Still, flying westbound fast makes tons of sense as you can arrive "before" you took off (local time) and thus you get a whole day in front of you.
But eastbound makes a lot less sense, unless you're just trying to save time. Because flying at night eastbound won't make you gain much compared to a regular red eye and flying during the day, you'll land at night...
The above poster is correct - supersonics are suboptimal for eastbound, especially when you consider they can only be used at speed over the ocean.
A super sonic flight that leaves JFK at 6PM arrives at 2AM in LHR after 3 hours of flying plus a 5 hour time zone change.
It's much more optimal to take a lie flat seat on a traditional aircraft, get a decent nights sleep on the flight, land at 7AM, shower at the lounge, and charge forth with the day.
My view is that the lie flat bed is really what made supersonic obsolete, and I see Boom as largely a folly.
As somebody who flew quite a few lie-flat business flights on JFK->LON - you absolutely do not get good night sleep. Flight time is 7:30 and you can realistically go to sleep 30 minutes after take off (when they start serving food and other passengers are still noisy - good luck falling asleep quickly) and you are generally woken up about 1-1.5 hour before landing (Why? I have no idea but they turn on the lights, serve breakfast and do announcements about weather in London about that time before landing). So you get at most 5.5h of mediocre quality sleep which is better than nothing but not enough to function 100%.
3 hour flight will change a lot of things for JFK-LON business trips as they open up opportunities to loose only 1 full day during business trip instead of loosing two full days. I generally stay on NYC time with meetings in the afternoon LON time if trip is less than 5 days so short flight is game changer.
If I’m a jetlagged businessman in NYC, operating on internal London time, and I’m finishing my work day at 6PM local time/11PM internal time, I want to get home and wake up with my family ASAP rather than try and sleep on a plane.
It's true, and makes sense where your face-to-face time is the key thing. But where it's just "work time", surely you can do a good amount of work on a 7 hour flight in a decent business class seat with reliable internet? Especially if you can also minimise the time wasted on the ground (fast security line, lounge with areas to work, airline calling your flight when it's almost finished boarding not at the start, etc.).
There are definitely people who can get work done in a flight, but honestly I have a hard time imagining logging 7 hours. Maybe if you have a lot of reading to do?
I do too, but I also don't have a huge amount of experience sitting in an incredibly comfortable first class seat. I imagine I'd get a lot more done than I do in coach.
I think if I had a decent internet connection (happening more and more) and comfortable seat I'd happily take a 7/8 hour flight over a 5 hour one in a coach-style seat.
I fly first class a fair bit, and I struggle to get anything done on the plane (in the terminal is fine, though).
For me, there's no way to take a good break on a plane. I can't really get up and stretch my legs (unless you try to pace the aisle), and any kind of distraction is going to be on a screen.
It is more comfortable than coach, but it's still not really comfortable. Coach is actively uncomfortable, first class is just kind of neutral; not actively comfortable or uncomfortable.
I usually get more done sitting in the terminal than I do on the plane itself.
I fly business a few times a year and almost always treat it as rest and relaxation. The chance for quiet downtime that I won't get on the trip and rarely get at home as well. 10 hours of extra sleep, reading, and podcasts. It seems like most passengers do the same thing. Trying to smash actual work into the flight is miserable.
For me, it's a good chance to watch a movie and maybe read a book (which I don't do often enough at home). I'm may be an outlier but I don't really care if I have Internet on a flight or not.
If I have a lie-flat business class option with decent food, getting to my destination a few hours early with less comfortable seating isn't a clear win. Like most people, I'm not jetting over to London to have lunch and sign a deal and heading home to sleep in my own bed.
> Like most people, I'm not jetting over to London to have lunch and sign a deal and heading home to sleep in my own bed.
Thank you for enlightening me. As someone nowhere near rich enough for this to be relevant, my upper bound for pleasant W-E transatlantic flight is being able to sleep. Shortening that sleep seems like a loss. But if you have a private jet on call, you can skip connecting flights, airport security, schedules, and all the things that actually make flying slow and miserable. I guess this company is aiming at the people who don’t quite have that kind of money.
There is, in general, a very big gap between private and cost-doesn't-matter commercial. And, no, I can't speak to what flying private is like.
