Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)
engineering.mit.edu
engineering.mit.edu
I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.
It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.
It seems like there are two problems:
1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong.
Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed.
2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns.
Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money.
Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed.
As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it.
It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.
That's . . . a take, considering that OBL's main beef with America was infidel troops on the soil of Saudi, because the Saudi royals were the guardians of Mecca. And the Saudis asked us to intervene against Saddam.
9/11 wasn't some coherent beef with US foreign policy; it was bog-standard religious extremism of the Salafist Islamic flavor.
Why would he bomb US and not SA then? At least in his own words it was about foreign policy and Palestine among other things.
Am pulling this completely out of foggy memory but one of the justifications for TSA was that potentially local airport authorities would be considered liable for acts of terrorism like 9/11.
Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.
And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.
I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im... https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
Similarly though admittedly more permissive, with Amtrak iirc it's like: you need a credit card and they probably won't check your ID. There were several more years after 9/11 before the "papers please" principle came for the trains and buses too.
E.g. search turned up a claim Greyhound "employees are not allowed to sell a ticket without an official ID" https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/140703/i-have-no-...
You definitely need ID for hotels a lot of the time. Not sure the level where the regulations are put in place--probably varies--and Europe is probably more formal than the US in this regard. Was staying with a friend in Europe about a year ago and they had to take our passports to the police station to make us "official."
As I wrote elsewhere, I also had a challenge in the US a few years back but I expect that, had I been at my usual chain, there would have been a discussion with the manager followed by "I see nothing, I hear nothing."
ID is not security.
This conversation just doesn't seem promising. Your initial wildly-off claim got me worried I might misunderstand the world by that much (I remember the 70s, fuzzily). I wasted time checking it, wondering if the actual peak might be in a year not mentioned, trying to find the paper Wikipedia cited: it was a non-open-access paper with at least four links to check; one of them did show the first page, which at least gave the figure in question, if not the ultimate source.
I've taken Amtrak quite a bit in the last few years (Emeryville & Truckee in California, and NYC, Philly, BWI, and DC in the east), and I've never been asked for ID to board a train. (In other words, trivially easy for someone to do something nefarious if they wanted to.)
No security checkpoints, no ticket checking before getting on the train, just someone checking tickets on the train itself 10-20 minutes after it gets moving.
You also don't actually need an ID to fly, though if you try that, give yourself plenty of time to get through "extra security".
I’m sure they both have policies about it on the books, but I’ve never seen them enforced
Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre).
I rationalized it in a few ways:
* "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...)
* With modern corporate surveillance, corps already have a shit ton of "my data" that they will happily sell to anyone, including "The Government". (https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...)
* If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.
I doubt it.
Technically, legally, right now, maybe the Colorado DMV's database isn't accessible to other parties. How strongly are you willing to bet that it's going to stay that way for the rest of your life?
I've lived in 5 states in the last 20 years, but none of them were Colorado.
A quick web search suggests that CO requires prints for licensing as an auto or motorsports dealer, but I can't find a requirement for getting a standard DL. I didn't look too hard, and I'm not claiming any authority here, but I remain surprised by the requirement.
"The information here covers identification and lawful presence requirements for Coloradans seeking a driver license, ID card or instruction permit... Per C.R.S. 42-2-107 and 42-2-302, applications for credentials must contain a fingerprint."
CRS 42-2-107 concerns applications for driver's licenses and learner's permits, and CRS 42-2-302 concerns issuance of driver's licenses and non-driving identification cards.
My friends who were already in the state prior to 2017 never needed to get their prints taken to keep renewing their licenses. But since I moved here in 2019, I needed to provide mine, as do any teenagers getting their permits or licenses for the first time here.
But compulsory fingerprinting is too authoritarian for my tastes. I can still visit, right? :)
Maybe this was just a GenX thing, and isn't really done anymore, but in elementary school we were all fingerprinted.
They told our parents it was in case we were ever kidnapped it would help them find us.
You might be surprised about how many people's fingerprints the gov't has.
Why have a "security measure" only to allow bypassing it?
The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval and the reasons for denial are of course obtuse.
Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design).
> The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval
Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.
The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive.
And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."
Iowans have committed significantly more homicides per capita than people from most European countries (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter). I don't think it's problematic if European airports screen Iowans more heavily than Europeans and Saudis. Do you?
If you really believe the public is kept safe most effectively by pretending to be fully blind to nationality when choosing who to screen at an airport (since you can't intensively screen everyone) I don't know what to tell you.
Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
Reputation?
Are we deciding security policies by reputation or statistics?
I think I'd win the bet of "Americans have killed more people (per capita) in other countries than Saudis have", so it does seem relevant to be more wary of them. Especially given how widespread the former has been, compared to a few incidents with the latter.
> If you really believe ... I don't know what to tell you.
That does seem evident, yes.
> Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
Citation?
That is true only if you start the count in 1946 or later!
The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.
The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all).
The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.
But who is going to keep up with the “frequent travelers”?
Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
They do, just kind of “at random”. I had it sometimes a bit of everywhere in Europe.
The security agents took it out, unfolded the knife blade, discussed it a bit in German and handed it back to me.
"It's OK! It's just a little guy! Go ahead".
So it depends I guess.
We were late for a flight in the Philippines and the gate agent knew it. Told me all of my travel fishing gear was contraband - even the rod and reel. Straight up stole all my fishing gear figuring (correctly) it was worth less to me than making my flight.
So after throwing away perfectly good food and multiple bottles of water because our flight was coming up, we then had to sit in a terminal that only had 2 snack choices and no real food offerings.
I've decided to never fly out of Dublin to the US again. Even if that means I have to fly to London just to transfer to the US.
I always fold up my pant legs so they can see I have low shoes and then it's no issue.
I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
Hmm. At least you weren’t threatening to measure the momentum very accurately. Since that would make the position unknown. Would that turn the plane into a slab?
this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk.
"police state reduces crime" okay i do not care.
even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone.
p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.
