5 ms·

You are missing an important factor in the baseline here, the cost of time. Right now, a cheap 7 hour each way round trip between NYC and London is ~500$. Hal

• kibwen 10mo ago
  Business passengers aren't out here paying for their own tickets. Their employers are paying for those tickets, so the question is whether or not companies care about the time their salaried employees spend in the air, when those employees can be just as productive on the business-class wifi.
  • ghaff 10mo ago
    Assuming they're even micro-managing employee productivity to the degree that they really care about working on a plane. Personally, I never purchased plane wi-fi even when I could have expensed it.
  • fooker 10mo ago
    Most employers book the most convenient flight for their employees, and not really care much but saving a few hundred dollars.
• j1elo 10mo ago
  That's a reasonable argument for businesspeople, but it doesn't apply for the greater public. Because chances are that except in a minority of situations, they are on holidays and during that saved time they wouldn't be working at all anyways. People who could perfecty afford a $2,000 plane ticket still fly with $400 ones (as long as they are within reasonable standards), for example because they have a desired budget for a given trip, and the expensive option would blow it away, so they don't mind the extra time.
  • fooker 10mo ago
    Have you ever picked a slightly more expensive nonstop flight instead of one with a layover for a vacation? This is similar. 3.5 hours vs 7 hours is a pretty good difference. You can take a 3.5 hours flight in the morning and have energy to see a city the whole day after that. Maybe not after a 7 hour flight unless you are a pretty experienced and motivated traveler who can sleep the entire flight and have the mental energy to enjoy new things after that.
    • csoups14 10mo ago
      That depends entirely on how much "slightly more expensive" is. For the vast majority of the travelling public, they'll choose the cheaper option and we know that because that's what they choose already.
      • fooker 10mo ago
        If that was the case, most nonstop flights between non-major cities would not exist at all.
        • csoups14 10mo ago
          Most major airports are at their physical limit in terms of both airfield and gate traffic and are charging extremely high gate fees. I'm not in airline logistics but I would bet my bottom dollar that is the true constraint in having more traffic fly into hubs.
    • jedberg 10mo ago
      I do actually think you're right, but the counterpoint is that airlines have slowed down all their flights to save money, and no one has come in offering a faster flight in exchange for more money. Maybe the delta just isn't enough to matter? Or maybe people aren't willing to pay for it.
      • fooker 10mo ago
• panick21_ 10mo ago
  With Starlink and better wifi, the time on board can also be used better. So if you end up on the internet answering mails and so on, you can do that on the plain or in the hotel-room.
• rootusrootus 10mo ago
  Also, the same plane can now make twice as many revenue flights.
• mkoubaa 10mo ago
  7 hour to London is actually 10 hours when you factor in the commute to the airport, security, planing, flight, deplaning, shuttle to hotel. Cutting it to 3.5 hours isn't a 50% overall decrease, because those 3.5 will turn into 6.5 of real time. So the marginal value of faster flight goes down the shorter the trip is, and these supersonic airplanes can't do the super long Pacific flights because physics. It's a much smaller niche than is often imagined. But it's still a niche, I guess.
• kachapopopow 10mo ago
  the argument breaks down when the cost of these flights will be at minimum in the range of $10000
  • fooker 10mo ago
    Read the article
    • kachapopopow 10mo ago
      unrealistic expectations or double decker economy where you can't even sit down. I believe that overvalue their time - there's a lot of things you can do during flights including sleeping and SpaceX providing near gigabit of Ethernet over the Atlantic further reduces the need for these solutions. VR is also being heavily used to review designs 'in person', anyone that genuinely needs to be at the right place at the right time probably has a private jet already. I might be an outlier as someone who is never in a rush to live their life.
• scythe 10mo ago
  Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.
  • fooker 10mo ago
    I think we’ll eventually have some technology to make this realistic. Supersonic flights powered by jet/rocket engines might not be it for all we know. IMO we are still pretty early in the history of aviation as a technology.
    • dotancohen 10mo ago
      If you are already mentioning rocket propulsion, then you should know that Gwen Shotwell foresees Starship flying E2E (point to point on Earth) flights with paying passengers, competing with airlines. One hour to anywhere on the planet.
      • fooker 10mo ago
        Hopefully we discover some sort of gravity physics/tech that makes chemical rockets obsolete! I don't see Starship being useful for civilian transport use cases, but for military operations sure! But there's not much to distinguish a starship from a nuke launch during a war, so it remains to be seen whether that risk is worth it.
      • robotresearcher 10mo ago
        > One hour to anywhere on the planet. Anywhere they can take off from, which is a decent distance from a population center. The last (forty?) mile problem bites again.
        • inglor_cz 10mo ago