That seems hard to believe; try printing, or formatting. It's like saying 'a person can fly just as well in a 1930s biplane or a current 737.' Sure, they both fly.
On the other hand, am I more productive in 2022 Emacs than I would be in 1985 Emacs?
The 2014 traveller must arrive an hour prior to departure, it takes 20 minutes merely to get off the plane on average (from the middle of the plane) on arrival, and 5--10 minutes to get to the taxi line. The net trip is only 20 minutes shorter than in 1936, despite the faster in-flight leg. Much more of that time is spent standing, waiting, or walking.
Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2015), pp. 396-7.
Costs fell markedly from 1930 -- 1970. Far less so since.
It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year.
Safety has increased, of course. That's largely been a continuous function from the first days of flight ... with a curious exception in the first decade of the 2000s, where passenger deaths/mile fell markedly. (Also in Gordon's book.)
Come to think of it, security too. Hijackings weren't unusual news items in the 1970s; now, it's hard to remember the last one. And that partly explains the slower airport experience today (which is really due to nobody investing in the resources to speed it up).
> It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year.
A lot of those narratives are similar if one takes even a cursory look at the facts. As an aside (and IIRC), per the autobiography of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who was not a Democrat (and was a follower of Ayn Rand) and served in various roles under many presidents including Carter, deregulation began under Carter.
Early air travel externalised numerous costs, and those have been internalised.
"Big Sky" air traffic policy was proved nonviable over the Grand Canyon (1956) and Park Slope (1960).
Bombings and hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s lead to increased departure-gate screenings. Those increased further after 2001.
Noise complaints lead to use of quieter high-bypass turbofan engines (with their own MAX failure modes).
Increased fuel costs in the 1970s also prompted higher-efficiency engines (again, high-bypass turbofans serve this role), as well as curtailment or cancellation of planned commercial supersonic transports.
Gordon also discusses similar apparent retrograde trends in automobiles. Here again I see formerly externalised costs (emissions, safety, handling, noise) being internalised and included in purchase costs. Electrification is a similar trend.
But despite this, I mostly agree with the broader premise.
Total passenger miles have been largely flat since 2000. Total departures actually fell during the aughts, along with jet fuel consumption. Some of that's due to more efficient flight booking (appropriately sized aircraft, higher seat utilisation), though a large share is decreased seat pitch, which is to say, far less comfortable travel.
https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/670/90/sites/default/fi... https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16947.jpeg
Global incomes have risen, most notably in China.
I may have misread a chart or mis-remembered statistics. The Statista chart does show that the post-2000 trend in air travel is well below the 1990s trendline. Actual miles travelled would have been above 1 trillion had the former continued.
The more notable chart of Gordon's does indeed show price per passenger mile, not total miles (p. 401, Rise and Fall).
It's also often useful to think of travel not as miles but as time. Given an average train speed of about 30 mph, and aircraft of about 450 mph, the time per person per travel mode is nearly identical: 1.3 vs. 1.6 billion hours.
People take trains. They don't take them as far as they do aircraft.
Auto travel works out to about 12 billion hours, again assuming 30 mph average speed. That's about 10 minutes per person per day.
I've yet to find a good presentation of long-term trends.
I have not read the book, but from your quote selection so far it seems to mismanaged comparisons of the 1% to the 80% of the population.
If you looked at the poorer part of the population that things are generally much faster since they get to travel by plane at all.
Gordon's point is that the best commercial-grade service ... didn't move much in the seventy-eight years* from 1936--2014. It's been nearly another decade and that story's largely the same.
In a world which obsesses over Moore's Law and doubling improvements every 1.5 -- 3 years, no appreciable movement in 8 decades* is something to take note of.
Put another way, the 1936 experience was in a DC-3 (or similar) aircraft. The 2014 experience is in a turbofan-powered plane. It turns out that approaching the speed of sound is a pretty hard limit for most aviation --- commercial aircraft tend to max out at about Mach 0.85 or so. The laws of aeronautical engineering aren't going to move that much, at least not for reasonable quantities of fuel (hence: cost) and noise (externalities).
There's also the fact that other factors, call them "frictions", begin to appear: airport and air traffic congestion, security requirements, etc.
Even private-charter aircraft might find themselves further curtailed if they are utilised in, say, future terrorist attacks. Or find themselves vulnerable to attacks themselves in ways commercial aircraft are not. (This resembles a plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.)
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-...
> Gordon's point is that the best commercial-grade service ... didn't move much in the seventy-eight years* from 1936--2014. It's been nearly another decade and that story's largely the same.
