Nobody wants to be first in this space. Because of the fuel costs of supersonic travel (the flow is inherently dissipative above Mach 1), the margins are too tight for anything but business class travel. As soon as you have a supersonic option, you've moved business class out of your subsonic fleet, along with that revenue. With the loss of the effective subsidy of business class, coach costs go up, and the market shrinks due to elasticity of demand.
That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.
> That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.
Honestly, I'm not even convinced that bit's true. Copying what others are doing is often the least effective way of competing. If supersonic premium carriers actually start eating into your business class demand, the sensible, conservative response is to refit your existing transatlantic fleet with more economy seats, refocus it on new routes or consider shedding an aircraft or two. You lose a stream of profit and a touch of prestige, but don't gain the problem of having to profitably operate new aircraft specialised for a highly volatile market segment. Especially when it's a new airframe programme from a no-name manufacturer.
To be honest, in a hypothetical and unlikely near future in which business class priced supersonic transport exists, subsonic premium services will happily coexist alongside them due to better start times, destinations and connections, even on the few routes actually suited for supersonic transport. But yes, there might be fewer flights and higher coach class ticket prices on a handful of routes.
For the most part major airlines didn't benefit from trying to cannibalise part of their existing business to copy [reliably profitable] low cost carriers, and they'll do just fine without the riskier option of supersonic medium haul all-premium flights.
I think (and I've spoken with considerably more commercial airline fleet planners than the average person) the sales challenge with this concept is even bigger than the engineering challenge, which is saying something.
One major crash, at an airline with serious maintenance issues. The final cancellation was supposedly on economic grounds but politics factored into it (I have heard it claimed that AF deliberately overstated maintenance costs to prevent BA from continuing to operate Concorde).
There's a lot of scorched earth in supersonics, since Concorde wasn't an economic success and the Boeing SST project was cancelled.
Since then, there has been research on 300 seat Mach 2.4-Mach 3 vehicles, but these are extremely challenging.
To make this happen and happen soon, you have to start much smaller than the established players usually consider. We're at 40 seats—that's the minimum economic size. Supersonics are hard, so it pays to start as small as you can and scale up over time.
I had always thought that the small size of the Concorde was what made the per seat cost so expensive and held the Concorde back economically. So my expectation was that to be economically successful, you'd have to build a supersonic plane that carried more people.
Clearly you know more about this than me, but can you elaborate on why my view isn't correct?
Actually, Concorde was too big: 100 seats. It worked NY/London but at ~$20k/seat they couldn't fill enough seats several times daily on other routes. Which means you can't have many airplanes, which means no economies of scale.
With 40 seats and business class prices, the Boom airplane works on many more routes, which means we can make a lot of airplanes and enjoy economies of scale.
Looking into the future, as fuel efficiency further improves, per seat costs come down, and it will make sense to make ever larger aircraft. It's a virtuous cycle that will eventually allow supersonic flight at economy prices.
Without qualification, I'd assume they were quoting historical prices. It would be pretty confusing to present any kind of adjusted figures without clarifying them.
It looks as if the Concorde was roughly $5K each way (or $10K RT) +/- in today's dollars--although I'm not sure a standard CPI inflation calculator is the best way to look at airline ticket price changes.
Given the existence of business class only BA NY to City of London flights, there probably is a market for expensive supersonic routes, but it's probably still pretty small. International lawyers may value the back and forth in a day, but most people who fly business/first are probably fine with comfortable seating and a nice meal even if it takes a bit longer.
If there are only two equally large competitors left in the market you won't get radical innovation.
Even "conventional" programs like the 787 and the A350 had big problems because they tried out new things. If you screw up a big program, you may loose lot of 50% market share for the next two decades.
That said, if your competitor fields a supersonic option, you have to, too, because you'll just lose business class to your comp, which is worse than losing it to yourself.