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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

I remember once being on an almost empty flight from SFO to ATL a few years ago. I checked the flight information on the seatback screen in front of me and was startled to see we were going well over 700 mph ground speed. That was pretty much the quickest flight I’ve ever been on; I think the whole trip was well under four hours.

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For me on a trip right now, I have:

2h drive to ORD 2h airport security Theater 4h Flight to SFO 1h to deplane get an Uber to someplace

So 9 hour total journey on a direct flight. A 50% faster flight would make it be 8 hours instead of 9? I don't think I would pay anything for that.

2h airport security? In Zürich im usually done in 10 or 15 minutes...

My experience at ORD is that it's usually done in under 45 minutes, but takes longer often enough for me to budget ~90 minutes for security to be confident of making my flight.

Then you aren’t properly groped for freedom.

Well, parking to at my gate.

If you park at the airport - It's about a 20-30 minute journey from parking lot to the front door of the airport. If parking offsite it can even be longer.

Then going through TSA, even with pre-check, can be from 20-60 minutes. 20 minutes is about the minimum time, just due to how BIG the airport is. You can end up having to walk a mile door to gate. I can run a mile pretty fast, but that is generally frowned upon.

And if you need to somehow deal with an agent for checking bags or anything else? That can easily be another 30 minutes down the crapper.

I was in ORD a week ago and went from my hotel (Hilton, connected to the airport) to my gate in under 15m. I think my time going through security was around 45s, give or take. Anecdata caveats apply.

Would it be nice? Flying is already a tremendous environmental burden with the focus on fuel economy. I'm happy to sit in my seat a few minutes longer if it means taking away some of that emissions impact

Yeah. I flew from JFK to Glasgow in April of last year and IIRC we arrived around 2 hours early. It was early enough that there were no passport control agents around, and they had to be called in.

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