2 ms·

I was fortunate to travel in one of these, back in 1996 - London to New York. (BA was offering some sweet deals to staff at partner airlines, at about 10% of r

by Jedd 2y ago

I was fortunate to travel in one of these, back in 1996 - London to New York. (BA was offering some sweet deals to staff at partner airlines, at about 10% of retail pricing.) At the time there was no expectation that we'd regress, though had I been more generally aware I'd have noticed the lack of next-gen SST R&D during Concorde's operational lifetime. I recall they flew one out to Sydney Australia in the mid 1980's, but I think appetite was quite low, probably from both regulators and small market size -- despite the obvious appeal (it's about 24h flight time still in conventional commercial passenger jets, to get to the antipodes).

donavanm 2y ago
I believe Qantas will be offering Sydney to London direct on a newer A350 variant latter this year. Should be about 20hrs direct. Travel to europe is a bit of a pain in that layovers and scheduling can easily blow it out to 30+ hours today, especially if going to a secondary market in europe. It makes the ~14 hours overnight to the US west coast seem very reasonable in comparison.
- Jedd 2y ago
  That route's been touted for a while - and having done the SYD-LHR trip quite a few times, I'm not 100% confident it'd be a significant QoL improvement (except for business travellers). Pricing will be interesting to watch, in any case. As you note, a lot of the time cost is incurred for the 'last mile' part of that trip, so apart from the (tourist / comfort) benefits of splitting flights of that length, I could see it being much less appealing for travellers bouncing through London to get elsewhere into the continent.