If supersonic flight ever returns, my money's on Emirates or Qatar to try it.
What's funny about these discussions is listening to the British and the French piss on Boeing: The 2707 was basically a big damn F-111. Hey, maybe we can talk about what actually happened? Note that the Concorde was no quieter... But when the FAA won't allow your plane to land it's hard to sell that NY-Paris run. Hey, why else did the 2707 die? Note that they weren't going to subsidize the planes. http://www.airlineratings.com/news.php?id=170 Note that that was $8k on top of an absolutely gob-smackingly high price: Doing the math: the real cost of the Concorde from DC to Paris and back was $28k. The primary difference between the Concorde and the 2707 was that France and England were willing to blow a billion dollars a year so that rich people could pay half-price (odd for such a peculiarly socialist system). I've got a 165-page sales manual on the 2707. I've got... pretty much all the sales literature on that thing. And even in 1965, you look at it and go... "this is a giant government subsidy waiting to happen." And in 1971, the United States went capitalist while England and France went socialist. And there we've been ever since.“When we were building Concorde, we were pushing technology as far as it could possibly go at the time. They were pushing for something that was just too difficult.”
Wings were not the only problem. The sonic boom the 2707 would create as it broke the sound barrier would be another issue. “Once it became apparent just how disturbing that was,” Coen says, “it put paid to the idea of supersonic flight over the US.”
President Kennedy’s carrot to Lockheed and Boeing was that the government would pick up 75% of the cost of the programme if either could produce a design that could rival Concorde.
According to one estimate from the London-based Independent newspaper, the total write-off for the British and French governments was $34 billion, which works out to a taxpayer subsidy of a staggering $8000 for every passenger who ever flew on the Concorde.
Such speed didn’t come cheap, though: A transatlantic flight required the high-maintenance aircraft to gulp jet fuel at the rate of one ton per seat, and the average round-trip price was $12,000.
A startup incubated at YC is trying something: http://boom.aero/
Jet engine efficiency has not increased by the order of magnitude necessary to make commercial mach travel feasible, and jet engine noise reduction has focused on high-bypass designs that are not applicable to supersonic travel. Going fast is fucking expensive. For reasons we need not get into I got pretty deep into calculating the costs of ownership of this guy: That thing is the VW Beetle of fighter jets, acclaimed for only burning 600l of Jet-A per hour at cruise. Right now, at historic lows, Jet-A is $1.70 a gallon. So cruising, at 45,000 feet, at about 0.8 Mach, my friend the Gnat costs $270 an hour just in gas... and it only holds enough juice to do that for two hours. The Concorde burned a ton of fuel per passenger per trip. That's 17l/passenger/100km. Read it and weep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft A 747 is 2.59l/passenger/100km. So until supersonic travel isn't basically an order of magnitude less efficient than subsonic travel, supersonic travel will remain a pipe dream.