alt Hacker News1. The in-flight time from LA to Dubai is not 24 hours. A direct flight between the two cities is more like 15. If he was on a "24 hour flight", it was a flight with a stopover, which just goes to show the point about air travel time being bloated by non-flight time.
2. Concorde rather infamously could barely make the transatlantic trip from New York to London, because supersonic flight is expensive. Boom's currently nonexistent aircraft is planned to have about the same range. Neither could make the flight from LA to Dubai, which is a distance close to double their maximum ranges.
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And NY to London really isn't bad. I have to do Zero Dark Thirty for London flights with a change in Newark but EWR-LHR itself isn't really much different from when I fly from BOS to SFO.
At a minimum, I'd want to be able to fly from the East Coast to continental Europe to avoid a red-eye but the biggest win would be trans-Pacific.
RE 1. - the example still stands. Travel time is best understood as falling into buckets. Roughly:
- < 1h - can go there for lunch, or as part of running some errands;
- 2-3 hours - can fly over, have a full day of work at remote location (or sight-seeing), and get back home for supper;
- 4-8 hours - can fly over, do something useful, fly back overnight or next morning;
- > 8 hours - definitely a multi-day trip.
(There are more buckets still, if you consider long-distance travel by sea or land, and then more when considering how people perceived travel in historical times.)
As long as the travel time stays in the same bucket, reducing (or increasing) it doesn't matter much to the travelers. However, going up or down a bucket is a huge qualitative change, and one people - especially the business travelers - are more than happy to pay premium for.
So back to our supersonic planes, cutting down the LA-Seattle travel time from 3 hours to 1.5 hours (and accounting for airport overhead), doesn't affect the kind of trips people take. Cutting down travel from LA to Dubai from your 15 hours to 5 hours means it suddenly makes sense for corporate executives to fly over in person for single-day meetings, where previously it wouldn't.
This is also why it's the business customers that are always the target for such ideas - regular people are much more price sensitive than corporations, and are fine with long and hard flights if it means they can afford them. Meanwhile, paying an extra $10k to get the executive on an important meeting might actually be worth it for a large company.