United makes supersonic bet

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I feel like this might (ironically) be a side-effect of the pandemic and the environmental "push" potentially restricting/highly taxing international flights.
I feel like fuel guzzling high altitude flights are likely to be at the top of the list for maximum taxes, fees, and surcharges. Otherwise why bother?

I can see a scenario where a 787 is running all-coach/premium economy while the SST is the Business Class operation.
All-business aircraft are a rare breed relative to the APEX market. It's hard to entice status flyers to remain loyal if premium upgrades require switching to a completely different flight. In my view there is nothing wrong with the BC experience on the B787 so I see no need to spend a fortune removing it.
 
All-business aircraft are a rare breed relative to the APEX market. It's hard to entice status flyers to remain loyal if premium upgrades require switching to a completely different flight. In my view there is nothing wrong with the BC experience on the B787 so I see no need to spend a fortune removing it.
I tend to agree. All BC aircraft can be sustained only on routes that have enough BC to fill the aircraft based on normal fares without discounts or discounted upgrades.

I had flown in one from Stuttgart to Newark flown by Privatair for Lufthansa. The aircraft was a BBJ. AFAICT everyone one that flight was full fare. That was during a brief period when I reported directly to a Senior VP at HP.

Actually the BC pods in 748/773s/787s in both Lufthansa and United today are way better than what was on that BBJ.
 
I feel like fuel guzzling high altitude flights are likely to be at the top of the list for maximum taxes, fees, and surcharges. Otherwise why bother?
That presumes that elected officials can be arsed to differentiate (when is the last time that the law was ahead of business?). A scheme like the UK uses at present would either (1) peg the seats on the flights in question as "business class" and charge the higher APD rate or (2) potentially get botched and note that the all-J arrangement is the "lowest class available on the plane in question". Note that as the rules are presently written for the UK, if sold today tickets on the Concorde would fall under the reduced rate as the flight was single-class (so Business was the "lowest available class") and the seat pitch was 37 inches (so under the 40" cap).

Obviously, the rule could be re-written but there's a good chance that either Parliament or the DfT (or the equivalent bodies elsewhere) either couldn't be bothered or would simply opt not to do so in a fairly classic move to cater to wealthy "clients" (i.e. donors). Heck, this sort of thing might even dodge the attention of environmental campaigners for a while (if only because the latter are in a sufficiently target-rich environment right, and chasing oil companies is probably easier), especially if the flights are only running on a few routes in modest numbers.

(Note: The 40" rule seems to be aimed at avoiding catching exit row seats under the rule even if the airline charges extra for them...but a TATL flight on an SST would likely have seat pitches in the 36-40" range since time in-flight is likely to be on par with a midrange domestic flight.)
 
A very interesting podcast about Boom and supersonic travel:

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/avtalk-episode-115-is-boom-all-noise/
They tried to keep an open mind about many issues, but the thing that really stuck out was that Boom doesn't have an engine, or even a rough design for one. They went into how airframe manufacturers and engine companies work hand in hand to build a new aircraft, and often help finance each other through the design process. Boom has no one on the engine side. It costs a fortune to develop a new engine, and no one is going to do it just on the hope that Boom will buy a few in 5-10 years.

You want to learn about supersonic engines, talk to the military. Be sure and ask how many hours they get between overhauls.

Anyone can do a mockup and some fancy graphics. They didn't want to badmouth United too badly, but it sure smells like a publicity stunt.
 
From the getgo the United thing with Boom has seemed like a publicity stunt to me. I have no idea what value United sees in that stunt. Is it going to cause anyone to fly one extra segment on United or move over to United from some other airline in anticipation of a hypothetical Supersonic travel a decade away? It is not clear they have even committed a single penny other than for creating marketing blurbs on this. Very strange.
 
OK, to step back: My point on why the mid-Pacific fueling stop is simply this: The time lost in the fueling stop and the disruption for the passengers for landing and takeoff, and likely deboard during fueling is that it would negate most of the advantages of the faster flying time. If I had a choice between 12 hours on a flight and an 8 to 9 hour end to end time with a get off and on in the middle, I think I would go for the longer time without disruption. After all, a fuel stop for a plane is going to take at least 2 hours maybe 3 hours in addition to the non-stop air time. If they can't haul enough fuel to get the blooming thing across the Pacific, why bother at all?
 
OK, to step back: My point on why the mid-Pacific fueling stop is simply this: The time lost in the fueling stop and the disruption for the passengers for landing and takeoff, and likely deboard during fueling is that it would negate most of the advantages of the faster flying time.
Why would they have to deboard? I have been through several unplanned and planned fueling stops in Fiji on the way to Auststralia on 747s and we never had to deboard. They just parked at a remote stand, filled up and were on their way as soon as done. Apparently it took a bit more time for the brakes to cool down sufficently than to actually complete the refueling.
 
