8 ms·

It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and app

It seems like there's not enough interrogation of how much time supersonic could actually save you. 3 hours of flying from LA to Seattle, 2.5 with climb and approach removed. If you cut it in half, 1h15m saved. On the flip side, how long does it take to get to the airport, park, though security, board, deboard, massive buffer time because flights are expensive and you don't know what might delay you, god forbid you have baggage to check and pick up. Flying at twice the speed might reduce the time to fly by less than 20%. Taking small on-demand supersonic flights from regional airports as suggested is definitely not a solution btw, because it's a pipe dream.

melling 9mo ago
He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example? Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?
- pixelesque 9mo ago
  LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's not comparing realistic flight times anyway.
- filleduchaos 9mo ago
  1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time. 2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO. At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.
    - filleduchaos 9mo ago
      Yeah, in my opinion the point that "wouldn't it be nice if this was faster?" becomes a real issue is the point that you would feasibly need to get your day's sleep en route with today's airliners, because it's difficult to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch on a flight even with business class conveniences (and that's before getting into the degraded quality of sleep). If I could catch a flight that's fast enough to let me hold off on sleep altogether until I get to my destination, then that's worth paying a premium even for economy seats. Unfortunately, that's also the point that a supersonic airliner becomes unworkable for airlines, because the fuel-to-passenger ratio just stops making sense. You can try to make it work with refuelling stops along the way, but that really eats up the theoretical time savings and adds its own operational overhead too. I think we need an energy breakthrough with a denser and still cost-effective fuel before really getting into the era of supersonic transport. Maybe at some point someone will dust off the nuclear-powered aircraft designs of yore...
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    RE 1. - the example still stands. Travel time is best understood as falling into buckets. Roughly: - < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some errands; - 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper; - 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back overnight or next morning; - > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip. (There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people perceived travel in historical times.) As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However, going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy to pay premium for. So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't. This is also why it's the business customers that are always the target for such ideas - regular people are much more price sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might actually be worth it for a large company.
    - filleduchaos 9mo ago
      Replying to point 1 (especially with this argument) while completely ignoring point 2 makes very little sense to me.
      - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
        Even with airport overhead, there's plenty of routes a supersonic plane could drop from 4-8h bucket to 2-3h bucket, and that is still something business flyers would pay for.
        filleduchaos 9mo ago
        Like which ones? Bear in mind that despite carefully worded PR, Boom has very much not somehow surmounted the laws of physics to eliminate the sonic boom that caused the Mach 2+ Concorde to be banned from going supersonic over land.
pixl97 9mo ago
No one is flying supersonic over land at least in the US. Going over the oceans is where it would happen.
- nomel 9mo ago
  That's because there was a dumb ban in place, with an executive order [1] and bill that just cleared to lift it [2]. The ban was "dumb" because it's indirect, trying to control loudness by limiting speed, which is an incorrect [3] assumption based on old tech of the time. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/leading-the-world-in-supersonic-flight/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/lead... [2] https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-supersonic-flight-clears-u-s-house-committee https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-supe... [3] https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise
  - seszett 9mo ago
    The ban was specifically to hinder the Concorde, so it made sense to base it on supersonic flight rather than noise in case the Concorde would have managed to mitigate its noise level one way or another.
    - nomel 9mo ago
      Reference? There was an "Anti-Cordorde Project" [1] but its purpose was to ban all supersonic flight, for environmental reasons. Concorde being the only in regular service, thus the targeted name. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project
  - gosub100 9mo ago
    I don't trust it. They will get approval and then when sonic booms disrupt nature from coast to coast they will say "it's just because the weather/it only affects a small number of people/the 3rd party contractor who supplied the data was wrong, they are gone now/the benefits outweigh the downside/think of all the jobs". Basically they'll say anything other than "oopsie we were wrong, no transonic flight for you".
elicash 9mo ago
Being on the actual plane is the most uncomfortable part of the entire experience, for me at least. Others may disagree, but I'd rather cut an hour from the flight than the entire commute/parking/security/airport waiting. (Assuming conditions on the actual plane were the same.)
- anon84873628 9mo ago
  Funny, for me it's the opposite. It's uniquely relaxing to be locked in with nothing but a book or some movies (I purposely avoid connecting to the internet during a flight.) My biggest dilemma is whether to sit in the aisle or window. The former you can get up whenever you want but are bumped by passers by and neighbors exiting the row. Versus being the one doing the disturbing. And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would be priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest discomfort is the dry sinuses. But in getting to/from the plane you are cattle moving through a logistical labyrinth with countless possibilities for something to go wrong.
  - ghaff 9mo ago
    I don't love being on a plane for a very long stretch, even in business class. And IMO food is very mid-tier restaurant. But I don't necessarily disagree with your comment. Even with transport and airport conveniences that a relatively modest amount of money can buy, there's plenty that can go wrong and you can avoid all the other people to only a certain degree.
  - hbosch 9mo ago
    >And if you can afford business class [...] The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! Let's settle down. This kind of biz class experience is almost certainly unique to international travel. Flying "business class" from ATL to SFO might get you a plate of microwave slop and an extra 15deg of incline on almost all domestic jets. Once in a blue moon you'll get a modern plane with the diagonal seats. One less person in the row, though. Paying for business class domestically is almost always a sham by my experience.
seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
Seattle to Beijing is like 12+ hours now that Russian airspace is closed. There is a lot of time to save.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  So save it using a Chinese airline who can fly through Russian airspace?
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    Chinese airlines aren’t allowed to use Russian airspace for any flight to/from the USA approved after 2021 or so, which, because of COVID, is basically most of them. You could maybe fly to Vancouver and get a quicker connection. My last trip was on Hainan, which didn’t over fly Russia.
zamadatix 9mo ago
The one note about Astro Mechanica towards the middle is referring to long haul flights from smaller airfields because they'll have a smaller private jet sized plane. It was not referring to short haul flights, nor was the rest of the article. I don't believe the economics for that will at all work out the way they are pitching, but it has no relation to how much supersonic makes sense for a domestic short haul.
nine_k 9mo ago
LA to Seattle is not worth it. The real gains are in London to NYC, or Tokyo to LA, or maybe Rio de Janeiro to Miami.
- GenerWork 9mo ago
  South America to Miami and vice versa will absolutely be a market for supersonic flight. It may be slow to takeoff (hah), but as soon as the South American elite pick up on it, it'll 100% be utilized to its maximum potential, especially during events like Art Basel.
hermitcrab 9mo ago
I am guessing this is really aimed at the 1%, who don't have to get to the airport 3 hours before a flight. Rory Sutherland commented that, insteading of spending billions on high speed trains, why not spend a few million on making the experience nicer. Better carriages, more staff, nicer stations.
- Schiendelman 9mo ago
  I don't think you have to be a member of the 1% to get to the airport an hour before a flight. Precheck is like $20 per year.
  - JasonADrury 9mo ago
    If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private terminals and have a completely different airport experience while flying commercial. This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere. I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded. At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.
grishka 9mo ago
It's for much longer distances. There are flights between St Petersburg and Moscow. About 10 daily. It's about 1 hour. Together with everything you described, it's more like 4 hours. A high-speed train is also 4 hours. So the only people who choose to fly are those who have a connection or those who couldn't get a train ticket because those are always in high demand.

