Boom Supersonic hopes to test-fly its supersonic plane in 2021
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Regional jets have been optimized over the better part of a century, are heavily regulated and have heavy competition from incumbent players. Based on the historic gains in commuter flight performance we're likely within 10-20% of the optimum plane configuration for any given market. A new entrant would take ~10 years to bring an aircraft to market, during which time an incumbent could introduce a competing aircraft or simply leverage their existing product lines and sales channels to compete with suboptimal aircraft.
So less wonderful than you'd hope: the Pacific is darned big.
Perhaps the supersonic range issue is just a really tough nut to crack?
Almost certainly.
You're right that trans-Pacific would be more compelling. Even with decent food, nice drink, and lie-flat seating, a trans-Pacific flight is still a long time to stay mostly sitting. (Though airlines could have lounges like the old first class lounge in the hump of 747s; people just don't want to pay for the space.)
Honestly, transatlantic is really not a big deal. Very few people are interested in flying back and forth in a day. And if you're going to stay overnight, NY to London, say, is really not a bad trip in business and you don't even need to do it as a red-eye.
I'd add that, if it weren't already the case relative to when the Concorde flew, I suspect that this period will permanently damp flying across the ocean just to sign a deal or do a quick meet and greet. (Which was certainly part of the market for Concordes).
If the noise issue is solved you could meet private, and high-end commercial flight demands. Where the customer isn't concerned with an order of magnitude increase in flight costs. If you can make a big dent in the former using new materials, improved aerodynamics, or higher altitude flight then there is an opportunity to chase commercial customers.
Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first, and then as economies of scale and efficiency improve, it can become the norm.
There's a reason why the term "jet-setters" came about in the 50s-60s to mean wealthy people. Nowadays flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up.
What?
Jets carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of payload - a 747 can carry nearly 250,000lbs of payload.
Rockets carry payloads in the range of thousands pounds at most. Simply making your rocket bigger isn't an easy solution, and you start burning a ton more fuel for marginal payload gains.
It also doesn't cost $90 Million to fly a 747 every time it takes off...
$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].
Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.
For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".
There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
[2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....
[1]https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-...
For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.
Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.
Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.
It's just not a realistic option.
A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.
The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.
How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?
How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.
The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.
And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?
This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.
That was the theory behind Concorde half a century ago.
Flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up because the industry learned from the lack of demand for Concorde and optimised for fuel efficiency instead of speed
2. But more modern and fuel-efficient
3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s
4. As it's made by an American company, they hope to avoid the US protectionism Concorde was subject to.
It remains to be seen whether post-COVID wealthy travellers will subsidise BOOM development costs as opposed to not flying or continuing with smaller private jets as at present. Although Boom is “designing Overture to be the first post-pandemic airplane", they will need a massive investment to scale from the single-seat prototype (still to fly) to an operationally profitable vehicle.
Concorde failed because there wasn't enough of these people.
Eventually you run out of people willing to pay $10k a seat for this type of travel. Which is what happened to Concorde - after the novelty wore off, all you had was an extremely expensive seat.
I think British Airways could have kept the Concorde flying longer than they did if it were not for this incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
which happened at a lower passenger*mile count than the 737 MAX accidents and would have required a Space Shuttle style shutdown-and-reform phase. Concorde's avionics and cockpit were completely out of date and fixing that would have been expensive.
People sometimes took the Concorde London->NYC to attend meetings and then returned to London the same day. I've done London->Dulles for meetings and then back on a regular boring jet, but it was exhausting and if there had been options to halve that flight time it'd have been fantastic.
At least a couple business class-only airlines didn't last long. The only current route I'm aware of is the BA London City to NYC route. Though there may well be others in the Middle East, etc.
