For whatever reason, people have a tendency to believe that history tells us that civilization gets ever more advanced, generation after generation, but the reality is that isn't true at all. Instead, a more honest and nuanced view of history would show that in some areas of civilization, there is great progress being made, and in other areas, a disappointing regression. When it comes to air travel, never have so many traveled through the air than at the present time, but the actual airplanes that take these passengers to their destination of choice have not had a quantum leap in their design for quite a while, but rather seem to rely on incremental improvements, or not even that, for in some significant cases, there is an expressed desire to simply pack in as many people as possible on certain airlines in order to increase revenue. So too, when it comes to the speed of aircraft, the normal cruising speed of such, is about 515 mph, which perhaps sounds impressive, but the fact that we had an airline, the Concorde, that began its service in 1976, with a normal cruising speed of 1350 mph, would seem to imply that there is room for major improvement when it comes to airline speed, especially for transnational travel, that seems to have been effectively ignored. After all, despite whatever bells and whistles a given airplane might now have, most people aren't all that comfortable on an airplane, especially when that flight is of long duration, so it would seem that there would be a ready market for an airline service that was significantly faster than anyone else, but that does not currently exist, presently.
While there are a lot of reasons why the Concorde airline went out of business, that isn't germane to why something akin to the Concorde could not thereby be rethought and redeveloped, because there would seem to be plenty of business people as well as serious travelers with money on their hands that would desire to get to their destination significantly faster and would be willing to pay a premium for such, but this option doesn't even exist.
Indeed, as it has been said, “build it and they will come,” but the fact of the matter is that no current airline company appears willing to build such, though they should probably take a serious look at doing so. After all, to believe that those that engineer airplanes aren't any sharper or aren't able to take advantage of today's computers and materials to build an airplane that is faster, smoother, and at a reasonable cost, seems to say that we are regressing and not progressing, because the bottom line is that when people discuss their vacation or their international business meeting they typically get right to the heart of the matter, which is what they did and accomplished when they were at their point of interest, which signifies that airlines represent a means to an end, which should thereby take into serious account the amount of time spent in that air travel and what these airlines could do to reduce such.