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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see any pressing need for supersonic jet travel now that in-flight Wi-Fi, hi-res HMDs for your laptop and the Nintendo Switch all exist. And I think that trying to justify it in terms of "we have to end the stagnation and go back to a regime where plane speeds increase YoY" is silly: either it provides a compelling service for its high cost (there's no getting around that air drag and fuel consumption increases quadratically with speed) or it doesn't, and personally I don't think it will.

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There is such a huge market of ways to improve flights that are between "what we have now" and "high price supersonic" that aren't currently being done; indicating that there's not a terribly large market for it.

Those who could easily afford supersonic can already afford other luxuries; the only one it gives is time; but if time is of the essence you can save it elsewhere by chartering your own jet.

> chartering your own jet

Honestly, this seems like the place to start with supersonic technology. The very wealthy are price-insensitive and would be ok paying 3-4x as much to get somewhere 2x faster. A good place to prove the technology, infrastructure, and market opportunity before cost-optimizing to try to get interest from mass-market travellers.

a good reason to tax the wealthy so hard that they can't own private jets <3

The thing is, if you can charter your own jet, you can make it travel on your schedule and suddenly cutting travel time in half isn't quite as important (even rich people sleep sometime).

It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is "good enough" if not perfect.

IMHO digital entertainment doesn't make up for being stuck in a cramped cabin for up to 19 hours (the longest international flight) around people (with varying levels of considerateness, contagiousness, and personal hygiene). Not to mention the increased risks of DVT and radiation exposure.

I travel each year to see family abroad, a minimum 2-leg trip totaling at least 27 hours. I can't sleep on planes so I arrive exhausted and am useless and cranky for the first 2 days after this trip. I would happily pay 2x the fare to cut that trip in half.

Deep Vein Thrombosis?

If you're flying half-way around the world, sleeping on the plane or a shorter flight isn't going to help much. I've done it twice and the jet lag is killer for the first 2-3 days regardless of how well you sleep on the plane (I usually sleep very well).

If you can afford supersonic travel, then you could also afford first class. And supersonic travel will probably be like flying economy. The concord was pretty crammed compared to today’s first class.

Even with those conveniences IMO that only dulls the tedium of the flight and no matter how comfy the travel is I'm still losing about a whole day at least of just flying across the Atlantic going from the US to Europe and back for a vacation which is pretty valuable with US leave allowances. At the very least there's the market for business travel where workers don't lose whole days to travel.

In the age of ubiquitous video conferencing, does it really make sense for business travel?

My work just did a big moderately disruptive shuffling of all the teams to try to localize as many members of each squad as possible in one location and the trend since COVID stopped being as deadly has been a massive wave of RTO so management seems to believe there's benefit in in person meetings or at least professes and acts like they do. I can't assign all of the huge RTO pushes to just management justifying and propping up their office real estate portfolios.

Sure, business travel is definitely still a thing. But every company I’ve ever worked at has sort of accepted that travel days are lost anyways because people come in from all over the country, get in at different times, have delayed flights, etc. My point being that I’m skeptical that companies are going to start paying 2x, 3x, 4x the cost so that their employees can get there a few hours faster, especially when, at least in my experience, it’s hard to get them to even pay for seats with extra legroom.

And also the negative externalities. Plane noise is irritating, sonic booms are far worse and spread farther.

There's a powerful and outspoken modern cult that worships technological progress, but only for values of "progress" that meet a certain wow-factor/"shininess" threshold.

The idea that such progress could ever falter is anathema to such a cohort (which, in their defense, have lived their whole lives in the most technologically anomalous period of the entirety of human history), making them susceptible to scams like Boom.

Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more.

Would expect nothing less from someone self-styling as "rational optimist".

Because these are not solutions, they're just fluff. If they were actual solutions these people would kill them because they'd diminish the power their real overlords have.

Just look at the whole circus around the hyperloop instead of just building high speed trains.

> Instead, I'd implore people to consider that true progress is the ability to do more with less, and not merely the ability to do more with more.

Being able to do more with less is equivalent to being able to do much more with only little more.

And yet all that the aforementioned progress-cultists care about is being able to do a little more, even if it costs much more. The rate of return based on the effort invested is precisely the issue here.

AI has some of the most stupidly high rates of return on effort and energy used out of all modern inventions, so I'm not sure what your point is.

> I

You are not the only consumer of air travel. Supersonic is not for you, it is for elites willing to spend 4x the ticket price for half the flight time. Concorde tickets were $6000 for D.C. to London in the mid 1990s, so about $12,500 today, and that was for an economy-style seat. It was very popular among a certain segment.

East Coast US to Europe in 3-4 hours versus 7-8, West Coast US to Asia in 5-6 hours versus 10-12.... makes it more like a domestic flight.

My dad got upgraded to a Concorde once (for reasons I don't know) from First Class on (I assume) Pan Am. His reaction was basically meh. Got into London at rush hour and he really wasn't that impressed.

“ Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.”

It's been a while since I've flown. Are ~20% of seats really business class?

Look at a 777-300 on [United](https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/company/aircraft/boeing-777...) - 60/290 biz/econ (~20%), but the biz seats take up probably 40% of the plane.

Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back. Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40% of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz. Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60% revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way biz.

But biz will be half empty or more at full price, so it gets filled with upgrades of coach tickets to reward frequent fliers or full-fare users. The average has to be lower. The biz price may also be optimistic. United EWR-LHR is more like your $2.5k-$3k. Delta has an ATL-LHR option for first/business class with a bed that's more like $8k-$10k, and their Premium Select, which is more like United's business class, is $2.5k. Interestingly, they offer more beds than big seats.

I remember pricing out the Concorde years ago, before it was grounded. BA's first class subsonic was $8k, Concorde was $12k. (2001 dollars) If you're paying those rates anyway, it might be worth it to go faster, if you don't mind the relatively small seat and limited food service. Coach was $400-$600.

Also by no longer providing service to non-business class customers they save a lot of money on personnel, services, logistics.

Of course the disadvantage, is no more air service for non-business class customers (that being most of us).

The math doesn't scan out on that, it sounds good for pitches and articles but is kind of nonsense once you think about it imo. It's going to cost way more than just 2x to run the supersonic jet along the same route per flight just in fuel and maintenance and you're cutting out all the low fare passengers they cram in the back so they need to make up even more money than just the fuel costs and running additional flights per day doesn't address the issue because the cost per trip is increasing so running more trips just keeps incurring those same costs.

It won't change the economics of the current class of aircraft. They will still need to have business class seats to pay for the economy cabin.

You will probably end up with 5 or 6 tiers of service instead:

Supersonic: Business + First

Subsonic: Economy + Eco+ + Business + First

Supersonic First will be a Veblen good that has a high price floor (like $30k). Business for time sensitive business passengers, and it's actually an Economy Plus seat for ~$15k.

It's very hard to resist marketing some service differences, particularly when you have two classes of users with different needs (speed vs. prestige).

The pitch quoted from the post I was responding to essentially said it was going to siphon all the business class fliers from normal flights: "Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price." There's no way businesss travellers would choose subsonic travel if supersonice was the same price for half the time.

We agree I think that there wouldn't be a similar price between the sub and supersonic travel options. The economics of running the routes can't work out to a similar price to existing offerings.

> Give those passengers a supersonic plane

Meaning a big price increase for us normal passengers?

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