The Concorde demonstrated the failure of the Mach 2 class airliner, not just because of "high fuel consumption" but because it could not do multiple trips across the Atlantic in a day thanks to takeoff and landing restrictions. Originally people thought the SST would crush all other airliners economically because they could fly twice as many flights in the same time ("half the capital cost") but that was not realized. (People in London and NYC have to sleep once in a while)
The Mach 3 class typified by military projects such as the SR-71 and XB-70 might be successful at both problems.
Believe it or not supersonic cruise at Mach 3 is about the optimum fuel economy for supersonic flight and it might be fast enough to do more flights and lower the capital cost.
One gap between the Mach 2 and the Mach 3 classes is that at Mach 3 you have to give up on aluminum as a structural material and switch to Iron, Titanium, or something else. The SR-71 squared some of the design circles by taking off with a minimum fuel load and refueling mid-air -- airliners would have worse problems in terms of wing design.
There is no commercial airliner in the Mach 1 class, the economics are certainly worse than Concorde. The Mach 1 business jet might just work if somebody values the time over the economics.
Also - not sure what you call Mach 1 class but the business jet market has a lot of planes which will cruise at eg Mach 0.93 or so - ie faster than airliners - and speed is valued in that market. If noise issues over land can be navigated successfully then I would expect there is a good market for supersonic business jets.
Surprised no one has made the crossover argument wrt supersonic travel.
I'd be curious what research exists for the viability of Mach 3 and hypersonic commercial aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707
which came across as a bit too ambitious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause
This is why "American Airlines" flights to smaller cities are flown by "Piedmont Airlines" or some other subsidiary. (eg. "United Airlines" runs ads and is concerned about their brand, they get people who work for their subsidiary to actually punch you in the face.)
If a company was trying to get the most of the E195 or A220 they'd probably replace some E145/CRJ200 flights with it and some B737/A320 flights but to do that the conflict between the real airline and the fake airline gets harder to reconcile.
Just as the B787 and B777 replaced the bigger B747 the E195/A220 should have been replacing the 737 in the last decade but the "scope clause" is a brick wall against that.
I can't think of many examples of 737/A320s being replaced by regional jets anywhere, even in countries with no scope clauses?
Southwest is still flying the 737 (they expect to be doing that in 2120) but JetBlue looks like an E series airline today.
One might argue that US labor laws are broken in that they encourage companies to agree to clauses like this, but one might also argue that the airlines blew it and should not have signed the contract.
(It does seem to me that the US has a lot of examples of deeply broken union contracts. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, the US government ought to do about that.)
But I'd also be far more thrilled by a truly next gen regional. Unfortunately the physical barriers for making regional aircraft significantly more economical are actually harder than for throwing more fuel at the problem of going faster. Between supersonic and next gen regional, they are not only taking on the more glamorous problem, it's also the easier one.
There's a lot of room for more efficiency. With carbon wing spars you can have whatever aspect ratio is practical for operations with not much weight penalty. In the last decades, the wind power industry has pushed forward methods for large composite structures mass produced cheaply.
Boom can always pivot. From Concorde came Airbus as well.
End result is that Bombardier suffered a huge loss, had to sell IP to airbus (joint venture deal), prices to end consumer are higher, and aviation manufacturing competition is stiffed.
I am a free-trader, and think all tariffs are bad, but Boeing acted in the spirit of that law.
Bombardier's aspirations were stymied by an incredibly expensive certification process, which they underestimated.
The A220 has something like 600+ firm orders from what I recall. It's going to be hugely profitable and Airbus is basically making all the profits. Was it politically motivated? Why wouldn't Canada want an aerospace sector?
I'm failing to see how this wasn't a sure bet...
Oil and gas, Hydro power in Newfoundland and auto plants all got bailed out.
I'm surprised they would give up support for a cutting edge industry like aerospace. That type of expertise will be almost impossible to rebuild.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-world-bank-... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/3354398/bombardier-trudeau-hammer... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bombardier-what-happ...
