Season 1
EP01 - The Speed Limit of the Sky (Why Don't We Have Supersonic Flight?)
Explore why commercial supersonic flight disappeared after the Concorde and has not returned despite the technology existing. Learn the sonic boom physics, regulatory barriers, and economic math that keep supersonic travel grounded.
I hate this. I hate everything about flying in a plane!
Wait... in 1976, you could fly from London to New York in **2 hours and 52 minutes**. Today, it takes 7 hours.
We have iPhones, AI, and electric cars. Why did airplanes go *backwards*?
We didn't go backwards, Shez. We went sideways. We traded speed for cheapness. And we traded the boom for the silence.
Kurumi! Get me off this slow bus! Why don't we have the Concorde anymore? Did we forget the technology?
We didn't forget. The Concorde was an engineering miracle. It flew faster than a rifle bullet, while people drank champagne in shirtsleeves. It was the pinnacle of human aerodynamic achievement.
But it had a fatal flaw. Not a mechanical one. A social one.
It screamed.
When you fly subsonic, the air waves move out of your way. They warn the air ahead that you're coming.
When you hit Mach 1, you are moving faster than the warning signal. The air can't move. It gets crushed.
This is the **N-Wave**. The Sonic Boom. It's not a one-time noise when you break the barrier. It is a continuous carpet of explosions that follows the plane for the entire journey.
Okay, so it's loud. So what? Construction sites are loud.
It's not construction loud. It's artillery fire. In 1964, the US government ran a test called **Operation Bongo II**.
...sounds lame. You lying to me?.
It was real. They flew supersonic jets over Oklahoma City 8 times a day for 6 months to see if people would get used to it.
Did they?
People went insane. Windows broke. Plaster cracked. 15,000 noise complaints. A class-action lawsuit.
It turns out, human beings fundamentally refuse to live in a war zone just so a few rich bankers can get to London three hours faster.
So, in 1973, the FAA banned civil supersonic flight over land. This was **Moloch Move #1**.
Moloch?
'The God of Coordination Failure,' we will be using this term a lot. It is a **Game Theory** force that drives us to make the worst decisions for the greatest number of people.
I know! It's the losing quadrant of **Prisoner's Dilemma**!
Anyway, the ban meant the Concorde could *only* go fast over the ocean. It killed 80% of the potential routes.
No New York to LA. No London to Tokyo. Just a few niche Atlantic crossings.
The business case was strangled by regulation before it even took off.
Okay, fine. Limit it to the ocean. I'd still pay extra to cross the Atlantic in 3 hours.
Would you? Would you pay $20,000?
T-Twenty... thousand?
This is a **High-Bypass Turbofan**. See that giant fan at the front? It pushes a massive amount of air *around* the engine, slowly. It's incredibly efficient. It sips fuel.
To go supersonic, you can't have a big fat fan. It creates too much drag. You need a **Turbojet**. It sucks a small amount of air and shoots it out incredibly fast.
It is thirsty. The Concorde burned **2 tons of fuel** just taxiing from the gate to the runway.
Two tons? Just to drive to the runway?
Physics dictates a brutal trade-off. You can be fast (Turbojet), or you can be efficient (Turbofan). You cannot be both.
In the 70s, fuel was cheap. Then the Oil Crisis happened. Suddenly, burning 4x the fuel per passenger wasn't just expensive; it was economic suicide.
So... it wasn't the crash that killed it?
The crash in 2000 was the funeral. The death happened in the accounting department in 1973. Airlines realized they could make more money packing 400 people into a slow, efficient cattle car than flying 100 people in a fast rocket.
So we chose cheap over fast. That's depressing. But at least the trip is cheap.
There's one more killer. The **Security Theater**.
In 1969, you walked into the airport 20 minutes before your flight. You walked onto the plane.
Today? You arrive 3 hours early. You take off your shoes. You get scanned. You wait at the gate.
If the flight takes 3 hours, but the 'Airport Experience' takes 4 hours... the total trip is 7 hours.
The faster the flight, the more the 'Ground Tax' matters. Reducing the flight time by half doesn't reduce the *trip* time by half anymore. The marginal utility of speed has been eroded by the bureaucracy of safety.
So... we're stuck? We hit the speed limit of physics and politics?
Maybe not forever. NASA is trying to cheat the physics.
Now startups like Boom are chasing the supersonic dream. Their approach? Build a much smaller jet—only about 60-80 seats—with composite materials and quieted engines.
They're using every trick: computer-designed aerodynamics, carbon fiber, and special engine nacelles to tame the noise. But they have to make tough trade-offs.
So, will it work? Can we actually fly faster again?
Sort of. Boom wants to avoid the old wall of sonic booms by flying mostly over water, not cities. They're betting fuel efficiency and new engines can make the economics work.
But every engineering choice is a compromise: to reduce noise and drag, they made it long and skinny; to make it lighter, they cut the capacity. The ticket price will be for the elite, not the masses.
It's aviation as a luxury product. The physics didn't change. It's just new tech and startup optimism fighting the same old walls: noise, fuel, and the economics of mass vs. speed.
So the reason I'm suffering here isn't because we *can't* do better.
It's because 'better' requires a noise violation, $20,000, and a planet that doesn't care about carbon footprints.
We democratized flight, Shez. We made it possible for everyone to go everywhere. The price of that miracle... was slowing down.
Can't wait for the day we all get our own flying cars!
Well, I might have some bad news for you...
Oh man, just leave it to the next episode...