They have no authority to take a weed pen or detain you for having one.
They can call cops but they can only confiscate items deemed to be threats to a plane and only detain you for the same.
The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists).
Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating.
Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip.
Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0].
So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite.
And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it.
You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.
Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
People are terrible at judging risk.
>People are terrible at judging risk.
And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
Proves the GP's point exactly.
Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
Well that's kind of what you'd expect a country to do if you treat it like a pariah and embargo people from even visiting as tourists.
It prevents a lack of funding for security pork. The TSA is a massive funding boondoggle for many many snake-oil security salespeople.
Full agreement with the point here: lock the cockpit doors, and let everyone go through the same level of security checks as TSA Pre.
A few things: we also put lots of effort into preventing mass casualty attacks in public places around the world (except the US govt in primary schools, for unfortunate three letter political reasons that begin with N and end with A). We generally don't want people to blow up planes because they're super expensive (even if we discount the lives of the passengers). Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things. When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground. And so on...
Do they? Other than 9/11, I'm personally unaware of this ever happening. 20 seconds searching says there was an airplane that crashed into a DC bridge in the 80's killing 4 motorists, and a couple of similar incidents, but it seems rare.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
11 residents killed by falling debris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...
Seems to me a lot of terrorist attacks are blowing up buildings or driving vehicles into crowds or bombs in crowds or stuff like that. Not a ton of blowing up planes in transit in the overall list of terrorist attacks.
There have been more terrorist car bombings than plane bombings by several orders of magnitude.
There are lots of reasons people bomb cars. I would bet most of those organizations (1+ individuals) would prefer to blow up planes full of specific targets over specific targets.
Train and subway stations rarely have more than one or two armed officers if they have any at all.
Train tracks have shockingly little protection to prevent timed derailment sabotage. Buildings have little protection from being surrounded by accelerants and set on fire, etc.
There is a strange subset of things terrorists seem to want to do and society doesn’t do much to prevent the rest.
The justification for the TSA is that terrorist attacks like 9/11 could deal a disproportionate amount of damage compared to the effort needed to pull them off. But it's sort of a flawed premise because the 9/11 attacks relied on the element of surprise: the victims thought the attackers were pirates. Otherwise there's no way a couple of terrorists could fight off an entire plane with just box-cutters.
If you blow a hole in the side of a plane, then no one can disembark until the plane lands, and the plane itself may simply disintegrate mid-air, killing everyone on board.
Same story if you fill the bus or train with toxic gas, or try to start shooting, or literally any other form of attempted mass casualty attack. Planes are uniquely different to all other modes of transportation because you cannot disembark them quickly and the default failure mode is everybody dies.
Pick your fallacy:
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. Surely we wouldn't have done that unless it worked.
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. It'd be a shame to let that go to waste.
- The TSA isn't perfect, but for every 30 handguns they let slip through they also successfully catch 1. That one could have taken over a plane.
...
And the results of those tests are widely misunderstood. Security isn't about a 100% success rate - that's the goal but not the outcome. It is about disrupting the planning process.
That someone, somewhere might sometimes get a gun through TSA security is one thing...but is that person intending to carry out a terrorist attack in doing so, or did they just leave it in their bag?
Is it possible for anyone to organize a coherent plan which involves as a first step smuggling weapons onto a plane in a way which is not more likely then not to be detected?
And is the correct conclusion from "in a test (where we motivated someone to try a plan they couldn't be sure would succeed but which would have no personal consequences for failure) they succeeded" that the security is pointless, or is it that they need to modify their procedures to improve the detection rate?
I think you might be misunderstanding the scope of the issue. In testing, guns get through screening more often than they get stopped.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
Too lazy to read the many GAO reports that all demonstrate TSA accuracy at finding dangerous items never topping 5%?
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
People do it all of the time for other reasons.
But as others have pointed out, a lot of the TSA processes (taking off shoes, laptops, liquids, etc.) are pointless.
What prevents another 9/11 are the cockpit doors, which have nothing to do with TSA.
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
as soon as we have 2.7 million people in subway and/or concert daily in the US you'd be right... until then...
Like what?
In the absolute worst case it grounds flights nation wide and 100 people die. In the grand scheme of things that's a minor hiccup and not a likely outcome. We saw a bigger impact from the polar vortex.
The security simply doesn't match the value.
I'll remind you that 70 people died from an airplane accident. Tragic, but we were hardly impacted by it. When you talk about 2.7 million flyers, the impact of a few hundred dying a year still makes it one of the safest forms of travel.
Airplanes aren't special and shouldn't have the annoying special security treatment they do today.
amen! but we know that ain't happening
Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_17...
Post 9/11 everyone else just caught up (except minus the actually killing the person), see e.g. the shoe bomber guy.
Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”
… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.
[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.
I do know flying from Los Cabos Mexico where TSA doesn’t matter, I didn’t have to remove my laptop a couple of years ago
Before 9/11, airplane hijackers were like bank robbers: idiots trying to get some cash. If you just followed their orders, everyone would mostly get out alive.
Even mid-9/11, when it became clear that the hijackers were using the planes to attack civilians (at the necessary cost of the lives of the passengers), people stopped cooperating and stopped the final plane from reaching its target.
Even if someone walked into the cockpit with a gun they'd get nothing for their trouble but an immediate nosedive as the pilot sacrificed the plane to protect whatever the intended target was.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
I do wish it was someone smarter doing this, but only a President already hated by all the elites could do this degree of upheaval and get away with it.
Anyway, he's not the real power, here.
If DOGE was a real agency, maybe it would.
You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
To be effective, safety measures don't have to block people who are smart and wouldn't commit the crime anyway. They only have to block the people dumb enough to do it.
If TSA is just theater, couldn't an attacker simply bring weapons sufficient enough to hold off the crowd and break the door? The hijackers on 93 only had box cutters.
It is the combined perception of airport security and the perception that passengers will fight that deter bad actors from even trying.
