Aerion estimates that its supersonic business jet will cost between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion to develop, chief operating officer Mike Henderson tells Show News. The estimate is under half what some analysts have speculated the project would cost, and although Aerion is talking abut a nominal 300-airplane market over 10 years, Henderson says that the project could break even with a "much smaller number."
The project could be formally launched inside two years, the company says, and would take about five years from launch to service entry—putting the SBJ into service as early as 2011.
The low development price tag and a target unit cost of under $80 million reflect the fact that the Aerion SBJ uses an existing engine—with some modifications based on known technology, conventional structure and off-the-shelf systems. According to Aerion, the per-mile operating costs will be comparable to those of today's heavy business jets.
Aerion's plan, outlined here on Monday, is to spend the next 18 months continuing to refine its design, while it assembles a consortium of risk-sharing partners to produce the aircraft. "We anticipate that it will be a global consortium," says chairman Robert Bass, and it will include an established airframe manufacturer. "Certification is not for novices," Bass says. Aerion itself will retain ownership of the supersonic laminar-flow technology on which the design is based.
Technology work leading to launch will be aimed at "whittling down our drag," says chief technology officer Richard Tracy, and will lead to high-speed and low-speed wind-tunnel tests. The company will also build structural test specimens. The team needs to make sure that the airplane will make its 4,000-nm design range.
The company will also conduct new market studies, according to CEO Brian Barents, "and we will carefully analyze the results before we proceed into the final phase of the program." The company has assembled a product review board of industry veterans and customer representatives—including Executive Jet Aviation evp Richard Smith, representing a massive potential customer—to provide an independent view of the program.
Fractional and charter operators are expected to be "40 to 50 percent" of the market for the SBJ, Barents says, and he adds that government, military and head-of-state applications constitute a "vast" market that has not been included in the 300-airplane estimate as yet. However, Henderson comments, the company has not made formal contact with the Pentagon and wants to make sure that its technology does not get hit with national-security export restrictions.
Aerion technology is scalable within some size limits, according to Tracy and Henderson. Laminar flow "works better with increasing Mach number," and a 50-passenger supersonic transport, flying rather faster than the planned SBJ, could be practical. "It's easily scalable to a small transport category," says Barents.
The current project started more than two years ago, Bass says here, when he engaged Henderson—a veteran Boeing engineer who led the company's supersonic transport program for seven years in the 1990s—to investigate Tracy's technology. Henderson spent a year in "due diligence" investigation before Bass decided to commit to the project, and says that he was "not particularly optimistic" at the outset. However, he says he found that Tracy's laminar-flow design produced a simpler configuration than the deltas studied by Boeing and NASA, with much better low-speed and transonic performance.
Bass says that Aerion has "the three hallmarks of a good investment: It has proprietary technology protected by robust patents, there is a demonstrable market demand, and it has a good chance of success—there are few areas of technology risk. There are no evident deal-breakers."
