Supersonic doesn’t make too much sense for short flights, but I routinely fly 10+ hour routes and it’d be wonderful if I could shave 5 hours from the total flight time. If they can do LA or SF to Tokyo or Taipei, it’ll make a miserable trip into a bearable one.
Exactly. Anything over five hours is very unpleasant for me. Over eight hours and I'll actually segment the trip with a hotel stay in between. Turning a 10-hour flight into a five-hour flight would save me a full day.
Sure, I'd take the shorter flight, everything else being equal. But what premium would you pay for that ability? The article only mentions being better than Concorde at 5x the fuel cost (I assume it means per passenger-km).
It may be a significant premium over coach, but would be much less significant over business and first class. A Lufthansa now retired 747 carries 8 passengers in first class and about a hundred in business. With a plane like this, LH would be able to carry more first and business passengers over the same amount of time at equivalent prices. Remember Concorde 2 would be much more efficient than the first iteration, and that was with late 60's technology.
