To be honest I thought Boom was an investor scam. I didn't think they would get this far. I still don't think they are going to build full scale production models and actually sell them, but I'll give them points for keeping it going. Moller kept his Aircar prototypes going for decades too though.
Let's assume we have a plane capable of Mach 3+: the SR-71 holds a record for flying from NYC to London in 1h54 and it could do well over Mach 3. Let's assume our plane can do the same in 2 hours.
If you take off from NYC at 10am, you will land at 5pm local time in London. Sure it's a lot faster than a regular flight but you didn't gain as much as flying west bound.
With the same 2 hour flight (because when you fly that high, wind doesn't make such a big difference), you could leave London at 10am and land in NYC at 7am local time, that's so much better.
But that's for a plane doing Mach 3+. Boom is planning to fly slower than Concorde (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.02).
Concorde did that in 3 hours FYI.
Me. Time is time. A lay-flat seat intercontinental is already $10+ k within weeks of departure, point to point. Not having to plan around sleeping on the plane or whatnot makes international trips feel domestic.
Plenty of people do for comfort. And these seats don’t look horrendous.
The # of passengers on the plane is small so that could also speed up many aspects.
The main problems were that the requirement to only fly supersonic over water massively limited the possible routes it could fly, and that actually flying in a Concorde was not very comfortable (cramped, tiny windows, hot, vibration etc). Boom promises to tackle both of these, which will open it up to far more routes.
It doesn’t take 2 hours to go through security , certainly not in the first class section in any case.
The line at security is typically 0-20 minutes. Add in walking time, and I'm getting from car to gate in 10-30 minutes.
But I still feel like I need to get to the airport at least 90 minutes, if not 2 hours early, just in case I end up flying on a day where 1 of the 2 security checkpoints is entirely closed and every traveler is now forced to go through a single checkpoint and it's going to take over an hour.
Now consider what's changed: Back when Concorde was new, airline security was perfunctory and brief, so the time spent in the airport was a fraction of total travel time. Today that represents potentially 2+ hours of your travel time that can't be omitted. For much of Concorde's life the modern internet wasn't a thing, or at least mature; every business traveler didn't have the ability to have a conference call IN MID FLIGHT. Today that's routine.
So what's the hurry exactly? Sure some people might have a need or desire, but the planned jet holds 64 people who are going to have to pay through the nose to make it profitable for an airline. Who are these people who wouldn't rather take a sleeping pill or futz around on their laptop instead?
tl;dr Supersonic civil aviation is an ECONOMIC problem, not a technological one, and the economics haven't changed.