The future of ultra-fast passenger travel
79 comments
·July 19, 2025Y_Y
> Concorde, ... ultimately failed economically due to ... regulatory restrictions on overland supersonic flights.
Hardly fait to blame regulation here, the problem was that it was incredibly loud and unpleasant. You can try to make it sound like government overreach, but it takes some serious mental aerobatics.
jillesvangurp
The sonic boom definitely was a problem when flying over land. But part of the issue behind the regulations were also that the Concorde was a French British collaboration and did not involve US aviation companies. The only airlines that operated the Concorde were British Airways and Air France. The only cities in the US that were reachable by the Concorde were on the east coast and the planes would slow down and come in subsonic. There are a lot of other valid reasons for regulations in the US; but the lack of US suppliers, jobs, etc. didn't make it easier.
burnt-resistor
That's why now there is development of very carefully-designed, pointier craft that exploit Mach cutoff so there's almost no boom.
arein3
It failed because US/Boeing coyld not make a competitor to EU's plane, and feared airlines would buy it, so they decided to ban it instead of competition.
pfdietz
The problem was it was very expensive.
There should be a name for the principle that one needn't look for more complicated explanations when economic ones suffice.
phire
It was expensive because they only built 14 aircraft (plus 6 prototypes).
And the overflight bans were a large part of the reason for all the sales to fall though. If the development/maintenance costs had been split over hundreds of craft as planned, they would have been much cheaper to both buy and maintain.
There is still the issue of high fuel costs, but fun fact, most of the cancellations came in months before the 1973 oil crisis.
wongarsu
And it was very expensive because it was a Cold War prestige project. A three-way race between the US, Europe and the Soviet Union. Just like the Apollo program it was forced into existence through force of will, on a tight deadline with limited economic considerations.
If anything it's a miracle how practical the Concorde was and how long it remained in operation
pfdietz
That was why it was done at all, but not why it was expensive.
xdfgh1112
That's Occam's razor more or less.
jajko
At that time, maybe yes. These days, it would fail in many other criteria. Sound pollution is brutal, can't be effectively mitigated and it was all just about rich sparing few hours to get to NY/Paris faster.
Fuck the rich, take normal airliner like everybody else if you are so poor to not have your own jet. We are not bending health standards to whims of few moderately wealthy individuals, sounds like some societal progress there.
A sort of self-regulating issue for a change.
namuol
Just give us high speed rail. Who does supersonic travel actually serve?
daft_pink
Most people using these flights would be traveling over oceans that are not serviceable by rail.
namuol
My point stands. Who needs to cross oceans so regularly and so fast?
Agingcoder
People working for large international companies or having lots of business related interests across continents. There is I think no substitute to physically meeting people at some point ( I’ve experienced this firsthand) so some people travel a lot. They’re expensive people as well, so making trips shorter and less tiring (business trips like these are exhausting ) is a good thing for them.
Yes, tools like zoom alleviate the problem somehow but not completely.
oceanplexian
It’s 2025. I want to live in a future where we do cool things like enable the average person to take supersonic transport. Sure, there are some marginal benefits here and there but going faster shouldn’t need any special justification.
AlotOfReading
Even with the decline of business travel, there's plenty of people traveling constantly who would pay absurd amounts of money to arrive faster. Celebrities, sports teams, entertainers, the ultra-wealthy, etc. Less flight time allows them to get more rest and spend extra time preparing for the events they're traveling to.
dexterdog
Very rich people and C-level execs. Ok, maybe not 'need' but they want to.
supportengineer
We had the perfect machine for this. The SS United States.
scopendo
I would hazard to say very many people, me included.
youngtaff
Are they?
Sure trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic travel are big routes but there’s also a huge amount of traffic that goes Europe, Asia, Australia / New Zealand
RealityVoid
Well, build me a sub-oceanic trans-continental Hyperloop!
0cf8612b2e1e
That would be great if it could actually get built in the USA. Too many entrenched interests who want it to fail and/or want to skim off the project.
fortran77
There's high speed rail in Florida that works.
laurencerowe
Brightline is mostly 110mph with a few 125mph sections. Standard intercity speeds in Europe, the tier below TGV style high speed rail.
Philpax
Aside from the people it's killed: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article310829260.html
(I love high-speed rail; I enjoy it in Europe. I think Brightline's implementation may need some work before it's scaled up.)
Freedom2
Depends on your definition of "high speed", considering how slow it is.
areoform
Some of us would like to visit other continents. A world that grows ever smaller is one where war becomes ever unthinkable.
whoisyc
Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.
If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.
areoform
Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.
See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.
In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
KeplerBoy
I don't know. At some point in the not so distant past the west had hundreds of flights to Moscow and St. Petersburg and bought hundreds of millions worth of goods from Russia every day.
Didn't stop them from getting into a war
tom_
You can visit other continents already? If they aren't connected by land, we have aeroplanes - and if you don't like flying, you can go by boat.
perching_aix
A 6000 km long undersea tunnel with a 600 km/h avg speed train traversing it would be pretty futuristic alright :)
bojan
You'd think so, but Europe grew ever smaller, with open borders, low-cost flights, single market, until at some point it didn't any more, and that process is since 2016 reversing.
supportengineer
That sounds like a false choice. In order to avoid war, people need to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels so they can personally visit the country?
bjourne
If shorter distances were correlated with more peace there wouldn't be a genocide in Gaza, since the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv is only about 70 km. More travel may have other advantages, but peace doesn't seem to be one of them.
guenthert
ultra-fast passenger travel is clearly a first-world problem. it doesn't take much to see that this first-world is shrinking rapidly.
juujian
Fabulous, even more means for the ultra rich to consume and generate greenhouse gases while the quality of life for the 99% stagnates.
