Aerion has a supersonic business jet concept and a launch customer, Osama bin Laden’s half brother no less.

For $80m, you get an eight to 12 seat plane with 4,000 nm range and a top speed of Mach 1.6.  (Most business jets fly at Mach 0.85 or so.)  One technical problem is the sonic boom, which restricts the plane to sub-sonic speeds over populated areas.  Still, the advantage of flying at Mach 0.98 versus 0.85 saves you forty minutes flying across the US, for example.

But the real advantages are on over water routes.  According to Aerion’s claims,  they shave over three hours off of a trans-Atlantic flight, flying Paris-NY in 4 hours and 14 minutes.  NY – Miami over water is an hour and a half, an hour less than conventional business jets.

My time isn’t valuable enough that it’s worth some fraction of $80m to save an hour to get to Miami, but that time is probably worth it to someone, or at least they can think so.  And the bragging rights of owning a supersonic jet of your own: priceless.