Concorde has been retired by both British Airways and Air France after long operating at a loss. And yet many, many people fly every year. Many of them are wealthy. Time is money. It’s still a long way from New York to Moscow to Ankara to Beijing to Sydney to Los Angeles… or wherever. When and where, if ever, will supersonic aircraft return to regular commercial service?
Only if fuel becomes insanely cheap.
The faster you go the harder it is to go faster. Your fuel efficiency tanks fast. Sort of a law of diminishing returns.
If you want economical super (or hyper) sonic flight you need a cheap and abundant fuel and/or need to get out of the atmosphere.
Also, part of the problem hobbling the Concord was restrictions on flying over land. The sonic booms disturbs people. So its economic viability was seriously restricted since it could only do its thing over water (severely limiting its access). Only way to fix that is to fly REALLY high or out of the atmosphere…and now you are in a whole other realm of problems and expense to achieve.
Sydney to LA isn’t going to happen. Supersonic aircraft have limited range. Furthermore the routes that are in range are limited by the sonic boom. Supersonic planes are inefficient at subsonic speeds, and currently can only reach supersonic speeds over water. So really, there are only a few places they can go.
Furthermore, the landscape of business travel has changed with telecommuting and globalization. People need to go to a wider variety of places. And the landscape of who needs to go where has changed significantly.
We’ll know in two to five years.
The number of people who absolutely need to travel internationally, need it bad enough that they will pay a premium price, is easy to overestimate. Even on the biggest of legitimate business routes, I can think of three airlines (EOS, MaxJet, and SilverJet) that failed in the past two years due to failure to fill seats on the N.Y.C.-London route. And some of them were likely charging a premium that was smaller than you’d have to charge for a fuel-hungry supersonic beast. The number of business travelers willing to pay big bucks for Boston-Ankara or Los Angeles-Sydney on a supersonic jet would have to be even lower.
Even if you did have the passenger load, remember that the Concorde was actually a very non-capacious aircraft – I once heard the perhaps-anecdotal anecdote that Air France went all out to ply the Concorde passengers with great wine and food to keep them in their seats, because it was relatively cramped even with only 70 passengers, and had a single narrow aisle. When people talk about premium travel today, the emphasis seems to be on widebody aircraft and lie-flat seats – none of those are going to be fitting into a Concorde-type design.
The sonic boom issues are going to be an even bigger deterrent in today’s NIMBY atmosphere. I think with Concorde they also found that they were getting secondary and tertiary booms, miles away from the first one, as the shockwave bounced up and down between the atmosphere and the ground. And you have to think the tree-huggers would blast the heck out of a fuel-guzzling new design that would be ejecting lots of exhaust at high altitudes.
Recall too that in recent history, the airlines (and by inference, their customers) have shown no abiding interest in increased flight speed, even when given the chance. I speak of the Boeing Sonic Cruiser, which tech nerds thought was great, but which the airlines ultimately decided was not worth the incremental expense, and instead went with the conventional-speed 787.
Now yes, the Sonic Cruiser was sub-sonic, and you could argue that, with only 15%-20% increase in speed, it simply wasn’t a revolutionary enough advance, and would not get you there that much quicker, to justify premium pricing. But it still represents a pretty recent example of the market not being there for faster commercial aircraft.
True. But when the incremental cost of an hour saved rises above $1000 per passenger, the interest is limited.
The physics suggest this is the way to go. But it’s not looking like the cost or safety of this scheme will fall within an acceptable range for quite some time.
Video confrencing has killed any chance that surpersonic aircraft might have had. These days, if you absolutely need to talk to someone in Europe now, you fire up a webcam. As bad as Concorde had it, it’s worse now because there are fewer people who really need to get somewhere that fast.
The case might be stronger for a supersonic bizjet. That would allow more flexibility in design, and there might be enough customers willing to pay the premium. But even then you’d probably need intercontinental range, cheap fuel, a worldwide wealth boom (like the late 90s), and either decent subsonic performance or aerodynamics that permit boomless supersonic flight over land.
