Cool science. But the article fails to take even a cursory stab at contextualising the plan against the economic, environmental and political backdrop - doesn’t even mention that there’s already been one failed supersonic commercial flight programme. This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.
<p><pre><code> > This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.
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All your critiques are things we heard about Starlink too. "Oh, you're just reinventing Globalstar[0], which already failed. What makes you think this time will be different?" The question isn't wrong, per say, but most of the time it is used dismissively rather than in earnest. There's thousands of products you use today that were invented and ahead of their time. Hell, Google itself is famous for this. A great example being Google Glasses. When they first came out you could get punched in the face[1], but now there's Meta Glasses, Snap's, and dozens of others. The landscape changes, and fast. Just because others failed before doesn't mean others later won't.<p>It's not bad to ask these questions, but it is easy to be too dismissive. People love to tear things down, but not build them up. The two go hand in hand, but there needs to be a more measured approach. Frankly, projects can fail for many reasons. Too often it is simply bad luck. You either learn from the past or you repeat it.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-glass-blamed-for-melee-in-sf-bar/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-glass...</a>
I think a lot of the Concorde failure is tied to its status as a British-French project. Trans-Pacific flights are much longer and there's a lot of money in PEK -> LAX than in JFK -> LHR.<p>Qantas wanted to offer London to Sydney, but they couldn't fly supersonic over land. Mainland China or Japan to Australia is a feasible route for high-margin, low-capacity supersonic flights.<p>If you could make the flight from Beijing to California take less than 5 hours that seems like a premium product many ultra wealthy people would spring for. Dubai to SFO is also a possible route.
I was pretty sure the whole Concorde thing failed because people don't like it when you sonic boom an entire city dozens of times a day. And that all attempts to reduce the sonic booms necessarily resulted in flight times that aren't significantly faster than traditional subsonic flights, rendering the entire thing moot.<p>It was impractical due to physics, not some weird racism. You simply <i>can't</i> push a supersonic shockwave over inhabited areas, and the only way to not do that is to fly subsonic over land. Even if the oversea leg is supersonic, the tickets were much more expensive for not very much shorter flights. It wasn't a valuable proposition for most people.
However, there are markets where you don't have to fly supersonic over land, the distance is long enough for the speed to matter, and there is massive amount of demand. The only problem is, such markets require a longer range than what the Concorde was capable of. Notably, all the very frequently traveled trips over the Pacific.
It failed because the market dried up due to economic reasons, and they couldn't fill seats.
There is a lot of money in NYC-LHR, that's why Concorde continued to fly that route and profitably too, once they realized how high they could yank the prices and still fill the plane.<p>Also, Concorde's maximum range was 4,488 mi, which was calibrated to allow trans-Atlantic but not much more. Trans-Pac was not an option and even Australia to North Asia would be a stretch.
I think they are agreeing with you re: the range.<p>There is money in NYC-LHR (it brings BA alone $1B in revenue annually) but the market for supersonic basically vanished. In the 70s when Concorde started flying, it was certainly a step up. However, the market niche basically disappeared when the lie flat seat was developed; for a lot cheaper, you could have a sleep for six hours in a really cushy lie flat, or you could spend a crapton more to be in a much louder, more cramped cabin for only about three hours less. If you were halving a 12-16 hour journey instead, there would still be a market left, but Concorde just didn't have the ability to do so.
You can also essentially work remotely in an airplane now. I haven’t tried videoconferencing, but I easily do all my other software work on trips. So a couple extra hours might even be a benefit: more time with no distractions to wrap up that slide deck, maybe a 1:1 or two, get your free drinks from premium/business class, doze off to a movie, wake up for an early start at your destination.
> Dubai to SFO is also a possible route<p>Is there really that much premium traffic between Dubai and the Bay Area?
The Middle East (was) a pretty common stopover for India flights, since India's not that well connected to the US due to a lack of capacity.
A couple of searches suggests only Emirates operate a direct route between SFO and Dubain, so it wouldn't seem so.
I think the more interesting question is /will/ there be that much premium traffic ongoing
Honestly not so much in my experience. It was busy, but mostly because of Emirates longhauls. Dubai to NYC and back is extremely busy though.
