12 ms·

Given that supersonic travel has zero effect on time spent in the airport - which is a large fraction of travel time when flying domestically - I just don't thi

Given that supersonic travel has zero effect on time spent in the airport - which is a large fraction of travel time when flying domestically - I just don't think that the cost/benefit math comes even close to working out for most people. Especially for the famously cost-conscious airline industry [0]. If the premise of this article were true, then lifting the ban would be a major legislative priority for the airlines and likely already be lifted. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=7E-c6ni5MfYC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=Bob%20Crandall%20olive%20story&source=bl&ots=Say2jSbu--&sig=4xhyzJFpGt6fbW-ZenVJHRqM5_s&hl=en&ei=tgNXTpC6E4fC0AHQnISQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7E-c6ni5MfYC&pg=PA107&lpg=...

barney54 10y ago
With coast-to-coast travel, time spent in the airport is a much lower fraction of travel time. That's why the coast-to-coast flights make sense for supersonic travel. We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try.
- fisherjeff 10y ago
  Coast-to-coast is definitely the best case scenario. I recently flew SEA->ATL, and it took 4.5 hours at mach ~0.7. So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total. Even ignoring differences in sub/supersonic flight (i.e., being unrealistically conservative), doubling my cruise speed to mach 1.5 would've increased fuel consumption by 4x while bringing my total travel time down to around 4 hours. So it'd be (probably significantly more than) 4x the cost just to reduce my travel time by 30%. Again, that's for the "best case" of coast-to-coast travel.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total. How'd you manage to spend (average) only 45 minutes in the airport on each end? Even pre-TSA, I never managed to go from front door to jetway that fast.
    - fisherjeff 10y ago
      TSA Pre-Check plus no checked bags feels like some sort of travel revolution
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Probably not to people who remember travelling before 9/11 (and probably even less to people who remember travelling before the security measures implemented during the 1990 gulf crisis that continued until superceded by post-9/11 security.)
        schoen 10y ago
        You used to be able to go through without showing any documents, and so friends and family members could come through security to meet arriving passengers at the gate (or say goodbye to departing passengers at the gate!). One time as a non-passenger I went through security at BDL two or three times either because of confusion about where to meet someone or just in order to buy food on the other side. The security guards didn't seem to think this was improper.
        Kadin 10y ago
        I remember early-90s BDL also. The security guards were pretty relaxed. We enlisted their help in faking out a younger sibling who didn't know we were going to Disney World; they played along that we were just going to meet someone at the gate, and let someone else take all the bags through ahead of us. Wouldn't be remotely possible now. Then again, I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit, either before takeoff or while cruising. Air travel used to be almost fun.
        eric_h 10y ago
        When I was a kid air travel was great fun! I got to visit the cockpit in every plane we flew in, including the Concorde. As a curious child, this was absolutely wonderful. Ah well, it seems that those days will never return.
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- lujim 10y ago
  I think cost/benefit is pretty well known. Getting empirical data though flight testing is definitely a large portion of building full performance numbers for the manual, but Boeing and Airbus has some solid expectations on performance numbers before the first rivet is ever put into place. I don't believe there are any real big "wait and see" mysteries on supersonic cost/performance.
- tn13 10y ago
  > We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try. That is true. If someone had told me about Uber 15 years ago I would have called that person mad. I never thought it was even possible to run a taxi company bypassing all the taxi regulations in place. But having said that what really matters is the marginal value of time during coast to coast flight. At the moment it takes me on an average 10 hours to travel from SF to NY including the time spending in planning, traveling to airport, NSA bullshit etc. 4 hours is the actual flight time. If it is reduced to 2 hours I don't really benefit much. I still have to spend 8 hours.
lujim 10y ago
That's an excellent point. For the price of a ticket on a supersonic transport you could probably charter a Falcon 900, Citation 10, or Gulfstream 4 to get you there much more comfortably and reliably albeit a bit slower. I would be willing to be home to hotel door times would be comparable.
- notahacker 10y ago
  Home to hotel doors would be better for most, since you'd leave when you wanted and not when the not particularly regular scheduled service was due to depart. On board internet connectivity has also made the idea that waking hours spent in a first class seat must be "wasted" seem rather archaic
  - njloof 10y ago
    Not to mention that small regional airports can often be significantly closer to your destination. General aviation for the masses would be a game-changer.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    >On board internet connectivity has also made the idea that waking hours spent in a first class seat must be "wasted" I actually find long flights are a good time to catch up on things that don't require me to be online. (Whether work-related or not.)
