Time to end the speed limit in US airspace?
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If anything we should look at the trade-off benefits of flying with the least amount of fuel consumption per passenger and miles flown. Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?
... at the same altitude.
Looking it up, the Concorde flew at 60,000 ft, compared to normal planes at 30,000 ft.
And atmospheric pressure at 60k ft is less than a quarter of what it is at 30k.
Is it possible to fly twice the speed of a regular aircraft but without using that much more fuel, by flying higher? Or does the plane have to burn even more fuel to get up to that altitude and maintain lift in a thinner atmosphere?
If you go higher, the speed of sound decreases so you have to go slower to avoid going above the critical Mach number for your aircraft. Normal airliners have to stay quite a bit below Mach 1 to avoid any part of the airflow going supersonic, since that would create big issues like shock waves making the aircraft uncontrollable.
But due to the air being really thin, you also have to go faster. Otherwise your wings will not generate enough lift to keep flying.
At some point you cannot go faster and you cannot go slower, that effect is called Coffin Corner and limits how high a subsonic airliner could fly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)
"In the days when the supersonic transport was in active service, and cruising at between 60 and 68,000 feet, the estimated radiation received by the crew was 50-130 mSv/yr. thus, obviously, as newer generations of aircraft cruise ever higher, by the time we reach altitudes above 60,000 feet, it is entirely possible that, especially with crews flying trans-Atlantic or transpolar routes, the acceptable maximum safe dose of radiation per year will be exceeded. In addition, these numbers do not take into account the possibility of pregnancy in female crewmembers. "
See Van Allen Belts.
If I edit my photos on the flight home, am I more likely to corrupt my files with bit flips?
It turns out that higher cruising altitude isn’t nearly as useful as atmospheric pressure might suggest. Aircraft end up optimized for their cruising altitude, but there’s a lot of tradeoffs when targeting a higher altitude.
As long as nothing ever seems to be mysteriously off course and heading for Moscow it sounds like a great idea. Is it easy to distinguish a ballistic missile full of passengers from the more bad kind?
But I was more curious about the fuel efficiency...
You do need more energy to go that high and fast, but it take a bit of analysis to figure out if it's problematic. Most likely it would be driven by the mission profile as to whether or not the trade-off is worth making.
The turbofan engines of today mitigate this inefficiency by, in essence, strapping a big prop in front of the turbine, except we call it a fan.
Props employ lift like a wing. Fans are screws.
It's really a spectrum where most props & fans actually posess at least a little of both properties, and there are some in the middle that had to simply be called propfans.
The more demand there is, the more incentive there is for carbon-reducing companies to arise.
As it stands, the economics of air travel force carriers to optimise for reducing fuel consumption, since that's (by far) the biggest fraction of a commercial aircraft's operating cost.
If supersonic transport makes a comeback, it'll be because the economics will make sense, which (in my mind) will be either because of:
- Somehow reduced fuel consumption, potentially through engines that leverage the effects of the supersonic flight regime for increased fuel efficiency (e.g. ramjets, through that likely wouldn't be possible in low-supersonic flight)
-> As another commenter in this thread mentioned, drag decreases with lower atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes, so there are fuel efficiency gains to be made just by flying higher, within the engines' design constraints.
- It'll fill the niche of richer-than-god people who use jets to skip highway traffic.
There's likely more cases than just these, but these are just the greatest hits as far as I can tell; and I say all of that as someone who's not involved in the aviation industry.
For the record, I don't support this second niche existing, but it does, and it can be an economic driver.
I am skeptical that lifting barriers to them polluting more would land any type of net benefit given that ultra-luxury products such as said jets don't tend to land outsized downstream advancements than let's say, funding basic sciences such as what Boeing or Airbus are already doing
(0) https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
If it could be proved that things like faster private jets or faster planes could benefit in a sizeable and proportionate way to the general public, then yeah I would be in favor of this too, but as it stands I don't find the available info compelling, I'd rather them to pay more taxes
I like to bring up the question of how many startups and how much innovation is stifled because people stay with their jobs because of the healthcare.
Zoom is not a valid substitute when you’re trying to make high stakes decisions that involve millions - billions of dollars and complex relationships in multiple time zones. Saying that human progress depends on it is a bit dramatic but these folks allocate large amounts of capital and have an outsized impact on the economy.
And not because it kills the planet less.
[cue sad trombone]
It's not perfect (as fossil fuels are still being burned) but it's better than nothing and a much more realistic solution than some extremist ideas such as stopping using fossil fuels overnight and effectively shutting down the economy as a result.
Being absurdly rich shouldn't give you license to destroy the planet.
The best combination of being technically correct of missing the point.
When peopme talk about the planet being destroyed, they usually mean for human life.
It's not about saving humans from extinction.
It's just the smart thing to do unless we want to spend massive amounts of resources in the future to adapt to the consequences of a warming climate.
As trajectories go, currently habitable places will become uninhabitable within the lifetime of people you know. And that process isn't nice. Becoming uninhabitable means a series of natural disasters (and clean water pressures) that force people to migrate. Mass migration means global turmoil as people scramble to get safe. And many will die along the way. That's already started.
The planet will physically be here but its habitability matters too. I don't really care about what comes after humans, as long as it doesn't come now and kill me and mine.
If your only argument is "life, uhh, finds a way", that's great. Thank you for your contribution. Now find us a way to relocate a billion people in the next three decades.
To skip highway traffic a richer-than-god person would use a helicopter. Private jets are used for further distances.
Nice language, was she stabbed? Has she lost money, job?
Why conflate well-deserved criticism with violence?
Let's say that you can now make twice as many flights in a day. You can now do twice as many flights with the same crew and aircraft (same maintenance costs). Your fuel costs increase, but your other costs remain fixed, so despite the increase in fuel costs, you still end up making more profit. You might be able to charge more for the faster flights as well, and there may be beneficial second-order effects.
