The Concorde was also really expensive. I was able to fly on it twice, once each direction, near the end of their operations. I only flew on it because they'd announced they were shutting down and I wanted to fly supersonic before they went out of business. It was very expensive.

I think it was in '03 and the price was just something like $12,000 for the two flights. It was high enough that I put it on a credit card. The prices had a lot of variation and I flew first class but they had a higher class that they called Concorde, as I recall.

Yes, it was a premium product. But if you're a banker/lawyer going between NY and London a lot and your billable rate is $crazy, it's super good value.

I think there is an enormous market for something like Concorde now, much more than there was before. The amount of super rich has increased massively (and each of them have way more money). I think you'd even see executives using it over their own private jets for the speed increase - which means tickets could be crazy expensive, as operating a jet is very pricey.

I suppose it'd depend a bit on if you could get WiFi on it though. Wonder if that is possible at supersonic speeds?

R.E.G. Davies worked out why this isn't as powerful as you think because the earth is round. The justification for that expensive ticket is that you can have your meeting without getting jet-lagged. So, basically, leave your house at a reasonable time, get to a meeting on the other side of the Atlantic at a reasonable time- that's worth an awful lot of money. If you have to fly out the night before anyway, what justifies the extra money versus subsonic transport?

So let's imagine you live in New York and have a meeting in Paris- and let's say, for the purpose of argument, that it's actually a transporter, instantaneous travel from airport to airport. You leave your house at 6AM, get to the airport at 7AM. Its an international flight, so you need to get to the airport early, so your flight leaves at 8AM. You instantaneously arrive in Paris, but that's six hours time zone different: 2PM in Paris. Two hours to navigate through customs and the airport and it's 4PM, an hour to do ground transport to your meeting and it's already 5PM.

So even with exactly zero travel time between JFK->CDG your meeting can't be conducted at normal business times. So if your meeting still requires traveling out the day before and dealing with jet lag and all the rest, there just isn't that much benefit to justify the costs.

It might make sense for a business jet, so long as the costs are really not much more than a GV, or if it's primarily about prestige anyway.

Two hours for customs? If you join the Global Entry Program it only takes a few minutes--you check-in at a kiosk and go to a special lane. Great if you have kids. You also end up enrolled in the Trusted Traveler Program, which puts you in the expedited lane for terminal security.

As for the wait time at the airport: if you're buying premium tickets the airline doesn't care how late you arrive as long as you don't delay the flight. IIRC, at least for domestic travel TSA requires that all checked luggage be presented at least 30 minutes prior to departure, so that's the only hard time limit. Maybe it's earlier for international travel, but for a single day itinerary you presumably wouldn't have any checked luggage.

So far as I know, France has no equivalent of Global Entry. It's also not universal advice, even if you were flying into the US- it's only available to citizens of certain countries. (France is not one of them, though Germany's EasyPass is.)

It would be faster to get through the CDG customs lines if you had a Schengen citizenship, since they could get into the the Schengen lines, but that's not really particularly useful advice.

Yes, but if you are in those jobs then 5pm is a normal meeting time and the folks in the Paris office are going to be there - like it or not.

There are two real reasons this no longer works; first the international travelling class has turned out to be far greedier and care less about their lives than anyone imagined, secondly Skype.

Two points: A) that 5PM was with transporter technology, more realistic numbers push you to starting the meeting at 7PM. B) The reason to do meetings in person versus telepresence is to build relationships in a way that phones just can't do. Starting meetings at 7PM does not improve relationships.

As far as travel versus communications goes, from what I can see improving communications technology places a higher premium on travel than before, not less. Easier for senior executives to stay in touch with HQ on the go, but that ability means that relationship building is now more important.

That's an interesting point. If you're sitting in your office, the ability to hold meetings and communicate isn't really all that different from what it was in 1985. You could email documents, presentations, and have conference calls (at least in many organizations though not all). Today isn't really all that different.

But traveling? In 1985, you could somewhat stay in touch by telephone (but generally not cell phone) though it was easier if you had a dedicated assistant and international long distance was rather variable. And sending documents probably involved faxes. While meetings/flights/time zones mean I may not always be reachable when traveling on business today, it's a lot easier than it was 30 years ago.

