white elephant when it should have been the beginning of a trend. Concorde's fuel efficiency per seat mile was similar to that of a business jet, but much faster!

By JetAviator7
on March 29, 2011 1:34 PM | Reply

It seems that airline passengers are more interested in price than speed, particularly given the extra time the TSA rules cause, so no wonder this aircraft never got off the ground.

What is worse, I feel, is that innovation in civil aviation has ground to a halt while the military moves towards unmanned vehicles.

Someone needs to reintroduce some excitement into general aviation and the airlines to help move things along.

By johnny stick
on March 29, 2011 10:19 PM | Reply

Several have talked about the sonic cruiser and the concorde in terms of missed opportunity. I hope Boeing stays somewhat on the wild side and introduces the Blended Wing Body. In my mind, it is the only way to compete with higher fuel costs, more noise restrictions, and gate crowding (smaller footprint for equvalent load). I just wonder if any airline, short of the freighters, are willing to gamble on it. It is not like to old days of the 747 intro.

By rc20
on March 29, 2011 10:38 PM | Reply

Supersonic is just another pipe dream.

Concorde sold out because at any given time, there are 75 people wealthy enough to be able to (and willing) to pay for that crossing (Titanic without the steerage).

Concorde lost money and bigger would not have made money.

What works is Titanic model, some really rich people paying a lot, and a lot of poor people paying small. Without the poor people, a 2000 person Titanic goes down financially as quickly as it sank from the ice burg.

Slow and less expensive it what keeps airlines in business. Those who want speed buy Gulfstreams (and make up the super sonic on point to point and staying out of Homeland Security grasp!)

By 787 Accountant
on March 30, 2011 3:28 AM | Reply

Jon thank you for highlighting the outstanding work of Dr. Piepenbrock. Your series of posts are helping us all to understand the challenges that an aerospace manufacturer faces in a mature industry.

While all new, cutting edge airplanes are exciting, we are finding out that with all the radical improvements on the 787 Boeing only achieved a mediocre high single digits improvement. This cutting edge approach only cut into profits.

By Rocketist
on March 30, 2011 10:16 AM | Reply

Jon,

there's a very interesting statement in your article: "going fast on the ground and slow in the air pays tangible dividends". The real issue is not how fast you get from JFK to SFO, say, but from Manhattan to Monterey. There's a world of on-ground opportunities for airlines to speed up travel (and for the TSA to slow it down again) that far outweighs cruising speed alone. Whether point-to-point connections, or fast approach/descent profiles, more efficient transfer, check-in procedures, ground transport, you name it: An airline that wants to solve the speed equation for its customers will do well to consider all of those.

By Rocketist
on March 30, 2011 10:27 AM | Reply

Jon,

there's a great quote at the beginning of your article: "going fast on the ground and slow in the air pays tangible dividends". That reminds us that the essential for the customer is not to go fast at FL510, or to go fast from JFK to SFO, but to go fast from Manhattan to Monterey. So an airline that wants to solve the speed equation for its customers will want to look at all the issues below cruise, specially on the shorter sectors.

By Guru Josh
on March 30, 2011 5:33 PM | Reply

When will people get the there's no such thing as "green" flying - unless you are into soaring.

By WingBender
on March 30, 2011 7:01 PM | Reply

On March 22, 2001, BA Investor's Boeing shares closed at $52.00.

By 4wsqv
on March 31, 2011 2:33 AM | Reply

Return with us now to early in the last decade. Boeing went out to potential Sonic Cruiser customers with three alternatives, all with passenger seat counts similar to today's 787:

- The Sonic Cruiser as shown above
- An M.98 alternative with normal wing and tail location, but with aerodynamics and performance similar to the Sonic Cruiser
- A conventional M.85 or thereabouts straight tube airplane

The presentation examined performance and economics for all three versions

Alan Mullaly was Commercial Airplanes President at the time; I am probably misquoting him, but one of his aphorisms was "the facts and data will make you free".

The conclusion of the study was that the M.85 airplane with constant cross section and below-floor containerized cargo had much better multi-class seating flexibility, more cargo capacity, greater potential for a future fuselage stretch, and better economics than either of the M.98 configurations. The potential customers agreed. And so the 787 was born.

Now if only Boeing had . . . never mind. We already know that part of the story.

By Aerospace Historiographer
on March 31, 2011 3:01 AM | Reply

Jon, thanks for sharing more insights into Dr. Piepenbrock's prescient research and work with the world's top aerospace manufacturers.

As some of your readers have previously noted, he shared his “Evolution of Business Ecosystems” in his work with Boeing executives.

It now appears that EADS has joined Dr. Piepenbrock's ultra-exclusive group of executives. On the EADS website is the phrase "Theory of Evolution" describing EADs approach to product development.

http://www.eads.com/eads/int/en.html

By airplanejim
on March 31, 2011 5:34 PM | Reply

keesje, I would agree with your statement that the 787 looks more like an A330 then a Sonic Cruiser. But since the A330 is a design knockoff of the B707 the heritage of the 30 degree swept wing with engines hung under the wings is still all Boeing.

By Anonymous
on March 31, 2011 7:23 PM | Reply

John,

Great article. Your stories are evolving to be much more than blogs, offering critical strategic insight into the aersopace industry, something that appears to be lacking from many of the journalists and industry analysts today.

Aerospace Historiographer...you may be interested to learn that a large aerospace company recently sent Chinese executives (its partners) to MIT to learn about Piepenbrock's "Evolution of Business Ecosystems"

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