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by JoshTriplett 3739 days ago
Obviously, shortening an international flight provides the highest value for your first major route. How well can this scale down to domestic flights? Turning a 3-4 hour flight into a 60-90 minute flight, or a 90 minute flight into a 30 minute flight, appeals quite a bit.

EDIT: your answer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330935 applies here.

Do you have concrete plans to change those regulations? Do you have solutions for the problems addressed by those regulations (e.g. noise)? Will this scale down well if you have to reach a certain altitude first?

2 comments

Supersonics help most on long international flights. So that's the first focus. San Francisco - Los Angeles, so much time is spent on takeoff and landing that faster cruise doesn't help much. Hyperloop, self driving cars can help with these shorter trips.

As far as regulations, our first aircraft is much quieter than Concorde, and it will get quieter with future iterations. Altitude helps, but quieting the boom is mostly about nuances of aircraft shape.

Eventually, when you can get from San Fran to Tokyo faster than San Fran to New York, the rules will get updated.

> a 90 minute flight into a 30 minute flight, appeals quite a bit.

It does appeal, but then you have to factor in the travel to and from the airports on both ends, and various additional inherent delays.