Time to end the speed limit in US airspace?
I think the author is right in wanting laws to try to directly control the thing they care about rather than indirectly affecting it.<p>I’m confused about the other point though. Did this rule affect transatlantic flights? Somehow Concorde was allowed and I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now).<p>I think the extrapolation of the max speed graph doesn’t really make sense. It may have made sense to do that in the ’60s or ’70s, as I think that people in the aviation industry reasonably thought that was the direction planes were going. The 747 was designed to become a cargo plane once supersonic planes replaced it. But apart from Concorde, supersonic civilian jets didn’t happen so is the claim here that the rule prevented them from being developed because of the extra economies of scale from selling a few more planes to fly between the east and west coast? That is: I think this argument would have been more convincing if transatlantic supersonic flight was also banned and Concorde hadn’t existed. Given that that’s not what happened, I think it must make a stronger case for that rule hindering the development of supersonic civil aviation rather than other things like consumers preferring comfort to speed or the increased speed only affecting time in the air and not travel to the airport, waiting there, baggage claim, and travel from the airport.<p>Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.