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Previous commenter had it right. Supersonic aircraft have terrible lift/drag. This means that they will always burn much more fuel. Since the extra speed is

Previous commenter had it right. Supersonic aircraft have terrible lift/drag. This means that they will always burn much more fuel. Since the extra speed is really only useful for long flights, a supersonic aircraft has to carry a higher fraction of its weight in fuel, further reducing efficiency. This makes supersonic airliners infeasible for the really long routes that they would truly help with. The Concorde only shaved 3.5 hours off the NY-London time, and cost about 8x as much to operate. The extremely high costs then mean that you have to sell what are essentially coach seats at greater than business class prices. There aren't many people willing to pay business class prices, so you can't run the planes very often, and you can only run them between very large, rich cities. Since the whole point of supersonic is speed, you can't effectively sell connecting flights, because if you fly, say, Boston-London through NYC, the direct flight from Boston subsonic will arrive at nearly the same time as the supersonic flight with a connection. This leads to a very small passenger market. It also means that supersonic planes will operate on an infrequent schedule. Many people in a position to pay for a supersonic flight will prefer a subsonic flight that meets their schedule over a supersonic flight that doesn't. With the advent of lie-flat beds, in-flight wifi and power, and higher cabin pressurization, being on an airplane an extra 3.5 hours isn't even so bad anymore, so the practical advantage isn't nearly as great. All of these factors make supersonic a very small niche market. This means that few planes will be produced. High performance aircraft have high development costs, and those need to be amortized over the production run. Concorde was a complete financial disaster because they only produced 14 of them, for all of the reasons above. The only solution is to somehow make the airframe far more efficient.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> With the advent of lie-flat beds, in-flight wifi and power, and higher cabin pressurization, being on an airplane an extra 3.5 hours isn't even so bad anymore, so the practical advantage isn't nearly as great. I think this is huge. From what I read, the cabin of the Concorde was very cramped. I would prefer business class on a 787 or A380 vs being cramped and arriving faster.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  The size of the seats was a little bit worse than what airlines sell today as premium economy. It's interesting to see what Boom is doing here relative to Concorde. They have a similar sized cabin, but they propose to configure it with fewer but larger seats. They will have more efficient engines and a lighter airframe, but the lower efficiency at higher speeds means they can't match subsonic range, so they'll have to make a fuel stop on transpacific flights, which hurts comfort and will cost at least an hour per flight. Economically, transpacific routes may make more sense even with the fuel stop. Concorde probably could have done this too, but Air France and British Airways didn't serve these routes. All of the very long routes they might have used it on crossed Europe and Asia where they couldn't go supersonic.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> With the advent of lie-flat beds, in-flight wifi and power, and higher cabin pressurization, being on an airplane an extra 3.5 hours isn't even so bad anymore, so the practical advantage isn't nearly as great. I think this is huge. From what I read, the cabin of the Concorde was very cramped. I would prefer business class on a 787 or A380 vs being cramped and arriving faster.

cameldrv 7y ago
The size of the seats was a little bit worse than what airlines sell today as premium economy. It's interesting to see what Boom is doing here relative to Concorde. They have a similar sized cabin, but they propose to configure it with fewer but larger seats. They will have more efficient engines and a lighter airframe, but the lower efficiency at higher speeds means they can't match subsonic range, so they'll have to make a fuel stop on transpacific flights, which hurts comfort and will cost at least an hour per flight. Economically, transpacific routes may make more sense even with the fuel stop. Concorde probably could have done this too, but Air France and British Airways didn't serve these routes. All of the very long routes they might have used it on crossed Europe and Asia where they couldn't go supersonic.