Not only this, but in general jet speeds have decreased due to airspace congestion. There is a lot of schedule padding due to delays at hubs like JFK, LAX, LHR, etc.
If you want to compare apples to apples, I suggest you refer to the 2 metrics I mentioned: - gallons of fuel per miles flown - fuel used per passenger
One without the other is a useless comparison as you pointed out.
So, for the blackbird, how does it do on take off? You know, when it is literally leaking fuel? :)
Down thread it was pointed out that sports cars are more efficient than busses. Per vehicle. This is about the same idea, at best.
The bus wins when carrying 3 or more passengers besides the driver. And in a city with dedicated bus lanes, the bus may win for route speed, too.
If we want to improve lives of workers, I am game, but can we start by helping all the amazon can drivers that pee in a bottle?
Why does designing a Ferrari have anything to do with your broken society? It’s not about the Ferrari - it’s about middle class upwards being cheap. Pay higher taxes and your problems on “improve live of workers” will go away.
I pay approx. 60-65% on my gross income. Do the same and we can start talking again.
Oof, I would be carefull eith that, it could be interpreted as a bribe and get you in trouble
You what would actuslly help? Start a union, run it well.
The SR-71 had a maximum takeoff weight of 140,000lbs.
The 747 has a maximum takeoff weight of 735,000-910,000 lbs, depending on model.
That helps quite a bit for the former using less fuel per mile.
Whether it benefits the masses or the elite is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the use is worth more than the correctly priced cost of carbon
The proper argument is to get a carbon tax first before unbanning anything like this.
And it's not on the political horizon so....
And anyway, forests are not carbon-negative; all that lives must die. They're carbon-neutral.
Carbon taxes, on the other hand, are an effective solution to global warming.
Why is that irrelevant? Must we permit everything that might be of benefit to someone, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else?
If we can offset "the expense of everyone else" (in this case via a carbon tax), why not?
Unless you use that tax to pay someone to clean the air?
If we wanted to massively fund air cleaning, which I'm in favor of doing, we should use a tax as funding from day one.
So EPA, FDA, etc regulations should be replaced with fees for poisoning everyone rather than outright bans, because to desire freedom from such concerns is to be a jealous tyrant?
Or get executed, as happened with China's 2008 milk adulteration scandal.
The technically correct answer but practically silly answer is: yes because the correct charge for the externality of poisoning everyone would be asymptotic and unaffordable by anyone so it would amount to a ban.
Also the concern is not about being a jealous tyrant, the fact of the matter is markets almost always work better than dictating what to do, especially in the long term due to reacting to new information more effectively and changing course more effectively than an authoritarian regime.
Insofar as market based solutions I don't know why you imagine they should work. People are in general hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless. The only way to make them behave with any modicum of sanity and decency is for someone educated in the topic of interest without a dog in the fight to stipulate based on objective standards the kind of things one must and must not due in order not to fuck their fellow man.
The fact that this at present remains less than ideal doesn't mean we ought to trust the same immoral pieces of garbage with less controls on the notion that they will do a better job that way rather than trivially corrupt the over-complicated process. By and large we know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do we don't need a market based solution to figure it out we need a less bought and paid for government to actually implement what we already know.
Do we really have to rehash how and why markets work better in 2023? I mean, we spent the last century watching places that adopted freer markets succeed and places that went in the opposite direction failing, we saw communism fail a couple times, we watched communists that embraced markets turn themselves around (although they now look a lot more like facists, which is very concerning), etc. They likely work precisely because so much of humanity is hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless and free markets allow those that aren't to supply the needs of the rest while building up capital, increasing influence and spreading capability throughout the system. On the other hand authoritarianism might have flashes of excellence but more often than not excellence has dumbass kids or friends that replace him or other factors change and the formerly excellent authoritarian doesn't pivot like the multitude of independent actors in a market can and then that flash is gone and we are back to stagnation for the society organized along authoritarian lines.
Your third paragraph's main flaw is that WE don't know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do. YOU think you know that and YOU may be too hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy and/or useless to know when YOU are wrong. With a market solution you can be all of those things and it's usually self regulating because you lose your ability to influence anything by blowing your resources on stupid, while people that get it right end up with more resources to bet on their predictions in the future.
No, we spent the last century watching the utter depravity of free market capitalism be reigned in by regulations. Free markets don't maximize public welfare, they maximize profit for successful marketers.
Also maximizing profit for successful individuals in the market is equal to maximizing public welfare IF regulation is successfully mitigating market power and externalities, which is exactly what I have been arguing for here. Everybody knows the outcome of a totally free market is monopoly and there is a role for government in breaking up/regulating those potential monopolies to mitigate their market power as well as in spots where there are natural externalities that need to be priced in. That I seem to have to recap all of this before making an argument that a specific regulation is incorrect is a bit concerning, as the above is basically settled in economics and the current argument is what should be regulated and how (which is the discussion we are having here regarding a national speed limit on flying and how it is incorrect to argue who changing the law will benefit regarding carbon output when we can just tax the carbon at the amount that most likely covers the externality and not have to make those judgement calls (and risk getting them wrong as we often do).)
Banning something is a solution that prevents some people from doing what they want. Taxing something is a solution that subjects a (potentially much) larger group of people to a reporting and tax burden and random inspections. If it's authoritarianism you are concerned about, you have to contrast the sizes of these groups and the potential harms from the banning and tax collection to determine which solution is worse.
Regulation is difficult, especially when you are trying to outwit the market.
I have no idea what you think a passenger jet would switch to?
If writing regulations that have the intended effect without significant downsides was as easy as you suggest, tax planning would not be a big business.
It's not like a whole airline can get away with not reporting how much fuel they buy, and a carbon tax would apply to all their fuels.
Many taxes are complicated and flawed, but this kind is already good to go.
That we have a multi billion dollar industry designed to assist with this process?
