I feel sad and disturbed that i have to sit tens of hours in an airplane to travel home from europe, that i need to sit at least 10 hours in an airplane from Tokyo to San Fransico. We see bigger and bigger airplanes but absolutly zero progress in the speed aspect. We are totally pushed under the tyranny of distance. Concorde was developed in 1969 and proved that SST is profitable. British Airways operated a fleet of 7 Concorde and those 7 airplanes made each year more than 20% of the profit of the entire British Airways fleet. Concorde takes just 2h and 50 minutes to reach New York from London. Concorde is out of service since 2003 and now you have to crawl over the sky. Concorde never reached mass market simply because USA failed to build its own SST and organized campaigns against Concorde. because of that Concorde became not a standard in aviation. It became a legendary airplane for the rich. Fact is, that an even more advanced model of Concorde, caleld Concorde B was alerady in the planning stage. With wider range and even more passengers. It never went into production, because aonly Air France and British Airways ordered Concorde. But major japanese Airlines ordered Concorde too. JAL ordered 3 Concorde in 1965 and the livery would have been looked like this: Japan never got its ordered Concorde though...Now we have 2014 and still have nothing like this but only primitive subsonic airplanes... And where is developmet heading? Some smaller projects of sst business jets exist but only Japan has a passenger SST in development. JAXA works on a great SST passenger plane but development is still in early process: For those interests you can read into the test flights here: http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2005/10/20051010_sst_at1_e.pdf We need to push this forward!