The time zones might not be ideal for JFK->CDG/LHR, but it works nicely in the other direction.

If you go fast enough and the other direction, you can land before you departed! Well, at least as far as the clock is concerned.

I'm pretty sure that SpaceX's BFR in earth-to-earth configuration is targeted at the wealthy market you refer to.

On the topic of WiFi, SpaceX is able to return video from the Falcon 9 on ascent and descent in many cases. So even though the very high Doppler and tracking problems involved in wireless communication to a rocket are not trivial, they're already doing it.

> I'm pretty sure that SpaceX's BFR in earth-to-earth configuration is targeted at the wealthy market you refer to

One of the challenges Virgin Galactic ran into in its sales efforts was the high co-incidence between (a) people who can pay for a super-expensive form of transport and (b) people whose Board, limited partnership or employment agreements prohibit them from doing super-risky stuff.

yes its the chargeout rate that makes it cost in, at my first job we considered a charter a plane to take some senior engineers up north for ran on site experiment as our OH rate was 600% the cost of driving vs flying was substantial.

All the gear would have been put in a transit and driven up by one of the technicians

I seem to recall reading about a supersonic business jet being designed by some company or other.

There are several companies working on the idea. There’s been a lot of work done recently on advanced aerodynamic designs that would significantly reduce the sonic boom for a given size of aircraft. On smaller planes this might reduce it to levels that would be considered tolerable over populated areas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_business_jet

Boom [1] has been on a number of HN comments, using a similar NYC <-> London model at a fixed cost.

1: https://boomsupersonic.com/

"Boom" is a terrible name for a company hoping to popularise supersonic transport. The "Boom" is not something they should be drawing attention to!

If they've minimised the boom perhaps it's genius.

I remember reading somewhere that it was the first time humanity had chosen to take a step backwards in terms of transport speed. Definitely seems like there would be a market.

I did the same in '03. BA released some steeply discounted tickets with the end-of-life announcement; I think I paid $3,500 round trip (JFK-LHR leg in coach, my rationale being I could afford one way and London to New York was an hour more time on Concorde).

It was also noisy and cramped. Fantastic though, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and a wonderful thing to have done.

GP was explaining why it was expensive.

So, how much was the experience different from flying subsonic?

Jet engines sound different.

If you felt the window, it was warm to the touch vs. cold on a subsonic. Outside window was much smaller than subsonic.

The sound of the air passing by was closer to a sizzling sound in super cruise vs. what we hear on subsonic.

Take off had a noticeably faster groundspeed before rotation.

60-90 seconds (I forget, depends on airport) after departing the runway, throttles were reduced and you felt the plane slow quickly and the plane's angle of attack was reduced. This was for noise abatement and they explained this prior to takeoff so not as to alarm you. Leaving JFK on 31L included a sharp left bank as soon as wheels up to follow the shoreline and avoid populated areas. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-3003jtuY

After leaving populated area, throttles were pushed to full and climb resumed. If all went according to flight plan, Concorde would be at .95 Mach shortly and get the OK to go supersonic.

Afterburners. You felt them getting turned on to go supersonic. They were turned on in pairs - one on each side. Felt like someone was gently pushing you from behind.

No turbulence - would fly above the weather.

Landing was like being in a recliner. High angle of attach on the approach. Once down on all wheels, NOISE as the reversers kicked in.

The delta wing didn't flex like subsonic wings do, so any bumps during climb or decent felt a bit more sharp (less bouncy/spongy? hard to find the words). Maybe it was just me.

Other than that, it's the same as a regular subsonic.

10/10 would do again. Need time travel.

Thanks!

The service was truly first class, compared to other offerings at the time. It wasn't a very big aircraft and the acceleration wasn't as much as I was hoping for. The booze was free flowing and they happily served me for the whole flight. The announcements were informative and entertaining.

That's pretty much it... I enjoyed it but it wasn't life altering.

Was it worth it? Probably not for most. It was worth it just to have had the experience, in my case. I'd always wanted to go and they were shutting down. So, I went. At the time, I could have spent the money more wisely, but I don't regret it.

Thanks, interesting

Also, they substantially over-estimated the importance of speed over comfort.