OK, to step back: My point on why the mid-Pacific fueling stop is simply this: The time lost in the fueling stop and the disruption for the passengers for landing and takeoff, and likely deboard during fueling is that it would negate most of the advantages of the faster flying time. If I had a choice between 12 hours on a flight and an 8 to 9 hour end to end time with a get off and on in the middle, I think I would go for the longer time without disruption. After all, a fuel stop for a plane is going to take at least 2 hours maybe 3 hours in addition to the non-stop air time. If they can't haul enough fuel to get the blooming thing across the Pacific, why bother at all?

There’s no reason for a fuel stop to take 2-3 hours if you’re not doing anything else. If the airport is along a reasonably direct flight path, the time for landing, taxiing, and taking off back to cruise again shouldn’t be more than 30-45 minutes. The fueling itself would take a similar amount of time (just a guess, though, because I really have no idea how much fuel this plane will use).

For reference, the recently cancelled BA flight 1, flying from London City Airport to New York via Shannon had an end-to-end schedule 90 minutes longer than nonstop flights LHR-JFK. The ground time in Shannon was for refueling (though they also used it to preclear passengers for US customs & immigration).
 
I always wanted to visit Fairbanks, now I have the perfect excuse for a 30 minute visit!
:cool:
There’s no reason for a fuel stop to take 2-3 hours if you’re not doing anything else. If the airport is along a reasonably direct flight path, the time for landing, taxiing, and taking off back to cruise again shouldn’t be more than 30-45 minutes. The fueling itself would take a similar amount of time (just a guess, though, because I really have no idea how much fuel this plane will use).

For reference, the recently cancelled BA flight 1, flying from London City Airport to New York via Shannon had an end-to-end schedule 90 minutes longer than nonstop flights LHR-JFK. The ground time in Shannon was for refueling (though they also used it to preclear passengers for US customs & immigration).
 
No need to deboard during refueling duly noted. My only experience with stops made for refuel only were on flights 50 years ago going back and forth to Vietnam courtesy of the US Army and via flights on never-heard-of-them-before and hope-to-never-see-them-again charter airlines, and we had to deboard for the occasion. Most of these were announced as one hour on the ground stops but commonly took longer. As to the 90 minutes longer time with the Shannon stop, I consider that amazingly short. For the supersonic plane, what would be the difference with a much higher top speed? I know when on rails the higher the through speed, the greater the time penalty for a stop, and I would think for a plane it probably be worse, but then I claim no expertise in this area.
 
I always wanted to visit Fairbanks, now I have the perfect excuse for a 30 minute visit!
:cool:
Then you better do it westbound...back before the 747SP made New York/Tokyo nonstops possible, the nightly Pan Am flight made a stop at Fairbanks, to service the 707, and change crew. Eastbound, the passenger's were kept in an 'in-transit' lounge, and cleared custom's and immigration at JFK.
Pan Am would sell space to and from Fairbanks either way, but anyone boarding in Fairbanks (very few), still had to clear customs even though they were on a 'domestic' segment.
 
All-business aircraft are a rare breed relative to the APEX market. It's hard to entice status flyers to remain loyal if premium upgrades require switching to a completely different flight. In my view there is nothing wrong with the BC experience on the B787 so I see no need to spend a fortune removing it.
That depends on how you handle the scheduling. If you're sliding folks around by a few hours and moving them halfway down the terminal, that's one thing (visions of the ending of Airplane come to mind...). If the flights board simultaneously, leave within five minutes of one another, and use neighboring gates (but the SST gets to the destination a few hours faster), that feels like an entirely different ballgame.

As the main "target" market would seem to be the daylight East Coast-Europe markets, on the present timetables an easy example is that you could have an SST "shadow" Virgin Atlantic's morning flight out of JFK (depart JFK 0815 NYC time, would arrive LHR 1710 London time if you go by the old Concorde schedule) and then "shadow" the return flight (depart LHR 1850 London time, arrive JFK 1745 NYC time). Presuming a 787 vs a 50-seater SST, you could probably begin boarding simultaneously (or even start the SST after the 787) and still get the SST "out the door" faster. The question there would be turn times, but I think that timetable (which is not far off of BA's pre-accident Concorde schedule...you could presumably slide the relevant flights by 10-20 minutes if needed to get the turn time right) would generally work. The reverse schedule would be trickier...but you could probably have the LHR departure tag to one of the first flights in the morning and then the JFK departure to one of the last departures at night (an SST with a 2130 departure JFK time would actually arrive at about the same time as the 1830 flight out of JFK...the idea of an "overnight" TATL flight only taking four hours but still avoiding graveyard hours is kind-of surreal).

Now, my guess (FWIW) is that you don't totally eliminate the front cabin on the 787...but you can reduce its size.

(Notably, if I'm not mistaken then it looks like you could probably run a round-trip on the SST with a single crew and no hotel needed versus the 787 needing two crews and a hotel night to work.)

If Boom's range pans out, 4250 NM puts a number of city pairs within reach (if you can get the sonic boom to go off in the right place, at least). SEA-TYO comes to mind, as does (surreally) SEA/YVR-LHR (though this might be impeded by rules on where the plane can go boom...an uncomfortable choice of words if ever I saw one). Does anyone know if Canada has a CONUS-style ban on sonic booms? I wonder because much of the great circle route up there is extremely rural.
 
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