"Privately built", so it's technically accurate, even if there's still an elephant in the room. Similar to that amusing SpaceX marketing speak with the Falcon Heavy being "the most powerful orbital rocket since Saturn V", which was also technically true because both Energia flights were payload-assisted. (they changed that line since then)

That's not the issue. It's the third supersonic airliner, not the second; the Soviet Union had the Tu-144.

Which is what I meant - it was designed and built by the state, not a private company, so the careful wording is probably correct.

Although come to think of it, Sud Aviation/Aerospatiale was also a state-owned company, and the BAC wasn't private either, so the nitpicking can go on forever.

I'm sorry to be so nit-picky but it always pains me to see a long exchange each side doesn't understand the other. Here's a minor reading comprehension issue where I think you and the GP are failing to communicate:

> first privately built supersonic airliner and the second ever after Concorde

In this sentence, do you think "second ever" refers to "second ever privately built supersonic airliner"? Or "second ever supersonic airliner"?

If the Concorde was the first privately built supersonic airliner, what airplane is "first" intended to refer to in Boom's marketing?

BAC I believe was private (though merged) firm until it became British Aerospace (later renamed to BAE Systems). Have to check on that though.

I also immediately spotted the oversight of the T-144 which was enough to give up reading the article and just look at the pictures.

Britain and France also definitely explicitly paid for Concorde.

I think anybody would be hard-pressed to argue that the Tu-144 saw meaningful commercial passenger service. Neither has Boom yet, to be fair, but it at least isn’t provably a failure at this point.

True, but it was a supersonic airliner, 16 pieces were built and it did have 55 passenger-carrying flights (according to Wikipedia), so if you make a list without further qualifiers as in the article ("second ever"), it's a bit strange to gloss over it completely...

It also flew before the Concorde, but we can't have inconvenient facts like that in the middle of a cold war.

From my childhood I was under the impression that it was a rip-off copy like the Buran.

> From my childhood I was under the impression that it was a rip-off copy like the Buran.

That's never been proven-proven, but there still are lots of suspicions: it looked strangely like earlier concorde design, at least one person (Sergei Pavlov) was caught smuggling concorde design documents, and there are many declassified reports (e.g. from the CIA) of a large industrial espionage ring targeting Concorde in both France and the UK.

Also regardless of the previous, the TU-144 had flagrantly been rushed to arrive before Concorde, the inside design was complete garbage, it needed braking parachutes to stop, and it was very unstable at low-speed. This necessitated serious improvements and refinements which led to its first passenger flight taking place almost 2 years after Concorde's (November 1977 versus January 1976).

The sadness comes from that it's quite misleading. Saturn-V couldn't bring to orbit the satellite of some 100 tons - the mass of Space Shuttle orbiter, which Space Shuttlle launch system obviously could. Saturn-V could either send to LEO the Skylab - less than 80 tons - or bring to orbit an Apollo stack, from which a lot of mass was the 3rd stage of Saturn-V with carefully unspent fuel, intended to provide translunar injection; that stack, yes, was way more than 120 tons. So is Saturn-V less powerful to LEO than Space Shuttle? We usually don't do this hairsplitting and leave the crown with the Mighty Saturn. Here we can also see a technically accurate reading, but the problem remains - the author omits an important member of supersonic commercial flights fame - the one with some 55 passenger flights, which is more even than half of Falcon-9 flights and e.g. way more that Spruce Goose flights.

I do think that HN readers generally know - and ought to know - better.

From the fact that you've been modded down, it seems the author wasn't the only one to forget the TU144.

I'd imagine that had more to do with the tone of the comment. Would be more helpful to readers if it said "actually, the first supersonic aircraft for commercial use was the tu144 made by tupolev from the Soviet union"