[yinyinwu]

The technology around Supersonics has existed for nearly half a century. The Concorde supersonic plane was flown in 1969 - nearly nearly a half century ago. At the time, one of the big cost was gas. Significant improvements has been made to materials to improve gas efficiency for supersonics.

Boom can use the Tesla approach by starting with business class customers to prove the demand then moving down the latter to consumers. Tokyo could be a weekend trip if the flight was five hours.

[notahacker]

The "Tesla approach" doesn't work at all with aerospace: the programme costs are all up front and you want to sell as many units as possible as quickly as possible to recover them, and the major demand all comes from the airlines. Scaling to meet demand is much less of a worry than having a product being in demand.

Business aviation is a less lucrative market than commercial, and business-only commercial flights is a market which has almost completely failed to make any profit. In automotive terms, not only are there are a lot more people buying buses than cars, you also don't make a higher profit on the cars either unless you're the interiors outfitter....

[yinyinwu]

On a commercial plan, business travelers accounts for >70% of an airline's profits. My read on the article is that Boom is targeting the business customers on a commercial flight and faster transit time is one of the biggest wants for business travelers.

[notahacker]

They're a large part of some airlines' profits because there's a small number of people willing to pay silly prices on most routes at most times of day.

That doesn't translate particularly well to less frequent 55 business class seat flights on most of those routes; even if the flights are shorter the arrival times are probably a lot less convenient for most of the executives.

The all-business class model has struggled to be economically viable even on ideal routes like London-NY. Those economy seats give you a lot more flexibility when the business class seats aren't selling.

(And as ghaff pointed out business travellers /= business class; most people travelling on business have an economy ticket sized budget)

[ghaff]

Most business travelers don't actually travel business class. And don't get to pick premium levels of service. And that would be even less the case if those premium levels were at a premium over today's premium levels.

[yinyinwu]

The rate of business travelers who fly business class is not 100%, but it's very high for most airlines.

For US and European carriers, it's around 75%. Since the cost is 4 - 7x higher than commercial, most people aren't paying for this expensive personally. Not sure about other industries, but for consulting and tech, the standard is to allow a business upgrade on international flights and not domestic.

[ghaff]

i can't produce numbers but, anecdotally, the idea that 75% of international business travelers get to fly business seems...unlikely based on the people I know and even assuming my own terms are especially shabby. Very frequent travelers, i.e. greater than my own 75K miles per year or so, do get upgrades from time to time but the I dispute the idea that the typical tech business traveler is usually flying business.

[kevin_thibedeau]

There are enough billionaires in the world to support them if they have a product. Conventional business jets only offer more flexibility with little speed advantage beyond bypassing security.

[notahacker]

The flexibility is worth more than the speed for most flights, and not many of the world's ~2000 billionaires are going to put down a large percentage of their net worth for a fast-depreciating personal transportation device that only becomes worthwhile if they need to leave their continent.

[sseveran]

There is another company working on a slightly supersonic private jet (Mach 1.4).

https://www.aerionsupersonic.com

So there may end up being other options.

[reaperducer]

There's always fractional aircraft ownership. I see ads for it all the time, but I don't know if it's a viable business model.

[notahacker]

Fractional ownership works for the likes of Netjets buying existing aircraft types, but it's another niche-sized market and essentially a way for the superrich to avoid buying aircraft.