The Japanese are foolishly teaming up with the French to build what they call “Son of Concorde“:

The new plane will have 300 seats and cut the flight time between New York and Tokyo to six hours, reports said.

While there’s unquestionably a market for such a plane, assuming the right ticket price, they provide no clues as to how they can build a supersonic plane this large, with that much range, let alone one that won’t be unaffordable to fly, given its fuel consumption. They do pretend to, though:

The ministry added that Japan had successfully tested an engine that could theoretically reach speeds of up to five times the speed of sound.

Whoop de doo.

That’s nice, but it has zero to do with building an affordable, boom-free supersonic airliner, about which they seem clueless. One can only imagine that government money is involved.

At least it’s no longer US government money.

This effort will share Concorde’s ultimate fate, if it’s lucky. More likely it will simply be a black hole of tax dollars, ending in nothing but paper, just like NASA’s equally poorly-conceived, and disastrous High-Speed Research program in the 1990s.