Concorde's narrow fuselage made it remarkably cramped and uncomfortable. The galleys were also tiny, precluding the elaborate à la carte dining that is now standard in the front seats of widebody jets.

For the kind of customer that used Concorde, the idea of being pampered in Business or First was often much more attractive than saving a couple of hours.

Today, Concorde would struggle to compete on overall journey time with the A318s flying out of London City Airport. The speed advantage of Concorde would be badly eroded by the Kafkaesque nightmare of travelling via Heathrow.

> For the kind of customer that used Concorde, the idea of being pampered in Business or First was often much more attractive than saving a couple of hours

People vastly underestimate the effect lay-flat travel had on demand for the Concorde.

Consider the time differences between London and New York. An overnight lay-flat loses a traveller little to no daytime. A Concorde, while faster, is less comfortable and leaves and/or arrives at an awkward time for a business traveller.

The major(and I will take the risk and say - only) benefit of the concorde was the amazing ability it gave some people of making a New York<->London return trip in one day. For some businessmen that was absolutely invaluable - they could jump on a plane in the morning, have their meeting in New York, and be back in London late in the evening. No other plane offers that.

Note that this very much only worked one way: Europe to the US, not vice-versa, because of the curvature of the Earth (and even then, better for London versus Paris because of geography). Since the plane needs to be full on all of it's flights to pay it's costs, this was quite the problem and very much a limit on routes that could be profitable.

To be pedantic it's because of the direction of rotation of the earth, rather than its curvature.

Lay-flat came to the game relatively late so I'm not sure about direct impact on the Concorde. But I would agree that looking forward any supersonic commercial aircraft would have to compete with seating in standard widebodies that is very comfortable and food that is pretty decent. A transatlantic flight in first class or even business class takes some time but it's really not uncomfortable. Relatively few people are really in a situation where the few hours in a comfortable plane are worth $$$$.

Yes, longer distance flights are, well, long but then you have a whole other set of engineering challenges to do those routes nonstop supersonic.

> Lay-flat came to the game relatively late so I'm not sure about direct impact on the Concorde

Lay flat preceded the Concorde. More than that, it was caused by it. "In 1977, El Al announced plans to reconfigure its aircraft with a small first class cabin and larger business class cabin on the assumption that most transatlantic first-class passengers would shift their business to the Concorde" [1].

EDIT: This is all wrong.

> Relatively few people are really in a situation where the few hours in a comfortable plane are worth $$$$

Business class is where airlines make the bulk of their profits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_class#History

Business class was not originally lay-flat. What the NYTimes reference used by that Wikipedia article says is that El Al assumed the Concorde would take away most of the real first class flyers and all that they needed was basically something like domestic business class today.

Business class mostly started up as an offering for, well, business travelers who could give the appearance of being frugal relative to first class while still traveling comfortably. What's happened over time is a lot of dedicated first class seating has gone away and business class has been incrementally upgraded to something that's mostly much better than old-fashioned first class ever was.

> Relatively few people are really in a situation where the few hours in a comfortable plane are worth $$$$

Business class is where airlines make the bulk of their profits.

I wasn't clear. Yes. Lots of people will pay extra for business. I was saying I'm not sure how many of those will then spend 2x or more for a bit more speed when they're already comfortable.

ADDED: This article suggests lay-flat came in during the 1990s which sounds about right to me: https://thepointsguy.com/2017/05/evolution-of-business-class... I definitely remember flying business class transatlantic in the early 90s and it wasn't lay-flat.

> Business class was not originally lay-flat

You're 100% correct--my bad.

My dad used to fly back and forth to Europe in first/business a lot. He told me that he once got upgraded to the Concorde and, while it was a neat experience to do once, he actually preferred the experience on what I assume would have been a 747. He was doing longer trips so the fly to London to seal a deal and head back home the next day wasn't his use case.

(And as I recall it got him in at rush hour rather than just having a nice dinner on the plane.)

Kafkaesque nightmare?! I think you must have an easy life if you describe Heathrow in those terms.

Maybe the Concorde would be a better fit for trans-Pacific flights today?

All of the relevant destinations on both sides of the ocean (Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle) are right by the sea, which of course isn't the case for Paris and London where the Concorde flew from.

I'm crossing fingers for Elon Musk and SpaceX rockets.

