• ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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    17 days ago

    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.

    • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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      17 days ago

      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.

      • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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        17 days ago

        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?

        • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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          17 days ago

          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.