melling 9mo ago

He used 24 hour LA to Dubai as an example? Why would you pick a 3 hour flight?

pixelesque 9mo ago
LA to Dubai is just over 16 hours flight time, so either way, he's not comparing realistic flight times anyway.
filleduchaos 9mo ago
1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time. 2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO. At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.
  - filleduchaos 9mo ago
    Yeah, in my opinion the point that "wouldn't it be nice if this was faster?" becomes a real issue is the point that you would feasibly need to get your day's sleep en route with today's airliners, because it's difficult to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch on a flight even with business class conveniences (and that's before getting into the degraded quality of sleep). If I could catch a flight that's fast enough to let me hold off on sleep altogether until I get to my destination, then that's worth paying a premium even for economy seats. Unfortunately, that's also the point that a supersonic airliner becomes unworkable for airlines, because the fuel-to-passenger ratio just stops making sense. You can try to make it work with refuelling stops along the way, but that really eats up the theoretical time savings and adds its own operational overhead too. I think we need an energy breakthrough with a denser and still cost-effective fuel before really getting into the era of supersonic transport. Maybe at some point someone will dust off the nuclear-powered aircraft designs of yore...
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  RE 1. - the example still stands. Travel time is best understood as falling into buckets. Roughly: - < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some errands; - 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper; - 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back overnight or next morning; - > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip. (There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people perceived travel in historical times.) As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However, going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy to pay premium for. So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't. This is also why it's the business customers that are always the target for such ideas - regular people are much more price sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might actually be worth it for a large company.
  - filleduchaos 9mo ago
    Replying to point 1 (especially with this argument) while completely ignoring point 2 makes very little sense to me.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      Even with airport overhead, there's plenty of routes a supersonic plane could drop from 4-8h bucket to 2-3h bucket, and that is still something business flyers would pay for.
      - filleduchaos 9mo ago
        Like which ones? Bear in mind that despite carefully worded PR, Boom has very much not somehow surmounted the laws of physics to eliminate the sonic boom that caused the Mach 2+ Concorde to be banned from going supersonic over land.

pixl97 9mo ago

No one is flying supersonic over land at least in the US. Going over the oceans is where it would happen.