melling 10y ago
Who said we were talking about domestic flights? This is a common problem on HN. Someone always tries to cherry pick the use case no one is talking about then create an endless pointless conversation. There's a lot of international travel from the US: http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html Now LAX to Europe becomes easier. NYC to Asia gets much better.
- fisherjeff 10y ago
  The article's about the FAA ban on supersonic travel over the US - there is currently no ban on transoceanic flights.
  - melling 10y ago
    Please read what I wrote again. I said nothing about flying from NYC to Europe or LAX to Asia. The point is that you can fly supersonic from NYC to Asia and from LAX to Europe. NYC and LA are huge markets, and probably where you'd expect a lot of people willing to pay the extra cost of supersonic flight. NYC to London wasn't enough of a savings with the Concorde for many people. NYC to Tokyo/Shanghai/Beijing/Sydney/Singapore/Seoul/Mumbai would probably have more value, for example. Also, LAX to London or Paris is about 10.5 hours. I'd think a market that cuts that to under 5 hours would exist.
    - fisherjeff 10y ago
      Ah, I apologize - I definitely did swap NYC and LAX when reading your comment.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      Pretty much the only land a great circle JFK-NRT flight passes over is northern Ontario, Nunavut/NWT/Yukon, a little bit of Alaska, and Kamchatka. A great circle JFK-TPE changes that to Quebec, Nunavut, far-east Sibera, and Manchuria. (Of course, planes would take different routes for reasons like 'weather patterns' and 'restricted airspaces' and similar.) So basically my point is this: the FAA has no jurisdiction over the vast majority of those routes.
nnain 10y ago
Time spent at the airport can be more productive though - catch up a few emails/tasks, walk around, shop etc. It's the long sitting flight hours, with constant interruptions that are very irritating.
- mark-r 10y ago
  If it's time spent waiting in a security line, you can't do any of those things.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  If I'm flying long distance it's already a day where I'm not going to get anything else done. Might as well chill out at the airport with a book and the free drinks in the lounge.
nnain 10y ago
Time spent at the airport can be more productive though - catch up a few emails/tasks, walk around, shop etc. It's the long sitting flight hours, with constant interruptions that are very irritating.
davidw 10y ago
"Is it worth it?" is the kind of question markets are particularly adept at solving, if we let them.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  I lived under concord fought path and the double sonic boom was very annoying.
  - davidw 10y ago
    One way that you can deal with an 'externality' like this is to internalize it: rather than an outright ban, have the airline pay some money to those affected. Maybe that makes it too expensive to be worthwhile, maybe not, but at least it's no longer impossible.
    - dalke 10y ago
      That's a fake sort of internalization because you can't really establish a fair compensation. For example, if I have a recording studio under the flight path, do I get more compensation in order to add sound-proofing? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/preserving-silence-in-national-parks-6611918/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/preserving-sile... describes "a Natural Sounds Program .. with the aim of protecting and promoting the appreciation of park soundscapes." > In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which have a major naval air station to the west and a large military air training space to the east, park officials take military commanders on a five-day "Wilderness Orientation Overflight Pack Trip" to demonstrate the effects of military jet noise on visitor experience in the parks. Before the program started in the mid-1990s, rangers reported as many as 100 prohibited "low flier" incidents involving military jets every year. Now the number of planes flying less than 3000 feet above the ground surface is a fourth to a fifth of that. Complaints are taken seriously, especially when, as has happened more than once, they're radioed in by irate military commanders riding on jet-spooked pack horses on narrow mountain trails. In that context, human cursing is generally regarded as a natural sound. How do you charge for that?
tedmiston 10y ago
True, but there are plenty of travel hacks to throw at this problem. To start, the amount of time spent in airport varies highly by city and airport. There's room to optimize that time — Global Entry / NEXUS and TSA Precheck for example. Taking one of the first flights in the morning or last flights at night can also significantly reduce it. Public charter / executive airports are another. One example is Ultimate Air Shuttle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Air_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Air_Shuttle). > Ultimate Air Shuttle offers various benefits to passengers that some other airlines do not. These services include no baggage fees, no cancellation fees, and the ability to arrive at the airport 15 minutes before scheduled departures. I'm not saying charter is available and accessible for every route, but there are lots of options out there.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Start with chartered flights?
epicaricacy 10y ago
New York JFK to Tokyo is 14 hours on a Boeing 777-300ER. JFK to Taipei is 16 hours. Those would be the perfect niche for a supersonic flight.

