Yes, but that's one of the only routes it will fly. With the Concorde, we discovered that flying supersonic jets around population centers is a big deal-breaker because of the supersonic boom.
Given how few of these routes you can actually fly, I expect Boom will come to the same realization that the airline industry did 20+ years ago; you can't make money on supersonic.
- Boom. Boom supposedly targeted a 10x noise reduction for its sonic boom compared to Concorde, but whether or not it can convince the FAA remains to be seen. - Lack of bodies that could reliably fill seats at the ticket prices. Boom is targeting current business class ticket prices, and the plane is half as big as the Concorde; 55 seats is around the size of a current premium class cabin. - The wrong ocean. Flights across the Atlantic are not that long; six hours is a reasonable night's sleep from NY-London. On the other hand, the Pacific is massive; even Seattle-Tokyo is 12 hours. When Concorde was built, Asia wasn't rich and they could only convince Air France and BA to buy them; today JAL is investing in Boom, and there are probably people willing to pay a premium to halve 12+ hour flight times from the West Coast to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590#/media/...
Do you associate DC10's the same way? (The debris were from a DC10).
Apart from being a chain of events vanishingly unlikely to repeat, I doubt all other aircraft would come away from the same scenario fatality free.
Almost every plane out there has had at least one bad accident. And every single time measures are taken so that type of accident doesn't happen again.
Those are basically the four major global economic centers. And among those four, the only link that this service can't provide is Europe <-> East Asia.
Really? Most of those routes are either trans-arctic or trans-Siberian.
Not necessarily.
For example, Southwest Airlines got its start by moving businesspeople around Texas. It only started leaning on tourists later.
It looks like they are hoping to make money by having a more efficient, slightly faster and smaller aircraft than Concorde. It also has more range which they hope will open up transpacific routes which Concorde could not do. Their goal is to make it profitable for airlines to charge about the same as they do for a business class ticket.
They also suggest that their aircraft will make a much smaller sonic boom. Possibly quiet enough to be tolerable over land routes. That would obviously be a huge game changer.
Their still building their technology demonstrator, so I'd take all their claims with a big grain of salt. They want to fly their XB-1 in 2019, so hopefully we'll have a much better idea of how well this work next year.
Do you know a good way to check, for a particular flight route, how much of it would be eligible for supersonic flights?
The only places in between with enough space to get up to supersonic and subsequently drop out in time for population are a few chunks of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Look at a night time satellite picture of the US to see how infeasible flying over most of the eastern US is.
I grew up in fly-over land, and military training flights based out of the Dakotas used to go overhead; we would get the occasional boom.
(Also, once in a while doing my farm-kid chores driving a noisy piece of machinery across a hay field I would get buzzed by a jet sneaking up from behind me flying at a very low altitude. It was always startling because I never heard them coming over the noise of the tractor. I'm sure I made a pretty good surrogate for an enemy tank...)
So for super-sonic flight, that path might be modified to be off-shore enough to keep sonic boom over the ocean, but follow the East coast closely enough that an airport capable of accommodating the plane for an emergency landing is always within a reasonable distance. (Bonus points for being able to fuel up and take off again.) It isn't simply a problem in spherical geometry.