Blake Scholl

There was a Soviet project to create a supersonic airliner.

There was a European project to create a supersonic airliner.

And there was an American project to create a supersonic airliner called the SST.

And in all three cases, they were government funded and they were government specced.

And the result was everybody was building products that show technological superiority, not products that made any commercial sense.

So Concorde and the Soviet airplane were very similar.

The American airplane was going to be 300 seats in Mach 3.

So it made even less economic sense than Concorde did.

And then what happened is the American, so Congress pulled the plug appropriately on the American supersonic airplane.

Concorde and Concordesky were still coming.

And now all of a sudden, it was not obvious back then just how economically dead on arrival Concorde was going to be.

And so then America responded trying to protect Boeing by banning supersonic flight over land.

That's what it was.

That's what it was.

It was to protect Boeing?

This was protectionism.

As long as Boeing's building a supersonic airplane, it was all fine.

That project gets canceled, all of a sudden we can't have that sonic stuff.

It's terrible.

And I think the real tell was if it had been about sonic boom being bad, it would have been a noise limit, not a speed limit.