The small niche of customers willing to pay a significant premium in order to save some travel hours is not big enough to sustain an entire industry of specialized mechanics, parts suppliers, pilots, etc... Basically you need a critical mass of people riding these aircraft every year before the relatively high fixed costs eat you alive, and it's very hard to get a lot of people to buy into a high priced luxury service.

Going from the Concrods 3550nm range to 4250nm should help with that as it opens up several new routes and longer routes see a more significant drop in travel times.

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=KSEA-RJAA&MS=wls&DU=mi&E=60&EV=...

j/k, it stands for "Extended Range Twin Operations"

https://www.caa.co.uk/commercial-industry/aircraft/operation...

https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...

At todays Jet 1 A US fuel price of $3.07 per gallon it would cost $108k to fill the Concord. Which holds 120 passengers. That comes out to a cost of $900 per person passenger on a full fight.

If the cost of fuel were double like a few months ago then that cost would be $1,800 per flight.

Compared to a Boeing 737 which has a fuel cost of ~24k at max capacity of 7,878 gallons at todays prices. A passenger limit of 177 and a fuel cost as low as $136.64 per passenger on a full fight.

Thus fuel while expensive wasn’t a deal killer over most of it’s history as long as they could keep most seats filled.

There was enough demand for one return flight a day carrying a small proportion of the overall passengers on the immensely-popular with wealthy people JFK-LHR and JFK-CDG routes. That wasn't enough to utilise the 14 production aircraft properly, never mind enough demand for it to have been viable as an airframe programme ...

That said, boom is building a significantly smaller aircraft which should again open up more possible routes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

Yes, and this was mostly necessary because of the small unit counts and small number of routes, not because of fuel costs (though the latter certainly did not help.

Both could be significantly better with Boom: more routes, and lower fuel costs.

Currently airline passengers don’t have to pay for their carbon emissions, but I doubt that’s gonna last for much longer (we are in an emergency after all). And I’ve seen elsewhere in this thread that the emissions are likely gonna be somewhere between 5x and 10x of normal sub-sonic flights. The price of this extra carbon emission will probably be something that even affluent passengers will want to skip.

Starting to tax airplane fuel would be an important step towards reducing the CO2 output. Possibly that would trigger a switch to synthetic and carbon neutral fuels.

There will be a global cost scheme for carbon at some point in the future. I hope it will be a simple tax (imposed by each state by some international agreements; although some weird cap-and-trade scheme with limited effect is probably more likely given how governments are behaving) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is mostly in effect by the time Boom plains are in commercial operations.

Whatever the scheme there will probably not be an exception for international flights (I’m guessing countries will be focusing their efforts on exempting their militaries). The thing is that every industry is going to try to get a discount, and that is simply not possible (we are in an emergency after all). So it doesn’t matter if it only shaves of 0.3% of global emissions (which honestly would be a disaster and not acceptable in the long run). What matters is that all industries (except the arms industry; lets be realistic here) will have to suffer equally for their sustained pollution.

Subsonic flight has become much more efficient, cheaper and when paying for higher class, more comfortable. This is one of the reasons often mentioned for the economic demise of the concorde. The audience willing to pay $6000 on a concorde ticket, could now spend $4000 on first class subsonic with a seat that fully reclines into a bed. They can fly a little longer at night but sleep the whole journey.

Wendover did a good economic analysis of the concorde: https://youtu.be/n1QEj09Pe6k

At least.

Even if you think price is a barrier, think about how many more millionaires and billionaires there are in America and Europe today than there were just 20 years ago.

Tack on our society's rediscovered fascination with conspicuous consumption ("influencers"), and I don't think filling seats will be the problem today that it once was.

Plus, it's just f*cking exhausting to fly 10-18 hours, so people may well be willing to spend more on those extra-long-haul flights just to spare their mind and body. I don't believe any commercial supersonic jets were even able to fly trans-Pacific in the past, and ties between those regions were a tiny fraction of what they are today anyway. Faster trans-Pacific transport simply seems inevitable.

I flew 2,000 miles between the Midwest and the west coast last week. $109 each way, with checked baggage, booked three weeks out.

I like Utah, but let's not pretend that your flight (or mine) is representative of anything.

We are talking about a plane that will burn much more fuel (which they claim will be carbon neutral) and fly a fraction of the passengers per trip, on routes that are already very competitive. 100 USD will only be a heavily subsidized fare at best. In reality the cost per route will much more likely be far higher.

Who in their right mind wants to spend top dollar to fly internationally on an American airline, worst of all AA, one of the two worst airlines on the planet?

Anyone with some money who wants a nice international flight is going to take one of the Asian or Middle Eastern airlines, not one of the shitty American-run airlines. The level of service is so far superior it's not even funny. AA is infamous for their horrible service in First Class.

I know I would pay a premium for this experience. Simply because it fits into my imagined jet set lifestyle phenomenally well. Maybe once every two years for a special occasion or treat ;)

I also think the economically limiting term is still the turbine blades. Lifetimes for commercial service turbines run 100k+ hours. Supersonic is maybe 1/10 that. And have higher rates of oxidation, cavitation, catastrophic fatigue, etc. We need a new Alphafold! For phase stability of alloys exhibiting high strain resistance at high temps and fast cycles...

But will the range be there? Concorde was severely range limited, which somewhat defeats the purpose of faster travel (if it only works on medium length routes).

Cutting a 14hr SYD-SFO flight down to 8.5hrs is just more impactful than cutting a 7h LHR-JFK flight down to 4.2 (when taking into consideration significant time at the airfields for taxi, boarding, security checks etc)

Concorde didn't have the range for long haul and once you need to land to refuel you lose all time savings.