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Comment by recursivecaveat | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and approach removed. If you cut it in half, 1h15m saved. On the flip side, how long does it take to get to the airport, park, though security, board, deboard, massive buffer time because flights are expensive and you don't know what might delay you, god forbid you have baggage to check and pick up. Flying at twice the speed might reduce the time to fly by less than 20%. Taking small on-demand supersonic flights from regional airports as suggested is definitely not a solution btw, because it's a pipe dream.

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Being on the actual plane is the most uncomfortable part of the entire experience, for me at least.

Others may disagree, but I'd rather cut an hour from the flight than the entire commute/parking/security/airport waiting. (Assuming conditions on the actual plane were the same.)

Funny, for me it's the opposite. It's uniquely relaxing to be locked in with nothing but a book or some movies (I purposely avoid connecting to the internet during a flight.)

My biggest dilemma is whether to sit in the aisle or window. The former you can get up whenever you want but are bumped by passers by and neighbors exiting the row. Versus being the one doing the disturbing.

And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would be priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest discomfort is the dry sinuses.

But in getting to/from the plane you are cattle moving through a logistical labyrinth with countless possibilities for something to go wrong.

100% agree with you. Actually being on the plane is fine, I don't have many complaints there. Yes, there are various compromises around space and comfort, but they're all understandable given the cost/efficiency concerns.

Getting through the airport is just a huge pain in the ass though. At least some airports now let you keep your shoes on again, hopefully soon we'll have scanners that don't need you to remove electronics (I tend to bring too much of this and it's always a pain), or even let you keep liquids again (!).

Look for the "Smiths" brand scanners and go in that line if possible. Those don't have to remove items from the bag.

I don't love being on a plane for a very long stretch, even in business class. And IMO food is very mid-tier restaurant. But I don't necessarily disagree with your comment. Even with transport and airport conveniences that a relatively modest amount of money can buy, there's plenty that can go wrong and you can avoid all the other people to only a certain degree.

>And if you can afford business class [...] The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark!

Let's settle down. This kind of biz class experience is almost certainly unique to international travel. Flying "business class" from ATL to SFO might get you a plate of microwave slop and an extra 15deg of incline on almost all domestic jets. Once in a blue moon you'll get a modern plane with the diagonal seats. One less person in the row, though.

Paying for business class domestically is almost always a sham by my experience.

I was specifically thinking of my experience flying Emirates to the UAE :)

Other threads are discussing what range is actually practical or worthwhile. The article is very optimistic saying Australia can be a weekend trip. For me it's much more beneficial to cut a 16 hour flight in half than a 6 hour one. I don't really mind an itinerary 9 hrs or less, which includes all US domestic travel. But of course it will be different for a business commuter vs the occasional getaway.

ATL to SFO would almost certainly top out at first class, not business class. This is true of most all domestic routes. First class on international also just gets you the 15 degrees and 1 or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that gets you the lie downs and such.

The food will probably still be worse than a first class international flight though. Not as many people paying as much and not enough air time to really force all of them to want to eat airplane food in the first place.

> First class on international also just gets you the 15 degrees and 1 or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that gets you the lie downs and such.

This is not my experience at all. First class is better than business class on international (and domestic, of course, though relatively few domestic routes have true three cabin service [counting all the slightly different economy levels as one cabin]).

For ATL<->SFO the directs are Delta, Frontier, and United:

Frontier doesn't have a business class nor long haul international flights (they are an ultra-low cost carrier).

Delta calls their highest tier "Delta One" their business class offering. It's mostly available in mid & long haul international flights, though there are a few select domestic routes with it IIRC. A tier below is First, which is available for both domestic and international flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines#Cabin:~:text=D...

United's highest is called "Polaris", representing their international business class. Confusingly, they have "United First and United Business" as the next class. I.e. it's the same class but on domestic flights they call it "United First" and on international flights the same seat would be sold as "United Business" despite having Polaris for that already. Regardless of that oddity, the First class can't be higher than itself named Business class even compared directly instead of with the actual business class Polaris - it's the same seat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines#Cabins:~:text=....

Other airlines label and order things differently of course. E.g. American has Flagship First above Flagship Business above First/Business (shared much like United on that 3rd class) and maybe that's where your experience is. To my knowledge though, no such airlines operate the ATL<->SFO route originally described though.

Can you find any three-cabin service where First class is the middle tier of cabin? (In a two-cabin service, whether the one that's not economy is called Business or First is not helpful in determining whether business or first is higher; we both agree they're better than economy.)