My point is that none of these things have to be impenetrable. There is a swiss-cheese model to safety. TSA doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective. Every layer of security adds up. There is no single component responsible for all airline security, not even the cockpit doors.
I'm guessing they weren't though, in which case this is a false equivalency. People did hijack airplanes prior to (and during) 9/11
2. In the modern world, it's unclear whether hijacking is a severe risk to planes (compared to drones or missiles which are way more acquirable by terrorists and civilians than they were 25 years ago)
3. TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
Well, if we caught 20% of threats across the 19 hijackers on 9/11, there would have been a 99% chance one was caught. And a 67% chance that someone was caught in each group for each of the first 3 planes with 5 hijackers.
But even if they do miss 80% of the failures in penetration tests, what actually matters is whether or not real world threats are being caught. Threat actors in the real world act with different motivations than penetration testers, and with different skill sets.
I have a family member who works at a (European) airport in an administrative position, and apparently the security culture is quite deep and, I dunno, it sounds reasonable? As in, employees have clearances and passes to enter the more restricted areas (and they go through their own security points), the airport generally knows where the employees are and why they're there, the public areas have guards and many cameras and even the layouts of the stores and booths are subject to many security rules regarding materials and even stuff like camera sightlines.
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
I took flights in the 2010's that didn't feel all that different from boarding a bus. You went to the desk to check in and to give them any checked baggage, walked to the waiting area to wait with a couple of dozen people, then went outside to board the plane. Any plane that would eventually connect to an international airport would have passengers go through security, but otherwise no.
In a post-9/11 world, I took an airplane to university and back, and on a regular basis from [SMALL CITY] airport. I could, as a disorganized young adult, be at the airport within 10-15 before boarding time with luggage to check.
Pre-9/11, my family travelled internationally and it was always a 3+ hour, pack-a-lunch affair to be at [MAJOR CITY] airport.
You can tell it was pre-9/11 because you didn't need to throw the lunch away before getting to the part where you have to wait the longest.
But I've never had, like, a sandwich taken from me.
When I take domestic flights within the US (between places like St. Louis, Denver, NYC, and LA), security takes far longer for several subtle reasons. Everyone has to show a government ID to a TSA employee (and get your photo checked against a database) before proceeding to the actual security lines. Then, most of the security lines use full-body scanners, not just metal detectors; some have moving parts and some don't, but they all require you to actually stand there for a second instead of just passing through. Every single person also has to take their shoes off before they go into those scanners, and you put your shoes through the same slower scanning system that the baggage goes through (which basically doubles the load and halves the bandwidth of the baggage conveyor belt).
In my experience, flying internationally out of/into the US (with both Japan and Canada as the other side) is no more security than flying domestically within the US. Which basically means we have full international-level security even for flying domestically here.
> eventually everyone will have [pre-check]
How do those two things follow? The government does a /bad/ job yet I have to submit to even /more/ monitoring to fix it? They're the greatest exploiters of the transport monopoly we have in the USA and so strong is their grip people don't even avail themselves of the obvious solution.
Except now with a subscription fee.
If you were picking someone up, you could also park in short-term parking, go all the way in to their arrival gate and meet them as they got off the plane, help them with their bags or just accompany them to your car. No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
This hasn't really changed. If you're willing to pay to park you can still park and meet them at bag claim or another outside-security exit.
I think people are just more rushed and there are more flights so more contention for parking.
Think of it like this. Suppose 1% of handguns get through security, and you are a terrorist. Do you really want to take on an assignment that has a 99% chance of ignominous failure and jail for life?
I remember as a kid in the 60s I was invited into the cockpit of the 707 to watch them fly. Of course, my dad being in his AF officer uniform probably helped :-/
I try to take the train whenever I can afford it (money and time-wise)
You man the bathroom sink... right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
First, the hull shapes of container ships are tuned for a particular cruising speed. They accelerate up to that speed and cruise across the Pacific. In particular, the ship's bulbous bow is shaped to create an efficient counter bow wave at that speed.
Before 2007, that cruising speed was faster, maybe 27 knots. This is just like the 707 doing 525 knots in the article. It was faster but not efficient.
Enter Slow Steaming. They redesigned the hulls for a lower cruising speed, maybe 18 knots. They actually took ships into dry dock and re-nosed them. The result was better fuel economy. Fewer shippers (some still are) were willing to pay extra for the 27 knot speed. With Slow Steaming, the results are lower costs and significantly less pollution.
The economics of flying and shipping are largely the same in this case.
Did the crackdown on cheap sulphurous bunker oil have no effect on it? Or was there no real crackdown and it was just media hype? (This is a genuine question).
We should probably just reduce consumption and emissions though.
Chlorofluorocarbons stay 50-150 years in the atmosphere, once they are there it takes a while for things to go back to normal.
Hydrochlorofluorocarbons are also now banned pretty much everywhere, replaced with hydrofluorocarbons and hydrofluoroolefins which both have an ozone depletion potential of 0 (zero).
We do of course know how to power large ships with nuclear fission. The US Navy has been doing so - for generations(!).
Only issue with that is the US military is a "money is no object" scenario. Price container shipping at the unit cost of hauling it on a naval nuclear reactor, and we'd be looking at degrowth anyway. It's proven, practical technology, but very very expensive.
(Other countries with nuclear deterrents run their sub fleets on fission, but even those with nuclear subs have found it too costly for their surface fleet).
Actually, seeing recent developments, I'm afraid the only remotely realistic chance left to limit global warming is for fusion to become widely available and dirt cheap pretty damn soon! Renewables, you say? Nah, those windmills are disgusting and made in China anyway, so we're better off burning good clean American coal and oil (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/trump-war-on...).
As for the IMO 2020 restrictions, I've read that they have significantly lowered pollution but that would be in addition to Slow Steaming.
Or alternativly you can afford better seats than me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...
On the other hand, I took an Iceland Express flight many years ago, and my knees were uncomfortably pressed against the seat in front.
