[darkteflon]

Cool science. But the article fails to take even a cursory stab at contextualising the plan against the economic, environmental and political backdrop - doesn’t even mention that there’s already been one failed supersonic commercial flight programme. This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.

[hdndjsbbs]

I think a lot of the Concorde failure is tied to its status as a British-French project. Trans-Pacific flights are much longer and there's a lot of money in PEK -> LAX than in JFK -> LHR.

Qantas wanted to offer London to Sydney, but they couldn't fly supersonic over land. Mainland China or Japan to Australia is a feasible route for high-margin, low-capacity supersonic flights.

If you could make the flight from Beijing to California take less than 5 hours that seems like a premium product many ultra wealthy people would spring for. Dubai to SFO is also a possible route.

[vitally3643]

I was pretty sure the whole Concorde thing failed because people don't like it when you sonic boom an entire city dozens of times a day. And that all attempts to reduce the sonic booms necessarily resulted in flight times that aren't significantly faster than traditional subsonic flights, rendering the entire thing moot.

It was impractical due to physics, not some weird racism. You simply can't push a supersonic shockwave over inhabited areas, and the only way to not do that is to fly subsonic over land. Even if the oversea leg is supersonic, the tickets were much more expensive for not very much shorter flights. It wasn't a valuable proposition for most people.

[godelski]

1) The flight markets are different now. There's been a large increase in both transatlantic and transpacific flights, especially the latter. These change the economics of considering only these types of flights, flying only over uninhabited regions.

2) The technology has changed. We're much better at dealing with sonic booms now. You can't get rid of them entirely, but you can reshape them. You can't send everything "up" but the longer of a tail you can make the more the sound dissipates by the time it hits the ground. There's lots of research around this and as you can imagine, incredibly important for the military. You can't fly fast spy aircraft if they are just announcing their position while flying around. Sure, there are satellites, but those are predictable by the enemy, you'll always need aircraft to do this.

[Tuna-Fish]

However, there are markets where you don't have to fly supersonic over land, the distance is long enough for the speed to matter, and there is massive amount of demand. The only problem is, such markets require a longer range than what the Concorde was capable of. Notably, all the very frequently traveled trips over the Pacific.

[gorgoiler]

Concorde’s sonic boom was astonishingly loud. The night flights would go supersonic outside the Bristol Channel at around 9pm to 10pm. It was still audible over 60 miles away and sounded like a muffled barn door slamming outside.

Far louder though — it would wake all the pheasants up just as they’d gone to roost.

[toyg]

England in the '80s didn't give a shit about little people. Had it been really profitable, Concorde would have continued operations. It just did not make sense economically, particularly once they stopped making new airframes.

[KennyBlanken]

It failed because the market dried up due to economic reasons, and they couldn't fill seats.

[decimalenough]

There is a lot of money in NYC-LHR, that's why Concorde continued to fly that route and profitably too, once they realized how high they could yank the prices and still fill the plane.

Also, Concorde's maximum range was 4,488 mi, which was calibrated to allow trans-Atlantic but not much more. Trans-Pac was not an option and even Australia to North Asia would be a stretch.

[bobthepanda]

I think they are agreeing with you re: the range.

There is money in NYC-LHR (it brings BA alone $1B in revenue annually) but the market for supersonic basically vanished. In the 70s when Concorde started flying, it was certainly a step up. However, the market niche basically disappeared when the lie flat seat was developed; for a lot cheaper, you could have a sleep for six hours in a really cushy lie flat, or you could spend a crapton more to be in a much louder, more cramped cabin for only about three hours less. If you were halving a 12-16 hour journey instead, there would still be a market left, but Concorde just didn't have the ability to do so.

[mckn1ght]

You can also essentially work remotely in an airplane now. I haven’t tried videoconferencing, but I easily do all my other software work on trips. So a couple extra hours might even be a benefit: more time with no distractions to wrap up that slide deck, maybe a 1:1 or two, get your free drinks from premium/business class, doze off to a movie, wake up for an early start at your destination.

[XorNot]

12 hours on a plane is 12 hours on a plane. And there's currently no amount of ticket money that can make that shorter.

[fragmede]

Shorter, no, but having a private cabin with a shower, and a lounge with a bartender on the plane, not to mention Starlink, would make those 12 hours a lot more bearable vs 12 in an economy seat.

[wat10000]

Everyone thought SSTs were going to be the next big thing. Both the US and USSR had projects. The 747 got a hump so it could easily be converted to a freighter once it was made obsolete by supersonic passenger planes.

Despite two superpowers making the attempt, and plenty of time for more tries since then, Concorde is the only one that came even remotely close to something commercially viable.

