They are making air travel more efficient. More time efficient. That's great for everyone flying, but also great for airlines. The last three flights I've been on arrived significantly ahead of schedule and were going much faster than usual. I assume this was to get the pilot to the location ASAP so they can fly again sooner.
Also how do you not see supersonic flight as just generally good for everyone flying? I want to sit in a plane for less time, always.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a coast to coast flight, at least 30-40% of the flight time is spent getting to the airport earlier to de-risk the TSA line, or standing in the TSA line. Or, going outside to hail a cab to the airport, sitting in airport traffic, and driving to and from the airport.
For a 5h flight from LAX -> JFK, approx 3-5 hours is spent doing these things.
So, to shorten the 8-10h of an LA to NYC trip, the easiest possible thing to do is... build a f%@#$ train.
I was with you until the last sentence. Your train trip that crosses two continental divides is still going to take you more than a day. Even a "spare no expense" rail project isn't going to make that cross-country trip palatable for most travelers.
It might be palatable if it's quite a bit less expensive, which could be the case if we start passing externalized costs (e.g. offsetting the impacts of carbon emissions, pollution, noise, etc.) down to the consumers who use these services.
It is a slow subway train that requires transfers at Jamaica to the airtrain and then an internal airport people mover. Some people need multiple transfers from
WTC/Penn/14th street are centrally connected stations that should have a direct connection to JFK.
Run an express A-C-E train from central-park, 34th, 14th, WTC, Atlantic, Jamaica, JFK. It should not be that hard. While we are at it, run an express downtown manhattan to Newark train/BRT too. LaGuardia is....hopeless.
The upstream comment ambiguously suggested a train as a solution to an 8-10 hour door to door LA to NYC travel time. Either that means connecting the airport to the city by rail or the cities themselves. Sub-8-hour LA to NYC by train is beyond any currently known technology. JFK is already connected to NYC’s subway by rail.
Sorry I meant that you can use rail to get to and from JFK to the parts of New York served by the subway.
If the claim was to build a sub-8-hour LA to NYC train that’s obviously not going to work because of physics. If the claim was we need rail to LAX and JFK that’s silly because both are already served by rail.
Most of Europe doesn't even check if you have a ticket before boarding a train. Some countries check tickets at the station, but I have never been checked for anything else. And there have definitely been incidents.
The Eurotunnel is kind of special because it is an especially long undersea tunnel. It is very much the exception, you won’t see that for any other trains in the UK or France, high speed or otherwise.
Honestly, with Pre-Check, I haven't had a security check be a major issue in years and years anyway. I still tend to get there early though because--who knows what could happen? I certainly cut things a lot closer with early morning Amtrak departures than the airport.
A myth created because Concord came to market before the American SST. Sonic booms are not the epic thunder crashes of Hollywood fame. The Concorde going by at altitude wouldn't be any louder than a truck engine braking on a nearby highway for a second or two.
Not even remotely correct. They flew supersonic aircraft over Oklhahoma City a thousand times and basically drove the city insane and had to cut testing short when it was obviously untenable to regularly Sonic Boom half a million people for commercial aviation, let alone every large city in America.
If I'm doing my calculations correct, their targeted sound pressure levels of 50-100 pascal is equivalent to 127-133 decibels, which is over the threshold of discomfort for most, and getting close to the threshold of pain.
My childhood home was in the flight path for NASA when they were given the Blackbird after it's official retirement. We also routinely had fire-retardant bombers flying eye level close enough you could read the tail numbers off with a naked eye (we were on the side of a mountain, bombers flew down the valley).
Point is: the Blackbird, flying at altitude, sounded like a tree fell on the house . Big crash/thud suddenly. The bombers, though loud, were a steady build up until they passed, then quietly faded away. The Blackbird, I literally remember leaving the house to make sure there wasn't a hole in the wall or roof.
Blackbird was a beast, literally the fastest plane out there and it never really slowed down. Compare shuttle, which came in much faster but few ever complained about its boom.
This seems bit excessive, Concorde booms were purportedly about 105-110 dB on the ground when cruising at altitude (around 60 000 ft).
I've personally only experienced sonic booms from MiG-21s. They are not painfully loud, but surely startling. They are very deep and make the windows rattle.
Many municipalities have laws against engine breaking because of how much noise pollution it causes, so I don't think your example works they way you expect. Especially considering this would cause that noise pollution for 10s of millions of people.
It's no myth. I'm old enough to remember sonic booms as a regular occurrence. We were used to them but they were definitely louder than a jake brake and they disturbed a much larger area.
In principle, yes? I also want to sit/lay more comfortably. I also want to pay less money. In general, halving my in-air time is honestly not worth a lot.
> In general, halving my in-air time is honestly not worth a lot.
It's a huge enabler - right now, flying to see my family in Brazil is a huge PITA - two airports and 12+ hours in the air. It's less horrid in business class, but still something I tend not to do more than once a year.
If I had a 5-hour direct flight, it'd be a no-brainer.
Maybe I'm just more accustomed to long flights, but a 12-hour non-stop flight in business class if I'm not really thinking about the cost much just isn't a material inhibitor for me. (And whether there are non-stop flights is a separate issue.) Certainly shaving off 6 hours of flight time wouldn't really affect my calculus much, if at all.
When scheduled commercial flights arrive ahead of time it's because ground delays were less than average and/or winds were favorable. Airlines don't control those factors and don't really account for them in crew scheduling. They can sometimes cruise at slightly higher speeds to make up a bit of time when running behind schedule, but this comes at the cost of higher fuel burn and can only save a few minutes at most.
Also how do you not see supersonic flight as just generally good for everyone flying? I want to sit in a plane for less time, always.