>In the late 1950s when supersonic transport (SST) designs were being actively pursued, it was thought that although the boom would be very large, the problems could be avoided by flying higher. This assumption was proven false when the North American XB-70 Valkyrie started flying, and it was found that the boom was a problem even at 70,000 feet (21,000 m). It was during these tests that the N-wave was first characterized.
It is probably part of their "secret sauce".
It was pretty cool because it was close enough to takeoff that you could easily make out the distinct shape of the plane.
I don't recall it being significantly louder than any other aircraft I've been near, but the vast majority of aircraft that were any where close were military aircraft!
So this new product will be limited to the same routes as concorde (plus pacific if they manage extra long haul).
The pressure wave is ultimately caused by displacement because of the volume of the aircraft, lift, and engines. We cannot really get rid of any of these. Given enough time, a strong enough pressure pulse will steepen into the double-shock 'N-wave' (because the pressure signal is N-shaped) the sonic boom.
Sonic boom mitigation then means to prevent the pressure waves from steepening into a boom before it hits the ground, e.g. by a long nose, lift distribution over a large part of the aircraft length, putting the engines on top so that their pressure wave radiates upwards, etc.
And if you have multiple, subsequent shocks (one at the aircraft tip, another at the engine inlet, another at the wing, etc), the later ones will eventually catch up to the first one, resulting in the N wave we would want to avoid.
Our knowledge of transonic aerodynamics and aircraft design have improved considerably sense then and much of the "common" knowledge that sonic booms will shatter windows and disrupt everyday life as a plane flies overhead at cruising altitude are very much outdated.
The problem with Concorde on approach/departure was largely a function of its engines, rather than speed. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1973-07-18/debates/427... shows it was comparable to slightly older aircraft at the time of introduction (VC10, B707, DC8) but notably louder than what was arguably its biggest competitor (747-200). In later years, continued improvements in aircraft noise pollution meant the margin between Concorde and other aircraft operating out of LHR just grew larger and larger.
"According to a 1999 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, introducing 1,000 commercial SSTs more advanced than the Concorde could make the climate impact of airlines balloon by 40 percent by midcentury. That’s on top of the tripling of emissions already expected as more travelers take to the sky."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/opinion/reviving-superson...
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/06/18/187048...
https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/aerion-supersonic...
I fail to see how building yet another luxury transport service will meaningfully help the world compared to tackling some of the bigger problems in energy and environment. Especially since there's no possibility that Boom is more efficient than existing modes of travel.
Perhaps a passenger ICBM? That would really cut down "across-the-planet" travel time down to a total of ~30 minutes. Why not? the Fantastic Four had one in their Manhattan laboratory (https://www.tumblr.com/search/passenger%20icbm#).
You know what you are getting into : bugs.
Kafka.
A fireball is precisely what you want to avoid in spaceships.
Death cigarettes
My understanding of watching VC over the past decade is that it's great for hyper-scaling software companies, tenuous at best for hybrid tech/real world companies, and ruinous for companies that don't enjoy the zero marginal cost benefits of a software company at scale.
If the demonstrator proves itself next year, that's when to expect an exit. I don't see Boom independently competing with either of the mainstream manufacturers here; they're likely only a vehicle for proving that the concept works, and then the whole package — patents, tooling, team, and all — is sold to a firm that can scale it.
Would be interesting to see if any non-commercial firms e.g. Lockheed use Boom as a way to make inroads into the commercial sector, though. My money is on a buy-out in 2021-2022, and for bonus points, I'll include unexpected buyers who want to make inroads in the commercial space, e.g. if Lockheed wants to add commercial airliners to its portfolio and also see whether any of Boom's supersonic tech makes sense in their non-commercial projects or if Rolls Royce wants to transition away from being just an enginemaker (for Boom and others).
If Boeing buys Boom, it's a lost cause and the tech will likely just end up being mothballed by bean counters for being too slow to scale.
Worked just fine with Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, Sun, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Nvidia, Network Appliance, Juniper Networks, Ciena and numerous other prominent tech / real world companies. There is a long list of successful hardware companies that took venture capital spanning many decades.