Sonic booms go parallel to your path, so a vertically moving rocket has a sonic boom that goes parallel to the ground and doesn't bother anyone.

However the big issue with rockets (other than technology which SpaceX thinks that it can handle) is that about 1/3 of people get sick in freefall. (Estimate that I read from the operators of the vomit comet.)

The other problem is that the BFR would carry 10 kt of fuel. Even a very small chance of that much fuel exploding anywhere near a major city is too much risk, so you'd have to put them well away from population centers. So you can tack on a couple hours to the spaceport on each end.

SpaceX's vision was a 30 min ride on a high speed catamaran. Depending on details that probably puts the landing pad something like 15-20 miles out in the ocean.

Do you think that that is unreasonable?

Well, something to consider is that Little Boy (the hiroshima bomb) had a yield of roughly 15kt. Obviously a nuke has different characteristics from a fuel-air explosion, most of which I haven't considered and would not qualified to comment on anyway, but the comparison doesn't make me very comfortable with 15 miles. It probably wouldn't be within the blast radius (depending on how the burning fuel propagated), at least, but the the amount of radiant heat generated would be nothing to sneeze at. I could certainly be overestimating the issue - I'm guessing the rapidity of a nuclear explosion vs. a fuel air explosion affects its pound for pound destructiveness significantly.

Sibling comment has a good point that hyperloop could make spaceports at safe distances more accessible.

Hiroshima was total destruction within 1 mile, the farthest away that glass broke was 12 miles, no damage past that.

So 15 miles is definitely out of the blast radius. What about the fireball?

Google told me the following. 15 miles is roughly 24 km. The mass of air is 1.2 kg per cubic meter. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3. The energy of a kt is about 4.184e9 joules. It takes about 1 joule to increase the temperature of air by 1 C. When I put all of that together I calculate that a 15kt explosion has enough energy to raise the temperature of a 15 mile ball of air by about 0.9 C.

Please double check my figures and calculation, but I think that your average city can survive that. :-)

Ha! Thanks for running through the numbers, very interesting. The air in that 15 mile ball is almost transparent to infrared, though, so I'd probably assume that the surface area of the sphere would receive the lion's share, rather than the volume within it. So the energy delivered should fall off roughly with the square of the radius rather than the cube. Might be enough to give a sunburn, if nothing else.

Edit: On my phone I'm getting ~5.8 joules per square meter. Google seems to be mangling the units, though, so I can't be sure it's not dropping or adding in a factor of 1,000, though.

Edit 2: assuming that figure is correct, unless it's released in <1/200 of a second, it's not competitive with the sun at the equator (>1,000 Watts/Joules per m^2 per second)

I think that there are some decimal places missing. But that said, I'd expect a chemical explosion to deliver itself mostly as a shockwave and a ball of hot gas, with relatively little delivered by light. Because the part exploding is surrounded by smoke and chemicals that absorb light.

Yeah, I was going for worst case assumptions, where all of the energy turned into infrared, which is definitely not going to be the case.

Here's the math, if you want to double check: (10 x 4.184 x (10^9 joules))/(4 x pi x (24000 meters)^2)

Atmosphere is only transparent to infrared in 7-13 mkm window. Yet I expect the fireball to producing heat at above 500 C that gives peak of radiation below 4 mkm.

Thanks, good to know. I was going for worst case calculations, assuming complete transparency. Even that doesn't seem bad.

Lenghty travel to spaceport would tie in nicely with the hyperloop.

Good point, that might make it more feasible. I hope we see some successful deployments.

This is lower, however, when you're strapped into your seat. In the vomit comet, you're free to move about, which drastically increases the likelihood of nausea.

The F9 makes a pretty disgusting triple boom on landing so I can't see the bfr being better in that respect.

Per SpaceX's plans, the landing would be some miles away from people.

A supersonic jet makes a sonic boom on the ground over its whole trajectory. That's what makes it undesirable for overland travel.

What? Surely you mean perpendicular to the path? Or does path mean something different from trajectory..?

I do mean perpendicular, sorry.

I really want it to happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I don’t think Concorde has enough range to be viable for Pacific routes. Maybe a redesigned version with greater range would work well though.

Mid air refueling works well for the air force.