barney54 10y ago

With coast-to-coast travel, time spent in the airport is a much lower fraction of travel time. That's why the coast-to-coast flights make sense for supersonic travel. We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try.

fisherjeff 10y ago
Coast-to-coast is definitely the best case scenario. I recently flew SEA->ATL, and it took 4.5 hours at mach ~0.7. So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total. Even ignoring differences in sub/supersonic flight (i.e., being unrealistically conservative), doubling my cruise speed to mach 1.5 would've increased fuel consumption by 4x while bringing my total travel time down to around 4 hours. So it'd be (probably significantly more than) 4x the cost just to reduce my travel time by 30%. Again, that's for the "best case" of coast-to-coast travel.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total. How'd you manage to spend (average) only 45 minutes in the airport on each end? Even pre-TSA, I never managed to go from front door to jetway that fast.
  - fisherjeff 10y ago
    TSA Pre-Check plus no checked bags feels like some sort of travel revolution
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Probably not to people who remember travelling before 9/11 (and probably even less to people who remember travelling before the security measures implemented during the 1990 gulf crisis that continued until superceded by post-9/11 security.)
      - schoen 10y ago
        You used to be able to go through without showing any documents, and so friends and family members could come through security to meet arriving passengers at the gate (or say goodbye to departing passengers at the gate!). One time as a non-passenger I went through security at BDL two or three times either because of confusion about where to meet someone or just in order to buy food on the other side. The security guards didn't seem to think this was improper.
        Kadin 10y ago
        I remember early-90s BDL also. The security guards were pretty relaxed. We enlisted their help in faking out a younger sibling who didn't know we were going to Disney World; they played along that we were just going to meet someone at the gate, and let someone else take all the bags through ahead of us. Wouldn't be remotely possible now. Then again, I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit, either before takeoff or while cruising. Air travel used to be almost fun.
        eric_h 10y ago
        When I was a kid air travel was great fun! I got to visit the cockpit in every plane we flew in, including the Concorde. As a curious child, this was absolutely wonderful. Ah well, it seems that those days will never return.
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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lujim 10y ago
I think cost/benefit is pretty well known. Getting empirical data though flight testing is definitely a large portion of building full performance numbers for the manual, but Boeing and Airbus has some solid expectations on performance numbers before the first rivet is ever put into place. I don't believe there are any real big "wait and see" mysteries on supersonic cost/performance.
tn13 10y ago
> We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try. That is true. If someone had told me about Uber 15 years ago I would have called that person mad. I never thought it was even possible to run a taxi company bypassing all the taxi regulations in place. But having said that what really matters is the marginal value of time during coast to coast flight. At the moment it takes me on an average 10 hours to travel from SF to NY including the time spending in planning, traveling to airport, NSA bullshit etc. 4 hours is the actual flight time. If it is reduced to 2 hours I don't really benefit much. I still have to spend 8 hours.

lujim 10y ago

That's an excellent point. For the price of a ticket on a supersonic transport you could probably charter a Falcon 900, Citation 10, or Gulfstream 4 to get you there much more comfortably and reliably albeit a bit slower. I would be willing to be home to hotel door times would be comparable.

notahacker 10y ago
Home to hotel doors would be better for most, since you'd leave when you wanted and not when the not particularly regular scheduled service was due to depart. On board internet connectivity has also made the idea that waking hours spent in a first class seat must be "wasted" seem rather archaic
- njloof 10y ago
  Not to mention that small regional airports can often be significantly closer to your destination. General aviation for the masses would be a game-changer.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >On board internet connectivity has also made the idea that waking hours spent in a first class seat must be "wasted" I actually find long flights are a good time to catch up on things that don't require me to be online. (Whether work-related or not.)

melling 10y ago

Who said we were talking about domestic flights? This is a common problem on HN. Someone always tries to cherry pick the use case no one is talking about then create an endless pointless conversation. There's a lot of international travel from the US: http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html Now LAX to Europe becomes easier. NYC to Asia gets much better.