nomel 9mo ago
That's because there was a dumb ban in place, with an executive order [1] and bill that just cleared to lift it [2]. The ban was "dumb" because it's indirect, trying to control loudness by limiting speed, which is an incorrect [3] assumption based on old tech of the time. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/leading-the-world-in-supersonic-flight/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/lead... [2] https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-supersonic-flight-clears-u-s-house-committee https://www.govtech.com/transportation/bill-authorizing-supe... [3] https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise
- seszett 9mo ago
  The ban was specifically to hinder the Concorde, so it made sense to base it on supersonic flight rather than noise in case the Concorde would have managed to mitigate its noise level one way or another.
  - nomel 9mo ago
    Reference? There was an "Anti-Cordorde Project" [1] but its purpose was to ban all supersonic flight, for environmental reasons. Concorde being the only in regular service, thus the targeted name. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Concorde_Project
- gosub100 9mo ago
  I don't trust it. They will get approval and then when sonic booms disrupt nature from coast to coast they will say "it's just because the weather/it only affects a small number of people/the 3rd party contractor who supplied the data was wrong, they are gone now/the benefits outweigh the downside/think of all the jobs". Basically they'll say anything other than "oopsie we were wrong, no transonic flight for you".

elicash 9mo ago

Being on the actual plane is the most uncomfortable part of the entire experience, for me at least. Others may disagree, but I'd rather cut an hour from the flight than the entire commute/parking/security/airport waiting. (Assuming conditions on the actual plane were the same.)

anon84873628 9mo ago
Funny, for me it's the opposite. It's uniquely relaxing to be locked in with nothing but a book or some movies (I purposely avoid connecting to the internet during a flight.) My biggest dilemma is whether to sit in the aisle or window. The former you can get up whenever you want but are bumped by passers by and neighbors exiting the row. Versus being the one doing the disturbing. And if you can afford business class - where supersonic would be priced - then I mean... The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! The biggest discomfort is the dry sinuses. But in getting to/from the plane you are cattle moving through a logistical labyrinth with countless possibilities for something to go wrong.
- ghaff 9mo ago
  I don't love being on a plane for a very long stretch, even in business class. And IMO food is very mid-tier restaurant. But I don't necessarily disagree with your comment. Even with transport and airport conveniences that a relatively modest amount of money can buy, there's plenty that can go wrong and you can avoid all the other people to only a certain degree.
- hbosch 9mo ago
  >And if you can afford business class [...] The meals are restaurant quality and the full recline?! I hardly want to disembark! Let's settle down. This kind of biz class experience is almost certainly unique to international travel. Flying "business class" from ATL to SFO might get you a plate of microwave slop and an extra 15deg of incline on almost all domestic jets. Once in a blue moon you'll get a modern plane with the diagonal seats. One less person in the row, though. Paying for business class domestically is almost always a sham by my experience.

seanmcdirmid 9mo ago

Seattle to Beijing is like 12+ hours now that Russian airspace is closed. There is a lot of time to save.

charcircuit 9mo ago
So save it using a Chinese airline who can fly through Russian airspace?
- seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
  Chinese airlines aren’t allowed to use Russian airspace for any flight to/from the USA approved after 2021 or so, which, because of COVID, is basically most of them. You could maybe fly to Vancouver and get a quicker connection. My last trip was on Hainan, which didn’t over fly Russia.

zamadatix 9mo ago

The one note about Astro Mechanica towards the middle is referring to long haul flights from smaller airfields because they'll have a smaller private jet sized plane. It was not referring to short haul flights, nor was the rest of the article. I don't believe the economics for that will at all work out the way they are pitching, but it has no relation to how much supersonic makes sense for a domestic short haul.

nine_k 9mo ago

LA to Seattle is not worth it. The real gains are in London to NYC, or Tokyo to LA, or maybe Rio de Janeiro to Miami.

GenerWork 9mo ago
South America to Miami and vice versa will absolutely be a market for supersonic flight. It may be slow to takeoff (hah), but as soon as the South American elite pick up on it, it'll 100% be utilized to its maximum potential, especially during events like Art Basel.

hermitcrab 9mo ago

I am guessing this is really aimed at the 1%, who don't have to get to the airport 3 hours before a flight. Rory Sutherland commented that, insteading of spending billions on high speed trains, why not spend a few million on making the experience nicer. Better carriages, more staff, nicer stations.

Schiendelman 9mo ago
I don't think you have to be a member of the 1% to get to the airport an hour before a flight. Precheck is like $20 per year.
- JasonADrury 9mo ago
  If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private terminals and have a completely different airport experience while flying commercial. This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere. I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded. At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.

grishka 9mo ago

It's for much longer distances. There are flights between St Petersburg and Moscow. About 10 daily. It's about 1 hour. Together with everything you described, it's more like 4 hours. A high-speed train is also 4 hours. So the only people who choose to fly are those who have a connection or those who couldn't get a train ticket because those are always in high demand.