The fact that total passenger miles has been largely flat since 2000 (is that even accurate? [1]) has no bearing on that claim. Furthermore, the number of passengers has basically tripled in the last 20 years alone [2], at the cost of some comfort certainly, but this also must count as efficiency gains. I mean, if we ignore an order of magnitude reduction in cost and increase in number of passengers, yeah, I guess the industry is the same since the Wright Brothers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/185744/us-passenger-mile... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
One is the capabilities of commercial general aviation air travel in terms of total elapsed travel time.
The second is the general commercial utilisation of air travel.
In the case of the first, advances in aircraft speed have been all but entirely offset by increased frictions in other parts of the air transport system. 2014 travel between NYC and Chicago is only barely faster than it was over 80 years ago. Moreover, aircraft speed is flat or declining since the late 1950s and the introduction of jet-powered aircraft.
The cost side is based on economics and other factors. In part, it is a question of both supply and demand. Costs have fallen through technological efficiencies; jet engines of today are roughly as efficient as propellor engines of the 1950s, not merely faster as was initially the case. They've also fallen through nonaeronotical advances: more efficient booking, higher seating utilisation, tighter seating spacing, and the like.
Statista's data extend only to 2007. Gordon gives data to the 1940s.
Among the big surprises to me a few years back was that peak avaiation fuel (at least through the mid-2010s) had occurred by 2000. Total passenger miles increased, but only through much higher load factors.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings... (Search for "aviation fuel usage data".)
http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast...
Gordon's data show inflation-adjusted passenger price per mile as essentially flat since 1990. Given miles travelled is a function of price per mile ... a similar relationship holds. Rise and Fall, p. 401.
Your issue is twofold: you are focusing solely on one metric to measure efficiency, arguably the worst one (speed), and you then further narrow the scope by saying efficiency gains must come from one dimension of the business ("aeronautical" advances).
There are obvious reasons for speed to not increase further, namely the speed of sound as you already mentioned, so this is a non-starter. We are simply not trying to make commercial planes faster anymore because that would be useless.
Regarding the second point, I think it is remarkable that you present data that directly contradicts your hypothesis and fail to realize that. If we are starting more flights, carrying more people and using the same fuel, the precise definition of it is an efficiency increase. To achieve that we had improvements in booking, avionics, crew training, business models (Ryanair and other low-costs), etc. The fact that we could make a few flights at incredible cost 80 years ago does not mean that we routinely achieving far safer, cheaper and frequent flights at the same speed today is stagnation, rather the opposite in my view.
I get the strong impression you don't like that point, and would prefer to use different measures. That's fine.
But it doesn't invalidate the measure or point made.
There are obvious reasons for speed to not increase further, namely the speed of sound as you already mentioned, so this is a non-starter.
You see my point. You admit it. You state it freely yourself. And yet you reject it.
SST would be useful, and is used in specific domains (satellite launches, military). On a costs/benefit commercial basis, given externalities and legal frameworks, however, technology has hit if not a dead end, then a remarkably robust barrier to further progress.
The areas in which air travel has expanded, and the mechanisms by which it's done so, are notable because they are largely not related to aeronautical engineering: flight controls or power plants.
There's some exception to the latter, jet engines have increase in efficiency both in terms of fuel consumption and power-to-weight ratios. But that's limited incremental improvement. (I'm pretty sure Vaclav Smil addresses this in Energy and Civilisation, as one of his power-plant efficiency curves. These tend to approach asymptotic limits with time.)
Most of the efficiencies though come from smaller aircraft, economies of scale, increased load factors, some materials advances leading to lightweighting, and removal of both price and amenities lower-bounds which have made available lower-cost, but also far-less comfortable, air travel. There's also been a significant, though largely incremental over time increase in overall safety. No major breakthroughs, but chipping away at major risks with time.
Some of those risks are reversing. The number of commercial aircraft downed by missile attack seems to be increasing in recent decades, at least on an absolute basis. It's still likely falling relative to total passenger miles. Still sucks to be you if you're on the wrong end of that ratio.
But aeronautical engineering has hit a hard stop.
Seeing and understanding that point viscerally is key to grasping the premise of technological limits. Many people seem exceedingly averse to doing so.
"Revenue Passenger Miles for U.S. Air Carrier Domestic and International, Scheduled Passenger Flights"
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM
Jan. 2000: 48.3b
Jan. 2022: 56.4b
"US airlines revenue passenger miles" 1974-3 -- 2004-11
This shows flattenings 1979--1984 (Iranian oil embargo, Reagan recession), again 1990--1992 (First Gulf War / recession), a strong climg through 2000, then a large post-9/11 drop and relatively flat trend through late 2004. Omitted is the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-airlines-revenue-pass...