I don’t know: San Jose - Seattle is ~900 miles or 1400km-1500km. That is 5-6 hours direct train at best at 300kmh. I don’t see this as something beneficial to a plane. Borderline comparable to flying and only because of slow TSA.
> 5 hours from the east coast of the US sounds right, but Seattle to Reykjavic is over 7 and closer to 8.
Well, it takes about 5 hours to fly from Seattle to NYC. If it takes 5 hours to fly from NYC to Reykjavic, you shave 2 hours off because you don't have to stop and you're following the great arc. Did you think that tacking on an extra ~3000 miles of naive travel distance would only take 2 hours?
It’s a bit faster than the trains running from Portland to Seattle, so there’s that to celebrate. Hopefully it gets faster over time.
Comparing to flying Portland to Seattle, it’s a wash mostly when including transfer times (airports are in the outskirts, require arriving well in advance). But, the train is “on time” maybe half the rides I’ve taken (and the delays can be hours) so the airplane has determinism going for it…
The article says "800 mph". Meaning it would be around 30 minutes. Not including accel/decel. No? It takes a flight hour to hour and a half from LA <> SF.
He may have been referring to a non-direct flight with an Atlantic route? eg, going Seattle to Chennai will be ~24 hours of travel either via Frankfurt or Dubai.
Thinking of the magic of flight in broad strokes, I can see how you'd call that going across the Pacific, just not quite literally.
This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours.
Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
Also depends on range. If a supersonic flight makes, say, London or JFK - Sydney doable, then you've just shaved a lot of time off with connections as well.
It may be European perspective, but there are dozens of absolutely gorgeous historic cities within an hour or two of flight from where I live, so flying sixteen hours to see Seattle (where I could fly two hours to see Paris or Rome) is just a sorry proposition.
JFK-NRT is 6745 miles, BRU-SYD is 10398 - although the Reaction Engines plan would be to go the long way round to avoid bothering people with the noise, a distance of 10097 miles.
Generations of hypersonic unmanned fighters required: zero!
RFP says 45 minutes to an airport with direct flights to Seattle, SF, NYC, and Washington DC. I don't know the area but it seems to me that YYZ is too far away to qualify
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