It does seem to be all over the place.
I’d rather be happier, less stressed, and get there more slowly, than go through all the nonsense. I can always read, work, play a game, or just watch the world go by so the time isn’t wasted (unlike so much of the dead time in a noisy and crowded airport).
It also has the increasingly important benefit of being more environmentally friendly.
Budget airlines and priority boarding are a particular bugbear of mine here. Most people pay for priority boarding just for the extra bag it allows you to take into the cabin. You end up with two thirds of the flight made up of people who have priority boarding. That's great, but there's only so much space in the overhead lockers, so you have everyone queuing up way before boarding starts to avoid having their cabin back checked into the hold at the gate.
The whole process is just... endlessly tedious and wearisome. I'd genuinely rather board a much slower form of transport, like a train, coach, or ferry (or even drive under some circumstances) than deal with being treated like cattle at an airport. The whole experience of airports, and getting to and from them, sucks.
This is something you can change though by changing your mindset and outlook. Airports are what they are, they are highly predictable and unlikely to change drastically. On the other hand you can recognise when you are begining to feel on alert, acknowledge it and let go of the feeling. Let it wash over you like a wave.
You are presumably not a terrorist, nor a criminal. The worst thing which can happen is that there is some misunderstanding and you are delayed a bit. And even that is very unlikely. If you make peace with that maybe that will help with the feeling?
Not saying that you can go full meditating zen monk with “this one little weird trick”, but if you can make the experience more pleasant for yourself by just a little bit maybe that is worth the try?
I don't get it. Address the feeling, let it wash over you. It won't wash over. It sticks and causes the chemicals in my body to fuck me up completely. I can already tell you that I'm anxious.
Probably this is _the_ solution for many? GP seems to talk from experience with this, or similar situations.
Probably it could work for you too, if you haven't tried it yet. (Also, if you haven't tried it enough times. One experiment/measurement is not enough.)
For many (this is not universally true), what is experienced as "anxiety" is like a preset program or routine that auto-executes across cognitive, behavioral, and emotional channels. CBT isn't a cure, but helps you interrupt the program during its cycle or before it starts by inserting new and different programs that don't auto-run without effort. As you sense your anxiety spiking ("awareness training" may be needed to get this early insight), you engage in behaviors or techniques to prevent the normal cycle of anxiety spiraling and calm the nervous system.
It is effective, but it is not a magic trick and takes practice.
And, perhaps, you can appreciate that the sooner one notices what is happening subconsciously, the easier it might be for some people to "put out the fire" of their autonomic response. Even if getting good at this might take practice.
Maybe this awareness and these tools are not things of interest or value to you, but they don't seem to be things that are that are that hard to understand abstractly, even if you don't practice them.
If you want to get better at the "washing over" thing, maybe try visualizations like: - As you breathe, imagine you're pulling over to the side of the road and watching your anxious thoughts drive past. - As you breathe, imagine taking each anxious thought and placing it on a leaf on a stream and watching it float away
But in general, security theatre is kind of a legit reason to feel anxious - these folks have real power over you and can screw up your life - so it's ok to just feel it in those situations.
This means that even as a passenger with a completely clean record, every action you take is viewed through the lens of being potentially suspicious. The worst case scenario is not being delayed - it's being falsely accused.
Less importantly but hugely more likely is that you travel is disrupted. Your bags are misplaced or stolen. You can't take your water bottle so now you have to buy another for 10x the price. Your passport was accidentally torn so you now have to explain that to a skeptical border police officer. You don't speak the foreign language well enough to explain yourself. Your flight is cancelled and you must now rush to the only hotel to book a room before they sell out - or risk waiting in order to convince the airline to book it for you.
I don't disagree with you that some relaxation can go a long way to making such an experience more pleasant, but it's still true that there's more to go wrong in one international journey than in a whole month of most people's day-to-day lives.
Being falsely accused is just one form of being delayed. The kind where it takes longer to clear it up.
> Your bags are misplaced or stolen.
Does worrying help with this? Does it make it less likely for it to happen?
> You can't take your water bottle so now you have to buy another for 10x the price.
Yes. That is how it is. Does worrying help with this?
> Your passport was accidentally torn so you now have to explain that to a skeptical border police officer.
Border guards see torn passports all the time.
> our flight is cancelled and you must now rush to the only hotel to book a room before they sell out
I don't know where you are flying where there is only one hotel. Is this a real worry or are we just catastrophising here?
I got plenty. My luggage got lost more than I can count. Missed connecting flights due to delays. Had a flight take of with four hour of delay to then ingest a bird in the engine on climbout so we had to land back imediately with a smoke filled cabin. Got selected for extra screening plenty of times, had been asked to go to the security office to answer extra questions about my luggage. Had my share of flight cancelations too. The most serious issue was perhaps when I got waylaid for a few weeks because an airline didn’t like the stamps on my imigration paperwork. According to my imigration lawyer the airline was in the wrong and misunderstanding the law, but what can you do? We got it sorted with the embassy as soon as we could and I was on my way.
Thing is that worrying would not have helped with any of these. Simply not the right answer.
AFAIK (because I do regularly) you can take a water bottle, you just have to fill it inside security which doesn't seem a great hardship.
Even so, the little things alone can ruin the experience, before adding the big ones.
Maybe it's a busy day at the airport and you're stuck in a surprise 2h security screening or passport check queue. Maybe you're pulled over for a routine check, or 2, or 3. Maybe you have 1kg over weight for your hand luggage and they expect you to check it in for extra cost while others are allowed with oversize luggage. Maybe they keep changing the gate 2-3 times and you have to constantly be alert and ready to move around the airport. Maybe your flight is late 1h or 7h. Maybe you have to sit in a crowd with dozens or hundreds or people in the (off)boarding area. And so on. There are just so many more ways to be irritated by air travel.