A certain amount of margin is ideal if you're going to deal with VC, however it's not strictly necessary. You can also compensate with high top line growth and lower margins - Amazon was a low margin retail business for the first 12 years and produced an epic return for its early investors from 1994-2006.
My biggest skepticism about Boom is that I don't see them even talking about this issue much. If they can't get big efficiency improvements I see this being a niche toy for the super rich rather than a mainstream transport option.
I'm not an expert, but I wonder: can you get large efficiency improvements by going to really extreme altitude where the air is thinner? Maybe that's the long term plan. But as far as I know that may require a novel engine design or the adaptation of military engines, and the latter is a minefield if classification and ITAR regulations. Extreme altitude also means you're dead if you get a major hull breach, but the increased risk there may be statistically mitigated by decreased overall flight time... and it's still going to be safer than driving a car.
Apparently re Musk's old Telas that he launched towards Mars:
>It has achieved a fuel economy of 9,886.9 miles per gallon (4,203.4 km/liter, 0.02379 liters/100 km), assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel. https://www.whereisroadster.com/
But it's not on a very popular flight route. Should be kinda near Mars Oct 7th.
There is also less drag, and both lift and drag are calculated using the same formula: Cl * A * .5 * r * V^2
- Cl (Cx for drag, Cz for lift) is a coefficient depending on the wing shape, among other factors
- A is the area (thickness for drag, wing surface for lift)
- r is the air density
- V is velocity
If you divide the air density by 4 by going higher, you get the same lift and drag by going twice as fast. Which is great, and a good reason for fast planes to fly high.
The reason it is so great is that in order to fly level, lift cancel gravity and thrust cancel drag. Because by going higher, we managed to keep the same lift and drag with higher speed, it means we got faster using the same amount of thrust.
There are certainly complications somewhere. For example at supersonic speeds you get shock drag but suffice to say, high altitude is good for speed.
Still there is a good reason why planes don't just get higher to get speed for free. And that's because planes are not rocket powered. Air breathing engines lose efficiency the faster you get, they are also designed to operate at specific speed ranges.
Yep. In fact, this is one of many things that makes the Concorde so special: being able to cruise for a long time at Mach 2+. Supercruise has only come to fighter jets fairly recently, and there it is usually in the Mach 1.4-1.6 range. This means that if the Concorde has even a small head-start, it can outrun most fighter jets that might want to intercept it. The SR-71 could keep it company but is unarmed. Maybe the Mig-31, although its range also diminishes rapidly with increased velocity.
> efficiency is what has kept civilian supersonic flight from being a thing
This was an issue, but less than you might suspect, for example it didn't actually burn that much more than its contemporaries. The planned Concorde B [1] was to have more efficient engines that would have allowed the same performance without afterburners. Along with having larger fuel tanks, this would have led to a dramatic increase in range and therefore in the possible routes.
Alas, the US effectively killed Concorde before that could happen by not allowing overflight, due to noise, particularly the sonic boom, and one suspects also the fact the the US SSTs weren't making much progress. And of course the oil price shock.
Concorde tickets were actually quite a bit cheaper than the public expected, BA (and AF, presumably) later raised prices to match public perception, with a nice boost to profitability.
> extreme altitude where the air is thinner
Jets in general (~35K feet) and Concorde in particular (~60K feet) already do this. IIRC, jet engines are actually not very efficient, but they continue to operate well at high altitudes where the air is so much thinner that the plane becomes more efficient overall, whereas both piston engines and the propellers they drive become significantly less efficient at altitude.
I also can't quite avoid that suspicion. The Concorde was noisy, but not that noisy and Concorde B should be quieter from the aerodynamic improvements.
Perhaps putting the pilots in pressure suits would be sufficient. I think it's a matter of how quickly pilots could descend with the plane, which is probably a complicated question for aviation engineers to solve. This all said, only pilots getting pressure suits probably wouldn't inspire passenger confidence.
