Why? What customers is this meant to serve in the commercial airline market? The Concorde overwhelmingly catered to high end business travelers, which made sense at the time. Every hour you were in the air was an hour you couldn’t be doing business. Time is money so if you need to get across the Atlantic, making the trip as short as possible was worth the price. Now we have airplanes with WIFI, we have laptops, we have smart phones. Now you can remain comfortable, productive, and connected on your flight. Secondarily was the rich persons market.
You also gave up a lot of comfort to ride the Concorde. That would be even more true today with excellent business-class options on most airlines and many world-class first-class products like the Etihad A380 “Apartments”. Are high end business flyers or rich tourists really going to trade that to save 4 hours between New York and London in high enough numbers to sustain a regular route?
There is also the exclusivity factor, but that is already highly served by private jets. Then finally, just the experience. But is that enough to fill the seats every day?
Supersonic flight is a really cool idea but the reality involves a lot of tradeoffs. When it comes down to people actually buying tickets and looking at the customer base, I just don’t see it as some slam dunk product.
You also gave up a lot of comfort to ride the Concorde. That would be even more true today with excellent business-class options on most airlines and many world-class first-class products like the Etihad A380 “Apartments”. Are high end business flyers or rich tourists really going to trade that to save 4 hours between New York and London in high enough numbers to sustain a regular route?
There is also the exclusivity factor, but that is already highly served by private jets. Then finally, just the experience. But is that enough to fill the seats every day?
Supersonic flight is a really cool idea but the reality involves a lot of tradeoffs. When it comes down to people actually buying tickets and looking at the customer base, I just don’t see it as some slam dunk product.