Are you aware of the bottomless pit of fraud the carbon yax credita have become?
Or that 80% of plastic recycling and electrinics recycling is fake?
Carbon credits don't even resemble a fuel tax. That fraud doesn't matter here.
Why is fake recycling relevant to a discussion of taxes?
How do you deal with refueling at international destinations and possible carbon taxes in the destination country?
Do you actually want to tax carbon emissions or climate impact? A synthetic fuel could plausibly be carbon neutral, but burning it at the cruising altitude would still have an impact on climate change.
A business with other things has no advantage or disadvantage.
> How do you deal with refueling at international destinations and possible carbon taxes in the destination country?
Pick an option. It won't make much difference.
> Do you actually want to tax carbon emissions or climate impact? A synthetic fuel could plausibly be carbon neutral, but burning it at the cruising altitude would still have an impact on climate change.
We can have that as a possibility. Probably it's worth wording the law so that the tax scales with the remediation cost.
Second, international refueling has historically been the main reason why jet fuel cannot be taxed properly. In many European countries, gas has long been much more expensive than jet fuel. If you try taxing jet fuel without coordinating the tax scheme with nearby countries, the end result is increased emissions. Planes will refuel under a more favorable tax regime, fly with a heavier fuel load, and maybe even trade some payload for fuel. Airlines may also route their flights suboptimally to take better advantage of cheaper fuel.
Third, if you want to tax climate impact, it's not enough to tax fuel. You have to collect data on where the fuel is actually used and build new systems for ensuring that the reported data is correct. And then you need a model for calculating taxes from the data, which is going to be a politically contested issue. Especially when the model is changed according to the latest scientific understanding.
I don't see how business structure affects my suggestion at all. The main tax would be on fuel purchases.
> Second, international refueling has historically been the main reason why jet fuel cannot be taxed properly.
So make it an EU thing. And the US can do pretty well by itself despite that.
And you can charge planes at landing based on any fuel they recently used that wasn't taxed enough.
> Third, if you want to tax climate impact, it's not enough to tax fuel. You have to collect data
Nah you don't have to do that. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and don't try to make taxes too complicated.
Including fuel used by trucks when the same fuel could also be used in planes? If you tax it, businesses that operate both trucks and planes are at disadvantage. If you don't, you create opportunities for tax evasion.
> So make it an EU thing. And the US can do pretty well by itself despite that.
The EU has to deal with major hubs outside its regulations in London and Istanbul. As for the US, Toronto is conveniently located for many domestic routes.
> And you can charge planes at landing based on any fuel they recently used that wasn't taxed enough.
Assuming that you are allowed to do that, according to various tax treaties and free trade agreements you would like to keep.
> Nah you don't have to do that. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and don't try to make taxes too complicated.
Unfortunately it's 2023 and not 2003. The window of opportunity for a good outcome has already closed, and even an ok outcome requires understanding the difference between carbon neutral and climate neutral.
And as I mentioned, there is an alternative to making taxes too complicated: banning activities that are obviously wasteful.
So the 'Forever chemicals' cannot be removed from the environment now, they are in the blood of thousands of people and in the water.
The fine should be infinite?
In terms of climate change, there isn't really any budget of "safe" CO2 emissions left -- we've used it all up by largely ignoring the problem up until now.
The world can't realistically just stop using fossil fuels right now, because so much of our infrastructure depends on it. But we can stop wasting fuel on things we don't need. One of those things we don't need is the vast majority of air traffic that isn't transporting high-value time-critical cargo or getting people where they need to go to complete a specific job (and if it could have been done with a Skype call then no, it isn't a need).
This is not actually true. Drag is at max at around mach 1. After that it goes down again. If you go fast enough you can be very efficient.
The gain comes from being able to fly in thinner air if the plan be is designed to survive the the transonic regime and supercuise, because mach speed becomes lower higher you fly and the air thinner, so lift available to subsonic planes is limited
The root of all this is really just that the pollution from fossil fuels needs to be paid for.
I don’t think wanting fuel efficiency is incompatible with getting rid of the speed limit rule.
I'd make an example but these are exactly the sort of things that launch off topic 10 page discussions with very low information content.
Nevertheless, I think those are exceptions. I think first order effects tend to matter more than second order effects (that’s why they’re called first order) and not doing good first-order things because of potentially bad second-order things is often wrong.
Do you want waste? Because that's how you get waste!
More energy will cost more fossil fuels.
It's smarter to write regulation for each uniquely and directly.
Eg.
- Sound from air traffic shall meet <sound regulations> and when violated will incur automatic fees of <formula> amount.
- Air traffic emissions are required to meet <emission regulations> and will be taxed at <formula> amount (which should be used to offset pollution).
For emission, require airlines/airplanes to have a emission-sensor installed that automatically measure the emission. As a part of take off, make it mandatory to check it's working and as a part of landing, make sure it sent there data to where it has to go.
No. Rich people, who fly business and first class still fly with the same airlines as poor people. The margins of the entire industry are thin.
People love to blame SUV’s because they are in peoples faces, but replace every American SUV with an EV and the impact on the climate is negligible. Things would get just as bad a few weeks later, and that’s about it. People blame the rich and powerful because when you blame the people running things when things are fucked up.
Consider, the option for electrified roads instead of burning hydrocarbons existed 20 years ago. We could have reduced gasoline use by around 90% by now without any great breakthroughs but such choices aren’t up to individual consumers.
If you’re a middle-class American, you have a huge house by global standards, which you heat and cool more than just about anywhere else on Earth. Each family has two bigger than average cars which they drive more than most other countries. Middle class Americans also eat far more beef than most of the world.
It is true that middle class Americans fly less than the rich, let alone the super-rich in private jets.
Yes, the super-rich do pollute a great deal per capita. But the idea that American or indeed global emissions is in large part the result of private consumption of the super-rich is just wrong.