You can't just mindlessly descend because that would overstress/overspeed the airframe.
In any event, I think the Concorde proves that operating at that altitude is feasible. It's not like 60,000 feet at supersonic speeds is survivable. The pilots would have minutes to get down before passengers were brain damaged. The chemical oxygen generators giving oxygen to the passengers don't last long, not nearly as long as the oxygen bottles for the pilot/crew, and that's assuming the passengers can get the masks on.
If all the meat sacks pass out, drop out of mach and drop down in altitude, send SOS, find somewhere to land. At this point ground control could start commanding the plane remotely too.
We are not quite ready for pilotless passenger planes, but pilotless as a fallback is viable.
He said it's impossible to commercialize supersonic flight without breaking some laws of physics. I confess to not understanding the reasoning that got him there. It's not a controversial opinion in physics, though.
I suspect Boom may end up being the uBeam of aviation.
Then those "laws" have been duly broken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
"Laws" that can be broken hardly seem to qualify as "laws of physics".
An increase in maintenance costs due to the planes being very old and out of production also doesn't qualify:
British Airways and Air France were able to operate Concorde at a profit, in spite of very high maintenance costs, because the aircraft was able to sustain a high ticket price.
Its estimated operating costs were $3,800 per block hour in 1972, compared to actual 1971 operating costs of $1,835 for a 707 and $3,500 for a 747; for a 3,050 nmi London–New York sector, a 707 cost $13,750 or 3.04c per seat/nmi, a 747 $26,200 or 2.4c per seat/nmi and the Concorde $14,250 or 4.5c per seat/nmi.
So 50% more expensive per seat/mile than a 707 and twice as expensive as a 747.
Part of the calculation is that supersonic flight is so energy-intensive that we'd need a major breakthrough in fuel extraction/storage/efficiency. More fuel weighs more, whether stored as a liquid hydrocarbon or as a battery.
I wouldn't. Some people would, but considering that Spirit is the fastest-growing airline in the US (or was), I think low prices are more important than any other feature of a plane ride.
I think Boom and its competitors are targeting people who would otherwise use a private jet and can afford $30k tickets. If they're targeting typical consumers, I think they're already doomed.
Sure, some people paid for tickets, but it's a stretch to call that 'commercialization' in the context of the impossibility of ever recovering the programme's losses.
There's other factors, but this dominates.
This sounded ludicrous to me, so I tried to check it. Still not entirely convinced.
The closest source I could find was a Vice article [1]:
> A Concorde’s taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737’s flight from London to Amsterdam.
The article links to a now-defunct 2012 story on "scotsman.com", which I found on the Wayback Machine [2]. This story interviews Jim O'Sullivan, the former general manager and chief engineer of British Airways' supersonic fleet, but does not explicitly attribute this taxi fuel consumption claim to him or anyone else.
A simulation-based fuel calculator I found says that the 737-800 would use 94,000 lb of fuel flying LHR-AMS [3]. The Concorde's fuel capacity was 211,000 lb [4].
Could any aviation nerds weigh in on how plausible it is to claim that the Concorde would somehow burn through HALF of its entire fuel load just by taxiing? Maybe "taxiing" here includes takeoff?
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ezz8q7/concorde
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170626124207/http://www.scotsm...
I have seen various proposals for having some form of external taxi for aircraft, but nothing close to being adopted which I have put down to jet fuel still being cheap and the capital & operational costs being quite high for a lot of tractors with qualified drivers.
Check out the Concorde wiki[1] It states ~4.4K lbs for taxi which passes the common sense test. Taxi time is generaly planned as 15 minutes, so ~10K lbs/hr which is more than what a Boeing 767 burns at cruise - quite a lot! For comparison Concorde super sonic cruise fuel burn was 40K-55K lbs/hr.
For another reference Boeing 767s typically plan to burn 2K lbs of fuel for start-up/taxi/takeoff run.
