Still impressively cool.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
i just think the little plane is neat.