And that's just before you are on the plane. Seat comfort-wise air travel is probably the worst option. I'm above well above average height so I have to pay extra for a decent (not great) experience, or be ready to do the check-in the first moment it's available, or if there are no sits with extra leg room I'll suffer for hours, or be hit over the knees with the different carts by every inattentive flight attendant if I try to spread towards the aisle, or sit behind someone who reclines their seat the whole way.
There's only so much will you can have to have all these things slide. It's like saying that whenever you get punched in the face you can lean into it to make the experience better. It will still very much suck, just marginally less. And I flew hundreds of times, I tried all the tricks. For average travelers there's a ceiling for their air travel experience and it's in the "hopefully tolerable" range. And I tolerate it because I have no choice but it's objectively a bad experience almost without exception.
It’s like browsing a Fandom site but in real life.
Except with the train, I can just drop myself into the seat 10 minutes from home and go to sleep / work / do other things for those 5 hours without a care in the world.
The biggest quality-of-life improvement for flights, for me, was paying up each way for an emergency exit seat. A secondary benefit that I hadn’t initially considered but turned out to be huge is being able to get in and out of my seat at any time without making the entire row get up or having to get up for others.
This is why turboprops are so common in ultra short haul where there's no point in climbing so high. They're more efficient at lower altitudes.
And I don't really see the relation between engine type and cabin space
The math doesn't seem to make sense for it: there's a maximum speed that can be hit with turboprop (x), and if you can only carry so much fuel (y) as part of your useful payload (to maximize carrying revenue-generating cargo), then you can only go a certain distance. That distance turns out to be <1500 nmi.
Broadly speaking, fuel consumption has an outsized influence on range as the other two terms are usually fixed at a maximum value by state of the art.
I also don't think "Many people would gladly pay for..." has been proven in the marketplace. If anything, the success of Ryanair, Easyjet and co has resoundingly proven that people will gladly suffer less spacious seating if it means paying less.
Given the number of 7 hour flights I could find, I really don't think that proves anything except maybe people will pay more.
I was very struck recently looking at the Wikipedia pages for the KC-135 Stratotanker (first flight 1956) and its ongoing replacement the KC-46 Pegasus (first flight 2015). Just from the pictures of the two planes, I'd have no idea that one was more modern than the other.
This short book is a great work on the topic
I think with planes it's the cube.
But I think that's a naive model.
Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends.
If I'm taking a 6 hour flight, it's actually a 10 hour flight. If the airplane gets there twice as fast, it's a 7 hour chunk of my time. I save three hours but how much am I willing to pay for that? It's still effectively a calendar day gone.
For shorter flights, this is even worse. For super long flights like London to Sydney, maybe it would be useful to double the speed, so that you're not wasting two days instead of one, but doubling speed is also pretty far from possible.
It's absurd that getting onto a 3-dimensional bus takes ~1.5hr more per end than a normal bus. The fundamentals of embarking and disembarking passengers and their luggage is unchanged beyond needing to have all the luggage in a pile before you toss it on for weight distribution reasons.
Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.
Mind you, I'm annoyed at the liquids thing given I used to routinely bring bottles of wine or a local liqueur home in carry-on. And I can't any longer.
He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.
So this is why we also can't bring own cocaine on board in addition to not having own booze. What a shame
Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive).
Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)).
But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop.
Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
I don't know why there isn't just a bunch of seats in the terminal laid out the same way as the plane. Sit there and wait, and then when it's time to board, the people at the end get on first, tada, everyone is boarded and we're not stopping each other from getting in.
Anyway, people would just ignore it.
There was a company about 15 years ago that developed a double ended jetway so you could load and unload from the front and back simultaneously. They said it shaved about 18 minutes from loading and unloading (combined). On the average flight this would be the equivalent of going about 100mph faster for seemingly a simple change.
They installed a few in Denver and I believe in Calgary. Unfortunately one in Denver had a problem and collapsed and hit the wing of a plane, and so they ripped them all out and no one ever tried again.
Ryanair actually orders specialised 737s with built-in airstairs and a few other modifications to facilitate this.
This only really works for 737-sized planes and down, though, where air-stairs are an easy option (AFAIK even A320s can be a bit of a stretch, as they're significantly taller than 737s).
Ah, that depends on the airport. Haven’t been on one of those in a few years; I think Ryanair and friends managed to grab a lot more proper gate space during Covid when the higher-end airlines were practically giving it away.
(Years ago, I was on a Ryanair flight to Brussels airport which used a jet bridge, because it’s mandatory there… But the jet bridge was in the middle of nowhere, served by a bus. Half-convinced Ryanair does this sort of thing deliberately, to live up to their brand image of being quite annoying.)
> but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.
It _definitely_ is, at least for short-haul stuff.
Washington Dulles aka IAD is a fine example. It has a vast security area below deck for regular folks and a smaller one up top where all the Clear and Pre flyers go. That should be inverted.
Then, after security, passengers must walk 300m and change levels to catch a small shuttle train. Or, to take the special mobile lounge bus things. If you take the train, it drops you off 500m from the gate area, so you have tonget off the train, climb the stairs, walk through a tunnel, climb the escalator, and then walk the remainder of the terminal to your gate. It is absolutely laughable how poor Dulles is, esp considering its importance to United.
What they should really have is a line for clueless people. You know, the people ahead of you who walk thru metal detectors with belts. Then aw-shucks and waste another 5minutes. Then they forgot to take their laptops out of their bag. Aw-shucks again. Then they want to unlace their shoes.
I'd love to have a line for clued-in travelers and one for people who arent.
Fun times in Texas.
Planes land outside the city, taxi to the downtown terminal.
If you're suggesting this hypothetical giant tunnel would actually have the planes taxiing all the way to a whole airport underneath a city... I don't see that solving more problems than it would create.
It would create problems, but the problems would be for the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure, not for the passengers.
Airplanes are not fundamentally that much bigger than trains, which routinely go under the city.
This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time.
Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”
I wouldnt, doesn't matter if airport is in bloody state of war.
On a quiet day I measured 7 minutes from stepping out of the bus and being through security.
