Blake Scholl: prediction

Transcript context

…Now, I live on the East Coast of the US. For me, the worst flight is to go overnight to Reykjavik, Iceland, because it’s too short. I’d actually rather fly to Istanbul. I’d even rather fly to South Africa, which is an easy flight for me for sleeping. As a customer, am I a problem for your business model? No, because your overnight flight to Reykjavik turns into actually quite nice daytime flight. If you want to go from the US to Europe, instead of having a too short night of sleep, if you could even sleep on an airplane, you leave in the morning, you get there in the afternoon, and it’s a daytime flight with great WiFi. I think what will happen in the first wave of supersonic is that the North Atlantic, which today is red-eyes, turns into daytime flights instead, and you save an entire day. If you look across the Pacific, you actually save two days on a round trip. Today, if I go to Tokyo for a Monday morning meeting, I have to leave midday Saturday. I get there end of day Sunday. Go to a hotel. I try to sleep. My alarm goes off the next morning. I go to my meeting and try not to sleep in my meeting. Then I can fly back. By the way, we have a deal with Japan Airlines. I did this a bunch of times. It takes three calendar days, and you better not make any decisions the rest of the week because the jet lag has really messed us up. Supersonic is totally different. You don’t leave Saturday. You sleep Saturday night at home. You leave Sunday morning. An 8:00 a.m. departure from SFO arrives at Tokyo 8:00 a.m. Monday morning Tokyo Time. That’s six hours later, so it’s Sunday afternoon to us, Monday morning in Tokyo, do a whole day of meetings, overnight flight back, sleep on the flight. You’re back in town 24 hours after you left, but there’s no jet lag because you never change time zones. It’s much, much better. Should there be windows on commercial flights crossing the Pacific? What are they good for?…

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