This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 3rd, 2018. I'm Kila Brown.

Supersonic Flight is not a new technology, and yet it may still be in its infancy.

Why? Well, the FAA has banned it and has for a long time.

That might change.

Alan McQuinn is a senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

We discussed lifting the speed limit in the sky last week.

Commercial supersonic flight in the United States doesn't exist, but it can exist over water from the United States elsewhere.

Where are we right now with the status of regulating supersonic flight? It just doesn't happen, right? That's correct. The FAA has had a ban over land flights for

supersonic planes since 1970 when it used its authority under the

aircraft noise abatement Act to basically create a speed limit of

Mock 1 over land. This has artificially reduced the market size, obviously, for this type of technology,

and is one of the many reasons why the Concord,

which is the famous jet that was Suppersonic ultimately failed.

So I mean I remember as a kid you hear about the concord and there are pictures of it.

It has that nose that sort of dips down a little bit and it doesn't look like any other kind of

plane. And I remember being very excited by the possibility of flying from one point to another around the planet very quickly.

So what give me the blue sky so to speak vision of the possibilities that supersonic air travel provide us?

Yes, so imagine going from DC to LA in two hours and 15 minutes.

Imagine going to LA in two hours and 15 minutes.

Imagine going from New York to the United Kingdom

to London in a little over three and a half hours, right?

It's, it can at its higher end have the travel time

...