Two hours faster

The company Boom is working to build a new supersonic airliner. In a recent interview, the founder extolled saving a few hours of flight time:

When I call Blake Scholl from New York, he says it’s a shame we couldn’t have met at his office in Colorado. If only there were a supersonic jet that could cruise at 1.7 times the speed of sound, and get me there two hours quicker than the typical JFK-to-Denver route.

That true, from a certain point of view. It’s also indicative of tech bro thinking. Of all the places to shave time off of a transcontinental flight, the speed of the airplane is an odd place to look. But the tech bros approach everything as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a community issue that multiple stakeholder can address.

Getting to JFK is a transportation nightmare. Instead of direct trains to the airport, you have to get to Jamaica station first and then take a slow “people mover” to actually get to the airport. Improving public transportation would also improve driving times as there would be less traffic. That’s an easy way to save half an hour or more and would apply to nearly every major airport in the US.

The main reason you have to get to the airport so early is for the security theatre. If they stopped the nonsense with the shoes and upselling “faster” screening, and instead simply staffed the airport well enough to allow passengers to get through this in a few minutes, you’d save another hour.

Of course, the rebuttal is that there’s no funding for either of these radical ideas. But isn’t it odd that building a functional train from Manhattan to JFK or hiring a few more low-paid staff is impossible but building supersonic luxury jets is a practical solution?