Climate change is beyond individual choices. The infrastructure of suburban homes and roads doesn’t go away when someone moves into a city.
The actual solution is to discourage and then eliminate mining coal and other fossil fuels. Rather than simply rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
But then I see what happens at city council meetings and on local forums when people suggest loosening up on zoning rules to allow for denser development. It's mostly normal people that are pushing back on this stuff, and then blaming the "greedy developers" for trying to "ruin their neighborhood". That "traffic is bad enough" and that "our infrastructure can't handle it". We can't have separated bike lanes because "we don't have enough parking as it is", or "that road is already too full, we can't take away lanes". It's totally ingrained in our culture.
Who's been running the disinfo campaigns on carbon taxes?
It’s not like “oh the average Joe making 50k a year won’t be able to fly his supersonic jet because of the fines but rich people will”
Limiting proxy metrics, almost as speed instead of noise, when the limit is pretty easy to enforce doesn't do anything other than stifling innovation.
A lot of the assumptions people make about efficiency don’t hold water in aerospace. There are no laws of physics preventing supersonic aircraft from being efficient provided they can fly high enough and we figure out how to build better engines.
But thank you for trying to point out that engineering efficiencies matter a great deal. Hopefully the message will get through.
If we really want time savings, fix the entire airport experience. Thats where time can be most saved. When travelling domestic I ussually end up spending far more time waiting for flights/bags/security than actually flying.
Show up, hop on, tap your credit card to pay, and the plane takes off while you're still wandering down the aisle looking for a seat.
/fire suit on
The real difference now is that flying is too affordable. It used to be, only the rich could fly.
What we need to do is make air travel much, much more expensive, out of the reach of most people except on special occasions, and we can go back to having (1) less unnecessary carbon emissions from people flying to Disneyland or whatever shitty resort they spend their vacations at, and (2) very short waits at the airport for people who need to get somewhere in a hurry and can afford it.
Environmental and efficiency problem solved.
wish that were true, but the variance of wait time, even with tsa precheck, etc defeats the purpose. needs to be reliably consistent (and short) for me to take advantage of a 30min show time.
No, it assumes you care about reducing air travel more than equality of access to it
> forcing most people to become vegans because meat becomes too expensive
Sounds...effective? It isn't what is happening, but taxing the hell out of meat would be a great lever to pull if you want to drive consumption away from it.
Outside of cost the only possible lever is rationing. Good luck with that one.
I remember the times before September 11, 2001, when I could show up at the airport about 30 minutes before my flight, get through security (which was locally operated -- no TSA), get my boarding pass at the gate, and board. It was great!
People could also meet you at the gate when you arrived, instead of outside the security area. There would always be peoples' families and loved ones there waiting for them.
If you are flying within Europe, without checking a bag, and have the QR code from your boarding pass, it always takes less than 30 minutes to get to the gate. Allowing an hour is more than safe.
From the bay area, there is nowhere you might want to go that a train would make less stressful.
Want to go to LA? That's 1 hour in the air for around 100 bucks. Or it's a 10 hour ordeal involving transfers between coach bus and train in more than one location. All for the low price of 60 dollars.
Want to go to New York? That's 6 hours by air or 80+ hours by rail. Where realistically you are going to book a roomette ($$$) and not just sit in coach for 3 days straight.
The airport experience is why, even though I enjoy actually flying, I avoid doing it to the greatest degree I can. Everything that happens from the time I arrive at the airport to the time the airplane leaves the runway is awful.
Hi! There are many of us who exist outside of the US and would be open to planes flying faster because the world is super big. Thanks for listening
Sure, but that isn’t particularly affected by restrictions on supersonic flight over the US.
(London-LA semi-frequent flyer).
https://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper.htm...
Non-Americans who wish to complain about USA have a broad range of topics from which to choose; there's really no need to complain that USA regulates the operation of airlines in USA airspace.
This is true, but isn't the flip side of this that the high altitude emissions are much more damaging?
Efficiency for a given aircraft is nice but it's not the point. I believe Concord was most efficient at cruising speed (~Mach 2) but it does not change the fact that it burned like 4x more per seat/km than a b737 (Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft). Of course Concorde was only first class but that's part of the point of the parent.
As for boom, some guesstimate are around at least 4x too (https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-b...). No idea how biased this is but I believe it's quite telling that there is only mention of SAF on https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability. At best in some 2017 article they compare themself to a lay-flat bed in subsonic business class, but since they only manage to secure an engine maker last year it was firmly in the guesstimate too.
Basically a faster airplane can have smaller wings which produce less lift and less drag. If we in spherical cow tradition ignore body drag, you can halve wing size, increase speed by 44% and have the same drag. You need more power but for a shorter duration, for the same energy usage per trip.
That wing lift/drag relationship may be less fungible than you're supposing in order to address lower-speed flight segments.
In reality, planes fly higher where the air is less dense, and faster to keep the lift and drag equal.
In a car, lift is not needed. Higher speed doesn't have compensating effects. Higher speed more clearly causes more fuel burn for the distance.
If anything, automobiles frequently utilise negative lift, as with a Formula 1 or Indy Car's inverted wing which generates increased downforces. On street cars you'll find spoilers and similar factors.
Aircraft can fly low and fast, though that's typically associated with combat aircraft evading radar or air-defence systems. Such missions are known as fuel-burners precisely because of the greatly increased drag.
It's been a long time since I've touched compressible fluid mechanics or turbomachinery design, but if I recall correctly the theoretical "sweet spot" for overall aircraft efficiency is something like Mach 1.3. I'd have to dig though my textbooks to remind myself why, but the number stuck with me.
Can't find the picture anymore...
Let’s just fly around really fast and enjoy it for the next century or os.
Just tax fuel to price in the externality and let people decide how much they want to spend?
> Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?
The elite are also people.
How much should it be taxed to factor in the external cost?
