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Richard Branson Reveals Prototype For Supersonic Passenger Aircraft (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sir Richard Branson on Tuesday heralded the rebirth of supersonic passenger flights with the unveiling of a prototype aircraft promising 3.5-hour flights from London to New York for an "affordable" $5,000 return. The billionaire Virgin Group founder said his Spaceship company would help Denver-based startup Boom build a new generation of supersonic jets and reintroduce transatlantic flight times unseen since Concorde was scrapped. Branson is partnering with Blake Scholl, a pilot and former Amazon executive, who will later on Tuesday unveil a prototype of the new jet in a hangar in Denver, Colorado. While several other companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are developing new supersonic jets, Scholl said his plan was likely to beat them to market as it does not require any new technology that would need approval by regulators. Scholl said test flights would begin in southern California, with plans to launch the first commercial departures in 2023. If the plans stick to schedule, Boom flights will launch 20 years after British Airways and Air France decommissioned Concorde. He said Boom would succeed where Concorde failed because developments in technology and lighter materials meant tickets would be much cheaper. Boom will have just 45 to 50 seats, compared with Concorde's 92 to 128. Scholl reckons the demand for affordable supersonic flights could make this a $100 billion market. He said his plane could work on 500 different routes, but would concentrate initially on London to New York, San Francisco to Tokyo, and Los Angeles to Sydney.
The most profitable routes for supersonic aircraft are mainly over oceans, so the aircraft won't be supersonic over land for those routes. I don't know how they would handle a Los Angeles to New York route, though.
Not true; in fact the reverse! In its later years, (once BA and Air France had figured out that people did not actually care how expensive the tickets were, and racked up the prices), Concorde flight were very profitable.
Of course, this ignored the massive R&D costs that were written-off by the UK and French governments and could not be recovered due to the small number of units produced.
Concorde was retired mainly because Airbus decided to stop offering maintenance...understandable because it was 1960s technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As a non-1% resident of London, I wish you were right, but I doubt it. To understand you need to see London from a rich person's point of view. From that perspective, the main thing you are interested in is political stability (i.e. a ruling political class that will protect your interests/wealth), which the UK almost uniquely has through a hereditary monarchy at the top (which clearly has an interest in protecting unearned wealth), a parliamentary system that is pseudo-democratic (house of lords, first past the post), and a judiciary that can curb the power of government against the people (look at the way private citizens can sue the government).
Compare this with other countries which have either more populous democracies (where the masses can simply vote to redistribute your wealth) or those with less democracy (where the leader might decide they want a share of your wealth). Where would you rather hoard your assets? The answer is London.
The other big benefit of London is that it is the pre-eminent global tax haven through the non-domiciled status system. It is essentially like a supermarket for tax havens, where you can live in London and shop out your tax liabilities to any of the convenient offshore tax-free locations around the world, without having to live on a sleepy island in the middle of no where. Many of the available tax havens have power structures that connect up with the UK mainland, which gives great confidence in the protection of your wealth.
You must mean the 1% of the 1%. It only takes 400-500K of household income to be in the top 1% in the US. The idea of someone (technically a household, most 1% households are two income) earning only 400K and flying private is ridiculous.
I am in a 1% household (500K/yr) and I rarely even fly business class unless someone else is paying for (NYC->London b-class ticket is $3-6K depending on when and who you fly).
"Upper middle class" in your eyes seems to be the top 2-3%, and the "1%" in your world must be the top .05%-.01%.
They spent five years developing their first commercial craft... and then accidentally destroyed it on its fourth test flight, killing the copilot and seriously injuring the pilot. Ironically, the crash had nothing to do with it being a rocket; a combination of too few safety lockouts and poor pilot training led to the air braking system being deployed at too low of a speed. Which was a brand new huge setback. The fact that it took five years to even get to that point was itself due to a series of delays, including a complete redesign of the motor (really, the first team should have just read the research on hybrid rocket engines, they would have learned that polybutadiene, while a classic binder for solid rocket fuel, does not make a good hybrid fuel).
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Burn rate, mainly. Solids are very different from hybrids in that the oxidizer is intermixed with the fuel, and thus it's easy to get any burn rate you want, from "none" to "rapid unscheduled disassembly" ;) With hybrids, combustion only occurs on the surface as a surface/gas reaction and the rate of reaction there is limited, so it's much more of an issue. With polybutadiene, this means having more channels and thinner walls to get the burn rate up, which increases the odds that chunks will break off as it burns, among other problems. It's generally recognized that the optimal situation is to have a fuel that readily forms a low viscosity melt layer which can be easily aerosolized, dramatically increasing the surface area. So, for example, fuels like paraffin wax and polyethylene work very well for hybrids. Combustion enhancers like aluminum significantly help as well.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.