Everyone thought SSTs were going to be the next big thing. Both the US and USSR had projects. The 747 got a hump so it could easily be converted to a freighter once it was made obsolete by supersonic passenger planes.<p>Despite two superpowers making the attempt, and plenty of time for more tries since then, Concorde is the only one that came even remotely close to something commercially viable.<p>I’m sure there’s a market for California to China in five hours. But is it enough to support a whole new type of aircraft? Fuel burn is going to be enormous. Maintenance on something so cutting edge will be extremely expensive. Tickets would probably cost more than a private room on a widebody.
You’re hinting at another huge part of the issue.<p>There are no economies of scale to be had here. If there are only a handful of plausible economically-profitable routes, all of the expenditures on R&D, testing, certification, and production facilities can only be amortized across a handful of aircraft.<p>Once you’ve built a dozen or two of them and a handful of extra engines and spare parts… what then? There’s no point in keeping the production lines open.<p>From an airline’s perspective, they have to now have an entire separate chain of employees (pilots, mechanics) dedicated to another airframe that barely makes up a fraction of their fleet. That’s a lot of overhead for two or three routes.<p>Those are some pretty big structural disadvantages that need to be overcome in order to make a boutique supersonic route appealing.
ORD -> Vatican
It's not tied to anything other than there not being enough people who care enough to spend the sort of money required.<p>The people who have that kind of money are going to be more interested in flying in a jet share doing mach .96 leaving when they want to leave, going where they want to go, when they want to go, how they want to go, with who they want to go with.<p>You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking, and meanwhile the ultrawealthy are shuttling around physical assets worth millions of dollars in their private jets and customs barely does more than stamp their passport.
Yeah, this is something that changed from Concorde times (and possibly even sped up its very demise): the market for reliable, high-quality private planes has grown massively. It's now pretty easy to shuttle between the big cities in almost complete privacy through secluded airports.
I think the SpaceX plan for point to point travel might be even more pie in the sky. Or maybe a tie.
Point to point rocket travel was never a good faith pitch, it was a hype thing (and your pension money are going into the fraud soon).
I think it's more practical. They've already got humans flying.
Vastly more favorable today than it was when Concorde flew.<p>1) Rich people are WAY richer, and time is even more valuable
2) Businesses have some very important employees and "2 day trip" vs "3-4 day trip" is worth $50-100k
3) Larger population of people able to pay $20-30k for a flight than ever before.<p>The biggest practical impact is there's probably going to be a private jet version instead of just a commercial one, and there will likely be transpacific demand exceeding transatlantic. Also government/military use.
Whenever you look at supersonic or hypersonic commercial aircraft plans you should assume one of two things.<p>A. It's a bait and switch by a founder who wants to pivot to weapons/military aircraft but wants to be able to hire high grade talent without paying the "we're gonna kill people" premium, can pivot once a good chunk of the workforce is complacent with a paycheck. You laugh but this happens SO FUCKING MUCH.<p>B. It's for business jet scale operations for billionaires. There are >3000 billionaires and however many corporate aviation departments and if you can build a super/hypersonic private jet that's not <i>horribly</i> expensive to operate the "time savings"* for that class of person will demand they buy one.<p>* when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest
Defense contractors don't pay premium wages. Rather the opposite. Many employees specifically want to work in the field in order to contribute to the national security mission.
I'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues.<p>That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.
From my experience with working for defense/aerospace companies as well as civilian b2b ones in the US, the general situation is that defense/aero companies pay less but demands less of a grind. People usually take the lower pay (usually 70% of equivalent role in commercial sector) for the better culture
For pure generic full-stack-whatever devs yes. For EEs, embedded, FPGA, RF, etc you can pull waaaaay more in the defense world, especially if you're willing to do cleared work.
What companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?
Google tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.
Can't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.
I can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at.<p>Places I haven't worked:<p>Skydio<p>Applied Intuition<p>Saildrone<p>Planet Labs<p>Boom<p>Scale AI<p>Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"
> * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest<p>And in this case smaller is better?
Safety should probably also be considered.