How many of us, 15 hours into a seemingly endless journey, have asked ourselves this question: In 2000, is there any valid reason why it should still take a day and a half to get to where you want go?

Well, yes, there is. Despite all the promises of cheap supersonic travel dating back to the 1950s, we seem to be stuck with a speed limit of less than 1,000 kilometres per hour. For a whole slew of reasons, no one has managed to come up with a way of making supersonic air travel work.

Sure, there's Concorde. But Concorde was never a real-life commercial proposition, and it looks like the recent prang in Paris will see the things grounded for good, even though it wasn't Concorde's fault. Maybe the disaster has given the airlines an excuse to put these financial incinerators out to pasture once and for all.

But the question remains - how come we can put spacecraft into orbit around Jupiter and Saturn, but getting to Europe hasn't got any faster since the 707 first flew in 1957?

Not surprisingly, it's really a matter of money. Concorde never made any, and the only way to make money on long-haul flights is to carry a lot of people to the same place in one aeroplane.

The most successful airliner of all time has been the Boeing 747, which can carry around 500 people at 1,000kph for long distances. Since its introduction in the early 70's, air travel has exploded. There were jet airliners before that of course, but in the 60s air travel was still the province of the wealthy. The extra capacity of the 747 brought costs down to the point where just about anybody could fly.

But only at 1,000 kph. Ironically, once you try to get through the sound barrier, the costs go through the roof along with the speedometer, and you're back to the economics of 1940's piston engine air travel, when a one-way trans-Atlantic ticket cost three month's average wages.

The brute fact is that it costs an awful lot of money to shove 500 people around the planet at supersonic speeds. It needs an awful lot of fuel too, which also has to be shoved around at high speed. The numbers just don't stack up, which is why the only supersonic airliners to fly were built by governments, not private enterprise.

The Soviet Tu-144 and the Anglo/French Concorde were financial disasters. The Tu-144 was only built to show that it could be built, and Concorde only kept flying because the bulk of the money had already been spent. Anyway, the planes gave British Airways and Air France a certain futuristic cachet, and scrapping the things would have looked even worse than running them at a loss.

The Americans drafted countless plans for supersonic transports (or SSTs) between 1955 and the mid-1980's, only to throw all of them into the bin.

SSTs have drawbacks apart from cost. Sonic booms are not popular, and these planes are very noisy at any speed. Concorde uses the same Olympus turbines that power the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, and they aren't quiet. A lot of airports simply won't let them land.

But what about now? Surely we've moved beyond the 60's technology that gave birth to Concorde. What happened to the new materials, quieter engines, lighter airframes and all those other wonderful improvements that engineers have been working on for the last thirty years?

The short answer is that they do exist, but that they still haven't made enough of a difference to the bottom line. The basic jet engine can be tinkered with, the carbon fibre composites, the super-strong alloys and the computerised flight decks all help, but SST's still cost a bundle. There simply aren't enough people in the world who'll pay twenty thousand dollars to fly to New York in a third of the time it takes to get there for two grand.

The economics are still heavily weighted in favour of big, slow aircraft over small fast ones, and it looks like we're going to see over 1,000 people per plane well before we see tourists travel at over 1,000 kilometres per hour. The double-deck Airbus 3XX, scheduled to fly in 2006 with over 600 passengers, is a case in point.

R. E. G. Davies, writing in his encyclopaedic A History of the World's Airlines in 1963, said of the SST "At some point in its headlong technological race, air transport must reach its own limit. The forecasts made so far concerning the economic possibilities of the supersonic airliner leave faint hope for further fundamental advances in this direction, short of some as yet undiscovered principle of propulsion".

Maybe, just maybe, the scramjet is that "undiscovered principle".

Of course, the scramjet offers much faster transit times than Concorde ever could, and with it would come one or two experiences peculiar to Mach 10 commuting.

For one thing it would take a bit of getting used to the idea of leaving Sydney at 7 am on Monday and arriving at Heathrow at 10pm the day before, having watched the sun set in the east.

Given that the plane would be flying at an altitude of up to 20 kilometres, the view of the curved horizon would be rather spectacular, halfway between a 747 and a space shuttle.

But if this is the kind of transport you've been waiting for, be prepared to wait a little longer. We hear every day about our rapidly changing world, how technology is advancing at helter-skelter pace, but it just isn't so in aviation. Long gone are the days when technical revolutions leapt from drawing board to runway in a matter of months, or at worst a few years.

In 1940 you flew to London in seven days in a flying boat. In 1950 it took four days in a Lockheed Constellation piston aircraft. Less than ten years later you could do it in under two days in a jet.

Forty years on, and yes, one or two things have changed. You're sharing the plane with hundreds of people, and you can actually afford to be on it. But it still takes almost two days to get there.

It will take that long for a while yet. A Mach 10 airliner is at least twenty years away. But unlike the 100 seat, Mach 2 Concorde, a scramjet-driven, 500-seat Mach 10 machine might just turn out to be the 747 of its time.

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