Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Evan Swartzrober. On today's show, make America boom again. Should we do that? I'm not talking about the election. I'm talking about supersonic flight. Since the 1970s, supersonic flight has been banned as the FAA made that decision back in 1973. Maybe they had good

reason back then. The planes were not exactly high tech, but it's 2016 and maybe some things

have changed. And maybe the FAA should revisit its ban on supersonic flight so that we can

travel faster. Joining me to discuss this is Eli Dorado, research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Eli, thanks for joining the show. Great to be here with you. So we are recording this on election day.

This will not be released on election day. So your cleverly named paper is not going, is not an effort

to sway voters one way or the other. We are. I'm pretty sure the candidates have not

spoken out about supersonic flight. This is not exactly an election deciding issue, but maybe

for those of you who travel a lot, it could be. But Eli, tell us first, how has supersonic flight

changed? I mean, let's paint a picture of what it looked like back in the day.

You know, the Concord might come to mind for listeners who are old enough to remember.

Sure, yeah. The Concord was basically the only commercial supersonic plane that ever was in service

for an extended period of time. There was a Soviet one that briefly operated and turned out to be unsafe.

Shocked.

They pulled it out of service.

And then there were plans for an American-made Concord started beginning in the 60s.

This was one of John F. Kennedy's ideas. He asked the FAA to

like come up with ideas to really improve aviation. And he sort of insisted that we do a Mach 300

passenger monster plane, which just never worked. It never, never really got very far, and it was

canceled by 1971. So really, the Concord is it. It was in service from 1976 to about

2000, I think.

No, 2003, maybe.

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