Here are airlines offering three-cabin services on a single aircraft where First is the highest tier:

Air France - La Première (First), Business, Economy

American Airlines - First, Business, Economy

Cathay Pacific - First, Business, Economy

Emirates - First Class suites, Business Class, and Economy

Etihad - First Class private suites, Business, Economy

Japan Airlines - First, Business, Economy

Lufthansa - First, Business, Economy

Happily, here's one from Delta as I described above https://i.imgur.com/wwYQXy1.png. Sadly (for me, at least), I've never flown above "First" on such a configuration from Delta though :). Like you had noted, they call it 4 cabin classes... but the economy classes ("Main" & "Comfort") are both treated as a single cabin in terms of service and the difference in economy seats is an inch or two of leg room. So it's really a 3 cabin of: business, first, economy.

Again, hbosch said ATL<->SFO... and you aren't going to be flying Air France or Japan Airlines for that route. My list, as far as I'm aware, was exhaustive for that route. It was not a cherry picked search of airlines which do it that way or global claim of what all other airlines do, only a response to the particular claim. On other routes/airlines the statement could, or rather "would", certainly have been true. Honestly, I think those airlines have it the right way around, but, having flown the exact route and the same airlines internationally, it did not match my experience for the route - which agreed with the labeling for all airlines for that route according to the links above. Unless, perhaps I'm missing that American or similar does actually have a ATL<->SFO to be compared with?

Where is the label of “first” anywhere in that image or in Delta marketing on that flight?

It literally says "first" in the upper right hand corner of the image indicating the red seats, which are clearly not as nice as the purple seats, aka Delta One?

That is a composite image, with screenshots from two different pages (and I'm virtually certain from two different flights), not a legend of the seating chart and a seating chart.

I can't find an ATL-SFO flight offering Premium Select and in fact couldn't find a domestic Premium Select flight at all, but on flights where I can find Premium Select, such as BOS-AMS on May 10, 2026, here is the fare selection screenshot from that flight, and the seating chart screenshot, including the legend on a single page:

https://imgur.com/a/Nz1FxOT

Notably, neither of those use red for "First Class" and there's no confusion between trying to use a legend from one page/flight as a key to understand a seating chart on a different page/flight. In fact, they both use red for "Premium Select" and booking Premium Select on that flight gives you a fare class of "A", which is specific to Premium Select (and NOT to First Class/Delta One, which share J, C, D, I, and Z, because Delta One is just a branding of First Class, rather than a cabin distinct from first class).

Delta fare class codes: https://www.nerdwallet.com/travel/learn/delta-fare-classes

I'm not saying that there was a specific intent to deceive with that prior imgur link, but I think the end effect was deceptive.

> And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would be priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest discomfort is the dry sinuses.

Lay-flat chairs and business class are nice and a massive upgrade for long flights but better than being off the plane? Nope.

> restaurant quality

The food is mid-tier at best, I would not return to a restaurant that served food like what they serve in business class. It's only amazing when compared to the alternatives and the fact you get treated like half a human for a minute.

> full recline

Ehh, I find them claustrophobic and they only really "lay flat" if you aren't 6'+. They are approximately 1 billion times better than normal airplane chairs but you are still in an airplane.

The whole experience nowadays is horrible. The airplane is a bus, the airport is a shopping mall. Passengers are just cattle.

When you can fly e.g. London to Barcelona for something like $59 (if you time your ticket purchase right), it is a bus, for the price of a long-range bus ticket.

(There is even a big aircraft company named "Air Bus", or something, did you hear about them?)

I've flown business class, it's still a bus, a nicer bus where you are treated marginally better, but it's a bus. Maybe private planes would change things (I've never been on one) but I can't imagine airplanes as being anything but a means to an end that I wanted to spend the least amount of time on.

Of course it's a bus, what do you expect? If you want it to be like the 1950s golden age, you can get that, but for a price.

Nah, its quite opposite for me. It becomes real chore with small kids on non-short flights, but the thing is - I travel normally only for vacations. Time spent in airports is literally vacation wasted on bureaucracy without even moving, since in ideal situation I would spend 1 minute giving them big luggage, if at all, and stepping in the plane just about to take off. Flying is actually moving me towards the goal, feels more acceptable.

Overall when I started traveling I loved all of it, exciting, new. Now I hate this part as a whole, necessary evil of wasted life to get what I actually want where I actually want.

I expected that others would have opposing experiences and tried to reflect that in my comment. People are different sizes, flying different class, frequenting different airports, traveling with families or solo, for longer or shorter periods of time, more or less luggage, etc. So of course it won't be universal.

My main point is that all time is not created equal, that it matters WHERE you shave the minutes/hours off, not just what percent of overall travel time is removed. And while we disagree on how to apply this, we seem to agree on that main point.

