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Comment by hdndjsbbs | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the Concorde failure is tied to its status as a British-French project. Trans-Pacific flights are much longer and there's a lot of money in PEK -> LAX than in JFK -> LHR.

Qantas wanted to offer London to Sydney, but they couldn't fly supersonic over land. Mainland China or Japan to Australia is a feasible route for high-margin, low-capacity supersonic flights.

If you could make the flight from Beijing to California take less than 5 hours that seems like a premium product many ultra wealthy people would spring for. Dubai to SFO is also a possible route.

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I was pretty sure the whole Concorde thing failed because people don't like it when you sonic boom an entire city dozens of times a day. And that all attempts to reduce the sonic booms necessarily resulted in flight times that aren't significantly faster than traditional subsonic flights, rendering the entire thing moot.

It was impractical due to physics, not some weird racism. You simply can't push a supersonic shockwave over inhabited areas, and the only way to not do that is to fly subsonic over land. Even if the oversea leg is supersonic, the tickets were much more expensive for not very much shorter flights. It wasn't a valuable proposition for most people.

It failed because the market dried up due to economic reasons, and they couldn't fill seats.

However, there are markets where you don't have to fly supersonic over land, the distance is long enough for the speed to matter, and there is massive amount of demand. The only problem is, such markets require a longer range than what the Concorde was capable of. Notably, all the very frequently traveled trips over the Pacific.

England in the '80s didn't give a shit about little people. Had it been really profitable, Concorde would have continued operations. It just did not make sense economically, particularly once they stopped making new airframes.

1) The flight markets are different now. There's been a large increase in both transatlantic and transpacific flights, especially the latter. These change the economics of considering only these types of flights, flying only over uninhabited regions.

2) The technology has changed. We're much better at dealing with sonic booms now. You can't get rid of them entirely, but you can reshape them. You can't send everything "up" but the longer of a tail you can make the more the sound dissipates by the time it hits the ground. There's lots of research around this and as you can imagine, incredibly important for the military. You can't fly fast spy aircraft if they are just announcing their position while flying around. Sure, there are satellites, but those are predictable by the enemy, you'll always need aircraft to do this.

Concorde’s sonic boom was astonishingly loud. The night flights would go supersonic outside the Bristol Channel at around 9pm to 10pm. It was still audible over 60 miles away and sounded like a muffled barn door slamming outside.

Far louder though — it would wake all the pheasants up just as they’d gone to roost.

There is a lot of money in NYC-LHR, that's why Concorde continued to fly that route and profitably too, once they realized how high they could yank the prices and still fill the plane.

Also, Concorde's maximum range was 4,488 mi, which was calibrated to allow trans-Atlantic but not much more. Trans-Pac was not an option and even Australia to North Asia would be a stretch.

I think they are agreeing with you re: the range.

There is money in NYC-LHR (it brings BA alone $1B in revenue annually) but the market for supersonic basically vanished. In the 70s when Concorde started flying, it was certainly a step up. However, the market niche basically disappeared when the lie flat seat was developed; for a lot cheaper, you could have a sleep for six hours in a really cushy lie flat, or you could spend a crapton more to be in a much louder, more cramped cabin for only about three hours less. If you were halving a 12-16 hour journey instead, there would still be a market left, but Concorde just didn't have the ability to do so.

You can also essentially work remotely in an airplane now. I haven’t tried videoconferencing, but I easily do all my other software work on trips. So a couple extra hours might even be a benefit: more time with no distractions to wrap up that slide deck, maybe a 1:1 or two, get your free drinks from premium/business class, doze off to a movie, wake up for an early start at your destination.

12 hours on a plane is 12 hours on a plane. And there's currently no amount of ticket money that can make that shorter.

Shorter, no, but having a private cabin with a shower, and a lounge with a bartender on the plane, not to mention Starlink, would make those 12 hours a lot more bearable vs 12 in an economy seat.

Sure, but it would also make it much more expensive than a supersonic flight…

    > having a private cabin with a shower

AFAIK: Showers are only available to first class customers flying via the major Gulf carriers. I checked Google flights for business class and first class tickets between Tokyo and London. Business is about 5,000 USD and first class is about 10,000 USD. Assuming that we are talking about first class here (to satisfy your shower requirement), what kind of developer is hacking code at 10,000 meters in first class... except... hmm... Mitchell Hashimoto?

Wasn’t Concorde like 20-50% more expensive than a normal first class ticket for the same itinerary?

So any hacker considering a SST flight should also be able to afford the first class cabin.

If it ever actually gets off the ground, Boom Supersonic is allegedly targeting a $5000 business class trip for transatlantic.

Mitchell Hashimoto's got tres commas in his bank account and his own jet. He doesn't need to take commerical, or even first class. If we backsolve, say $10,000 is a once a month purchase, and $10,000 for a hotel and you stay a month. Say your other living expenses are $10,000/month, so we're shooting for spending $20,000/month. With the recommended shaving off 3% the nest egg, (20,000 * 12) / 3% gets us $8 million in the bank.

