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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, I think the route to more efficiency is funneling people to massive hub airports where widebody planes carry them on less frequent runs to other hubs— but that results in longer boarding times, less flexible schedules, and more stopovers, none of which the market wants.

So instead we have a bunch of smaller "commuter" jets making point-to-point trips, many of which are short enough that they really should be trains, not air travel. And that's a whole other issue. Sigh.

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A supersonic passenger jet would not find much of market on short haul flights. They would either stick to the dense pockets of wealth, the biggest airports beside the biggest cities, or rely on feeder airports to bring passengers in. Either way, I don't see this saving much in actual travel time over the current system.

It's certainly niche, but NY-LON sees ~3 million non-connecting passengers a year.

If they can make it quiet enough to be supersonic over land, it's a lot more compelling. But even being supersonic for the atlantic crossing will shave hours off of most EU routes from NY.

I think the bigger problem is the time changes on a lot of routes make EU flights pretty efficient - you don't want the overnight flights to be shorter really (and I wish most were longer).

Maybe overnight flights should optionally let you sleep on the ground before/after the flight. Charge extra, you don't have to pay pilots or for fuel, park away from the gate.

You would need power without the engines but you could hook up a generator or a feed from the airport.

Planes run on shore power at the gate anyway.

Then turn on all the lights and wake you up for the preflight briefing!

I've been on redeye flights where, a few hours in, the pilot came on the PA, told us about something to see out the window, and also about the drink we could buy from the flight attendants - credit cards only please!

Air travel is just endless indignities and discomfort.

What would you possibly see out the window in the dark?

If planes are full, how can it be more efficient to fly my ~200 lbs (including lots of luggage!) from point A to B to C, adding extra distance and another takeoff, rather than directly from A to C?

Are widebody planes that much more efficient?

The short answer seems to be no. Newer planes are much more efficient than older ones, but the most efficient aircraft and flight segment per passenger-distance are the A320 Neo and 737 Max making ~1000 mile flights.

Fuel burn is probably not the main reason airlines use the routing that they do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

I'd guess that staffing and gate time are big cost drivers. A lot of those "how Southwest succeeded" articles from back in the day cited very fast gate turnarounds as being a key thing— get the people off, get the other people on, get back in the air.

> many of which are short enough that they really should be trains

That's a good point, but rail infrastructure is very expensive to build and, unlike planes, where you only need to build the destinations, you need to build every route.

Anyway, the future of short commuter flights is electric.

The key determinant that tells you whether trains or planes are more cost-efficient is population density. If you have two cities far apart with not much in-between, then it's cheaper to build a couple of airports. If you have loads of other cities along the route, then it'd be cheaper to build a railway. The former case is true for much of North America, and the latter for much of Western Europe and UK.

Commonly cited but not really grounded in reality— lots of places that have made rail work have very similar or worse density characteristics to the coastal US routes that should be a no-brainer:

https://persquaremile.com/2011/05/27/u-s-not-dense-enough-fo...

If you take into account cost-per-moved-amount-of-cargo trains are dramatically cheaper, even including infrastructure. The only reason we don't use/develop them more is social/political bs not due to choosing the ideal engineering solution for the problem and that solution being planes)

As for electric flight:

1 gallon of jet fuel has like 40 kwh of energy and weighs like 6 lbs. A Ford Lightning has a battery capacity of 100 kwh and that battery weighs 1,800 lbs. Electric flight ain't happening in a big way anytime soon with current battery tech.

Dreamliner prevailing over the A380 already disproved that.

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