I try to find absurd humor in counting the different steps that I had to go through from leaving my house to getting on the plane. Or analyzing the legibility & usability of the systems. Or just being proud of myself for being able to be so patient and let it all go. Sometimes you can even strike up a good conversation with a stranger. But with kids, oof, yeah... :-)

Unless you pay the sort of money (or more) that supersonic flight would realistically cost. Even without going private, business/first seating (along with expedited service through security, airport clubs, and arranged private car to your hotel) deal with a lot of the issues that many economy travelers have with air travel.

being on the plane is the easy part. put bags up top -- and check the big ones so this is a simple process -- and then buckle-up and snooze.

it's the everything-else part of air travel that is fucking awful.

40+ minutes of security theater even with NEXUS and other fast-passes, lost bags, massive PITA airports, delays, and the hoards of dumb fuckin rubes who have no idea how to travel and need to haul their comically huge carry ons that somehow got through sizing + emotional support chihuahua -- a far cry from even the worst subways I've been on.

If you live in the right areas - mostly the western US - try JSX. Runs about equal to maybe 20% more than commercial domestic first class. Regional jets, all 1+1 seating, fly out of (effectively) an FBO, show up 20 minutes before domestic and 40 before international flights. Light screening, no terminal, no carryon (all bags brought off immediately at end of flight for collection planeside). Free WiFi on board and 120V power outlet at every seat.

I feel the need to praise the (relatively) new SFO terminal 1 somewhere. The design is a breath of fresh air.

Always my smoothest airport experience by far. No checked bag, Clear + Pre Check, fill your water bottle after security, get a coffee at Ritual, buy a banh mi for the plane, use a pretty clean bathroom, sit in one of those swivel chairs, get on the plane.

>40+ minutes of security theater

This is such an exaggeration. Usually it's like 3-5 minutes.

Seattle to Beijing is like 12+ hours now that Russian airspace is closed. There is a lot of time to save.

So save it using a Chinese airline who can fly through Russian airspace?

Chinese airlines aren’t allowed to use Russian airspace for any flight to/from the USA approved after 2021 or so, which, because of COVID, is basically most of them. You could maybe fly to Vancouver and get a quicker connection.

My last trip was on Hainan, which didn’t over fly Russia.

LA to Seattle is not worth it. The real gains are in London to NYC, or Tokyo to LA, or maybe Rio de Janeiro to Miami.

South America to Miami and vice versa will absolutely be a market for supersonic flight. It may be slow to takeoff (hah), but as soon as the South American elite pick up on it, it'll 100% be utilized to its maximum potential, especially during events like Art Basel.

No one is flying supersonic over land at least in the US. Going over the oceans is where it would happen.

That's because there was a dumb ban in place, with an executive order [1] and bill that just cleared to lift it [2]. The ban was "dumb" because it's indirect, trying to control loudness by limiting speed, which is an incorrect [3] assumption based on old tech of the time.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/lead...

[2] https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-supe...

[3] https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise

The ban was specifically to hinder the Concorde, so it made sense to base it on supersonic flight rather than noise in case the Concorde would have managed to mitigate its noise level one way or another.

Reference? There was an "Anti-Cordorde Project" [1] but its purpose was to ban all supersonic flight, for environmental reasons. Concorde being the only in regular service, thus the targeted name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project

I don't trust it. They will get approval and then when sonic booms disrupt nature from coast to coast they will say "it's just because the weather/it only affects a small number of people/the 3rd party contractor who supplied the data was wrong, they are gone now/the benefits outweigh the downside/think of all the jobs". Basically they'll say anything other than "oopsie we were wrong, no transonic flight for you".

Bear in mind that despite carefully worded PR, "Boomless cruise" is 1) not guaranteed to be "boomless" 2) is much slower than would make all the rigmarole of supersonic flight worth it even when it is "boomless".

I'm not sure how that matters. A sonic boom in a phenomenon not an SPL reading. The goal should be to have a direct metric for how loud/how much it disturbs things is. "boomless" and "speed" aren't a direct metric. If someone makes a sonic boom that's quiet enough, that's fine too.

I'm not sure how to respond to this because it's really just ignoring what I said entirely (maybe due to a lack of context?) and instead responding to things that I didn't say. "Supersonic for supersonic's sake" makes no sense.

Wasn't that just an act of spite because Europeans were the first to deliver commercial supersonic flight? I'm sure it will be reversed if the US becomes the leader.

The author of this slop seems to believe Boom's pitch deck that they can use AI to only boom into space and thus do supersonic overland. The only thing his article suggests though is that you could do it under certain atmospheric conditions, and more likely this is just cover for "do it all the time and blame the computer when we rattle peoples' windows".

Saying it requires or uses AI seems to be just... modern marketing bullshit. But the technique itself seems sound enough. NASA studied the phenomenon already: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/downloads/20...

