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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
by TeMPOraL 10mo 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 10mo agoReplying to point 1 (especially with this argument) while completely ignoring point 2 makes very little sense to me.
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoEven 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 10mo agoLike 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.
- fragmede 10mo agoNASA seems to think it's possible though. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/downloads/20160007348.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/downloads/20...
- labcomputer 10mo agoYea, but only for speeds up to Mach 1.3… theoretically. Not Mach 2.0 flights. And they only demonstrated the effect up to Mach 1.1. Saving only one hour on a transcontinental (US) flight doesn’t seem all that impressive.
- filleduchaos 10mo agoSee the pesky thing is that if you actually read the paper you've been linking as opposed to just running with "NASA said it's possible", you'll notice that like I alluded to, at Mach 1.3 (theoretically!) "boomless flight" is much slower than Concorde's Mach 2+ cruise that the company certainly wants you to think of when you do your back-of-the-napkin supersonic flight time savings maths. And that's on top of requiring optimal atmospheric conditions, so not even a guarantee to begin with. The laws of physics funnily enough are not something you can "move fast and break" or PR-speak your way around.