[anon7000]

Not immediately. But small changes add up over a long period. Air travel is currently hard limited by the sound barrier & fuel efficiency. I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel.

Faster travel time makes a lot of places feel much closer together, which I think is generally a good thing.

Supersonic flight is one example, rockets are another. Neither are commercially viable… yet. But people get excited about technology like this because these investments are required for it to be possible in the future.

Saying it’s not a problem worth solving is ridiculous. You’re suggesting that humanity is never and should never get faster at traveling between point A and point B. But many places on the planet are still very far apart.

[Grombobulous]

Given the state of our global climate that it’s orders of magnitude more important to tackle aviations fuel efficiency and emissions than figuring out how to make supersonic travel commercially viable.

You say you can’t easily travel to visit family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel, but that’s not strictly true because red eye flights exist. You can just fly during sleeping time and sleep.

It’s just not really worth it because a subsonic jet is already going so fast. It’s not like the train to plane transition where a 50 hour train ride (California Zephyr) turns into a 5 hour flight.

The longest commercial flight is about 20 hours long. Cutting off half of that, yeah, saving a day for a round trip is nice, but still a very limited benefit by comparison, especially when you consider the sleep schedule. When you remove “time you have to sleep anyway” it makes the time savings less impactful.

And as far as comfort sleeping on a plane…I guarantee you a lie flat seat on a subsonic jet is always going to cost less than an economy seat on a supersonic jet.

[pkulak]

> I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend

And instead of moving or being slightly more careful with your vacation planning, you’re going to do exactly what you want, on the backs of everyone else who has to absorb the negative externalities.

[rjh29]

Isn't it already ridiculous that we can get to the other side of the world in half a day? It used to be straight up impossible, and then it took months by boat. We're now at diminishing returns, saving a couple of hours.

How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?

[Ferret7446]

Imagine if our predecessors thought the same thing when Grug discovered fire and stopped there.

Actually, we don't have to imagine, they got outcompeted and went extinct.

[pkulak]

Careful now, Mr. Goebbels, you're blissfully stomping down a very frought path.

[remh]

Don't want to be a downer and I fly regularly myself, but I think right now Air Travel is limited by 1 thing: the supply of carbon neutral fuel.

A few weeks of war in Iran showed us the impact of reduced availability of oil. The rise in the number of amplitude of climate events show us that a lot of what we do is not sustainable.

[Grombobulous]

Is there a good estimation of how long the world has left of actual commercially viable oil that can be refined into jet fuel?

Even disregarding climate impact (which we shouldn’t) it seems like supersonic flight is just the wrong direction to be going in. If the commercial aviation industry is to survive beyond a century or two they probably need to find a different energy source for planes.

Also, it’s just not like the train to plane transition where passengers experienced 5-10x average speed improvements. The maximum amount of time you can save for a round trip flight is about a day. There’s just a limit to how much value that has. Business travelers can work on the plane, leisure travelers can just take another day off.

I mean, speaking of trains, flights sometimes gave a hard time competing with those, too. There are a lot of situations where going a little slower isn’t a problem.