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Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I can’t believe that they’ve actually secured orders from major airlines. Didn’t they learn their lesson with the Concorde?

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> Didn’t they learn their lesson with the Concorde?

What was the lesson?

Cost-agnostic business travelers are not a large enough segment of the market for transatlantic flights to justify flying a plane that only seats business class and costs a lot of money. (Boom says they're targeting $5,000 fares between NYC and London [1], and I bet they'll end up being even higher, if/when it gets off the ground.)

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/16/23308514/american-airline...

Concorde ran a profit until its last flight, actually. It was retired in expectation of how expensive it would get to maintain; it was one of the few planes so analog that it still had a flight engineer seat, when it was retired.

I think the lesson was that business travellers prefer comfort to speed, as business class funds the entirety of transatlantic passenger aviation. There's plenty of business-class-only flights.

https://www.lacompagnie.com/ is the only one I’m aware of. What other company offers business only flights?

I would say it's the exact opposite, after all planes replaced ships and that NY to London leg is significantly more comfortable on a ship. Heck if I could cut my NY-London time in half, I'd take it, even if I had to give up lie-flat seats.

Hours is different from weeks.

But what if they could have both?

The Concorde was plenty comfortable when it first flew, it's just that it was never replaced. I'm sure boom will offer current business class comforts.

Concorde was very cramped, a longer flight in a first class suite with bed is more appealing, more so now in flight WiFi is a thing so you can work if needed.

No one wants to get to Paris quickly.

They want to get out of Paris quickly though :)

It looks like a Theranos or maybe a Tesla. 6 years (and counting)into their 1 year plan to launch the miniature subsonic demo version of their plans.

AirFrance and British Airways are not listed.

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