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The purpose of this paper is to show how an airline sees the SST engines from the 1967 perspective. With the British-French Concorde only months away from first flight, and the major United States SST design decisions made, the age of commercial supersonic flight has practically arrived. Afterburning turbojets will provide the power for both transport airplanes. A review is made, therefore, of some of the technological and operational complications which face the users of this equipment. Among these are the questions of how to deal with the noise problem, what the new higher engine operating temperatures will mean, and what might need to be done in the event of a performance “bust” of the airplane-engine combination. An attempt is made to identify the real problems and separate them from the imaginary ones: finally, the review ends on an optimistic note considering the resources and creative problem solving abilities of the industry itself.

The fixed plus variable cost concept is frequently employed in the analysis of productive industrial processes. This paper discusses application of this concept to the assessment of the direct operating costs of a proposed supersonic transport aircraft. It is shown that the unit variable cost is approximately the same for the proposed supersonic transport airplane as it is for current subsonic long range jet transports. The unit fixed cost, however, is four times as great for the supersonic transport as it is for subsonic transports. The factors which cause the increased fixed costs in the supersonic transport are identified.