I don't know. But that can be treated as a technical problem to figure out. (Problems being technical is good! Much more tractable than political or social problems.)
> Air fuel is taxed very little due to the Chicago convention.
I'm not quite sure how much the Chicago convention would hinder a clever law drafter. Judging by what I can see at Wikipedia on it, I would imagine you could technically tax not kerosene itself, but the burning of kerosene inside your airspace.
Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth. Seriously, f this guy. I suppose he's in favor of letting us chuck all of our garbage out of open windows while we drive, too.
I've heard sonic booms before at air shows, and it's not some quiet little "beep". They're loud and disturbing. As someone who values silence, hearing these frequently at any hour of the day would drive me insane.
I don't doubt there is technology that can make booms quieter, but until it's 0, STFU. Sick of people arguing that creating technology for the benefit of a tiny few (as others have mentioned, supersonic travel will always be inherently more inefficient) is OK, the externalities on the rest of the populace be damned.
To be clear, they boomed, and it was loud and annoying.
Edit: They don't need to be directly above me, 10KM to any side suffices. Of course it depends on the type, too. From experience, curiously clicking on flighttrackers to see who was that, it doesn't really matter though, because it goes all the way from small bizjets over airliners and freighters to heavy transports. And then there is the military. Always louder, no matter which. Even subsonic.
More generally, bans on a technology “forever” just seem silly. It should at least be revisited every decade or so. A decade brings lots of advancement; maybe there’s some clever way of minimizing the boom from a sonic boom now.
Or maybe there isn’t. But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “if it’s >0, ban it. No noise whatsoever!” Like… you’ve heard loud motorcycles. Why not argue for those to be banned too?
I have not heard them since the Space Shuttle was retired.
I agree with the forever part in theory. However in politics (and law) if you leave a door slightly open, then people are incentivized to open it wide open and “get around” various rules.
Permanent “for forever” laws and never that. They are forever until someone changes them. That’s more binary and easier to reason about than “this sonic boom is better than that sonic boom so it’s ok, and it the 1980s already so let’s have at it!”. You set some threshold number, then the politics is about the number not the booms themselves really.
If technology has truly advanced enough, people will change the laws. Done.
Now as an engineer, I prefer the threshold. But it’s so much easier to change that. You start a company in 1980 and have so much better tech after 10 years in 1990, but it doesn’t materially change things enough, so you shut down or try and change the threshold. What do you do?
“Just change the law” is usually not an easy proposal. One could argue that it shouldn’t be. But technology advances much faster than the law, and having a lag time of decades doesn’t seem optimal in most cases.
He's proposing allowing sonic booms below certain decibel limits that are apparently below what any aircraft can achieve today. So your experience with airshow sonic booms is not directly relevant.
No, the better thing is to demonstrate the lower number as achievable first, then change the rules to go into production.
Even current aircrafts’ air braking is loud enough to be annoying as hell (to the point where people routinely complain and force airports to move approach routes).
The air brakes sound something like “dew-yoooouuuuu”. Not sure what the actual name of the hated thing that makes the noise is.
Properly executed landing in airliner doesn't use airbrakes until touchdown (where they are used among other things to ensure airplane doesn't accidently lift from runway and are triggered by pressure sensors on main gear).
To quote a certain pilot's response to ATC: "Air brakes are for when I fuckup, not for your fuckups"
I highly doubt you’ve heard a sonic boom at an airshow, it’s illegal to perform them and has been for a long time. A true sonic boom performed at low altitude at an airshow would blow out the eardrums of every attendant at the show and all the windows in every car in the parking lot. Only the military is allowed to cause them and only for very good reason. There was a recent case in the UK where fighter jets caused a sonic boom as they were scrambled to respond to a malfunctioning plane; the video is here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGR96Zz0dXk and it had people from over 20km away calling the police to report that a bomb had gone off somewhere nearby.
What you’ve heard at airshows is close to a sonic boom, it’s called “tickling the cone” and it’s highly compressed but not collapsed sound waves. It resembles the regular roar of an airplane, but packed into a few seconds. Very different to a sonic boom, which sounds exactly like an explosion.
(The practical upshot is this strengthens your argument.)
As one spent my childhood in the Eastern Bloc with fighter planes practicing overhead passing supersonic limit frequently I say the sonic boom is no joke. Most likely those happened lower than the cruising altitude of an airlener and consequently the shaking windows and frighetened animals (and children) may be avoided if happen higher up yet the more silent ones were still enough waking up anyone. Happening multiple times throughout the night - airliners fill the night sky - would be detrimental to health in an already noisy society where good sleep is seldom.
I am living now in Easter Anglia and one or two years ago two Eurofighters went on to intercept an airliner not responding to calls and the resulting booms not only broke the work for everyone - wife was on a call and both end startled about the loud 'explosions' nearby - but the booms were in the news that day triggering discussions and analysis.
Booms are pretty distracting. Even milder noises are like low rumble coming from a factory or works, especially during the night. Better to be avoided, the regulators were wise. Uncaring fisherman - observed by the author - lost in an activity then interrupted by a mild boom only for seconds is no reliable reference here I think. : ) Someone lost in an activity - mind is engaged in to the level of being disconnected of surroundings - should not be noticing it at all to be accepteble.
This is an absurd attitude. Most human activities have externalities, from farming to driving to playing music to hiking to having the lights on.
Things with externalities should ideally have the beneficiaries be made to pay for those externalities, or if that's not practical, have them measured as best we can and a sin tax imposed.
Yeah great you have terrible living situation but at least the government has money for new F-35s.
And the reason this isn't done is because very often you couldn't pay those things in the first place. So companies that depend on not paying them will just lobby it away or die.
Sometimes its better to just make it illegal so no company actually starts depending on these things.
If this was a hugely important issue, yes, try to change it. However until then, lets not waste political capital on it.