I've heard it's cheaper (whether this is in terms of risk or dollars I don't know) to send up a dedicated tanker to top of a bunch of large planes that took off with little fuel than it is to make a bunch of large planes take off fully loaded with cargo and fuel.

The problem is that's a whole additional, expensive skill your pilots need.

Fuel from a tanker is an order of magnitude more expensive. It’s worthwhile for the military since they sometimes have a hard time stopping for fuel in the middle of a mission, and like using planes that prioritize the ability to kill people over the ability to go far, but I don’t think it would make much sense for airliners.

they also don't have to be profitable...

Air-to-air refuelling would be way, way, way too dangerous for commercial aviation to even consider.

I disagree, the bigger is the plane, the easier is the refueling

Part of that was due to ETOPS regulations which required twin engine planes to always be within a certain range of a ground airport for emergency landings.

A modern Concorde would almost certainly have an ETOPS rating which would allow for trans-Pacific routes, which is where the true time and fuel efficiency is to be found in supersonic flight.

Uh, Concorde was a quadjet? ETOPS didn't apply (and ETOPS didn't exist when Concorde entered operation).

Whoops, you're right, it was a quadjet. My memory screwed up because both engines on each side are so right next to each other, in my memory they fused into a single engine on each side.

Correct, Concorde had a range of 3900nmi (~7200km, ~4500mi).

LA-Tokyo is ~4700nmi (~8200km), and polar route flights are generally used by planes with a range around or above 7000nmi (~13000km) like the Dreamliner or the A350 XWB

It could stop in Hawaii.

Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in one hop.

ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most all air cargo between China and the mainland U.S. passes through Anchorage. The Anchorage FedEx hub is only passed by Hong Kong and Memphis in terms of volume, and the UPS hub is also one of the largest for that company.

That's counterintuitive when you look at a flat map, but not on a globe.

Here's a flat projection of some great circle routes:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN

Note that the shortest path goes a lot closer to Alaska than it does Hawaii.

Reminds me of something the boss of the company operating a former soviet cargo plane demonstrated. They often figured out how to get the plane somewhere by taking a piece of string cut to fit the flight range of the plane, and placing it on top of a globs to look for suitable airports.

Depends on the destination. Try Sydney, for example.

On most (all?) the round-the-world charters that Concorde did, it had two stopovers on every transpacific leg, one in Honolulu and the other variously in Papeete, Guam, or Fiji (and likely elsewhere, I've not looked exhaustively).

That said, the furtherest north any of those charters landed in the far east was Hong Kong.

You'd need a lot more range. The Concorde had a range of about 4500 miles. Even SFO-NRT (Tokyo) is over 5000 miles. And if you have to make a fuel stop--probably in Anchorage--you're really starting to cut into the time advantage.

Seattle is not right by the sea. It's separated from the Pacific Ocean.

The ban was lifted for subsonic travel overland, right?

NASA is working on quieter supersonic flight, which reduces the sonic boom on the ground.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-begins-work-to-build...

Hopefully, we get commercial supersonic flight in some form in the 2020’s.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/news/a28351/supersoni...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/boom-supersonic-jet/

Not yet, I think? There was some discussion in July this year:

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20...

Eventually the bill passed, it has a provision that the FAA should "obtain the input of aerospace industry stakeholders regarding the appropriate regulatory framework and timeline", and report back next year.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2997...

> The ban was lifted for subsonic travel overland, right?

Yes but as scrumper notes that made it inefficient.

You are overlooking the obvious problem. Subsonic planes already existed. Even it it was just as efficient at subsonic speed, I doubt if it was as cost effective as a 737, for example.

The Concorde seated 100 people, in first class. If you can’t fly at supersonic speeds, you aren’t going to spend the extra money.

The problem was also connected to latency vs. bandwidth.

Since the Concorde was a luxury airliner, it couldn't fly as often as a regular airplane.

If you're in London and you find out you need to be in NY right now at all costs, it may be faster to hop on a business jet or even a commercial flight rather than wait for the next Concorde.

And as first class (and business jets) got comfortable, the need to get out of the air ASAP is much less than it used to be.

>In 1976 the US actually banned Concorde due to noise complaints. The ban was lifted in 1977 after changes mentioned above.

US banned concorde because Boeing ordered the government to ban it