Good article here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=y3qfeoqErtY&t=5m50s
Anchorage is also not all that far off the Great Circle route anyway.
I recently discovered Nullschool's new (or updated) NO2 channel. This is even more effective than the SO2 channel for identifying global shipping routes. See for example (time-stamped for earlier today):
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/11/15/2100Z/chem/surface/...
Note that trans-pacific routes from both Seattle/Vancouver and Los Angeles/San Diego meet near Kodiak Island along the Aleutians.
I'm fairly confident those represent sea traffic rather than air, given similar traces through the Indian Ocean / Red Sea. I'm presuming relatively little air traffic traverses Suez. Similarly Panama, and traffic from Europe to South Africa.
Anchorage is located slightly north of that trace and has its own NO2 track.
The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.
Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I'm misreading it.
There's probably a little bit of effect like the rocket equation going on - the further you are going, the more fuel you need to get there, and the more fuel you need to carry the additional fuel. Stated a different way, fuel requirements vs distance is worse than linear, since fuel itself has weight.
For it to make economic sense it just needs to exceed the extra cost of time spent at the intermediate port. And even that can offset by adding cargo for that intermediate destination to replace the weight savings of not carrying that “last mile” jet fuel.
The orbit around the Earth is the closest and travel there is the cheapest, but manufacturing fuel out of nothing (vacuum) is pretty much impossible. Technically, what you have on lower Earth orbits isn't vacuum, but a very, very thin gas. It is still probably too thin to be used as a source of stuff for industrial processes.
The closest solid body we have as of now is the Moon. A nice source of minerals, where fuel will be almost certainly produced in situ in the future, but then you still need to fly from Earth to Moon orbit and get the produced fuel to the Moon orbit to tank the ship. (Possibly using a space elevator.) Still quite a lot of delta v.
The best solution could be to intercept a comet full of volatile materials and drag it somehow to the Earth orbit, say, 1000 km above the planet. Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
You mean a space elevator from the Moon (since on Earth it seems to be infeasible)? It's probably doable but I suspect that an electromagnetic accelerator would be far more affordable and technologically less demanding.
You need approximately 60 seconds of 3G acceleration to reach orbit around the Moon. That would mean some 54 km of an accelerator. That is more feasible than I instinctively expected. The main question is how much metal would be needed for 1 m of such accelerator track.
As for the track, I suspect it might be (order-of-magnitude-wise) similar to existing maglevs on Earth. On one hand, you need to reach higher velocities, higher precisions, etc. On the other hand, any supporting structure can be substantially more lightweight (much smaller gravity, no corrosion resistance required, etc.).
>Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
Why does it need to be in Earth's orbit. If we have the ability to capture a comet and place it in a more friendly orbit, we'd surely have the ability to park it in the moon's orbit negating a SimCity-esque ELE.
Electric aircraft you are always "flying with a full load of fuel" which means every joule of energy is "the most expensive energy" as someone here put it, analogous to the last mile of range for a liquid-fueled aircraft. You never have that ability to "take off with a half tank" and trade fuel for extra payload, or operate more efficiently by tailoring fuel to actual needed range, or benefit from higher efficiency at the tail end of a long flight.
Unless electric power becomes significantly more energy-dense, it's always going to be a problem that dogs electric-powered aircraft. And it's hard to see that happening since it's very much the opposite - liquid fuel is significantly more energy-dense than batteries anyway, plus the implications of the rocket equation.
To beat (or at least, not completely be ruined by) the rocket equation what you need is droppable battery packs - completely use them up in sequence, then drop them in midair as you fly to lighten the load. (Well, you need much higher energy density than batteries can currently deliver, too, but let's just talk rocket equation.)
Using "droppable" packs also has the implication that each individual pack (or at least a "core" pack) has to be able to support enough current for at least cruising power (and you probably do not want to design an aircraft with the known implication that full takeoff power will be unavailable after a certain duration of the mission - or that taking off with a "partial fuel load" means you do not have full takeoff power available - the FAA is not going to look kindly on either of those approaches, because if you miss a landing, going around is now very difficult, and that is one of the most likely places for crashes to happen already).
As far as pluggable battery packs - major airports already are critically short on available landing/takeoff slots. Airlines bid fiercely to get them already, and would love to add more slots for real aircraft and not gimmick 200-mile-range electric aircraft. And a large aircraft needs a large runway, so you can't just trivially "add more airports", nor do you want too many planes interacting in the same vicinity - two or maybe three active runways is about the practical limit. So that's not a very good idea at all, there's already a critical resource constraint that building an aircraft around high-takeoff-landing-cycle flight models would make much worse. The "meta" of airport landing slot economics already runs heavily to running bigger aircraft so you can fit more fares/cargo per landing slot - the A380 and 787 and other super-jumbo aircraft are basically designed for this situation where you simply cannot land any more aircraft so you have to land bigger ones.
Leaving aside runway slots, takeoffs and landings are also the most dangerous part of flight, more flight cycles means much more danger for the aircraft and its surroundings (and passenger airports tend to be near people, although perhaps this is not a constraint for cargo airports as much). It's also the hardest on the airplane - pressurization/depressurization cycles and wing loadings are what busts up an aircraft to a much greater extent than mere flight hours, there are only so many cycles you can make an aircraft take regardless of flight hours. So if you land and take off a lot more, you have to spend the energy (and financial) cost of aircraft manufacture much more frequently, which likely neutralizes a lot of the environmental benefits. It's also the most energy intensive phase of flight - if you are taking off 5x as much to make the same trip, are you even more efficient within a single flight, let alone when we amortize that the airplane (and it's "build-time emissions") now lasts 1/5th as long due to increased flight cycles?
It's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Just make more railways, and high-speed railways, we'd benefit hugely from moving as much traffic as possible (obviously not overseas!) to trains and (for cargo) ships. Significantly more environmentally friendly than air travel will ever be.
It's fun from a tech development perspective though. Obviously pushing tech at the edge of capabilities benefits everything - motor technology, manufacturing, battery technology. And those do go into some useful things.
Adding a stop in Anchorage adds about 200 km: https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK
The plane is probably limited by takeoff weight: body plus fuel plus cargo. By adding a stop in the middle, the plane can take off with less fuel from Shanghai. Since it has 45000 kg less fuel, it can instead carry 45000 kg more cargo. Total fuel consumption for the trip ends up slightly higher, but fuel per kg of useful cargo is much less.
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2044509,-174.2639372,10.04z
[edit]: The town of Atka apparently has a population of 53, spread over 32 households. There's an airport, but some expansion would probably be needed to handle Shanghai<->Oakland shipping traffic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska#/media/File:Atka....
I wonder why it has not been done? Maybe because of this -
"In 1996, the U.S. Department of Transportation exempted Alaska's Anchorage International Airport and Fairbanks International Airport from the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign airlines from transporting cargo between U.S. cities. Now, foreign carriers are allowed to refuel their planes in Alaska before continuing on to an American airport or returning home. Because of this, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport now handles approximately 80% of all air cargo traffic between Asia and North America."
Maybe you need to find a non American location. A floating refuel location?
It'd be interesting to run the numbers.
It is.
A direct great circle route still goes over the Aleutians, it seems.
P.S. BOOOOOO on UPS, who just claimed they tried and failed to deliver it while I was standing on my porch with the Ring camera on. So much for spending the night migrating. Hello, Monday night happy hour.
Oh man, I'd be on fire right now. Drinking is probably the best alternative.
It was delivered to a pickup point around 6pm thou so I was still able to get it that day at least.