Jtsummers
If they use Starship, though, it would reduce the number of ultra rich out there as their wealth gets divided through rapid unscheduled inheritance.
appreciatorBus
A whole section on economics, efficiency and speed without any mention of externalities.
robotresearcher
“More fuel per seat‑km means higher CO₂ if sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is scarce. Supersonic NOₓ and water vapour are emitted directly into the lower stratosphere, affecting ozone and radiative forcing . Methalox rockets also inject large quantities of H₂O and NOₓ at >30 km.”
appreciatorBus
Fair enough, I was literally searching for the word.
I assumed the history of noise externalities from supersonic aircraft might merit a broader discussion of externalities.
It’s great that they are talking about air pollution, but I’d still argue that there are many other externalities to supersonic air travel, (and sub sonic air travel, and ground transport, etc)
I just think we’d get saner transport policy and better innovation if we talked about them, and how to balance the benefits for people inside the vehicle for the costs to those outside the vehicle.
null
areoform
For the self-described "skeptics," 2 hour travel to anywhere on Earth means that everyone gets to have a donor organ shipped to them within the viability window.
If we could go from SF to Tokyo in 2 hours, it would permanently change geopolitics. Imagine commuting between Shenzhen and SF. One foot in each of the two most innovative cities on Earth.
The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
ThinkBeat
yeah, but in reality it would mean the rich and powerful can get a donar organ from anywhere in the world. Probably from somewhere whre organs can be cheaply obtained, one way or another and then rushed to the private hospital where Bill Gates is waiting.
justinclift
> The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
Is there strong evidence that's true?
bryanrasmussen
>The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
and the quicker disease can spread.
jMyles
It's unlikely that the general speed of spread of a pathogen will cause an increase in adverse outcomes from that pathogen. It's equally possible (though woefully underexamined) that the hastened immunity stemming from more rapid spread will cause a decrease in adverse outcomes.
What causes an increase in adverse outcomes, at least for fast-moving pandemics such as respiratory pandemics, is spread between risk tiers. For example, in the case of a pathogen with a significant age-dependent morbidity/mortality rate, one of the most dire threats is spread within multigenerational households.
Providing resources, opportunities, and guidance to facilitate spread within the low-risk tier while briefly isolating that cohort from the high-risk tier is likely to produce better outcomes.
Stated more tersely: the human proclivity to travel and share immune information with peers is a strength, not a weakness.
bryanrasmussen
>Stated more tersely: the human proclivity to travel and share immune information with peers is a strength, not a weakness.
hmm, ok, since your profile says you study epidemiology sometimes I guess that's a totally reasonable take I hadn't considered. I was of course going off the stuff that was going around during Covid's height when people would refer to theories that faster and increased international travel would lead to more pandemics, and that Covid worked as predicted by that theory.
areoform
> and the quicker disease can spread.
HN has attracted its share of luddites. People who aren't interested in building a better future. But are very interested in tearing it down.
When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
tom_
You can make the case for whatever case you are trying to make, without pushing back on this quite specific extremely correct point. When people meet. disease spreads. If it doesn't spread when they breathe on one another, it will spread when they touch. If it doesn't spread when they touch, it will spread when they fuck. If it doesn't spread when they fuck - phew, crikey, this disease is useless indeed, and natural selection will see it off quickly. Meanwhile our protagonists now have flu, norovirus and crabs.
bryanrasmussen
if you'll look at my profile you will discover that evidently it happened 5 years before you joined.
supportengineer
March 2020, approximately
Avicebron
> When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
As there as been a general broadening of discussion as to exactly what "a better future" means and I suppose more specifically to whom.
daft_pink
It’s kind of interesting the way the entrenched players really aren’t interested in this technology so much.
dopa42365
Can't go supersonic over inhabited land in this day and age. So all it does is shave some time off on ocean crossing. Like flying the 3000km from East Canada to West Ireland in 1.5 instead of 3 hours.
At extremely increased cost. It's a hard sell in an industry that's competing for price efficiency.
nunez
I believe United Airlines invested in Boom.
zeristor
Charm of Concorde sort of noise dived when it exploded.
Jtsummers
What's "noise dived"? I presume you mean "nose dived".
But it did not explode, it crashed. The cause of the accident was FOD (Foreign Object Damage). Debris on the runway, a 17"x1" strip of titanium, caused damage to the tire which caused additional damage and ultimately the crash.
Perhaps less dramatically, but that's not a unique-to-Concorde kind of accident. FOD is taken seriously in the aviation industry.
oceanplexian
If Boeing was held to the same standard they would have stopped making airplanes a half a dozen plane crashes ago.
jMyles
While the engineering and innovation surrounding fast travel is interesting and compelling, I think that ultra-comfortable but slow-and-sustainable travel is more likely to win the day.
Animats
The airship enthusiasts keep saying that, but nobody is flying luxury lighter than air yachts.
qayxc
There's reasons for that. One of them being that literally no one even builds airships anymore. Blimps don't count. Another reason is helium being very expensive and the irrational fear of using hydrogen as a lifting gas.
pfdietz
Makes the mistake of to some extent conflating propellant and fuel. Liquid oxygen is very cheap, much cheaper than hydrocarbon fuels per unit mass, a fact not in evidence in the article.
The future of ultra-fast passenger travel is Zoom calls.
A supersonic bizjet is a possibility. It's not cost effective, but it's a status symbol.