Dude, Where's My Supersonic Jet?

It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is "good enough" if not perfect.

Estimate 4k for one-way biz ticket and 500 for economy, then that's about 240k from the front and 145k from the back. Actually, I'd expect them to optimize based on space, so if 40% of the plane is biz, then 40% of revenue should come from biz. Perhaps the most profitable routes with this config are 60% revenue from biz; other routes might be more like 2.5k-3k one-way biz.

You will probably end up with 5 or 6 tiers of service instead:

Supersonic: Business + First

Subsonic: Economy + Eco+ + Business + First

Supersonic First will be a Veblen good that has a high price floor (like $30k). Business for time sensitive business passengers, and it's actually an Economy Plus seat for ~$15k.

It's very hard to resist marketing some service differences, particularly when you have two classes of users with different needs (speed vs. prestige).

Reminds me of that description of the Tu-144 as "so loud you couldn't hear the person next to you screaming".

I would assume the extra weight would make it not really worth the added cost and complexity.

Very inefficient but good for safety: if an engine is failing, you hopefully might discover that while taxiing rather than when you are in the death zone 25 meters up in the air.

https://www.safran-group.com/videos/e-taxi-safran-unveils-it...

Likewise for every fit 20-something being launched at Mach 5 you'd have 10 octogenarians dying of cardiovascular complications.

However I turn that idea, no matter from which point I'm looking at it, I'm not seeing it going anywhere.

It's much longer than the equivalent flight, but also much more comfortable. There's something annoying about airports - with the train I can get to the station 15-20 minutes before departure and it's fine.

Once the train rides get much longer than 12 hours it shifts, but there's a sweet spot right around there.

There are these really fast trains that exist in a dozen countries.

China has 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.

At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.

- < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some errands;

- 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper;

- 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back overnight or next morning;

- > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip.

(There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people perceived travel in historical times.)

As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However, going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy to pay premium for.

So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't.

This is also why it's the business customers that are always the target for such ideas - regular people are much more price sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might actually be worth it for a large company.

Let's settle down. This kind of biz class experience is almost certainly unique to international travel. Flying "business class" from ATL to SFO might get you a plate of microwave slop and an extra 15deg of incline on almost all domestic jets. Once in a blue moon you'll get a modern plane with the diagonal seats. One less person in the row, though.

Paying for business class domestically is almost always a sham by my experience.

Getting through the airport is just a huge pain in the ass though. At least some airports now let you keep your shoes on again, hopefully soon we'll have scanners that don't need you to remove electronics (I tend to bring too much of this and it's always a pain), or even let you keep liquids again (!).

Lay-flat chairs and business class are nice and a massive upgrade for long flights but better than being off the plane? Nope.

> restaurant quality

The food is mid-tier at best, I would not return to a restaurant that served food like what they serve in business class. It's only amazing when compared to the alternatives and the fact you get treated like half a human for a minute.

> full recline

Ehh, I find them claustrophobic and they only really "lay flat" if you aren't 6'+. They are approximately 1 billion times better than normal airplane chairs but you are still in an airplane.

My main point is that all time is not created equal, that it matters WHERE you shave the minutes/hours off, not just what percent of overall travel time is removed. And while we disagree on how to apply this, we seem to agree on that main point.

Always my smoothest airport experience by far. No checked bag, Clear + Pre Check, fill your water bottle after security, get a coffee at Ritual, buy a banh mi for the plane, use a pretty clean bathroom, sit in one of those swivel chairs, get on the plane.

This is such an exaggeration. Usually it's like 3-5 minutes.

(There is even a big aircraft company named "Air Bus", or something, did you hear about them?)

My last trip was on Hainan, which didn’t over fly Russia.

This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere.

I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded.

At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.