SSBJ and things
As far as the SSBJ goes, there really does not seem to be sufficient demand by the corporations out there, although there have been several stabs at the idea, the most famous being the Sukhoi/Grumman S21. The problem now is, as has been laboured ad nauseam, that neither scarebus or boingo want to go down the road of a long and expensive R & D process without KNOWING whether there are lots of sales at the end of that tunnel. Basically neither of the world's only large aircraft manufacturers have any interest in such a gamble. (And without any serious competition out there they have no reason to either). But we still have the attraction of the HST, typically the Lapcat A2. Anyone who has flown out of Terminal 3 at Heathrow on one of the late night JSA Far East services would know that both First and Business class cabins are invariably bursting at the seams, the intrepid travellers knowing that anything up to the next 24 hours has to be completely written off to the journey. Anyone doing the round trip then has two days completely taken out, not counting those many sweet sweet hours of jet lag. It does not take a genius to work out that a journey time of only THREE hours would be incredibly attractive to a large number of these folks, the trick of course is that the ticket price has to be realistic. The West Coast of the USA is another plumb route, but of course the problem becomes supersonic flight over the continental USA. Polar flying, or over northern Canada is a rather long way round, but possible solution, but of course this whittles down some of the time saving and means we burn more fuel in the process, albeit cheap and very environmentally friendly hydrogen. (And we have of course to assume that a cost effective way of producing and storing large quantities of our liquid hydrogen can be found). It seems that the need for speed is not really out there right now, and to all of us in the world of aviation that has to be a bit of a shame. When Concorde was abandoned mankind took a giant stumble backwards, and for the very first time in history had to settle for far slower journey times. We can only guess I suppose what the future of air travel holds; maybe people are just resigned to being stuffed into bigger and bigger tin cans that go no faster than those cans that came before, who knows. All some of us can do I guess is HOPE that someone out there has just a little imagination.