It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it.
Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled.
Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around."
Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.
Rather than trying to take time out of the "middle" of the journey (ie when you're on a plane), we would be better served as a society to take time out of the "ends" (before takeoff and after landing).
But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.
It's possible that it may make sense to establish a few business class only very fast point-to-point routes. But that also really depends on the vehicle taking people through space. There are a number of problems:
1. Currently, spacecraft are only licensed for experimental travel. Everyone signs an informed consent waiver and basically disclaims all liability. And the FAA is forbidden to regulate for passenger safety by congress (and has been for quite a long time) - they can only regulate for the safety of the general public.
This would have to be changed before any serious commercial spacecraft went into service
2. It's not clear that any spacecraft has the economics to pull this off. Maybe Starship can do it. But it's pretty far from clear that they can.
3. Spacecraft are orders of magnitude less safe than commercial aviation. Do you know the saying "regulations are written in blood"? If this starts happening, there'll be a lot of new regulations that happen over time.
And maybe that'll happen anyhow - I think that space tourism will certainly be a thing that becomes much more popular in the future, and that has the exact same problems (although it's much less readily comparable to commercial aviation).
Seriously. Just have the whole passenger section setup like cargo pallets and wheel them in and out of the plane. Why bother walking up and down a narrow aisle? Just have a "passenger marshalling facility" away from the airport, have the interior section in parts there, have everyone comfortably load up, put that on a bus, wheel that straight to the plane, then load them in like large scale cargo through a huge side door.
Lock them down and send them wherever. Do the same in reverse at the destination.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dulles-airport-mobile-lo...
And yes, evacuation issues kill the idea.
Reading this unlocked memories of the (after googling it) September 2005 National Geographic Kids magazine, which was centered around future life in 2035. One of the things in it was exactly this: travel time cut by launching into orbit and flying around the planet to cut travel time down to ~1h.
To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff.
But yeah - having to budget time to get through security is a pretty poor user experience. Especially during busy times of the year, when it's more uncertain just how much time is required.
I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.
Thankfully it's not as big of a deal now that airtags/trackers are readily available.
There are times when I know I have to check a, usually, pretty small bag. But especially because of the delayed baggage issue or because of last minute changes to flights because of weather or whatever, I probably carry-on (with a light load) 9 times out of 10. Especially with dress being more casual these days I usually don't really need more than carry-on unless I'm activities requiring some amount of gear.
Baggage claim is usually pretty quick but even 5-10 minutes sucks after flying.
I’ve also had 2 bags fail to make it with my plane meaning I had to wait 24 hours for a courier to deliver them. It also makes connecting or flight changes much more dicey.
I definitely think I’ve been unlucky recently but the fact that I could be unlucky is why I avoid it as much as possible
Except it has changed in the last couple of decades (probably not due to 9/11, but still), because size and weight limits for hand luggage keep getting smaller and smaller. I have always travelled light and avoided checking in luggage except for very long stays abroad, but it's becoming increasingly difficult.
For example, both Qatar and Etihad (very common airlines to travel between Europe and Asia) now limit hand luggage to 7 kg (and in the case of Etihad, they don't even allow the typical "personal item"). 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2. Pack a laptop and you'll struggle to pack even summer clothes for a few days. Let alone winter clothes or -oh, the luxury!- buying some souvenirs at your destination.
Fortunately, in my experience, they mostly just don't look. But they could, if you're unlucky. And even if they don't, the dwindling limits also reduce practical slack, i.e. with a formal limit of 9 kg I would feel comfortable packing 10 or 11 because most airport staff probably wouldn't be strict about that, but with 7, packing 10 or 11 starts looking like a real gamble.
> 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2
One thing that I have done is move from roller luggage to a travel backpack. I personally use the Osprey Farpoint, but there are many in the category to choose from. Not only is it much lighter than hard sided luggage, but it's typically much more forgiving of dimensional requirements, and can often fit in overhead bins, where hard sided luggage may not be able to (if you're the last person trying to put something in the bin).
And on top of all of that, it's been much more reliable for me - I've had and seen roller luggage fail pretty often - at both the wheels and the handle. Neither of those exists on the bag, which just keeps trucking.
I get that for many people a travel backpack isn't an option. But if it is something that might work for you, I highly recommend it.
But do you think one can pack as much as in roller luggage, while conforming to the size limits? I've always been under the impression that roller luggage would be more efficient in this respect, but have no real experience traveling with a backpack.
They're typically advertised by volume, so 30L, 40L, etc., so you can get one the size you want. I think carry on size is typically advertised as 35-40L. They've got all the same stuff as roller luggage - straps, dividers, etc., depending on what you want. Although, IMO, the best setup is to just get a bag with the volume you want and use packing cubes.
The great advantage of backpacks is that they're soft. Every carrier has their own "box" that your item is supposed to fit into. As long as you don't have too much stuff, you can just squeeze your bag into the box. But with a hard sided roller, it either fits or it doesn't.
I do have a larger travel pack and sometimes favor a slightly larger wheeled pack. But even though it's a bit heavy for any really long schlepping, it's lighter than the wheeled frame and is a lot easier to deal with on trains etc.
Has a plane ever been hijacked by a couple of European descent traveling with their own children? The lengths we go to to pretend everyone is the same is mind boggling.
Certain groups perform attacks of this kind.
It's not necessarily because they are backwards or evil or something. They just can't resist militarily, so they go for soft targets.
If the situation was reversed, and there was some kind of hegemonic global Islamic caliphate with an ostensibly unbeatable military, perhaps you would get some random Poles or Spaniards blowing up planes.
People who aren't in groups in those kinds of situations, don't do things like that. Why would they? Why do we pretend that they would?
If, on the other hand, you randomly select people for additional checking, they can't predict that and can't learn how to circumvent it, they just have to take a stab at an attack and hope they don't get unlucky.
Basically, any deterministic aspect of security is predictable, which makes it vulnerable.
Worst of both worlds.
