Have the seats setup in modules that can be filled at the gate before the plane gets there, and then the modules are swapped in an out like cargo.

Comparing passenger planes to fighter jets is daft. You used cars as an example - there isn't a single category of car where anything made in the 70s can in any measurable way compete with it's modern equivalent (I say measurable to exclude looks and desirability). Whether you're looking at trucks, SUVs, saloons or sports cars, there is a modern car that would completely kick the crap out of anything made in the 70s. In the category of passenger planes that isn't the case - there was a passenger plane made back then that is nearly twice the speed of anything currently available.

You don't find that odd? Humans are impatient and want to do everything faster, and rich people even more so. There are more rich people around than ever before (140 billionaires in 1987 when Forbes first did their list, 1226 billionaires now), and they're more international than ever before, the market for faster air travel must be huge. So how come we made Concorde and then stopped, why weren't companies competing to bring out something faster and/or cheaper like they did in every other sphere of life? Was it purely down to the sonic boom? And if so, does that doom all the contenders listed above, or will the US regulators go more easy on American-made supersonic planes than they did on the Franco-British effort?

There is no subsonic passenger jet from the 70's that compete in anyway with a modern subsonic passenger jet.

As mentioned before, Concorde and Concordski are in a class by themselves. A class that was more driven by egos and national prestige than any viable economic model. The boom was a major issue, but not the only issue. They were fast, but not fast enough so a first class passenger chooses to travel on a sleeper bed in a A380 that can go to any city nonstop instead of saving a few hours in an cramped tin can that can only fly select over water routes.

The reason there is all this new activity is two fold. 1) they figured out how to solve the sonic boom problem 2) they think they found a viable economic model in 15-50 passenger class size.

That's a pretty significant "sub" that you slipped in there! I get what you're saying about why Concorde was a one-off, I still find it to be pretty much unique in that we just stopped there and focused on making jets bigger and quieter, not faster. I can't think of any other sphere of life where that's happened. 200+mph supercars make no economic sense either - they're completely impractical, there's almost nowhere you can legally drive them even close to their limit, and yet we didn't just make the Lamborghini Countach in 1974 and then decide to stop there and take a break for 40 years.

Actually, much of the focus on subsonic passenger jets hasn't been to make them bigger and quieter; much of what has been done is to make them more fuel efficient, with a large leap in avionics technology as well. There have been pretty dramatic advances in engine technology and aerodynamics since the 1970s.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

"Hey Ridley, you got a stick of Beemans?"

" I might just have me a stick."

Go slay that demon in the sky!!

Totally get all that and fully agree, the oddity for me is why up until now those dramatic advances in engines and aerodynamics haven't at the same time been directed at making planes faster. Maybe it's simply the case that getting any large passenger plane onto the market is such a massively expensive exercise with very little competition (I fly quite a few different airlines in different parts of the world and can't remember the last time I wasn't on an Airbus or Boeing) that there's not much incentive for taking risks or disrupting. Combination of regulation against the sonic boom, oil prices and high exposure to the richest 1% of the market is plenty enough risk I guess.

Like I said, I can't think of any other area of technology where a feature that I assume people would want and be prepared to pay for has actually gone backwards. On international flights, first class seats seem to be up to about 10x the price of economy - if you can justify paying 10x for more legroom and nicer food, surely you can justify it for arriving in half the time?

There is a huge drag penalty to go supersonic. It takes a LOT more gas and different, more powerful motors, more beefed up structure, etc, to go supersonic. So now you have an aircraft that is going to require a large increase in ticket price in order for it to be profitable. I haven't checked, but I wonder if Concorde every actually made money, or if the airlines that flew it were eating some of the cost.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

Ahhhh, good that you noticed... Now go and fuck off, ye miserable Peasant!

Not sure they ever published the numbers, but it was certainly a political vanity project so the British and French governments subsidised a lot of the initial costs. The flights were always popular, they were still flying when I started work and there was a lot of kudos if you managed to fly Concorde (I knew a few people who did, I was way too junior).

You're not taking into account how few first class seats there are on a typical widebody airliner, and how few of those are actually sold at full fare as opposed to free/discount upgrades or people cashing in frequent flyer program points. If you're going to run the Concorde 2.0 profitably, you're going to need several hundred customers per day willing to fly that route at $5k+ per leg. There just aren't enough city pairs that can sustain that kind of demand. You can't sink several billion into development of Concorde 2.0 when the demand is there for a few dozen airframes at most.

I'm also not sure airline first class is the real competition for a large supersonic airliner. Many of the people who could truly justify a supersonic airline trip are already flying private. When you look at the total trip time, including ground transportation, security, possible connecting flight(s) to the hub that actually gets SST service, and having to work around the airline's schedule vs. simply having your driver roll up to your jet, hopping in and going, currently available business jets aren't meaningfully slower than something like a Concorde for most real world trips.

Fuck man, I bet you're a real hit at birthday parties. What next, you're gonna tell us there's no Santa Claus? Can't you just let BK enjoy his little supersonic boner here?

We're talking about different things. BK is talking about a plane that is ~10% the size of the Concorde by passenger capacity, not a large airliner. It would also be owned and operated on demand by deep pocketed individuals and corporations, not on scheduled airline service. A small supersonic bizjet like the one referenced in the original article may well work if they can get it approved to fly over land, it can use the same airports and runways that the current bizjet fleet is operating out of and it has transoceanic range.

A Concorde sized supersonic airliner that could only ever cover its operating cost between a small handful of large hub airport pairs is DOA. The economics don't work and it's not even close.