The purpose of the Mach 1+ ban is to reduce noise. But if the goal is to reduce noise, why not just set noise limits? We have the ability to measure noise, so if the goal is to reduce noise, set a limit on noise.
Then let the airplane operators innovate however makes sense for their business. If you're worried about pollution (which is a good thing to worry about!) then there should be a separate fuel per mile limit or a carbon tax. Then they can innovate within both constraints.
But the whole point is that the metric being used is wrong -- it should be noise output, not speed.
Most commenters in this thread seem to take issue with the author's assumption that there is no other justification for a speed limit other than noise reduction.
Honestly, I find the author's premise to be vaguely reasonable, but the whole thing is undermined by the god-awful chart which extrapolates historical aircraft speeds to imply that without the "speed limit" rule, we would have commercial aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean at 2500 mph. (Per wikipedia[0], the fastest manned aircraft in history, a SR-71 blackbird flight, capped out below 2200 mph.)
Which either means there was no reason to figure out how to go faster, or they just couldn't do it. If the former, maybe with commercial pressures there would be a reason to go faster, but that's unlikely. And with the latter, well I'm not sure a commercial entity would out-innovate the military-industrial complex.
But the military had other constraints, and needs.
One thing the military doesn't need as much as the civilian world is comfort. You might prefer to go from New York to Hawaii in 2 hours instead of 11. The military might prefer that too, but maybe not as much.
A lot of the things for which the military needs speed have alternatives: if you want to bomb a place, you can send missiles, if you want to surveil it, you may use satellites. If you want to evade some incoming surface-to-air missile, you are out of luck anyway. That's the reason the top speed of F-35 is lower than the top speed of earlier jet fighters like F-14, F-15 and F-16.
On the other hand, the military needs to optimize for other things. Maneuverability. Ability to open up a bomb bay and drop bombs (imagine Concorde opening up some hatch in the middle of its supersonic flight). Capability to take off from shorter runways. High G forces. And of course for more recent military jets low observability.
Compared to that, civilian aircraft is very boring: it needs to fly at a constant altitude and constant speed. That's the reason Concorde flew more supersonic miles than all the military jet fighters in the world combined.
If this changes it so that this is no longer true, then no, screw this idea.
Plus the reality is it would just be used by rich people to jet about, probably emitting much more c02 per mile.
Currently working up the energy to go on a walk so I don't have to hear my neighbors drying machine turn on and off at random intervals.
But, some people's windows would crack and some would break due to the boom, which they had to pay for. So, if this limit is changed, will the aircraft owners pay people for their broken windows.
Back then seeing a plane at any speed was not common event. Now you look up at just about any time of day and the chances are very good (like 90%+) you can find a plane.
The actual externality is the noise/pressure wave, not the speed. It makes sense to regulate as close to externalities as possible, rather than banning sort of related upstream things.
In other words, if they can do supersonic without booms that cause problems, go for it. If they're unable to, well, then they keep flying so as to not produce them.
But doesn't flying that high damage the ozone or something ? I thought that was one of the many reasons the concord was stopped (Yes, I know the real reason was financial). If so, many planes flying that high could cause other issues.
But some people will see if this happens.
Well, then add that to the list of things that are prohibited, I guess and let them see if they can make it work.
Regulate the things we actually don't want, rather than the adjacent things.
https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-b...
Ultimately it was maintenance issues (which in turn were caused by corporate political fights) and 9/11 (which required expensive modifications) that killed Concorde, not fuel costs - all combined with BA finding out that they could well enough replace the super-profitable Concorde routes with other aircraft and still make a bank even if individual tickets had to be made cheaper.
Although I will say if you reengineered Concorde with 2020s tech, maybe it would close the gap.
Maybe instead of "inefficiency" the better argument is opportunity cost. Hardly anyone flies pax 747s anymore, and I wonder how long Emirates will keep its A380s going.
Like low-level sonic booms, light pollution was never considered to be a big issue but eventually crossed the threshold where it now has significant negative impact on animals insects and plants. My concern is that once little sonic booms become commonplace and we start noticing the impact on the natural world, there will be too much money in play to stop the damage.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00665-7
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8322
[edit] just remembered another low-level fact that people did not think was important. Jet contrails significantly increase high-level cloud cover which alters weather patterns and holds more heat in the atmosphere. A simple change in flightpath by modifying altitude by couple thousand feet can eliminate 80% or more of cultural formation but the airlines won't do it because of the small amount of additional money it would cost.
This seems like a hasty conclusion to make. There are plenty of things that correlate with the stagnation of economic growth. I'm aware the author goes on to say almost the same thing after making this statement, but it is clear the author is trying to offer the ban on supersonic flight over soil to be the cause of economic stagnation in America.
To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority.
I fail to see how there has been a complete halt on the development of supersonic technology. A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology.
We need to get back to doing great things.
Who says we aren't?
If we want growth—if we want greatness—it’s time to make America boom again.
I can't agree with the author's conclusion. Besides, they don't really make an effort in their article to tie the development of supersonic flight over land to economic growth. This is more of a "build it and they will come" conclusion. I don't buy it.
I am not defending the author's economic arguments, but this sentence is quite dubious.
Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits?
(Edit: remove superfluous word.)
Militaries, for one. But that doesn't mean supersonic flight is completely off limits to passenger flight. There used to be regular flights across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds operated by Air France and British Airways. The last one was in 2003. Did the Concorde program fail because they couldn't fly over the CONUS?
This is how I read it too. I've lived near an air show (jets) location and I've lived near shuttle booms, both are annoying AF. The shuttle booms would make you jump out of your skin every time like we were being shelled and that occurred at 60,000 feet and there were two of them because of how large the shuttle was. Everyone would be annoyed by the air show because they'd practice for a week before the show. If I was on a call, I'd have to say, "gimme 20 seconds, a plane is going overhead." You'd have to pause the TV or radio or conversation because you couldn't hear anything. No thanks.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DF...