Flying can still be a hassle flying business/first mostly because of cancellations/schedule changes--which can still happen otherwise because of weather, air traffic, etc.--but is less frequent I assume. A lot of the hassles of commercial flight (security lines, lack of overhead space, airport crowds in the waiting area, cramped seating, etc.) can be mitigated to a significant degree however.
Yeah I feel like the fact that there are N screens all over the place is a huge distraction (even when I'm trying to relax!)
Just having somebody watching transformers in the corner of my eye... on a flight a couple of years ago I watched 2 bollywood movies start to finish cuz the lady in the row in front of me was watching it and I couldn't help just watching on her screen.
I'm the same, but I'm imagining the "super serious business people" who are presumably the target market for these planes (given the price). Is it worth the premium to get them from London to NYC in 4 hours, when they could do 5 hours of billable work in the lounge/on the plane anyway.
Getting better in my experience, last flight I had about 1-2Mbps which was plenty for browsing and sending messages/emails. If that's all you require to do work, then it's fine.
Every now and then it's not awful, that's true. But it's just entirely non-functional and/or extremely slow a high percentage of times, which means you can't reliably plan to have functioning wifi, which means you can organize your schedule around it.
On those lengths you start to go a little crazy. I've done Atlanta to Tokyo and back before, and those are 13+ hours depending. You sleep and wake up and sleep and wake up, watch movies, and then wonder why there's still so many hours left to go.
It does make me appreciate human engineering though. When you think about all the parts that work correctly day in and day out to have these longs flights run back and forth nearly non-stop.
100% this. After 16 hours, I could have kissed the ground when I walked off that plane. At some point, after maybe 8-10 hours, order seems to break down a bit. People stop caring so much about keeping clean, the plane starts to get really cluttered and nasty, food ground into the carpet. I feel for the cleaning crews that have to spruce up the interior after a really long international flight.
I still remember the first time I flew home from the north, we had taken off from Dubai and were headed to Seattle, which goes over the north pole. I watched that silly map more than I should have (it just makes things slower, I'm sure...) and I was so elated the moment we went 'feet dry' over North America. And then I realized that we still had six plus hours to go, more than if we were starting at the east coast. I was so sad for a few minutes I could have cried.
The Seattle to Dubai flight is rough, but at least it's usually on a nice plane.
The worst flight I've had in a long time was a British Airways flight to Nairobi. Not actually all that long a flight to Nairobi from London, but BA uses their "This plane is definitely about to be decommissioned" planes on that flight. The panel between the cabin and the fuselage came loose when I nudged it with my foot and slid down into the hold, so I spent the whole flight with essentially all my possessions wrapped around me, certain that anything I dropped would vanish into the void.
I live in Colorado, but am from Melbourne, Australia. I told everyone the last time I went back that it will be the last visit. That trip is hellish and once every 2 years is still too much.
Try adding a break in Honolulu. It is indeed a long flight from Los Angeles but I found it's bearable if you spend a few days in Honolulu. Also, Jetstar-Melbourne can be very cheap in economy or it can be a very good price/value in what it calls business which really is just premium economy in today's transcontinental flights.
Before the pandemic saved me from ever having to do it again, I was traveling from Portland to Hyderabad twice a year, and I told my manager that I wouldn't go back unless I could stop over in London for a day before continuing on to Hyderabad. Never did find out if that would have been accepted or not, but I was so tired of that particular three-flight nightmare.
Melbourne is on the coast so an offshore platform will work on that endpoint. New Mexico has a spaceport already. Baring one opening up near Denver, flying to the west coast and then taking a Starship would be possible.
I'll take your word for it with respect to Melbourne, which is a lovely city I thoroughly enjoyed several decades ago. "Spaceport America" is a silly boondoggle that will never launch an orbital flight and will eventually be absorbed into White Sands missile range. Getting from anywhere in Colorado to any populated location not in Colorado takes longer than an hour. b^)
I find planes impossible to sleep on. End up arriving over tired and stiff and sore after my 16 hour flight. I've never got my company to spring for a better class though. Next time I'm taking a 1 day layover in Germany or something.
That moment when your body really understands that it is in fact 1 or 2 in the morning, but you can't sleep on a plane. I'd nod off repeatedly, only to instantly wake back up again. I'm quite jealous of people who can just conk out on a plane, but it does not work for me.
