Concorde wasn't transformational for business at a time when executives couldn't work and videoconference from anywhere in the world and stay connected to the workplace for the majority of their flight duration.

The realistic potential of an operationally-expensive medium range aircraft designed for scheduled passenger flights isn't going to radically change trucks, trains and Zoom. Or business jets, for people that care enough about time to pay for it in thousand dollar multiples. Even for the small fraction who can actually afford it, a supersonic airliner is still going to have range constraints eliminating the possibility of quickly crossing the world, and for the transatlantic hops it might manage, it's the 8am JFK-LHR flight competing with a business jet at a time and origin/destination airports of the executives' choosing...

(for related reasons, I'd actually be more bullish about the economic case for supersonic bizjets, but there have been quite a lot of projects studying that market that haven't got anywhere...)

The supersonic biz jet fails because they all need longer runways. The biz jet wants to land at smaller private airports to avoid the hassle (security) of large airports. Any supersonic biz jet capable of also landing on a short runway ends up looking more like a fighter jet with some extra seats.

The Concorde wound up spending a lot of time at sub-sonic speeds, but really I think if we look to the future of air travel we can imagine surpassing supersonic speeds as well. There are already companies working on hypersonic (Mach 5+) designs with an eye towards consumer applications; obviously rich consumers to start, but that's how it often goes.

Those are some truly societally transformative speeds. You can go from the west coast of the US to Paris in less than 2 hours.

But we can't get to that without iterative improvement.

I believe the cultural integration aspects of cheap, fast, and effortless passenger transportation cannot be overstated. I'd like to see more and more people traveling to places they wouldn't travel otherwise.

It's easier to dehumanise the people you don't know, and much harder to do that when you have been with them.

The time spent in flight is not the limiting factor on globe-spanning tourism. Traveling is massively expensive (not just the cost of transportation, but also lodging, food, and itinerary), and if this just makes it more expensive, then it doesn't help in that regard.

There is a point a quantitative change becomes qualitative. Shaving 10 hours off a 20 hour flight makes it much more palatable. Shaving 19 hours (suborbital? hypersonic?) makes it a no-brainer.

Yeah, but Zoom (and its analogues) exist. Crossing the world doesn't take days OR hours; you can have a meeting with someone halfway around the world right now. I genuinely don't see an economic need for very many people to cross intercontinental distances that quickly in this day and age. How often does an executive actually need to go from New York to London? Or LA to Shanghai? We already ask "could this meeting have been an email?" Well, companies looking to save money should also be asking "could this intercontinental business trip have been a Zoom call?" Otherwise, it's just businesses subsidizing their executives' luxury travel expenses.

The existence of business class flights proves this wrong. You are probably right the relative demand for face-to-face has gone down since Concorde but the world has also gotten bigger and richer since. I suspect absolute demand is higher, particularly if they can deliver their promise of business-class prices (versus Concorde's, inflation-adjusted $20k).

> The existence of business class flights proves this wrong

I don't see how it does. Wanting a more comfortable experience than being crammed into a narrow seat for hours when travel/physical presence is actually necessary doesn't somehow translate into necessary travel being underserved.

(Specifying necessary travel because that's the GP's point - just because there are people who want to take 10 minute hops between neighbouring cities or to fly out for meetings that could have been conducted perfectly well over a call doesn't mean that the world should cater to their whims.)