Incremental improvement on flight time wouldn't even really benefit many passengers all that much, if I fly London to East coast US/Canada I spend more time getting to/from airports, and waiting in airport or on the field, than I do in the air.
Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh?
I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.
That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380.
But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
The problem with the A380 was that only the biggest airports could accommodate them. Personally I always try to fly direct I absolutely HATE changing flights and apparently I'm not the only one.
Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh?
I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.