New high capacity airplanes

It seems as if generally you pay upwards of a million dollars for an extra 200 nm of range

Million	Type	Range nm	ktas	psgrs	Useful Load lb	Takeoff ft
$2.76	Citation Mustang	1,207	340	5	3135	3,110
$4.2	Citation M2	1,580	404	7	3800	3,210
$6.37	Citation CJ2+	1,750	418	9	4595	3,360
$7.49	Citation CJ3+	2,070	416	9	5490	3,180
$8.76	Citation CJ4	2,192	451	10	6970	3,190
$12.2	Citation XLS+	2,111	441	9	7540	3,560
$14.9	Citation Latitude	2,500	440	9	N/A	4,030
$17.0	Citation Sovereign+	3,188	460	12	12695	3,530
$21.5	Citation X+	3,408	527	12	14436	5,280
$26	Citation Longitude	4,000	490	12	N/A	5,400

Washington Dulles to LAX is 1982 nm
Seattle to Miami is 2365 nm

Suborbital by 2017.

According to a paper released by British consulting firm Knight Frank, which specializes in trends for “ultra-high net worth individuals,” sub-orbital commuter flights traveling at about 4,000 miles per hour (today's planes go around 500 mph), will be ready for the public by 2020.

The key is getting companies that are already approved for sub-orbital space travel (like Virgin Galactic) to stop planning trips just straight into the thermosphere and back down, and instead to start traveling around the globe.

Virgin Galactic’s founder Richard Branson has already indicated that he’s looking into this. He imagines a “future version of the current spaceship which will make transcontinental travel clean and fast — London to Sydney in a couple of hours.”

The flights are estimated to cost anywhere between $90,000 and $250,000 a pop making them accessible to only the top 0.01%. Call it billionaire-exclusive technology.

Quote: Fleastiff

The flights are estimated to cost anywhere between $90,000 and $250,000 a pop making them accessible to only the top 0.01%. Call it billionaire-exclusive technology.

If you listen to Dannii Minogue squealing about this 125 square foot suite, it's not because the plane goes fast.


The problem with a $200K ticket to go anywhere in the world in 3 hours or less, is that it has to compete with the $20K overnight luxury first class seat in a plane where you can sleep. That eventually became a problem with the Concorde. Do you want to sit in a tiny little seat for 3 hours to fly from London to New York, or do you want a gourmet meal and a bed for 7 hours overnight for half the cost?

When they discontinued the flight on the Concorde from Washington DC to London, they put in a dedicated turboprop to fly people from IAD to JFK with special procedures to wisk you through to your connection. But with the connections, it ended up being only 1 hour faster than taking a jet from IAD straight to London.

In some sense it is a classic travel issue. Did you take an ocean cruise liner, or a Zepellin, or an Orient Express to your destination, or do you spend the money to go faster?

For 200K you can buy a pretty nice house
for income property. What a waste of money
for a plane ride. I couldn't do it if I was
Bill Gates.

Quote: Evenbob

For 200K you can buy a pretty nice house for income property. What a waste of money for a plane ride. I couldn't do it if I was Bill Gates.

On 31 May 2003 the Concorde was charging $6K for a one way ticket for it's final run. That's a lot to pay for 3.5 hours. People are paying Virgin Atlantic $250K now for a 2.5 suborbital flight that will fly higher than 100 km ( the accepted definition of the edge space). The weightless portion will only last minutes.

I suppose that if you pay that much just to go up, then it might be helpful to come down on another continent.

Guy Laliberté is known to have paid $40 million in 2009 for 11 days in space.

The trip around the moon being planned is going to sell seats for $100 million.

Quote: Pacomartin

On 31 May 2003 the Concorde was charging $6K for a one way ticket for it's final run.

That's not a good point of comaprison. Concorde was unique, in low production, and therefore its last flight was a major event.

How much did a regular ticket on the Concorde go for?

Quote:

People are paying Virgin Atlantic $250K now for a 2.5 suborbital flight that will fly higher than 100 km ( the accepted definition of the edge space). The weightless portion will only last minutes.

This is something both unique and very new. You could get a lot more "weightless" time from a number of operators at a much lower price (just not all at once), but that gets you nowhere close to space, nor does it give you a view of Earth from outisde the atmosphere.

