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Comment by Pyxl101 | Hacker News Reader

Exciting work! I'd be glad if supersonic flight was a reality again.

How do you plan to tackle the challenge of opposition to supersonic flight? Overland supersonic flight has been banned in US and Europe because the loud noise of sonic booms annoyed residents that the planes flew over. Coastal residents continued to object to supersonic flight. Is there a path to offering transcontinental flights again, and if not, will the program be viable with only trans-oceanic flights? (I notice NYC/London highlighted in the marketing materials)

Alternatively, is there a viable way to make supersonic flight quiet enough to fly overland? (That would be a game changer!)

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Thanks! We are very excited to be doing this.

We're starting out focused on long flights that are mostly over water, like New York - London or San Francisco - Shanghai.

Around an airport, our airplane will be about as quiet as other new aircraft. The sonic boom will also be much quieter—and we'll continue to make future iterations even quieter. It's hard to say exactly when, but I expect the supersonic overland ban will be reversed in the coming years.

> It's hard to say exactly when, but I expect the supersonic overland ban will be reversed in the coming years.

Can you elaborate on this? Is there a significant lobbying effort for this or is it something the FAA is considering of their own volition, to stimulate activity in this area?

NASA Ames has been doing some great research (in the bay area no less) on boomless supersonic crafts. There are basically two strategies: either modify the fuselage to disrupt the boom wavefront, or redirect the wavefront by going supersonic at a nontraditional attack angle. Both work.

is SYD -> SFO too far?

Curious about next steps once you've built the plane. It seems that you're core mission is commingled somewhere between "building Concorde 2.0" and "offering incredibly fast trans-ocean travel."

Many personal questions that you can ignore at your leisure:

Do you plan on operating an airline? If not, will you work with GECAS and/or ILFC directly or offer vendor financing? Are you open to partnering with an unconventional such as Virgin, Southwest to build out their international capacity, or a startup airline? It would be amusing (in a good way) to see Ohanian leverage his experience in travel at Hipmunk into operating a fleet of your jets.

Your idea is amazing and I have complete confidence in your ability to build a ridiculously fast jet. Looking forward to seeing your next steps in putting passengers in seats!

Nostalgia... In the 70s I lived in a London suburb that was under one of the approach paths to Heathrow, and could always tell when Concorde was passing over on final. Its sound was many decibels above a 747 and had a harsh, rock-crushing quality.

Indeed. I lived in Reading from 79-82 and remember that school essentially paused everytime that Concorde passed overhead because you couldn't hear anything that was being said in the classroom for a couple of minutes

I thought it was used because they didn't want the brits and french to have the market for these planes.

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