I get a small sense of morbid schadenfreude reading old books on economics.  Occasionally the authors make some of the most insightful predictions I’ve ever read about the nature and direction of the economy of their future (our past), but more often they miss wildly and I get to feel superior while reading a book on the bus.  I’ve now noticed a pattern though of writers from the 60s: a whole lot of people expected supersonic air travel to be the Next Big Thing.  I’ve already written about how the American Challenge predicted it as one of the most important challenges that Europe needed to invest in.  I’ve now started reading The New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith, in which he singles out supersonic air travel as “an indispensable industry” of the modern economy.  As I’ve noted before, supersonic passenger planes never quite took off as advertised, but it’s a fun little theory to look at why people might have expected them to do better than they did.

At first, supersonic travel seems like no less than the next logical conclusion of human travel.  First we walked, then we invented wheels to carry our stuff, then we built ships then railroads then automobiles then planes.  Each step in the evolution of human transportation seemed to bring an increase in speed and thus a huge economic advantage, so it seemed only natural that supersonic travel would follow this pattern.  But I think the constant increases in speed blinded people to the more important increases in efficiency.  Airplanes are much faster than cars and ships, yet to this day far more international trade is conducted by land and sea than by air.  In order for airplanes to compete as a mode of travel, they not only had to be faster but the gain in speed had to outweigh the increase in cost.  For moving people around this gain is very easy as none of us wants to sit on a boat for 4 weeks to get to our destination.  But for moving cargo that gain is much harder because the cargo doesn’t care as much about its speed and the cargo’s owner only cares how much fuel he has to spend moving it from A to B.  So speed only leads to efficiency in some cases, in others the higher cost of fuel means more speed has less efficiency.

The same dichotomy between speed and efficiency exists for supersonic vs subsonic planes.  The supersonic Concorde could of course do a transatlantic route in just under 3 hours, and this gain in efficiency was appreciated by its many passengers.  But the even greater gain in efficiency came from planes like the Boeing 747 and other “Jumbo Jets” that could take hundreds of passengers across that same route using significantly less fuel per passenger.  That meant a ticket on a 747 could be a small fraction of the price of a Concorde ticket, and there just weren’t enough ultra-high-class passengers to make the Concorde cost-efficient. 

It just seems like nobody did their due diligence on a cost-benefits analysis for supersonic transportation, or instead they looked ahead with starry eyed wonder and proclaimed that “technology” would in some way ensure that supersonic travel was made efficient enough to compete.