I used to live in the peninsula in SFBA. I was about 20-30 minutes away from SFO. Unless it was an international flight or I had checked luggage, I would never get to the airport before the flight started boarding. I would walk through security at a lightning pace (SFO is one of those airports where sometimes TSA precheck is longer than regular!) and get to my flight just as my boarding group was getting called.
It was so insanely efficient. I never spent a moment not moving in the airport. I'd often spend more time waiting on the plane to deboard than I would in the airport when leaving too.
I miss SFO. I live in NYC for now and all the NYC airports suck for the fact they all take about an hour to get to (from Manhattan) and they all regularly have large and inefficient security lines with theater that is only rivaled by Belgian airports.
Alternatively, I can take the train. It takes 9 hours home to city centre, and costs $35. It's a much better experience all around.
Google says the train is only 4hrs!
IF (yes, still a reasonably big IF) they could just automate highway driving, a large segment of air trips become really a wash, especially if you consider that taking your car someplace gets you a car for your destination, while if you flew it is an additional hassle/expense/delay.
So the exercise to me is: how far does it have to be before you would rather fly? If I had reliable highway automated driving, you're already dealing with a 3-4 hour drive being reasonably equivalent to the time and hassle of a 1 hour flight.
Plus with a car you can leave on a whim with no prescheduling, pack more with less restrictions, will be cheaper generally (especially if carpooling/family driving), can stop and eat more conveniently, have better internet access typically, can stop and see friends or other places along the way, and again, you have your car for transport when you get there.
A self-driving sprinter van converted to an RV would be even better: sleep overnight, have a place to stay at a minimum when you get there.
Anyway, I suspect this might hollow out quite a lot of flight demand when it becomes a reality (any decade now). Airlines will be forced to reexamine their policies if an overnight self-driving trip gets you the vast majority of the way to a destination.
Lately a couple of companies have started up attempting to bring plush lie flat seats to the intercity bus, but a lot of those have since folded.
You live in Pittsburgh. You want to go to NYC for a show. You hop in the car, it takes you to the theater, you get out, it drives itself to a parking lot in NJ to wait. You call for it half an hour before you need it, it picks you up, and it drives you home. That's currently the province of the very rich or the very extravagant. A car that drives itself can do that every night.
I would wager a supersonic jet liner could make a lot of money crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific even today. Sure for short hauls it makes no sense.
Btw, Boom is working on supersonic private jets,they recently flew a scaled down experimental jet at supersonic speeds.
Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.
If they made airline seats reasonably sized and ergonomic, sure, the flight time matters less, but right now the longer the flight portion is, the longer my back will complain afterwards. I'm not even unusually tall or heavy-set.
Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins, but if the planes are faster, they can run more flights and pay the pilots/flight-attendants for fewer hours, so that feels like it's a solution that's more likely to happen than the real solution, of making it so the seats aren't designed to destroy your back until you pony up for business/first class.
They usually stay overnight for long trips, so making the trip a little shorter makes no difference on that front.
Same for the staff
They would, but would non-business and non-wealthy consumers pay what it costs?
Pretty simple - we care more about air travel being cheaper and safer than we care about it being faster.
You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.
I'm not making a comment about the original topic, just the comment that operating an entire airline as business wasn't viable. Not on every route, no, but for the right route? Yeah, there are enough people who fly certain routes and will pay for a better seat that you could fill a plane with them.
If you have demand for 10,000 passengers to be transported on a route daily, and a plane carries 200 people, you would need 50 trips. If the round trip is 4 hours, you could do 6 trips per plane and you'd need 9 planes to service the route.
If the round trip time is 8 hours, you could only do 3 trips per day and you'd need 17 planes.
It looks like in the 70s a flight from NY to LA was $1000 USD adjusted for inflation.
My grandfather took a flight one time in his life, near the end of his life. Why? Because most of his life he couldn't afford it.
Once the freeways were built, truck and car speeds were about as fast as you can reasonably go.
Trains still have some headroom.
Hell, the garbage trucks here go 70+ until they hit a hill.
Honestly, not much. 350km/h seems to be the peak practical operating speed (and that hasn't really changed since the 80s). Even the rather impractical Shanghai maglev no longer operates over that speed, though it did routinely run at over 400km/h for a while. Most high speed systems are in that general range today.
_Maybe_ maglevs will eventually be practical, but I'd hate to bet on it. This is the only serious such project at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consump... (China seems to have largely lost interest in favour of conventional high-speed).
There is less advantage to increasing speed. Is it worth the cost of maglev Shinkansen to save 30 minutes? How long would 400 km/h rail take instead? Maglevs have disadvantage that need dedicated route, while high speed rail can take existing rail into cities.
But trains are just one part of the system.
Legally, road travel speeds have come along way from the 1974 federal speed limit of 55mph. States set their own limits now, and all fifty of them have a higher maximum limit. Safety-wise, cars are much safer in crashes than they were in the 60s, both at high and low speeds. Setting aside safety and the legal limits, raw top speeds of similar car models are much higher today than they were in the 60s and 70s. Acceleration and braking have vastly improved, too.
The US freeways are able to sustain high speeds but their older off ramps are proper old school and way too tight. Older bits of the German autobahns have the same issue - far too tight bends on "Ausfahrt". In France and Italy, Spain and well the rest of the EU I recall mostly decent on and off ramps.
I think the UK has the best efforts - we generally have massively long and large slip lanes but I will grant that we have some horrible exits from A roads, which are dual carriageway and so look like motorway. For example A303 whilst running through Somerset.
now cars are significantly more capable, but speeds are limited by laws and congestion.
I remember 90mph in lane one being normal and that was in the 1980s. 120+ in lane two was normal. Petrol was cheap back then - even in the EU. In the US gas was nigh on free! (or so it seemed to us).
I was given a scale model of an Audi Quattro rally car by a German chap when I turned 17 (1987). I still have it. That car destroyed all comers back in the day because it brought 4WD to the game.
