Originally Posted by
Air Guitar
First words out of his mouth were, 50 years, no real progress in aviation. Interesting way to spark interest for new investors.
https://youtu.be/TIfrL2Arj5o
He has a couple good points.
Faster is better for some of an airline's significant costs... crew, some Mx, DX overhead for example.
Higher is better for fuel burn, more direct routes, and WX avoidance.
All of that offsets any higher costs associated with an SST... especially if it can do twice as many legs in a day, that much of an increase in utilization dramatically cuts the mortgage component of CASM (the reason SWA does 20-minute turns). An SST could be twice the price of a conventional airliner and still cost less per ASM.
He's taking the obvious measure of designing it for 100% SAF for carbon purposes... I can about guarantee that all future airliner designs will be 100% SAF enabled. It's not hard, the only issue with current aircraft is that soft parts in the fuel system often need to be immersed in Jet A to stay lubricated and flexible, so all you need is different material for seals, or-rings, etc. It would be costly to tear apart an existing plane to retrofit those parts, but negligible cost for a clean-sheet design.
If this (or any similar project) makes it to production, it's probably going to be via one of the established airframers. Unless Elon or Jeff gets a wild hair.