Quote:

I suppose that if you pay that much just to go up, then it might be helpful to come down on another continent.

The Virgin Galactic notion of suborbital flights to nowhere is a novelty and will last only as long as people are willing to pay for it, or until the first spectacular accident. In principe, though, there's nothing preventing Virgin, or anyone else, from carrying out suborbital flights to somewhere else. You could do NYC to Sidney in uncer 90 minutes, with a weightless portion in the midle.

That is, if you don't mind undergoing high acceleration first, and the unpowered, long, long gliding descent doens't bother you. Consider if a plane decides to cross your plane's assigned runway, as happens nowadays sometimes, you can't just climb out and go around. you either land or you crash. The ATC procedures would need to be worked out first, naturally, but there would be other considerations as well.

But the principles are well known and have been tested, with ICBMs.

Once you are talking about sub orbital flights and gliding to remote landing strips, its no longer a high capacity aircraft.

Quote: Nareed

That's not a good point of comaprison. Concorde was unique, in low production, and therefore its last flight was a major event.
How much did a regular ticket on the Concorde go for?

I don't believe they raised the price specifically for the last flight. The price obviously went up many times during the 40 years it was flying. Initially, it was just expensive as they hoped to sell more planes. There was flights to Washington, and flights to Hong Kong via Bahrain. Eventually when it was clear that it was going to be an experience, they would set the prices a little higher than a full fare refundable first class ticket on British Airways or Air France.

After the last Trans-Atlantic crossing they did one more flight for paying passengers. That was just a novelty flight, where they got to top speed and then returned. I'm sure that flight was expensive.

But the technology and manufacturing and production costs to make you go fast are always higher in initial decades than the cost of swaddling you in luxury.

In (1907), the liner Mauretania with a capacity of 2,300 passengers was able to cross the Atlantic in 4.5 days, a record which was held for 30 years when the liner Queen Mary reduced the crossing time to 4 days.

The Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic in 1936, its first and only full year of service, with ten trips to the United States and seven to Brazil. The ten westward trips that season took 53 to 78 hours and eastward took 43 to 61 hours.

Within 4 years of WWII there was fierce competition among 10 major airlines to fly across the Atlantic, At that point a propeller crossing was roughly half a day depending on the route. But the full transition from cruise liners to aircraft took until the jet age, but it was aided by the fact that liners could be retrofitted as cruise ships so the capital investment was not completely lost.

On Oct. 4, 1958: ‘Comets’ began the Trans-Atlantic Jet Age. The first Boeing 707 from New York to London was made on Oct. 26, 1958. But propeller crossings were being made almost immediately at the end of WWII. So many propeller warplanes manufactured in the USA and flown to Britian during the war years, that the technologically was greatly advanced from the 1930's. Of course warplanes could be flown from Newfoundland to Glasgow (greatly decreasing the time over water).

Quote: Pacomartin

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In some sense it is a classic travel issue. Did you take an ocean cruise liner, or a Zepellin, or an Orient Express to your destination, or do you spend the money to go faster?

Depends on what you want to do. I know of people pay $2,500 an hour to fly a private jet on business because it saves time. This was an issue when the Detroit Automakers needed a bailout and took heat for fly the already paid for corporate jets and told to pile into minivans and drive. The lost productivity was easily greater than the savings, but image can matter.

Quote: Pacomartin

I don't believe they raised the price specifically for the last flight.

I don't believe they wouldn't.

Quote:

Initially, it was just expensive as they hoped to sell more planes.

That's exactly why supersonic travel never caught on. Oerhaps had it debuted a few years earlier, before the oil shocks. But we'll never know.

Quote:

On Oct. 4, 1958: ‘Comets’ began the Trans-Atlantic Jet Age.

And then nearly ended it...

On first look, it's hard to believe we've had supersonic engines for over 50 years, yet not a single successful supersonic passenger aircraft has been devised. When looking into the matter, though, the obstacles are obvious and seem insurmountable. Just fuel costs are astonishing. I had hopes when the F-22 debuted because it has supercruising engines; that is, it can cruise at supersonic speeds without using afterburners. But that's just a mere step. The supercruising engines are turbojet engines, with high fuel consumption. The day you can equal them with turbofan engines, which require less fuel, then we'll start getting somewhere.