I’m sure there’s a market for California to China in five hours. But is it enough to support a whole new type of aircraft? Fuel burn is going to be enormous. Maintenance on something so cutting edge will be extremely expensive. Tickets would probably cost more than a private room on a widebody.

[stouset]

You’re hinting at another huge part of the issue.

There are no economies of scale to be had here. If there are only a handful of plausible economically-profitable routes, all of the expenditures on R&D, testing, certification, and production facilities can only be amortized across a handful of aircraft.

Once you’ve built a dozen or two of them and a handful of extra engines and spare parts… what then? There’s no point in keeping the production lines open.

From an airline’s perspective, they have to now have an entire separate chain of employees (pilots, mechanics) dedicated to another airframe that barely makes up a fraction of their fleet. That’s a lot of overhead for two or three routes.

Those are some pretty big structural disadvantages that need to be overcome in order to make a boutique supersonic route appealing.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Scheduled service is not viable but there is a bountiful supply of billionaires willing to one up each other with lavish expenditures. Having the fastest class of private jet is worth something to them. This is what's going to be the market for Boom if they don't fold.

[SkyEyedGreyWyrm]

And currently we live in a vastly more unequal world ecomomically than when the Concorde and similar were developed, there is money to throw around

[steveBK123]

One analysis I read by a marketer that makes good sense is that the speed was worth paying for LHR to JFK but not really on the return given the clock changes and speed.

Getting to NYC before the clock time you left London was a cool trick. It allows you to make a morning meeting in NYC without coming in the night before.

But flying subsonic leaving NYC after dinner and arriving in London for breakfast works fine. Getting to London faster in 3.5 hours travel time but 8.5 hours later clock time means losing a day in the air effectively.

[laughing_man]

If it stays in the realm of the ultra wealthy I don't see how it will succeed in the end. Commercial aircraft are really expensive to design and qualify, and you need to have a lot of sales to justify a new model. Ultra wealthy people are willing to pay more, but they also demand luxuries that take up a lot of space.

The only reason Concorde did as well as it did, economically speaking, is the respective governments footed the bill for development.

[throwaway2037]

    > respective governments footed the bill for development

I just looked up development costs on Wiki: "£12–16.7 billion in 2025". Yikes. And "the market forecast was 350 aircraft", but only 20 were built. What a waste.

[laughing_man]

Yeah. But to be fair, it was the first supersonic airliner, so they were feeling around a bit in the dark when it came to estimating demand. They would have all looked like geniuses if enough demand to build 700 air frames had materialized.

I remember when the aircraft first went into service. Everybody thought subsonic air travel, at least over the ocean, would become a thing of the past.

[gottorf]

> Dubai to SFO is also a possible route

Is there really that much premium traffic between Dubai and the Bay Area?

[bobthepanda]

The Middle East (was) a pretty common stopover for India flights, since India's not that well connected to the US due to a lack of capacity.

[hdndjsbbs]

My point is mostly that since the 80s there's a lot more trans-pacific flight from the Middle-east and Far-east to the United States. When the Concorde was developed this wasn't really a worthwhile market to consider for ultra-premium air travel.

I could absolutely see Emirates doing a super-luxury super-sonic flight to the West Coast of the US. Once you're in the States you can take a PJ.

[vidarh]

A couple of searches suggests only Emirates operate a direct route between SFO and Dubain, so it wouldn't seem so.

[rafram]

Emirates just dominates long-haul flights to Dubai overall. Other (mostly flag carrier) airlines handle other airports in the region. Qatar Airways through Doha is also a big player in flights between the US/Europe and Asia.

[WorldPeas]

I think the more interesting question is /will/ there be that much premium traffic ongoing

[fakedang]

Honestly not so much in my experience. It was busy, but mostly because of Emirates longhauls. Dubai to NYC and back is extremely busy though.

[VerifiedReports]

ORD -> Vatican

[KennyBlanken]

It's not tied to anything other than there not being enough people who care enough to spend the sort of money required.

The people who have that kind of money are going to be more interested in flying in a jet share doing mach .96 leaving when they want to leave, going where they want to go, when they want to go, how they want to go, with who they want to go with.

You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking, and meanwhile the ultrawealthy are shuttling around physical assets worth millions of dollars in their private jets and customs barely does more than stamp their passport.

[toyg]

Yeah, this is something that changed from Concorde times (and possibly even sped up its very demise): the market for reliable, high-quality private planes has grown massively. It's now pretty easy to shuttle between the big cities in almost complete privacy through secluded airports.

[toast0]

> You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking,

Enforcement is super uneven, and etc, but IME, they just open your bag, find the thing, and then offer you the choice of tossing it or going back to check your bag. Depending on how much you paid for your shampoo and how much a checked bag would cost you and if you have time to do all that and then wait in line again, I expect most people toss it.

