You say you can’t easily travel to visit family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel, but that’s not strictly true because red eye flights exist. You can just fly during sleeping time and sleep.
It’s just not really worth it because a subsonic jet is already going so fast. It’s not like the train to plane transition where a 50 hour train ride (California Zephyr) turns into a 5 hour flight.
The longest commercial flight is about 20 hours long. Cutting off half of that, yeah, saving a day for a round trip is nice, but still a very limited benefit by comparison, especially when you consider the sleep schedule. When you remove “time you have to sleep anyway” it makes the time savings less impactful.
And as far as comfort sleeping on a plane…I guarantee you a lie flat seat on a subsonic jet is always going to cost less than an economy seat on a supersonic jet.
A few weeks of war in Iran showed us the impact of reduced availability of oil. The rise in the number of amplitude of climate events show us that a lot of what we do is not sustainable.
Even disregarding climate impact (which we shouldn’t) it seems like supersonic flight is just the wrong direction to be going in. If the commercial aviation industry is to survive beyond a century or two they probably need to find a different energy source for planes.
Also, it’s just not like the train to plane transition where passengers experienced 5-10x average speed improvements. The maximum amount of time you can save for a round trip flight is about a day. There’s just a limit to how much value that has. Business travelers can work on the plane, leisure travelers can just take another day off.
I mean, speaking of trains, flights sometimes gave a hard time competing with those, too. There are a lot of situations where going a little slower isn’t a problem.
How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?
Actually, we don't have to imagine, they got outcompeted and went extinct.
And instead of moving or being slightly more careful with your vacation planning, you’re going to do exactly what you want, on the backs of everyone else who has to absorb the negative externalities.
Faster travel time makes a lot of places feel much closer together, which I think is generally a good thing.
Supersonic flight is one example, rockets are another. Neither are commercially viable… yet. But people get excited about technology like this because these investments are required for it to be possible in the future.
Saying it’s not a problem worth solving is ridiculous. You’re suggesting that humanity is never and should never get faster at traveling between point A and point B. But many places on the planet are still very far apart.