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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

You are missing an important factor in the baseline here, the cost of time.

Right now, a cheap 7 hour each way round trip between NYC and London is ~500$.

Halve it to 3.5 hours each way with a supersonic plane, saving a total of 7 hours.

Now, the real question is then, what's one hour of your time worth to you or whoever is paying for your flight?

If improvements to subsonic aircrafts bring down the price to 200$ instead of $500, people would still be willing to pay 200$ + 7 * $HOURLY for a faster flight.

Even with a low-ish estimate of $HOURLY = 50, it would make sense to take the supersonic fight if the price was $500, which it could conceivably be brought down to, and the market has already validated to be willing to pay.

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That's a reasonable argument for businesspeople, but it doesn't apply for the greater public. Because chances are that except in a minority of situations, they are on holidays and during that saved time they wouldn't be working at all anyways.

People who could perfecty afford a $2,000 plane ticket still fly with $400 ones (as long as they are within reasonable standards), for example because they have a desired budget for a given trip, and the expensive option would blow it away, so they don't mind the extra time.

Even most businesspeople aren't really that hyper-scheduled on trips--especially the ones that can't book whatever class they want.

And to your latter point, I can afford higher-class tickets but it comes back to what I could do with the money instead like a nice dinner. I don't tend to have a budget per se but I do recognize tradeoffs.

Have you ever picked a slightly more expensive nonstop flight instead of one with a layover for a vacation?

This is similar. 3.5 hours vs 7 hours is a pretty good difference.

You can take a 3.5 hours flight in the morning and have energy to see a city the whole day after that. Maybe not after a 7 hour flight unless you are a pretty experienced and motivated traveler who can sleep the entire flight and have the mental energy to enjoy new things after that.

I do actually think you're right, but the counterpoint is that airlines have slowed down all their flights to save money, and no one has come in offering a faster flight in exchange for more money.

Maybe the delta just isn't enough to matter? Or maybe people aren't willing to pay for it.

I’d say the tech isn’t there yet.

Remember we’re still pretty early in the history of aviation.

We know the tech is there. It used to take 45 minutes to fly from LAX to SFO. Now it's 70 minutes. That's not a tech problem, it's a logistics/fuel problem. But if people really valued the difference, they would offer a 45 minute flight for more money.

Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

So why can't I buy a BOS->SFO flight that is one hour shorter for more money? Probably because of a lack of willingness to pay.

> Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

Catching favorable winds and burning more fuel. It is in the airlines best interest to have the plane in position for the next flight, so they will burn the fuel when they need to. However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of problems that means they would make less money than with the current schedule.

> However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of problems that means they would make less money than with the current schedule.

There is always a price where this isn't the case. My overall point is that that price is still too high and people aren't willing to pay, and we don't really know if that's the case (but maybe the airlines probably do).

They aren’t going to make that flight time very often so even if it was offered at a premium, they just could not deliver that product consistently.

That depends entirely on how much "slightly more expensive" is. For the vast majority of the travelling public, they'll choose the cheaper option and we know that because that's what they choose already.

If that was the case, most nonstop flights between non-major cities would not exist at all.

Most major airports are at their physical limit in terms of both airfield and gate traffic and are charging extremely high gate fees. I'm not in airline logistics but I would bet my bottom dollar that is the true constraint in having more traffic fly into hubs.

7 hour to London is actually 10 hours when you factor in the commute to the airport, security, planing, flight, deplaning, shuttle to hotel.

Cutting it to 3.5 hours isn't a 50% overall decrease, because those 3.5 will turn into 6.5 of real time.

So the marginal value of faster flight goes down the shorter the trip is, and these supersonic airplanes can't do the super long Pacific flights because physics.

It's a much smaller niche than is often imagined. But it's still a niche, I guess.

Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.

I think we’ll eventually have some technology to make this realistic.

Supersonic flights powered by jet/rocket engines might not be it for all we know. IMO we are still pretty early in the history of aviation as a technology.

If you are already mentioning rocket propulsion, then you should know that Gwen Shotwell foresees Starship flying E2E (point to point on Earth) flights with paying passengers, competing with airlines. One hour to anywhere on the planet.

Hopefully we discover some sort of gravity physics/tech that makes chemical rockets obsolete!

I don't see Starship being useful for civilian transport use cases, but for military operations sure! But there's not much to distinguish a starship from a nuke launch during a war, so it remains to be seen whether that risk is worth it.

> One hour to anywhere on the planet.

Anywhere they can take off from, which is a decent distance from a population center. The last (forty?) mile problem bites again.

I can imagine Starship landing on a sea launchpad (in coastal cities), and the last 30 miles can be taken by a speedboat in half an hour. The sea usually isn't as traffic-jammed as land communications, and boats, unlike high-speed trains, don't require that much infrastructure.

Which is nonsense. Not only will rockets never have airplane reliability and safety for basic physics reasons, but that rocket profile looks exactly like an ICBM and nobody wants to let that confusion happen.

Airplane flight trajectories look exactly like a V1 missile, and even modern tomahawks could be made to fly such a profile. Or it could be a subsonic B-1B instead of a Boeing 747. Solutions to IFF have decades of development.

Also, the same plane can now make twice as many revenue flights.

Business passengers aren't out here paying for their own tickets. Their employers are paying for those tickets, so the question is whether or not companies care about the time their salaried employees spend in the air, when those employees can be just as productive on the business-class wifi.

Assuming they're even micro-managing employee productivity to the degree that they really care about working on a plane. Personally, I never purchased plane wi-fi even when I could have expensed it.

Most employers book the most convenient flight for their employees, and not really care much but saving a few hundred dollars.

With Starlink and better wifi, the time on board can also be used better. So if you end up on the internet answering mails and so on, you can do that on the plain or in the hotel-room.

the argument breaks down when the cost of these flights will be at minimum in the range of $10000

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unrealistic expectations or double decker economy where you can't even sit down. I believe that overvalue their time - there's a lot of things you can do during flights including sleeping and SpaceX providing near gigabit of Ethernet over the Atlantic further reduces the need for these solutions. VR is also being heavily used to review designs 'in person', anyone that genuinely needs to be at the right place at the right time probably has a private jet already.

I might be an outlier as someone who is never in a rush to live their life.

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