So my guess is, “probably never, but who knows what Scaled Composites will cook up.”
I forgot to mention that while that’s true, for busy, wealthy people, time on a long-ish flight can be just as well spent as at the destination – they could:
(a) read backlogged correspondence, taking advantage of the absence of new e-mails pouring in;
(b) read/write other stuff (e-mails, proposals, PowerPoints);
(c) get an online connection (when this was available; I think Boeing discontinued their in-flight wireless offering) and work online;
(d) have strategic conversations with colleagues travelling with them;
(e) make phone calls, on aircraft equipped with such capability; or
(f) sleep (got to do it anyhow, why not take advantage of that lie-flat bed and your noise-cancelling earphones and arrive refreshed at your meeting?)
So, time on a long flight does not have to equal dead time or money lost, which I suspect further dampens demand to just get the damn plane there as fast as humanly possible, as well as dampening willingness to pay an astronomical sum to achieve this goal.
Thanks, everybody. That all makes sense to me. I’m enough of an airplane junkie to be a little disappointed, though.
Even subsonic aircraft aren’t commercially viable. I don’t have a cite handy, but someone did a study once showing that taken as a whole, the worldwide commercial airline industry has operated at an overall loss over its history. Richard Branson, head of Virgin Atlantic, said, “the easiest way to become a millionaire is to start out a billionaire then go into the airline business.”
Airlines, and the companies that build the planes, have only survived due to a complex web of government subsidies. These come in several forms: sweet deals on military aircraft (common in the “free-market” U.S.), regulated markets in which the government holds down supply and doles out routes to guarantee the existing airlines a profit, and outright state sponsorship of money-losing national airlines (see Alitalia) and money-losing manufacturers (see Airbus).
That QSST article sounded fishy (specifically, the part that characterized it as “in production by Lockheed Martin”), so I checked it out.
http://www.saiqsst.com/faq.html
Sure enough, it’s not quite that simple. The project appears to be the dream (obsession) of an individual entrepreneur. While he’s engaged Lockheed for design work, if he’s to be believed, I can’t see any indication that this thing is much beyond the vaporware stage, just yet:
Oh, a final not-fatal but challenging problem with such aircraft: figuring out what to do about the tires. The fast takeoff/landing speeds turned out to cause significant risk of blowout – the fatal Paris Concorde crash was only the last of many incidents in which tires blew out, shredded, etc. Obviously they had not totally gotten that problem worked out over thirty years.
You have enough fellow travellers out there that you should at least be able to continue to dream. I don’t read Popular Mechanics* that much, but IIRC they seemed to be good for three or four “The Next Generation Of SST” cover stories in any given year . . . .
I know Gulfstream, a aviation company, was working with NASA to produce a device to minimize/eliminate sonic booms on air craft. I’m not sure how well its going (the last article I could find was a year old), but lets assume they perfect the device and eliminate sonic booms and then get the laws changed to allow supersonic flights over land. Do you all think that would increase the viability of supersonic air craft?
It would be a big step. I suspect that if we do see SST, it may well be in the business jet market, driven by Russian oligarchs or Mideast sheikhs (who have already been buying A380s and customizing them into airborne pleasure domes).
How fast can a concord get you from NY to London compared to a regular aircraft. I mean whats 6 hours compared to 10? No really all that much
It took roughly 3:30 of flight time, NY-London, versus 7-8 hours via conventional aircraft.
The fastest New York-London Concorde flight was about two hours, 53 minutes. A subsonic flight typically takes say six hours, 40 minutes. So plan on Concorde being just about half the flying time.
One other issue we haven’t discussed is air traffic control. Traffic patterns at major destination hubs tend to be crowded. Introducing a new set of aircraft, coming in at a vastly higher cruising speed, seems like it would make coordination even tougher. Put differently, you might take off from Los Angeles, arrive over Atlanta two hours later, and circle for another two while they tried to slot you into the traffic pattern.