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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> how do you not see supersonic flight as just generally good for everyone flying

Because it require vastly more energy (fuel) per mile than most any other form of travel. Because the aircraft carry fewer people per takeoff/landing cycle, congesting airports.

Those who care about time can already travel at much greater speeds. Door-to-door travel times for first class, and especially private, are already about 1/3 to 1/2 that of the common economy passenger on a domestic flight. If we wanted to speed up the process, the easy fruit is the speed of the airport rather than the aircraft.

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> Those who care about time can already travel at much greater speeds

There is massive room for improvement. Consider the effect on global relations if crossing the world didn’t cost days but hours. More practically, consider an economy networked with this travel and transport competing against one sticking to trains, trucks and Zoom.

I believe the cultural integration aspects of cheap, fast, and effortless passenger transportation cannot be overstated. I'd like to see more and more people traveling to places they wouldn't travel otherwise.

It's easier to dehumanise the people you don't know, and much harder to do that when you have been with them.

The time spent in flight is not the limiting factor on globe-spanning tourism. Traveling is massively expensive (not just the cost of transportation, but also lodging, food, and itinerary), and if this just makes it more expensive, then it doesn't help in that regard.

There is a point a quantitative change becomes qualitative. Shaving 10 hours off a 20 hour flight makes it much more palatable. Shaving 19 hours (suborbital? hypersonic?) makes it a no-brainer.

Concorde wasn't transformational for business at a time when executives couldn't work and videoconference from anywhere in the world and stay connected to the workplace for the majority of their flight duration.

The realistic potential of an operationally-expensive medium range aircraft designed for scheduled passenger flights isn't going to radically change trucks, trains and Zoom. Or business jets, for people that care enough about time to pay for it in thousand dollar multiples. Even for the small fraction who can actually afford it, a supersonic airliner is still going to have range constraints eliminating the possibility of quickly crossing the world, and for the transatlantic hops it might manage, it's the 8am JFK-LHR flight competing with a business jet at a time and origin/destination airports of the executives' choosing...

(for related reasons, I'd actually be more bullish about the economic case for supersonic bizjets, but there have been quite a lot of projects studying that market that haven't got anywhere...)

The supersonic biz jet fails because they all need longer runways. The biz jet wants to land at smaller private airports to avoid the hassle (security) of large airports. Any supersonic biz jet capable of also landing on a short runway ends up looking more like a fighter jet with some extra seats.

The Concorde wound up spending a lot of time at sub-sonic speeds, but really I think if we look to the future of air travel we can imagine surpassing supersonic speeds as well. There are already companies working on hypersonic (Mach 5+) designs with an eye towards consumer applications; obviously rich consumers to start, but that's how it often goes.

Those are some truly societally transformative speeds. You can go from the west coast of the US to Paris in less than 2 hours.

But we can't get to that without iterative improvement.

Yeah, but Zoom (and its analogues) exist. Crossing the world doesn't take days OR hours; you can have a meeting with someone halfway around the world right now. I genuinely don't see an economic need for very many people to cross intercontinental distances that quickly in this day and age. How often does an executive actually need to go from New York to London? Or LA to Shanghai? We already ask "could this meeting have been an email?" Well, companies looking to save money should also be asking "could this intercontinental business trip have been a Zoom call?" Otherwise, it's just businesses subsidizing their executives' luxury travel expenses.

The existence of business class flights proves this wrong. You are probably right the relative demand for face-to-face has gone down since Concorde but the world has also gotten bigger and richer since. I suspect absolute demand is higher, particularly if they can deliver their promise of business-class prices (versus Concorde's, inflation-adjusted $20k).

> The existence of business class flights proves this wrong

I don't see how it does. Wanting a more comfortable experience than being crammed into a narrow seat for hours when travel/physical presence is actually necessary doesn't somehow translate into necessary travel being underserved.

(Specifying necessary travel because that's the GP's point - just because there are people who want to take 10 minute hops between neighbouring cities or to fly out for meetings that could have been conducted perfectly well over a call doesn't mean that the world should cater to their whims.)

It's a misleading rhetorical trick to criticize a company primarily focus on trans-oceanic flights by talking about first-class domestic flights.

Not when their ticket prices and passenger volume are similar to first class. Go to their site and scroll down until you see the picture of the seating and tell me that isn't first class.

https://boomsupersonic.com/overture

You don't actually think someone making under 6 figures is ever going to be flying on one of these things do you?

You miss my point: the optimizations on ground experience for domestic first class can save you 20-30% of the time because the actual domestic flight time isn’t that long. On a transoceanic flight, to generate similar time-savings, you have to make the plane faster.

Comparing domestic first class to transoceanic supersonic is misleading.

To be entirely fair, that’s a single image, and, it’s a marketing website. Of course they’re going to show a luxurious seat. The truth is that the interior will probably look like Concorde: more spartan than luxury.

> Door-to-door travel times for first class...are already about 1/3 to 1/2 that of the common economy passenger on a domestic flight

What? is this a different first class? Because first class gets off the plane like 5-10 minutes faster than economy in my experience.

Priority check-in, priority security, priority boarding, priority disembarkation, priority immigration, priority baggage pickup, priority customs lanes all exist and these add up, particularly for international travel. My APEC card alone has saved me hours more times than I can count.

Travel on first class. It is a different thing, especially internationally. You don't wait in line for check-in. You don't deal with security the same way. You don't deal with immigration the same way. You don't wait around hours for your bags to come out the chute. You don't get bumped off of flights, nor do your bags. It saves hours, even on the shortest flights. When companies send their people first class it isn't about comfort so much as saving time and increasing reliability.

Hmm. Some of this is true but I never saw 1st class immigration. Possibly you get in line first, but often there's an A380 worth of economy passengers there from another flight that landed 30min prior.

Re-entering the US for US citizens, Global Entry. And, yes, getting off a plane first is usually an advantage for clearing immigration though not guaranteed to breeze through.

In general (leaving aside flying private) paying more money doesn't necessarily buy you a lot of time savings (especially if you're not the sort who tries to cut things close) but it can eliminate a lot of hassle/buy you a lot more comfort which is probably more important to me most of the time.

Priority bags/check-in does help but I try not to check luggage so really doesn't save me a lot of time at the end of the day.

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