In all fairness to the billionaires (God knows how persecuted they are /s), it would be a lot faster than 20%. Probably 2-3x or more, depending on how fast they were allowed to go. You only pass the sonic boom threshold once.
I’m confused about the other point though. Did this rule affect transatlantic flights? Somehow Concorde was allowed and I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now).
I think the extrapolation of the max speed graph doesn’t really make sense. It may have made sense to do that in the ’60s or ’70s, as I think that people in the aviation industry reasonably thought that was the direction planes were going. The 747 was designed to become a cargo plane once supersonic planes replaced it. But apart from Concorde, supersonic civilian jets didn’t happen so is the claim here that the rule prevented them from being developed because of the extra economies of scale from selling a few more planes to fly between the east and west coast? That is: I think this argument would have been more convincing if transatlantic supersonic flight was also banned and Concorde hadn’t existed. Given that that’s not what happened, I think it must make a stronger case for that rule hindering the development of supersonic civil aviation rather than other things like consumers preferring comfort to speed or the increased speed only affecting time in the air and not travel to the airport, waiting there, baggage claim, and travel from the airport.
Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.
And mainstream consumers preferring the lowest price to both.
But, yeah, if you're going to be any significant premium over lie-flat seating that's a tough sell for anyone for whom a small number of hours != losing money. (i.e. almost everyone.). Saving a few hours coast to coast for NY to London is not worth thousands of dollars to most people.
There used to be a flight (BA1?) that showed a market desire for faster transatlantic flights: it took off from London City airport (lower travel time, potentially much lower; also less time in the airport as it’s smaller), all business class, flew to Ireland to refuel (runway is too short for it to take off fully loaded), passengers would do US passport control and customs in Ireland while the plane refuelled, then land in JFK and get transport to the city. I don’t think it has been reinstated since covid though. In the reverse direction, one could take a helicopter from downtown Manhattan to JFK, which improves speed except you need to arrive in advance of the flight and get a flight at a certain time, but you would go through security (and check-in?) in the heliport and so be on the post-security side when you got to JFK. I think they only have a midtown heliport now. You can book it through Uber, I think, and it is sometimes cheaper than an Uber to the airport.
So, I think there is some interest amongst frequent travellers for faster flights. I personally don’t sleep very well on flights so if I had a choice between a 7 hour lie-flat redeye from New York to London and a 3.5 hour[2] non-lie-flat flight at the same price, I would prefer the latter. But this would matter more if the travel/waiting time before/after the flight were reduced.
[1] I looked it up and I was wrong here. The cost was 10-15% more than first class which would have been more expensive than business class.
[2] I’m not sure what the right number to write down here is.
Usually I'll take a day flight from NYC to London anyway so lie-flat doesn't really matter. I am taking a red-eye in a couple weeks, which I really try to avoid, but that's because United now has a direct from Boston to London so doing the zero dark thirty thing via Newark doesn't really make sense. If I'm awake the whole time, business is nicer but not a couple grand nicer for 7 hours or so. I can have some really nice meals and other things for that in London if I want to.
Yeah, there's no heliport at the former Pan Am building now but there is a heliport in midtown.
BA1 was the business class only LCY-JFK flight. It stopped and hasn't restarted AFAIK. Business-class only has been a tough sell economically.
Sure if you ignore the cost of developing the airplane. There is no way in hell that its worth it otherwise.
And that's why new things aren't developed. If its not the government spending billions of $ for a luxury product that has a tiny market, then nobody else will.
At best this rule prevented a few more Concorde routes.
But the idea that any US company would have build its own supersonics is crazy.
> Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.
Yes. As 'Not Just Bikes' says, cities aren't loud, cars are loud.
Noise is an underrated factor in health, specially in densely populated places.
As soon as the government money was gone, Boeing threw the plans in the trash. Everybody else who was competing for government money instantly threw their plans in the trash as soon it was clear no government money was coming.
People could “live indefinitely” with ionizing radiation (and non-ionizing, I might add), but that does not mean it does not impact their health or wellbeing. There are detriments outside of the immediately obvious “loud noise bothers someone”, such as property damage, ecological destruction, environmental concerns, health impacts, passenger safety, etc.
I couldn’t disagree more with this.
I live near an Air Force base that luckily doesn’t do supersonic stuff.
Constant white noise, even at a pretty high level is something that can be tuned out pretty easily.
I’m not sure the same can be said of singular events like a sonic boom.
I think of it like the difference between a lawnmower half a block away, and a subwoofer the same distance.
Is enforcing a perceived noise, or even a measured decibel limit on the ground even realistic? It would be difficult to investigate reported infractions unless they're consistently coming from a scheduled route, because the noise level on the ground depends on more than just the plane. "Supersonic jets that don't have a lot of headroom on the noise limits in a dry, flat desert shouldn't fly supersonic through this area because the the land underneath is shaped like a parabola and it's very humid." is much more difficult for a pilot to manage and a regulation body to enforce than "Don't fly faster than this airspeed." especially when the effect was the same back when the bill was introduced.
-> benefit a minority?
Musk has talked for a long time about a supersonic jet that would fly higher and thus not be heard on the ground. However batteries would need to get quite a bit better still and it would be a massive expansive project.
Wouldn’t this just encourage designs that create a sonic boom null zone directly below the aircraft and make it louder 10 or 20 degrees to the sides?
If the proposed new standard is already impossible to meet, why not continue with the current permitting system and when quieter craft are on the horizon, make meaningful standards?
This was laugh-out-loud funny to me, something a character on the Silicon Valley show would say.
edit my point is there are people that aren’t as bothered by it as others and would like to see us do great things as a species
The bit about sitting in a sonic boom simulator chamber is just silly — the author's subjective opinion about the loudness of a sonic boom has no bearing on reality, and fails to factor in that sonic booms during e.g. Bongo II (1964) shattered windows not because of the sheer volume of the sonic booms, but because this pressure wave would strike the large surface area of a window nearly all at once, putting a fair amount of energy into it in doing so.
