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> 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. |