But if you actually, you know, read that NASA study, it mentions that the maximum practical speed (from theory) for “boomless” flights is less than Mach 1.3, and they only demonstrated “boomless” flights at Mach 1.1.

That would result in far, far less time savings that what is posited by the commentary on HN. Compared to Cessna Citation X, for example, that would reduce time in the air by just 15%.

Total travel time savings would be even less… so a private Citation X at M0.95 would still be beat a commercial M1.1 flight in door to door travel time.

Right but Mach 1.0-1.3 is all that "Boom Supersonic" is claiming to hit, though, so the paper is in line with the marketing pitch. The speed advantage of "up to Mach 1.3" might not be worthwhile, no, but that's orthogonal to the claims of "boomless" supersonic.

Now the article randomly pulls Mach 1.7 out of seemingly nowhere, and I have no idea where that came from or how that is justified. But the company isn't making that claim as far as I can tell ( https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise the "FAQ" section even specifically says: "Boomless Cruise is possible at speeds up to Mach 1.3, with typical speed between Mach 1.1 and 1.2.")

The one note about Astro Mechanica towards the middle is referring to long haul flights from smaller airfields because they'll have a smaller private jet sized plane. It was not referring to short haul flights, nor was the rest of the article.

I don't believe the economics for that will at all work out the way they are pitching, but it has no relation to how much supersonic makes sense for a domestic short haul.

I am guessing this is really aimed at the 1%, who don't have to get to the airport 3 hours before a flight.

Rory Sutherland commented that, insteading of spending billions on high speed trains, why not spend a few million on making the experience nicer. Better carriages, more staff, nicer stations.

I don't think you have to be a member of the 1% to get to the airport an hour before a flight. Precheck is like $20 per year.

If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private terminals and have a completely different airport experience while flying commercial.

This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere.

I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded.

At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.

He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example?

Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?

1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time.

2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.

RE 1. - the example still stands. Travel time is best understood as falling into buckets. Roughly:

- < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some errands;

- 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper;

- 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back overnight or next morning;

- > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip.

(There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people perceived travel in historical times.)

As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However, going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy to pay premium for.

So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't.

This is also why it's the business customers that are always the target for such ideas - regular people are much more price sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might actually be worth it for a large company.

Replying to point 1 (especially with this argument) while completely ignoring point 2 makes very little sense to me.

Even with airport overhead, there's plenty of routes a supersonic plane could drop from 4-8h bucket to 2-3h bucket, and that is still something business flyers would pay for.

Like which ones? Bear in mind that despite carefully worded PR, Boom has very much not somehow surmounted the laws of physics to eliminate the sonic boom that caused the Mach 2+ Concorde to be banned from going supersonic over land.

NASA seems to think it's possible though. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/downloads/20...

See the pesky thing is that if you actually read the paper you've been linking as opposed to just running with "NASA said it's possible", you'll notice that like I alluded to, at Mach 1.3 (theoretically!) "boomless flight" is much slower than Concorde's Mach 2+ cruise that the company certainly wants you to think of when you do your back-of-the-napkin supersonic flight time savings maths. And that's on top of requiring optimal atmospheric conditions, so not even a guarantee to begin with.

The laws of physics funnily enough are not something you can "move fast and break" or PR-speak your way around.

Yea, but only for speeds up to Mach 1.3… theoretically. Not Mach 2.0 flights. And they only demonstrated the effect up to Mach 1.1.

Saving only one hour on a transcontinental (US) flight doesn’t seem all that impressive.

And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO.

At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.

Yeah, in my opinion the point that "wouldn't it be nice if this was faster?" becomes a real issue is the point that you would feasibly need to get your day's sleep en route with today's airliners, because it's difficult to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch on a flight even with business class conveniences (and that's before getting into the degraded quality of sleep). If I could catch a flight that's fast enough to let me hold off on sleep altogether until I get to my destination, then that's worth paying a premium even for economy seats. Unfortunately, that's also the point that a supersonic airliner becomes unworkable for airlines, because the fuel-to-passenger ratio just stops making sense. You can try to make it work with refuelling stops along the way, but that really eats up the theoretical time savings and adds its own operational overhead too.

I think we need an energy breakthrough with a denser and still cost-effective fuel before really getting into the era of supersonic transport. Maybe at some point someone will dust off the nuclear-powered aircraft designs of yore...

LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's not comparing realistic flight times anyway.

It's for much longer distances.

There are flights between St Petersburg and Moscow. About 10 daily. It's about 1 hour. Together with everything you described, it's more like 4 hours. A high-speed train is also 4 hours. So the only people who choose to fly are those who have a connection or those who couldn't get a train ticket because those are always in high demand.

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