Will SST Flight Return?

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Hail_Ants

And they were 100% right. What’s really kind of incredible is that both Britain and France came to the same conclusion, that an SST would probably never be profitable. But, among other reasons, because BOAC and Air France signed a ‘quitter still pays’ agreement, if either of them pulled out of the Concorde project their govts were still legally obligated to continue paying for it. So neither side quit. Consequently the Concorde, magnificent is it was, became a ridiculously over-budget, impractical, govt boondoggle paid for to a large extent by the taxpayers of the UK & France simply because their govts just couldn’t stop throwing good money after bad.

We can thank the economist Kenneth Arrow, then at the Council of Economic Advisers, for lobbying against a home-grown US SST. The Nobel Laurette considered its demise to be one of his bigger accomplishments. Of course he didn’t do it alone: Boeing 2707 SST

@md2000

The real money to be made is trans-Pacific, especially with today’s China-centric economic activity - turn a 12-hour flight into 6 hours. However, the Concorde can’t fly that distance. New tech is needed. The expense of that development is a pricetag nobody wants to spend … yet.

The other complication is changing time zones and jet lag. That wouldn’t apply so much to a North-South route though.