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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Given that Concorde was not close to being transformative, I think Boom would need to be 10x better than Concorde to be transformative with >50% probability, and they seem to be going for 2x.

Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.

My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.

And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

That is what I mean by a 2x improvement. Slightly less than half the inflation-adjusted price, for a marginally worse product (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.0). Still a niche product for rich people - the marketing spin is that the fare is competitive with business class, but airlines don't sell many full-fare business class tickets at the moment* - the average fare actually paid needs to go up a lot relative to subsonic business class for the economics to work out.

* As well as the usual discounted fares, the big volume business travel customers (mostly banks and consultancies) all have negotiated rebate schemes which means that the revenue to the airline is less than the face value of the ticket.

Sure. So 1/2 the price of Concorde but connects all the major cities of the world at Mach 1.7 instead of the 0.85 of a 777?