1) The flight markets are different now. There's been a large increase in both transatlantic and transpacific flights, especially the latter. These change the economics of considering only these types of flights, flying only over uninhabited regions.

2) The technology has changed. We're much better at dealing with sonic booms now. You can't get rid of them entirely, but you can reshape them. You can't send everything "up" but the longer of a tail you can make the more the sound dissipates by the time it hits the ground. There's lots of research around this and as you can imagine, incredibly important for the military. You can't fly fast spy aircraft if they are just announcing their position while flying around. Sure, there are satellites, but those are predictable by the enemy, you'll always need aircraft to do this.

However, there are markets where you don't have to fly supersonic over land, the distance is long enough for the speed to matter, and there is massive amount of demand. The only problem is, such markets require a longer range than what the Concorde was capable of. Notably, all the very frequently traveled trips over the Pacific.

Concorde’s sonic boom was astonishingly loud. The night flights would go supersonic outside the Bristol Channel at around 9pm to 10pm. It was still audible over 60 miles away and sounded like a muffled barn door slamming outside.

Far louder though — it would wake all the pheasants up just as they’d gone to roost.

England in the '80s didn't give a shit about little people. Had it been really profitable, Concorde would have continued operations. It just did not make sense economically, particularly once they stopped making new airframes.

It failed because the market dried up due to economic reasons, and they couldn't fill seats.

I think they are agreeing with you re: the range.

There is money in NYC-LHR (it brings BA alone $1B in revenue annually) but the market for supersonic basically vanished. In the 70s when Concorde started flying, it was certainly a step up. However, the market niche basically disappeared when the lie flat seat was developed; for a lot cheaper, you could have a sleep for six hours in a really cushy lie flat, or you could spend a crapton more to be in a much louder, more cramped cabin for only about three hours less. If you were halving a 12-16 hour journey instead, there would still be a market left, but Concorde just didn't have the ability to do so.

The Middle East (was) a pretty common stopover for India flights, since India's not that well connected to the US due to a lack of capacity.

A couple of searches suggests only Emirates operate a direct route between SFO and Dubain, so it wouldn't seem so.

I think the more interesting question is /will/ there be that much premium traffic ongoing

Honestly not so much in my experience. It was busy, but mostly because of Emirates longhauls. Dubai to NYC and back is extremely busy though.

You’re hinting at another huge part of the issue.

There are no economies of scale to be had here. If there are only a handful of plausible economically-profitable routes, all of the expenditures on R&D, testing, certification, and production facilities can only be amortized across a handful of aircraft.

Once you’ve built a dozen or two of them and a handful of extra engines and spare parts… what then? There’s no point in keeping the production lines open.

From an airline’s perspective, they have to now have an entire separate chain of employees (pilots, mechanics) dedicated to another airframe that barely makes up a fraction of their fleet. That’s a lot of overhead for two or three routes.

Those are some pretty big structural disadvantages that need to be overcome in order to make a boutique supersonic route appealing.

Yeah, this is something that changed from Concorde times (and possibly even sped up its very demise): the market for reliable, high-quality private planes has grown massively. It's now pretty easy to shuttle between the big cities in almost complete privacy through secluded airports.

> You get treated like a criminal for forgetting your shampoo bottle is 2 ounces too big for some dipshit TSA agent's liking,

Enforcement is super uneven, and etc, but IME, they just open your bag, find the thing, and then offer you the choice of tossing it or going back to check your bag. Depending on how much you paid for your shampoo and how much a checked bag would cost you and if you have time to do all that and then wait in line again, I expect most people toss it.

  > I’m in favour of projects like these - even on spending taxpayer money on them.

  > However, when you’re doing journalism

You are not thinking high enough the food chain. I mean heck you have tenured SV engineers cracking $1mm with RSUs. It’s not rare in finance for folks to be hitting $3-5mm with bonus. So that’s what $19k comp a day. If that individual is making $5mm they are more than likely making a multiple of that for the organization.

American execs negotiating memory two months ago in Korea?

Good luck getting a launch and landing pad anywhere close to a population centre.

Logistics around the flight would be a big asterisk behind the flight time.

I'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues.

That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.

Google tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.

I’m not in the industry, but I would say Hermeus would be a perfect example. Ostensibly building a commercial airliner, but if you look closely it feels like a military oriented startup from the inside out.

Can't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.

I can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at.

Places I haven't worked:

Skydio

Applied Intuition

Saildrone

Planet Labs

Boom

Scale AI

Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"