[sfifs]

Concord was very old technology. I am quite sure a clean sheet now

1. Would have much lower sonic booms thanks to recent research (quite a bit of it by NASA on wing geometry) and more importantly computer simulation available now

2. The engines would be far more fuel efficient

3. The flights would be able to have better efficiency in the subsonic regime as well. Just see what winglets and the like have done to fuel economy .

I fly 14 to 18 hour routes maybe 4-5 times a year on business paying 5x the economy cost and it still sucks. Breaking the flight with a connection (IMO) sucks more. My management flies such routes every month. There is a lot of revenue headroom in that fare gap for something that flies maybe 3x-4x as fast which military aircraft already do.

What will hold back the idea is conservatism among the business managers in aircraft manufactures and incumbent airlines who will "draw lessons" from a 50 year old experiment

[trhway]

>2. The engines would be far more fuel efficient

not really. In supersonic regime Concorde engines were pretty good, and you'd not beat them today by much.

Concorde was using afterburners to accelerate to supersonic and this is where it burned a lot of fuel. Designing engines which would give you good thrust at subsonic speeds without afterburners and would still perform well in supersonic is still much unsolved. Just look at the best military engines today - they all under Mach 2 and can't give even 3000 miles range.

And without increasing efficiency we can't really get much beyond the Concorde's 4500 miles. I.e. unfortunately there seems to be no current tech (or coming right tomorrow morning) that will allow Trans-Pacific.

It looks more feasible to me that Starship suborbital SFO-to-Shanghai will come well before a new Concorde on that route. Especially considering that Starship's ballistic trajectory is more fuel efficient on such long distances than supersonic plane flight.

[notahacker]

It'd be far more efficient than the 50 year old tech, but so is the baseline tech they're comparing it with, and the market has optimised heavily for price competition (and has a lot more private jets doing exactly the route and time executives with Concorde money want) and needs speed somewhat less when it's a lot easier to stay in touch with a business whilst inflight. Ultimately there's not much to draw lessons from that suggests it's going to sell enough aircraft to recover the investment of building and certifying it (even comparatively simple niche aircraft like the A380 struggled there), which is why even Boom is now reinventing itself as a provider of turbines for AI datacentres to try to fund its development costs...

[HNisCIS]

Whenever you look at supersonic or hypersonic commercial aircraft plans you should assume one of two things.

A. It's a bait and switch by a founder who wants to pivot to weapons/military aircraft but wants to be able to hire high grade talent without paying the "we're gonna kill people" premium, can pivot once a good chunk of the workforce is complacent with a paycheck. You laugh but this happens SO FUCKING MUCH.

B. It's for business jet scale operations for billionaires. There are >3000 billionaires and however many corporate aviation departments and if you can build a super/hypersonic private jet that's not horribly expensive to operate the "time savings"* for that class of person will demand they buy one.

* when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest

[nradov]

Defense contractors don't pay premium wages. Rather the opposite. Many employees specifically want to work in the field in order to contribute to the national security mission.

[HNisCIS]

I'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues.

That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.

[picture]

From my experience with working for defense/aerospace companies as well as civilian b2b ones in the US, the general situation is that defense/aero companies pay less but demands less of a grind. People usually take the lower pay (usually 70% of equivalent role in commercial sector) for the better culture

[HNisCIS]

For pure generic full-stack-whatever devs yes. For EEs, embedded, FPGA, RF, etc you can pull waaaaay more in the defense world, especially if you're willing to do cleared work.

[nine_k]

But if you need clearance to do your work, how can it be bait-and-switch? You need to hire people who are able and willing to obtain a clearance.

[Seattle3503]

What companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?

[nine_k]

Google tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.

[bigfatkitten]

Google already does national security work.

https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped

https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/releases/2025-12-19/d...

[switchbak]

I’m not in the industry, but I would say Hermeus would be a perfect example. Ostensibly building a commercial airliner, but if you look closely it feels like a military oriented startup from the inside out.

[Onavo]

Can't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.

[HNisCIS]

I can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at.

Places I haven't worked:

Skydio

Applied Intuition

Saildrone

Planet Labs

Boom

Scale AI

Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"

[Grosvenor]

> * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest

And in this case smaller is better?

[rdl]

Vastly more favorable today than it was when Concorde flew.

1) Rich people are WAY richer, and time is even more valuable 2) Businesses have some very important employees and "2 day trip" vs "3-4 day trip" is worth $50-100k 3) Larger population of people able to pay $20-30k for a flight than ever before.

The biggest practical impact is there's probably going to be a private jet version instead of just a commercial one, and there will likely be transpacific demand exceeding transatlantic. Also government/military use.

