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Comment by bscholl | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of scorched earth in supersonics, since Concorde wasn't an economic success and the Boeing SST project was cancelled.

Since then, there has been research on 300 seat Mach 2.4-Mach 3 vehicles, but these are extremely challenging.

To make this happen and happen soon, you have to start much smaller than the established players usually consider. We're at 40 seats—that's the minimum economic size. Supersonics are hard, so it pays to start as small as you can and scale up over time.

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I had always thought that the small size of the Concorde was what made the per seat cost so expensive and held the Concorde back economically. So my expectation was that to be economically successful, you'd have to build a supersonic plane that carried more people.

Clearly you know more about this than me, but can you elaborate on why my view isn't correct?

Actually, Concorde was too big: 100 seats. It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes. Which means you can't have many airplanes, which means no economies of scale.

With 40 seats and business class prices, the Boom airplane works on many more routes, which means we can make a lot of airplanes and enjoy economies of scale.

Looking into the future, as fuel efficiency further improves, per seat costs come down, and it will make sense to make ever larger aircraft. It's a virtuous cycle that will eventually allow supersonic flight at economy prices.

> It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes.

Your price is way off.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

It looks as if the Concorde was roughly $5K each way (or $10K RT) +/- in today's dollars--although I'm not sure a standard CPI inflation calculator is the best way to look at airline ticket price changes.

Given the existence of business class only BA NY to City of London flights, there probably is a market for expensive supersonic routes, but it's probably still pretty small. International lawyers may value the back and forth in a day, but most people who fly business/first are probably fine with comfortable seating and a nice meal even if it takes a bit longer.

From the link: "In the late 1990s I paid $11,000US each for several round trips."

That's about $16k when accounting for inflation, so $20k isn't too far off.

Without qualification, I'd assume they were quoting historical prices. It would be pretty confusing to present any kind of adjusted figures without clarifying them.

Thanks for explaining that, I had never looked at it that way. And good luck to your venture.

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