this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Hopefully this goes somewhere, but even with a modern price of 5,000 dollars. I’m still confused as to who this plane is meant to serve. It is outclassed by trains for regional travel, and is entirely uneconomical for long distance flights since while it can save fuel while cruising, it will chew through a massive quantity of fuel while accelerating and climbing.
Also the Blackbird sacrifices a LOT to be as light and aerodynamic as it is, as is evident by the pilot requiring an entire spacesuit. That’s not really conducive to commercial travel.
The saving is time. An suborbital flight could get you from NYC to Beijing in under an hour theoretically. Altho idk how fast this specific plane is. But ur not understanding what i mean about price starting high. Its not "modern" pricing. Its just that things like this start out as a very niche luxury market and then over decades they expand and prices come down as they get practice and refine designs, and techniques to lower costs, and economy of scale takes over. So if it suceeds as a luxury time saving product for a niche use (Like business people, politicians etc) then over time it can be expanded to everyone and prices can come down.
As for sacrifices the SR-71 made the SR-71 was a military craft made for stealth bombing. It had a lot of equipment and stuff going on a normal plane wouldnt need.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by the word modern, I should have worded myself better, but what I meant is that even if prices were reduced significantly to 5-10 thousand dollars per ticket as compared to a current day valuation of the approximately 60,000 dollars that a 20,000 dollar concorde ticket would have cost in 1985... who is able to afford that price?
It doesn't matter what technology comes into play, bringing the price of a suborbital liner to modern day airfare prices would be impossible. 5-10 thousand dollars from 60 thousand is already an astronomical drop. What customers have 5-10 thousand dollars lying around for a single flight?
There is no economy of scale for a niche luxury product with more economical alternatives. You have an incredibly small subset of customers, and dropping the price from 10 thousand to 8 thousand isn't going to drive up business at all. Especially when a one way flight from New York to Beijing is 400-1,500 dollars, and as has been shown through endless industry studies, the primary concern for airline customers is by far price.
Youd be surprised how many of them there are. Lots of airfare these days already costs thousands of dollars. Im not in that tax bracket but i know there are lots of people with just heeps of money to burn. My guess is this would just be the new first class. Not only is your seat better its on a different plane and you get there faster.
True, but now you've just invented the Concorde problem again. How are you going to fill enough seats on a daily/weekly basis to justify a route? That's if you even manage to make this economical.
Concorde was killed by the internet as major businesses could simply have a video call or email conference instead of needing to send physical delegates to major financial capitals. That took away their core repeat customer base, and they weren't able to recover past that point. Who will be the main customer base for this?
Your wrong about why the Concorde failed. This isnt the Concorde. The Concorde had horrible range, and fuel efficiency and it wasnt very fast compared to a suborbital flight either. You couldnt even get to the west coast from NYC with it before it ran out of fuel. Plus it had horrible sonic booms that people under it couldnt stand so it was only flown over water usually. This is an entirely different aircraft they did not just recreate the Concorde. The only similarity is that its a supersonic plane meant for civilian use. I am not an expert on this plane but i think it would be a mistake to assume the designers of this plane weren't aware of the concordes failures. They wouldn't make it if it didnt have a atleast plausible use case. We will see if it fails or not tho in the future.