AFAIK this is not for carrying normal passengers.
There appears to be a definite market for some 100-200 of these in the oligarch sphere. It will be a “must have” item just like a huge yacht already is. A number of design bureaus around the world have been working on this as a result. One or two of them are in Russia and they are likely to be out of the running now, not just because Russia is likely to be under sanctions practically for ever.
There has been considerable progress on the sonic boom problem.
Hmm. I remember I visited NASA’s stand during Oshkosh some years ago and talked to them about a little model they had sitting there. A supersonic “no-boom” aircraft. It looked considerably more pointed than this aircraft. AFAIK it’s going to fly this year.
Peter wrote:
It will be a “must have” item just like a huge yacht already is
I think so too. Having a 6 seat supersonic aircraft in the hangar definitely is a “must” 
You need a bit more than 6. You need room for some private lounges, facilities for half a dozen rented girls (the Russians liked Ukrainian girls; funny how things change and this alone may cause Putin’s demise), a jacuzzi or two… basically what you have on a decent size yacht, except this one flies. It is like the BBJ and used for a similar purpose but goes a lot faster.
Peter wrote:
You need a bit more than 6. You need room for some private lounges, facilities for half a dozen rented girls
Probably. I think most of the development here is with engines. That is, they have to find suitable engines, both from a technical point of view and from a political point of view. According to that web site, this prototype or demonstrator use 3 x GE J85-15 engines. This engine is ancient. It’s what the F-5 used, and it used two of them. Obviously this engine is way too small for a larger aircraft. And why use a 70 year old engine in the first place? And why use 3 of them? Clearly it was the only engine they could get hold of.
A larger aircraft would need at least 2 x PW/GE F100/F110 sized engines (F-15/F-16 engines), but we are still talking max 6 seat size. There are no civilian variants of newer (in production) fighter engines, and obviously a civilian turbofan will not work at all supersonic. I doubt that Pentagon is willing to sell newer military engines for Russian Oligarchs to play around with.
One RR engine used on the Concorde had 140 kN of thrust (dry). A PW F100 has only 75. The engine on the F-35 is the largest western supersonic engine today, and it “only” has 125 kN of thrust (dry).
Scaling down the Concorde to use 2 x PW F-135 engines (F-35), and the number of theoretical seating will shrink to 20-30 perhaps. 10 in a biz jet configuration. To even get a F-135 to study, is pretty much out of the question.
Perhaps a Russian engine could be realistic in terms of politics, but I highly doubt that also. Chinese?
Exactly what are they demonstrating? That it’s possible to use 3 x J85 engines to fly supersonic in a single seat aircraft? 1000s of F-5s and T-38s has already done that during the last 50-60 years, and with only 2 x J85.
To develop a new engine from scratch costs a factor 100 times what developing the aircraft costs. That possibility is out of the question. IMO a commercial full size variant got a pretty difficult engine problem to solve.
Peter wrote:
the Russians liked Ukrainian girls
Who doesn’t ? It reminds me of the city of Drammen in Norway that decided the only immigrants they would take were Ukrainian immigrants. Meaning 50% kids and 50% young women I mean even if you don’t think in sexist ways (which I’m sure Drammen didn’t do), who wouldn’t want a relatively well educated, hard working young women who can go straight into any job, preferably in health care.
There appears to be a definite market for some 100-200 of these in the oligarch sphere. It will be a “must have” item just like a huge yacht already is. A number of design bureaus around the world have been working on this as a result. One or two of them are in Russia and they are likely to be out of the running now, not just because Russia is likely to be under sanctions practically for ever.
Around 25 years ago I had dinner with Allen Paulson, then retired from Gulfstream Aircraft, and he had just returned from a meeting with Lockheed that day to discuss his ideas for a supersonic biz jet along with what they might’ve known about making the thing quiet enough. He described to me how he’d previously tried hard to create a program with Sukhoi but given up. So what you describe is a long story that has so far never got off the ground.
If what LeSving describes re the engine options is the whole story (and I have no reason to think it isn’t) then how can these projects get funding?
Identical threads on the Boom merged.
I don’t think you can sell the idea of sitting in a narrow and probably noisy tube just to save a few hours to the super wealthy when the alternative is a very comfortable biz jet in which you can continue to be on-line anyway. So what do you really save in terms of time. Not to mention the evaporation of ‘time gained’ by having to make a fuel stop on long stretches.
And basically the same applies for using it in scheduled air travel.
Even if they succeed in designing and producing this product, the market will be for maybe 50-100 super rich who wish to show off. Or less than that now that the Russkie proportion of that target group, which is high, won’t have any use for it. Ah well, after such buyers will get bored of it you’d probably be able to buy one cheap and pray there is some customer support available 
Of course one could argue that it doesn’t matter that VC or the like capital is being thrown away but it’s still a waste of financial and engineering resources that could be used for purposes that the world needs.
NASA is working on a demonstrator that should dramatically reduce the sonic boom. Don’t think it has flown yet, they unveiled it not long ago.
As Silvaire says, I remember the talkeof the Poulson project. Airframe by Sukhoi and engines by Rolls Royce was the idea at the time. I think someone didn’t like the idea of giving Russia access to western fan technology at the time.
Peter wrote:
how can these projects get funding?
Like all of those head in the clouds stuff does. Smooth talkers and people with money to put where their dreams (or d… ) are.
How many such projects, not only supersonic, got huge funding, fed the inventors over several years and eventually evaporated in bancruptcy with the money gone and the inventors off to new projects, starting the rat catching race again? And how many of those projects ever came to actually be sucessful?
Clearly, a project like this will have it’s fans and die hard Concorde nuts will try to get their exclusive transport between NY and London back. Concorde, though a commercial failure in sales, was quite successful with the wealthy and prominent folks shuttling between London and Manhatten, with occasional stints to Barbados and supersonic joyrides over the Bay of Biscay. British Airways made money with Concorde, even though AF never did. So a viable replacement may well end up scooping up a few of the survivors of the Concorde Age and operate a fleet of maybe 10 airplanes between North Atlantic capitals or maybe between the West Coast and Hawaii and on to Japan, if permissions go through. That the Russians are out of the game would pretty much exclude Eastbound trips from Europe, as it was shown already in the times of Concorde that overflight permits for Boom Airplanes are impossible to get in most countries, whereas Russia happily operated their SST overland, albeit for a short time only.
Me, I give this project 1:infinite chance of success. If it does, it will be because some people put insane amounts of cash to chase a supersonic dream which may then operate a few years before going down the ecological and economical drain.
