Out of the 55 people on that plane how many actually need to save 50% of the flight time if they're already flying business or first?
Would this development not be better put towards smaller and faster planes rather than trying to transport ~55 people at a time? Make a small passenger jet that can do New York to London in 3 hours and it could possibly be profitable as a niche private jet not unlike Gulf/Lear/etc...
Growing up seeing the Concorde land and take off I would love to be on a supersonic flight at some point in my life.
The price point listed in the article is about $5000 for what's normally a 6+ hour flight. That much private jet time ranges for $15K-$50K, so it's a fundamentally different market.
I'd be similarly skeptical if it was just for consumer vacations, but there are a lot of business travelers who need to attend short meetings in faraway locations. My wife has 3 cross-country business trips scheduled this month alone, each of which is only for 1-2 days worth of meetings but takes about 4 days including travel time. In one case, she has a meeting in San Francisco in the morning and a dinner in NYC in the evening, and her employer's flying her out the day before so she can call into the SF meeting from NYC and still attend the NYC dinner, because it's physically impossible to make both of them.
It'll probably be a while before any SST is certified to travel over land, but the demand is there. I could see this being very handy for business travelers who regularly need to do NYC <-> London or SF <-> Tokyo <-> Shanghai.
Would this development not be better put towards smaller and faster planes rather than trying to transport ~55 people at a time? Make a small passenger jet that can do New York to London in 3 hours and it could possibly be profitable as a niche private jet not unlike Gulf/Lear/etc...
Growing up seeing the Concorde land and take off I would love to be on a supersonic flight at some point in my life.