fisherjeff 10y ago
The article's about the FAA ban on supersonic travel over the US - there is currently no ban on transoceanic flights.
- melling 10y ago
  Please read what I wrote again. I said nothing about flying from NYC to Europe or LAX to Asia. The point is that you can fly supersonic from NYC to Asia and from LAX to Europe. NYC and LA are huge markets, and probably where you'd expect a lot of people willing to pay the extra cost of supersonic flight. NYC to London wasn't enough of a savings with the Concorde for many people. NYC to Tokyo/Shanghai/Beijing/Sydney/Singapore/Seoul/Mumbai would probably have more value, for example. Also, LAX to London or Paris is about 10.5 hours. I'd think a market that cuts that to under 5 hours would exist.
  - fisherjeff 10y ago
    Ah, I apologize - I definitely did swap NYC and LAX when reading your comment.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    Pretty much the only land a great circle JFK-NRT flight passes over is northern Ontario, Nunavut/NWT/Yukon, a little bit of Alaska, and Kamchatka. A great circle JFK-TPE changes that to Quebec, Nunavut, far-east Sibera, and Manchuria. (Of course, planes would take different routes for reasons like 'weather patterns' and 'restricted airspaces' and similar.) So basically my point is this: the FAA has no jurisdiction over the vast majority of those routes.

nnain 10y ago

Time spent at the airport can be more productive though - catch up a few emails/tasks, walk around, shop etc. It's the long sitting flight hours, with constant interruptions that are very irritating.

mark-r 10y ago
If it's time spent waiting in a security line, you can't do any of those things.
chrisseaton 10y ago
If I'm flying long distance it's already a day where I'm not going to get anything else done. Might as well chill out at the airport with a book and the free drinks in the lounge.

nnain 10y ago

Time spent at the airport can be more productive though - catch up a few emails/tasks, walk around, shop etc. It's the long sitting flight hours, with constant interruptions that are very irritating.

davidw 10y ago

"Is it worth it?" is the kind of question markets are particularly adept at solving, if we let them.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
I lived under concord fought path and the double sonic boom was very annoying.
- davidw 10y ago
  One way that you can deal with an 'externality' like this is to internalize it: rather than an outright ban, have the airline pay some money to those affected. Maybe that makes it too expensive to be worthwhile, maybe not, but at least it's no longer impossible.
  - dalke 10y ago
    That's a fake sort of internalization because you can't really establish a fair compensation. For example, if I have a recording studio under the flight path, do I get more compensation in order to add sound-proofing? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/preserving-silence-in-national-parks-6611918/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/preserving-sile... describes "a Natural Sounds Program .. with the aim of protecting and promoting the appreciation of park soundscapes." > In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which have a major naval air station to the west and a large military air training space to the east, park officials take military commanders on a five-day "Wilderness Orientation Overflight Pack Trip" to demonstrate the effects of military jet noise on visitor experience in the parks. Before the program started in the mid-1990s, rangers reported as many as 100 prohibited "low flier" incidents involving military jets every year. Now the number of planes flying less than 3000 feet above the ground surface is a fourth to a fifth of that. Complaints are taken seriously, especially when, as has happened more than once, they're radioed in by irate military commanders riding on jet-spooked pack horses on narrow mountain trails. In that context, human cursing is generally regarded as a natural sound. How do you charge for that?

tedmiston 10y ago

True, but there are plenty of travel hacks to throw at this problem. To start, the amount of time spent in airport varies highly by city and airport. There's room to optimize that time — Global Entry / NEXUS and TSA Precheck for example. Taking one of the first flights in the morning or last flights at night can also significantly reduce it. Public charter / executive airports are another. One example is Ultimate Air Shuttle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Air_Shuttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Air_Shuttle). > Ultimate Air Shuttle offers various benefits to passengers that some other airlines do not. These services include no baggage fees, no cancellation fees, and the ability to arrive at the airport 15 minutes before scheduled departures. I'm not saying charter is available and accessible for every route, but there are lots of options out there.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Start with chartered flights?

epicaricacy 10y ago

New York JFK to Tokyo is 14 hours on a Boeing 777-300ER. JFK to Taipei is 16 hours. Those would be the perfect niche for a supersonic flight.