So at $8 million in the bank, you could take a $10,000 plane trip, stay for a month, spend $10,000 on a hotel, take a $10,000 flight back. Still upper end of net worth, but nowhere near Mitchell Hashimoto territory.

Everyone thought SSTs were going to be the next big thing. Both the US and USSR had projects. The 747 got a hump so it could easily be converted to a freighter once it was made obsolete by supersonic passenger planes.

Despite two superpowers making the attempt, and plenty of time for more tries since then, Concorde is the only one that came even remotely close to something commercially viable.

I’m sure there’s a market for California to China in five hours. But is it enough to support a whole new type of aircraft? Fuel burn is going to be enormous. Maintenance on something so cutting edge will be extremely expensive. Tickets would probably cost more than a private room on a widebody.

You’re hinting at another huge part of the issue.

There are no economies of scale to be had here. If there are only a handful of plausible economically-profitable routes, all of the expenditures on R&D, testing, certification, and production facilities can only be amortized across a handful of aircraft.

Once you’ve built a dozen or two of them and a handful of extra engines and spare parts… what then? There’s no point in keeping the production lines open.

From an airline’s perspective, they have to now have an entire separate chain of employees (pilots, mechanics) dedicated to another airframe that barely makes up a fraction of their fleet. That’s a lot of overhead for two or three routes.

Those are some pretty big structural disadvantages that need to be overcome in order to make a boutique supersonic route appealing.

Scheduled service is not viable but there is a bountiful supply of billionaires willing to one up each other with lavish expenditures. Having the fastest class of private jet is worth something to them. This is what's going to be the market for Boom if they don't fold.

And currently we live in a vastly more unequal world ecomomically than when the Concorde and similar were developed, there is money to throw around

One analysis I read by a marketer that makes good sense is that the speed was worth paying for LHR to JFK but not really on the return given the clock changes and speed.

Getting to NYC before the clock time you left London was a cool trick. It allows you to make a morning meeting in NYC without coming in the night before.

But flying subsonic leaving NYC after dinner and arriving in London for breakfast works fine. Getting to London faster in 3.5 hours travel time but 8.5 hours later clock time means losing a day in the air effectively.

If it stays in the realm of the ultra wealthy I don't see how it will succeed in the end. Commercial aircraft are really expensive to design and qualify, and you need to have a lot of sales to justify a new model. Ultra wealthy people are willing to pay more, but they also demand luxuries that take up a lot of space.

The only reason Concorde did as well as it did, economically speaking, is the respective governments footed the bill for development.

    > respective governments footed the bill for development

I just looked up development costs on Wiki: "£12–16.7 billion in 2025". Yikes. And "the market forecast was 350 aircraft", but only 20 were built. What a waste.

Yeah. But to be fair, it was the first supersonic airliner, so they were feeling around a bit in the dark when it came to estimating demand. They would have all looked like geniuses if enough demand to build 700 air frames had materialized.

I remember when the aircraft first went into service. Everybody thought subsonic air travel, at least over the ocean, would become a thing of the past.

> Dubai to SFO is also a possible route

Is there really that much premium traffic between Dubai and the Bay Area?

I think the more interesting question is /will/ there be that much premium traffic ongoing

The Middle East (was) a pretty common stopover for India flights, since India's not that well connected to the US due to a lack of capacity.

Honestly not so much in my experience. It was busy, but mostly because of Emirates longhauls. Dubai to NYC and back is extremely busy though.

A couple of searches suggests only Emirates operate a direct route between SFO and Dubain, so it wouldn't seem so.

Emirates just dominates long-haul flights to Dubai overall. Other (mostly flag carrier) airlines handle other airports in the region. Qatar Airways through Doha is also a big player in flights between the US/Europe and Asia.

My point is mostly that since the 80s there's a lot more trans-pacific flight from the Middle-east and Far-east to the United States. When the Concorde was developed this wasn't really a worthwhile market to consider for ultra-premium air travel.

I could absolutely see Emirates doing a super-luxury super-sonic flight to the West Coast of the US. Once you're in the States you can take a PJ.

ORD -> Vatican

It's not tied to anything other than there not being enough people who care enough to spend the sort of money required.

The people who have that kind of money are going to be more interested in flying in a jet share doing mach .96 leaving when they want to leave, going where they want to go, when they want to go, how they want to go, with who they want to go with.

You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking, and meanwhile the ultrawealthy are shuttling around physical assets worth millions of dollars in their private jets and customs barely does more than stamp their passport.

Yeah, this is something that changed from Concorde times (and possibly even sped up its very demise): the market for reliable, high-quality private planes has grown massively. It's now pretty easy to shuttle between the big cities in almost complete privacy through secluded airports.

> You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking,

Enforcement is super uneven, and etc, but IME, they just open your bag, find the thing, and then offer you the choice of tossing it or going back to check your bag. Depending on how much you paid for your shampoo and how much a checked bag would cost you and if you have time to do all that and then wait in line again, I expect most people toss it.

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