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by mshook 1396 days ago
Still, flying westbound fast makes tons of sense as you can arrive "before" you took off (local time) and thus you get a whole day in front of you.

But eastbound makes a lot less sense, unless you're just trying to save time. Because flying at night eastbound won't make you gain much compared to a regular red eye and flying during the day, you'll land at night...
1 comments
FredPret 1396 days ago
It always makes a lot of sense - time saved is time saved.

Flying east fast after a day of meetings means you get in bed on time.

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theYipster 1396 days ago
No it doesn't. You are forgetting timezones.

The above poster is correct - supersonics are suboptimal for eastbound, especially when you consider they can only be used at speed over the ocean.

A super sonic flight that leaves JFK at 6PM arrives at 2AM in LHR after 3 hours of flying plus a 5 hour time zone change.

It's much more optimal to take a lie flat seat on a traditional aircraft, get a decent nights sleep on the flight, land at 7AM, shower at the lounge, and charge forth with the day.

My view is that the lie flat bed is really what made supersonic obsolete, and I see Boom as largely a folly.

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dfadsadsf 1395 days ago
As somebody who flew quite a few lie-flat business flights on JFK->LON - you absolutely do not get good night sleep. Flight time is 7:30 and you can realistically go to sleep 30 minutes after take off (when they start serving food and other passengers are still noisy - good luck falling asleep quickly) and you are generally woken up about 1-1.5 hour before landing (Why? I have no idea but they turn on the lights, serve breakfast and do announcements about weather in London about that time before landing). So you get at most 5.5h of mediocre quality sleep which is better than nothing but not enough to function 100%.

3 hour flight will change a lot of things for JFK-LON business trips as they open up opportunities to loose only 1 full day during business trip instead of loosing two full days. I generally stay on NYC time with meetings in the afternoon LON time if trip is less than 5 days so short flight is game changer.

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FredPret 1396 days ago
If I’m a jetlagged businessman in NYC, operating on internal London time, and I’m finishing my work day at 6PM local time/11PM internal time, I want to get home and wake up with my family ASAP rather than try and sleep on a plane.

Thank goodness for Zoom

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