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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

The world's fastest plane was built before we landed on the moon. We're spoiled in tech by Moore's Law but the difficultly in making advances in commercial and military aviation is disappointing. In the 1970's everyone probably though NY to London in 2 hours was a given by now.

Here's a great book to read about the SR-71.

http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...

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In aviation there is also a law of diminishing returns because there are certain parts of the flight profile that are flown well below maximum speed. Even if you could do Mach 20 at altitude, you're still going to spend about 30-40 minutes between climbout (keep it under 250 below 10k!), descent, pattern entry, and approach.

A seismologist tracked the sonic booms of the new Aurora spy plane at mach 5.2.

A pretty slick hack as I've ever seen.

> In the 1970's everyone probably though NY to London in 2 hours was a given by now.

https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2

To be fair, a lot of the "We're too cheap to fly >Mach 1" comes down to the fact that door-to-door travel time doesn't really come down commensurate with the increased costs of faster-than-sound travel.

When the airport is outside town, and you have to arrive 1.5 hours before the flight takes off, taking even a large % of the flight time off doesn't make a significant dent in total travel time.

I think that for any travel there is some critical time when it doesn't matter how long it is as long it is < 24h and more than a long commute. You are wasting a whole day for that leg of the trip anyway no matter if the flight is 4 or 10 hours. So why waste money.

There is a big difference between a 4 and 10 hour flight. For a 4 day weekend, I wouldn't take a 10hr trip but 4 is doable. Of course, I live 20 minutes from an international airport.

It makes some difference but I agree with your basic point. Especially as you have to add 2 hours or so buffer for check-in, security, etc.--especially for an international flight.

And if you're looking for more generalized "reduced pain of travel," the reality is that really comfortable seating arrangements and decent food/drink can be delivered on a sub-sonic widebody for a lot less $$ than it would cost you to travel the route on a hypothetical supersonic passenger jet.

Transpacific is probably where the difference would matter the most, assuming the supersonic jet had that kind of range (which is sort of doubtful). But it's worth noting that, even with today's jets, some really long haul routes that would significantly cut travel time for some don't make economic sense and have been eliminated (e.g. New York-Singapore).

I'm from melbourne, australia, where its ~15 hours to LAX, or ~24 hrs to LHR. I'll take that large % off flight time please :)

Would you pay 25x an economy ticket for it?

It's probably not quite that bad although, given the plane doesn't exist, we're speaking in hypotheticals anyway. As I recall, the Concorde was something like 30% more than a first class ticket. It's hard to imagine such a thing being built in the foreseeable future unless there are radical breakthroughs that totally change air travel economics.

As I said elsewhere on the thread, for most people under most circumstances, the main thing is the overall travel experience rather than the number of hours. I don't find flying business transpacific all that unpleasant--just boring. And the first class setups for some of the Asian etc. carriers who have 3-class configurations look pretty amazing though I've never experienced them first-hand. The technology and capability exists to make long-haul air travel almost arbitrarily comfortable (and connected). It's just a case of how much money a large enough segment of travelers are will to pay.

An international first class ticket is often 15-20x that of an economy ticket. So give your 30%, then 20-25x is spot on.

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