I've been on here bemoaning the state of aerospace for a long time... who wouldn't love to fly a modern version of the Concorde? The only thing I can see that would drive a new age of commercial aircraft design is a quantum leap in materials technology, which is actually kind of happening now. Until you can satisfy the accountants that a new aircraft design is economically desirable, we'll just keep on with the incremental improvements in current offerings.

One bright spot in our industry is the new weather radar technology that uses multiscan (originally developed for fighters), and combines it with the work of a U of U meteorology professor to create a database of global weather characteristics, then corrects for time of day and season. Metadata basically. It then infers things about the radar returns and displays them accordingly, such as overflight protection, lightning and hail threat, and anvil penetration, and two level turbulence detection. It's called ThreatTrack. One or two of the 739's have it. The company is retrofitting all the 737's with it. The STC for the Airbus is coming soon. I think the 777's are getting it too. I've been trying to see if anyone has flown it yet and what do they think of it...

Google it... WXR 2100 ThreatTrack. Some Rockwell Collins propellerhead started working on it in his basement in Iowa about 15 years ago.