I think it's worth adding, as is reflected by your B767 ground movement figure that all jet engines are very inefficient at low power outputs, not just the Concorde's/supersonic aircraft. This is as a large amount of energy is needed to create sufficient compression to allow them to function.
Finding ways to minimize the amount of time spent in these states has been the industry's approach to date.
I just remembered that this is a great site for Concorde facts http://www.concordesst.com.
Also this OmegaTau podcast episode is pretty fantastic, it's so detailed you could almost jump in a Concorde and fly off after you've listed to it. http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-166-flyin...
Despite having zero bypass the Olympus engines in the Concorde were the most efficient heat engine of their day, achieving 43% efficiency [0]. Their propulsive efficiency was in the 50%s (compared to the 60%s for a B747-100) [1]. Despite this going at supersonic speeds does require an awful lot of energy over subsonic speeds so even with its high efficiencies it burnt a lot more fuel than an equivalent subsonic flight.
Even if Boom could produce the most efficient engines seen, it would still require a lot more energy for the total flight, and therefore would have worse total fuel consumption.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
Makes sense, there's no point going slightly supersonic since you gain only a little speed over high subsonic for a lot of extra trouble.
I guess this is a competitor for a Citation X+ which can reach mach 0.93
In a decade or so Boom might be competing with SpaceX, who are planning on using suborbital versions of their Starship rocket for long distance hypersonic passenger transport. Starship runs on methane, which is the easiest hydrocarbon to generate in a carbon neutral format. Methanation is a leading candidate for carbon capture for carbon intensive industries like cement production.
Also, with the way our culture currently develops, producing tons of excess CO2 for your slightly faster than ordinary business jet or first class business trip might become a very sinful, frowned upon, bad PR thing to do. If anything I see money in making business jets more economical.
Edit: reread the article, I guess it's not 100% clear if they will go that fast but it's doable with existing jet engines of course, separate from new potential efficient engines.
"Why let a handful of people cross the Atlantic in a couple of hours when the jumbo jets (that were developed concurrently) can do the same at far lower cost?"
Why indeed? Maybe because people want it and it's a better idea? That being said, I really hope I get to fly supersonic sometime
There is a cost function associated with time. For most people, there is a threshold after which further gains become insignificant per hour saved, so a Jumbo jet is not much better than a super sonic plane.
But the world has also changed since the Concorde, and maybe now there's a bigger market for people for whom getting something or someone across the Atlantic in a few hours is important: Let's say, for example, that a loved one is severely ill, and you need to get there fast to say your goodbyes.
Concorde was incredibly noisy, unsafe (do the numbers) and only available for a tiny number of elite travelers.
Most of the folks commenting here have never heard Concord take off or land. It rattled the entire city.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-x-59-quiet-superso...
(With some hilariously crazy features: https://www.greenpoint.com/747-8-aerolift/)
They're cracking along.
Odd statement for an otherwise interesting subject. Pretty sure there were many reasons the concorde was retired and political stripes weren’t one of them.
But who knows, if it's cheap and more comfortable than flying, maybe people will see the trip as part of the experience.
Something more akin to a recliner that I could actually sleep in, enough legroom, a place to put a laptop that wasn't hunched over and awkward and maybe enough room to get up and stretch for more than 3-5min at a time.
I don't know if it would be feasible to make a really wide, fat winged lifting body dirigible that you can put a huge amount of solar cells on top of but if you could do that and also make it somehow go ~150mph you're getting pretty close to 1/3 the speed of an airliner with the added advantage that you might not need anywhere near as much fuel.
I go from Texas to Florida semi-regularly There's 2-4 hours of pre and post flying travel and sitting around plus about 2-2.5 hours of travel for a total of 4-6 hours of total travel time. If the flying time went to more like 6 hours and you kept the pre and post travel flying times the same it wouldn't make a huge impact on me. I might actually ask if they could slow the "plane" down so that I could make it an overnighter and hopefully get enough sleep!