Almost as silly is the line extrapolating speed trends in commercial aviation over time; it reads like xkcd#605. It completely ignores the different regimes of high-speed flight and the limitations posed by it. 2,500mph is roughly Mach 3.2 at sea level, or nearly 3.8 at 60,000ft. At Mach 2, you need to start seriously considering thermal issues caused by friction related to parasitic drag and the paint/coating of the aircraft; at Mach 3, these become primary design constraints, and active cooling systems have to be deeply integrated into the airframe. This is to say nothing of the exotic engine design decisions that have to be made in these regimes.
Much north of Mach 4, transporting any useful load becomes borderline impractical in-atmosphere with current technology.
Ignoring fuel economy issues since I brought this up in a separate comment: since the introduction of the Concorde, the major focuses of aviation development have been on safety, reliability, and automation (all of which are strongly linked). "We live in the safest era of aviation in history" is an evergreen statement thanks to those advancements, and aviation incidents — while tragic and unfortunately not completely eliminated yet — claim fewer lives with each passing year (as a proportion of passenger-miles travelled).
Road noise increases incidence of hypertension
maybe this should be studied before the regulation is changed
It was just a normal part of life. Everybody was used to it and I never heard anybody complain about it. I've been in thunderstorms that were much louder.
Granted these jets were very high. If they had been going Mach 1 close to the ground, people would have complained about broken windows.
And I'm not suggesting my experience was the norm. Just that in some cases sonic booms were a part of life that nobody really paid much attention to.
Straight from the Silicon Valley comedy show. Next: "Why sonic booms are actually a good thing."
Noise leads to health problems and should be outlawed.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ea/d1ea0...
Supersonic passenger transport is hardly an urgent global need, so can we at least do some more science to understand the risks and appropriately regulate first?
Sure it would be cool to fly across the continent in 1/2 the time, but not at the expense of tens of millions of people having to know about it
I'm okay with not having to deal with the booms if it means the wealthy are stuck flying the same speed as the rest of us.
But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things. And I say that as someone who thinks we should be taxing the wealthy at much higher rates than we do.
Isn't this exactly a case of everyone having fewer nice things (such as peace and quiet) for the sake of a convenience for the very few? The author seems to actually propose a noise level of 90 PLdB with a straight face.
It’d be awesome to have supersonic commercial aircraft that were also quiet. I’m excited about YC’s Boom and their overature plane, but it’d be so cool to able to fly coast to coast at supersonic speeds.
Hopefully something like this can pass.
This is completely idiotic. There is not a single goddamn reason to operate supersonic civilian aircraft except to cater to the whims of the wealthy. This jackass read a study and sat in a simulator and thinks he has even the slightest idea of what it's like to grow up getting boomed every day. I did. It's not fun having your house rattle all the time at random. I cannot even imagine what it would be like around a commercial airport that had dozens of supersonics every day instead of a handful of small military jets.
For the past half-century, this one law has ensured that the entire field of supersonic flight has been explored by just one actor, the military, which has a completely different set of incentives and interests to all other actors in the field of flight.
Fuel efficiency, noise pollution, passengers per flight, economic benefits of faster commercial travel - the military doesn’t care about these at all. But commercial aerospace engineers care a great deal about these things, they have made huge strides in improving them*, and this law effectively completely bars all of them from investigating supersonic flight because no matter what they might discover, they will not be permitted to implement any of it. There is no way even in principle to get around this law because it does not care about anything except the speedometer reading.
( *: ”Revenue passenger kilometers per kilogram of CO2” is a statistic that tries to capture the combined effects of a wide range of efficiency improvements. Wikipedia says it has gone from 0.4 in the 1950s to 8.4 in the 2010s, a 20x improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft The FAA says that in 1975, one person on the ground experienced significant noise exposure for every 30 people taking a flight. Today, one person experiences significant noise exposure for every 2,100 people taking a flight, a 70x improvement. The threshold for ‘significant noise exposure’ has not changed in this time. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noi...)
For all we know there might be some particular combination of aircraft shape, speed, route, and cruising height that lets an aircraft skip along the upper surface of some obscure transition boundary in the atmosphere and you could fly a thousand passengers from London to New York in three hours using one-tenth of the fuel, and all the sound energy bounces off that boundary and is reflected into the upper atmosphere, never reaching the ground. We will never know because no company will pay any engineer to look for it because even if they found it they wouldn’t be allowed to test it, much less fly it commercially. They can’t even properly investigate it intellectually since there’s almost no research material because, again, it’s illegal in principle.
It’s hard to come up with an analogous law for other fields. It would be like banning any computation faster than one megaflop per second, because at the time of the law being passed we only had vacuum tubes and getting that speed out of a vacuum tube computer required a building the size of a football stadium and the tubes tended to explode and kill technicians. It would be like making it illegal for any person to travel at any speed greater than 20mph, because trying to go faster tended to harm the horses we were riding at the time.
We should repeal this law against supersonic flight (and replace it with an equivalent law that cares about the consequences of supersonic flight), to signal to aerospace companies that we will, in principle, let them do it - if they can do it well.
Crashing at any other time, sure, there is potentially more energy in a supersonic plane. I doubt that people on the ground will know the difference between a plane crashing on them at 600mph vs 1200mph.
Imagine how quiet hypersonic planes would be now if the rule had been a based on loudness instead of speed. I imagine getting from LA to NY in an an hour in near-silence... That would be awesome!
also - can someone give a tl;dr why that guy is so passionate about that to begin with?
> I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force.
seems like is onto something ...
> The speed limit cannot be responsible for the entirety of the Great Stagnation, of course.
oh, really, no kidding?
and, it needs to be cheaper