[deadbabe]

What are some examples of employees so important you would pay $100k to get them somewhere immediately?

[infecto]

You are not thinking high enough the food chain. I mean heck you have tenured SV engineers cracking $1mm with RSUs. It’s not rare in finance for folks to be hitting $3-5mm with bonus. So that’s what $19k comp a day. If that individual is making $5mm they are more than likely making a multiple of that for the organization.

[bobthepanda]

Even these days, a lot of retailers operate fleets of private jets even for district or regional managers, because it saves somebody like Walmart a lot of paid hours to fly someone from rural town A to rural town B rather than potentially deal with the hassle of an overnight booking at an airport hub.

[snicky]

I still don't quite get it given I have never worked high enough or in a big enough corp. What kind of mission a person earning $19k a day have to do at the destination to justify the cost? I imagine to earn this much their main responsibility is to lobby / influence someone important (at dinners, golfing and such). Otherwise, if there are no outsiders involved the whole thing could be just done online. If it's about lobbying though - does it have to be done immediately and 3-4 times a week?

Another example that comes to my mind is a highly skilled expert in repairing some important machinery, e.g. ship engines or factory lines.

[infecto]

Again thinking too small. Large business dealings are still done in person, who is going to give another entity $50mm or more without meeting in person, having dinner and getting to know the counter party. It’s not about lobbying so much as time in person counts.

Who said anything about 3-4 times a week? There are plenty of businesses with high earners where time matters and I could see flights like these being profitable. Boards meet quarterly typically and they are often preferred to have in person.

[deadbabe]

Well yea great but why do they have to be there so quickly that not even a private jet is good enough?

What kind of multi million dollar deal blows up because a dude arrives 18 hours later? And what are they doing when they get there that couldn’t have been done online?

[infecto]

Again, time is money. It’s not about arriving later but the efficiency of time. Many different attributes to consider from sleep, to time optimization or more simply a lot of folks don’t particularly enjoy the long travel and it’s worth the premium. The kind of trips I am thinking about are business related, may only last a day or two with zero buffer before or after.

In business face time still matters. Less than prior to COVID but it still matters. Most boards prefer to meet in person.

[rdl]

If a fund can get into the Anthropic Series A vs. not get into the Anthropic Series A based on a flight to meet with the team, that is worth buying the supersonic plane even if you scrap it after.

[Nesco]

American execs negotiating memory two months ago in Korea?

[amanaplanacanal]

I think the SpaceX plan for point to point travel might be even more pie in the sky. Or maybe a tie.

[jojobas]

Point to point rocket travel was never a good faith pitch, it was a hype thing (and your pension money are going into the fraud soon).

[bob1029]

I think it's more practical. They've already got humans flying.

[Snafuh]

Good luck getting a launch and landing pad anywhere close to a population centre.

Logistics around the flight would be a big asterisk behind the flight time.

[_carbyau_]

> This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.

I saw the "sounding rocket" and thought: Oh, hypersonic missiles money.

[zardo]

Probably because there is no plan to develop a commercial plane.

[godelski]

  > This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.

All your critiques are things we heard about Starlink too. "Oh, you're just reinventing Globalstar[0], which already failed. What makes you think this time will be different?" The question isn't wrong, per say, but most of the time it is used dismissively rather than in earnest. There's thousands of products you use today that were invented and ahead of their time. Hell, Google itself is famous for this. A great example being Google Glasses. When they first came out you could get punched in the face[1], but now there's Meta Glasses, Snap's, and dozens of others. The landscape changes, and fast. Just because others failed before doesn't mean others later won't.

It's not bad to ask these questions, but it is easy to be too dismissive. People love to tear things down, but not build them up. The two go hand in hand, but there needs to be a more measured approach. Frankly, projects can fail for many reasons. Too often it is simply bad luck. You either learn from the past or you repeat it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-glass...

[darkteflon]

I’m in favour of projects like these - even on spending taxpayer money on them. I think it’s super cool and I would love to see it. Yeah, I also think it’s extremely unlikely.

However, when you’re doing journalism, you should contextualise for your readers. TFA doesn’t even try to do the bare minimum.

[godelski]

  > I’m in favour of projects like these - even on spending taxpayer money on them.

Even a few hits is extremely valuable. I mean the US's investments in CERN and ARPA sure lead to way more economic activity and resultant tax money than they ever spent. By many orders of magnitude (I mean the US still is committing like a billion a year, that's nothing in government money. Let alone considering how many multi-trillion dollar companies there are?)

  > However, when you’re doing journalism

Which is why I say the questions are fair and to not use them dismissively. I agree, context matters.

[loeg]

Safety should probably also be considered.