I actually did 30 with a 2 year and a 2 month old. The young one is easy actually, they are in a bassinet and sleep most of the way. The 2 year old was much more a problem. She was just under 2, so didn't have her own seat, was obviously getting bored and her sleep rhythm was completely different to mine. Still was OK though.
As someone who flies first class there is no way I'm flying coach to save time. Flying business is about the lounges, the meals, the service, and the ability to stretch out your legs.
As someone who flies coach everywhere, I’d do the same if I had the means to do so. A long flight in coach is extremely draining even if you’re time-focussed, you’ve got to take recovery time into consideration.
If you value that over speed, why not take a oceanic cruiser? More lounges, more service, you can stretch your legs way more (or take a swim), better meals (and more of them)..
There's certainly demand for low-cost ocean voyages as vacations, with over 300 cruise ships in service (and cruise lines generally quite profitable).
It's high-cost, non-vacation, long distance travel/transport where ocean liners were beaten in the 1960s by airliners (and airlines, in contrast, are generally not very profitable).
Still, that solitary transatlantic liner carries more people across the Atlantic in a typical week than Concorde did when it operated scheduled services on that route, and not because the other Concordes were busy elsewhere...
In any case, the lack of senior business executives choosing seven day trips in plush private cabins as their preferred mode of transatlantic crossing isn't much of an indication of whether people in that price bracket will tend to prefer pay more to spend four hours in discomfort rather than eight hours mostly asleep.
She's the only one in service right now, but looks to also currently depart from Australia, the Emirates, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa.
That's true mostly of "rich people" who are also highly scheduled executives. Otherwise there are a lot of tradeoffs involving comfort, time, schedule, and so forth.
At just under 5 it already is, I know a few people who do it. Hawaii is a bad example because its very much a leisure market. They can barely make business class work with recliners let alone a Concorde replacement. That’s why they put their worst business class on the route.
This will end up running LAX-JFK-LHR in my opinion.
Ah yes, I should have said 'I see a potential market for faster premium air travel on both the LAX-JFK legs and the JFK-LHR legs within the range of the Boom plane' - you are of course correct that they would not be able to fly LAX-JFK supersonic.
14 CFR Part 91.817, in essence, prohibits anyone from operating a civil aircraft at a true flight Mach number greater than 1 over land in the United States and from a certain distance off shore where a boom could reach U.S. shores.
This was something I always heard before I experienced it but the truth is it wasn't so bad. You definitely weren't sitting in a full First Class seat (which were smaller in any case back then) but it was still perfectly comfortable especially for the relatively short duration.
And because the overall experience was so cool -- board directly from the lounge, the led display showing how fast you were going, seeing the curvature of the earth (sorry flat earthers), arriving before you left, etc. -- you never thought about the seat. I'm sure if you took it all the time you might care but most people it was awesome.
The Concorde was more or less what domestic business/first class is today which is pretty much what first class was internationally as well back when the Concorde was flying. (Maybe a bit more cramped--more like what's being called Premium Economy on an airline like United these days.)
The windows are so small because Concorde cruised at 60,000 feet. At that altitude the usual oxygen masks won't keep you conscious. The windows are small so that if one ever failed, Concorde could descend fast enough to an altitude where the masks would work before the pressure dropped too low.
When my dad was flying back and forth to Europe from the US East Coast a lot, he told me he got upgraded to the Concorde once for some reason. His reaction was that it was a neat experience but he'd just as soon fly first class in a 747.
I recall all the crazy designs that were shown before the A380 came out, bars, entertainment areas etc.. Unsurprisingly airlines instead opted to put more seats in (well Singapore did implement those suites with a bed, but that was it). These interior concepts never become reality because of the economics. They look nice in investor brochures and airline magazines though.
When the choice is a two day business trip flying in business class or a one day trip in elevated coach class, lots of people will choose the option that has them back on the same day.
I guess the idea is that the trip is such a short hop that you don't need to lie flat. For example train seats in first in the UK aren't lie flat either, because they're only ever a few hours at most.
I'm not sure lie-flat is a must if the flights are so much shorter. I'd rather have a comfortable seat for working if we're only talking about a 3 hour flight.
