alt Hacker NewsYou are missing an important factor in the baseline here, the cost of time.
Right now, a cheap 7 hour each way round trip between NYC and London is ~500$.
Halve it to 3.5 hours each way with a supersonic plane, saving a total of 7 hours.
Now, the real question is then, what's one hour of your time worth to you or whoever is paying for your flight?
If improvements to subsonic aircrafts bring down the price to 200$ instead of $500, people would still be willing to pay 200$ + 7 * $HOURLY for a faster flight.
Even with a low-ish estimate of $HOURLY = 50, it would make sense to take the supersonic fight if the price was $500, which it could conceivably be brought down to, and the market has already validated to be willing to pay.
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7 hour to London is actually 10 hours when you factor in the commute to the airport, security, planing, flight, deplaning, shuttle to hotel.
Cutting it to 3.5 hours isn't a 50% overall decrease, because those 3.5 will turn into 6.5 of real time.
So the marginal value of faster flight goes down the shorter the trip is, and these supersonic airplanes can't do the super long Pacific flights because physics.
It's a much smaller niche than is often imagined. But it's still a niche, I guess.
Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.
Also, the same plane can now make twice as many revenue flights.
Business passengers aren't out here paying for their own tickets. Their employers are paying for those tickets, so the question is whether or not companies care about the time their salaried employees spend in the air, when those employees can be just as productive on the business-class wifi.
With Starlink and better wifi, the time on board can also be used better. So if you end up on the internet answering mails and so on, you can do that on the plain or in the hotel-room.
the argument breaks down when the cost of these flights will be at minimum in the range of $10000
That's a reasonable argument for businesspeople, but it doesn't apply for the greater public. Because chances are that except in a minority of situations, they are on holidays and during that saved time they wouldn't be working at all anyways.
People who could perfecty afford a $2,000 plane ticket still fly with $400 ones (as long as they are within reasonable standards), for example because they have a desired budget for a given trip, and the expensive option would blow it away, so they don't mind the extra time.