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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.

There really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people, the metrics of cost and convenience can trump objective quality and performance.

Moving the amount of people we want to move, for the cost at which people are willing to endure, shook out the way it did and supersonic lost out.

For general aviation you just have many more challenges to overcome than say driving. It takes really special circumstances before it makes sense.

We won't have flying cars for the same reason we don't all have planes. They aren't required, few need them and they would be more inconvenient to operate than a simple car.

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An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes 3 hours, and the time difference is 5 hours. If you are leaving London, this means you can leave at a reasonable time, and have plenty of useful business meetings in New York: Much better the subsonic flight. But what happens when you fly in the other direction? In practice, it's 8 hours. So leave NYC at 8 am in the morning, and by the time you are at an office in London, the workday is over: Far less valuable for an executive than the other direction. Thus, the price differential over the regular flight in one direction is very different than in the other.

A supersonic jet with concorde-like economics in supersonic routes would be usable if it could fly subsonic at a competitive price on the way back, but that's not how physics works.

If they could get the cost differential down a lot, then paying a little extra for supersonic would be worth it to some people just so they don't have to sit in an airplane as long. Across the Atlantic it's not such a big deal, but routes across the Pacific take a really long time.

London to New York, New York to San Francisco, San Francisco to Tokyo, Tokyo to Mumbai, Mumbai to London. Send a subsonic plane in the other direction.

Sounds like a lot of that is over land, I hear people on the ground really don't like that.

You're just not being ambitious enough. You have to make it fly high enough they can't hear it. Use a scramjet accelerated from the ground with a railgun and get the thing nearly into orbit, something like that.

Or shape the plane like a Busemann Biplane, so it doesn't produce a boom at all. I am a fan of parabolic-arc travel though. ICBT (inter-continental ballistic transport)

An interesting side effect of that is the impact on ICBM defense protocols. If everything looks like an inbound missle you couldn't protect against them anymore, unless your protocol becomes "shoot down any ICBx trip not registered" but now you have a theoretical gun pointed at every passenger transport, ready to fire automatically for the sake of missing paperwork.

> really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people

Most people are irrelevant for commercial aviation. And there are entire sections of the market for which most rich Americans are irrelevant.

> Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.

The regulatory environment is the economics. A majority of airline customers won't pay extra for supersonic flight, so whether it's worth having a separate model of supersonic plane that might represent 10-20% of plane sales for planes of that passenger capacity is down to how much it costs to certify a new model of plane.

It had nothing to do with economics. Congress banned it due to noise.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/nasa-50th-anniversary-us-comme...

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