Nowadays I drive an EV - a Saic MG4. I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which is where the Morris Garage (MG) started off in around 1910. I can safely say that an MG4 is not a British thing at all.
1) TSA stuff doesn't keep anyone any safer
2) protectionism: foreign carriers are banned from flying many domestic routes. We'd have more capacity and throughput, as well as lower prices.
3) boarding algorithms are silly and could easily be improved by letting passengers self-select into fast vs slow boarders and letting fast get on/off first.
4) incentives for crew flight time / overtime / limits create scenarios where passengers are made to wait on the tarmac for no good reason.
Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
Additionally moving security to the gate rather than having a single security point for all flights also makes the wait here shorter and more importantly predictable.
If I'm just taking a cabin bag I always arrive 35-40 minutes before a flight and have had no trouble with time, normally enough time to grab a coffee too before boarding.
I never got the choice and I must admit I would have liked to have flown Concorde once, just so I could say I had done - a beautiful aircraft, but then so is the 747.
If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are borderline incompetent at delivering this (or just not interested).
And the other potential big saving is in airport transit time - but airports nowadays are optimised for "extract as much money as possible from each user", not "minimize user transit time from the station/car park to their assigned seat on the aircraft".
- Most people want cheap flights over everything else, speed is expensive
- The flight time only has a limited relative impact on the overall travel time. Time to get in and out of the airport, security, border controls, boarding, taxiing, etc... often take longer than the flight itself.
- For passengers who are ready to pay more, you can always offer more comfort. The advantage with comfort is that you can divide the plane into classes, it is highly modular. Faster requires an entirely new plane design just for those who can afford it.
- Arguably, comfort is more valuable than the kind of speed improvement we can get. For example, if you sleep better on the plane, that's less sleep you will need at your destination, saving you time overall. If you can work on the plane, that's also time you don't have to spend working at some other time.
It's not fast, but it's a clean bathroom, great beer, and a really big suitcase I don't have to unpack.
And don't even talk about the security theater. Sometimes twice (although that gotten better in that there isn't a 2nd check.)
And, yes, I noticed that pure flight times got longer, about an hour on transcontinental flight. All this time I thought I made that up, but at speeds mentioned in the article this is about right.
As soon as I saw the title I knew the answer ... economics. The vast majority of people buy the cheapest flights they can, and with modern jet engine technology it's cheaper to fly slightly slower.
The same is true with ocean going cargo ships. They deliberately cruise[0] slower if they are under some nation's flags because the wages are lower for those nationals[1], and the balance between cost of wages versus cost of fuel shifts towards spending more time (higher wages) at a lower speed (less fuel).
Roughly, steaming faster increases your fuel bill but lowers your wages bill, and vice versa. The exact balance point depends on the base rate for the wages of the crew. And the number of crew.
The arithmetic is brutal, but unassailable.
[0] The technical term is, believe it or not "steam"
[1] It's complicated. Very complicated.
https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-fast...
But haven't jet engines become more fuel efficient in the past 50 years? You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.
No.
The problem is not engine efficiency. To my knowledge, Concorde still holds the title of having the best engine fuel-efficiency at cruise. Close to 60%.
And although engine efficiencies at subsonic speeds have improved drastically since the 60s, the problem airplanes face when cruising closer to Mach 1 is that they start getting transonic effects around their wing and fuselage. And that greatly increase your drag. It is therefore more economical to stay below the speed threshold at which these effects start occurring.
A high Mach 0.8+ could probably achieve that. Aircraft builders have settled for about Mach 0.82 for airliners. Private jet builders, in some cases, care less about fuel efficiency, and still build airplanes flying above Mach 0.9, as for example, the Cessna Citation X.
[1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
Some airports are known to be 'black holes' for luggage, from dealings with Swissport who handles lost&found everywhere, they mentioned that Fiumicino airport near Rome didn't have stellar reputation to say politely, and Barcelona wasn't that great neither. Had luggage lost on both in rather annoying way - both of them didn't have a clue where it was for more than a week, started saying goodbye to all rather costly equipment like paraglider set in it.
But I've seen stuff get lost in places like Vienna multiple times, so one can't draw any simple conclusions. I see it as a massive room for improvement and automation via 'AI', but that should have been done a decade ago, ie automated barcode scanning isn't novel tech.
For the frequent traveler who is loyal to an airline, a lot of those problems go away.
We are Delta loyalists and both Platinum Medallion.
1. When we buy a main cabin seat, we get upgraded immediately to Comfort+ for free.
2. When we go to the airport, if we don’t use curbside check in (and tip), we get to use the Sky Priority Checkin line and have two free checked bags
3. We have TSA Pre-Check and Clear to skip the line
4. After check-in, we head straight to the Delta, Amex Centurion or Priority Pass lounge where we have plenty of seating free food and drinks (alcoholic and non alcoholic)
5. When boarding, we get to board early because of our C+ upgrade (Zone 3) or worse case Zone 4 and have plenty of overhead space if we need it and get to be situated early.
Clear is $189 a year or $239 (?) for two people.
I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.
What I find annoying these days are those people who theatrically mask up and then look at you like you're supposed to do the same. Luckily it's very uncommon in aviation now. A bit more in the metro but they can just walk elsewhere if they want.
TSA requires a background check and fingerprinting.
- Amex Delta Platinum Card - $350 Annual Fee and you get a companion pass - buy one get one free round trip ticket anywhere in the US, Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean and a $150 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Business - the same benefits except a $200 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Reserve - an up to first class companion ticket and a $200 Hotel credit + lounge access.
It takes $15000 MQDs to reach Platinum Medallion. But if I flew less, I would only care about Silver Medallion where you get sky priority Checkin and preferred exit row seats (extra legroom) for free.
Just by having those two Platinum cards would give you the $5K MQDs to get Silver. Either of those cards give you free checked bags. Medallion status gives you an extra checked bag.
You get 1 MQD for every dollar you spend on flights and $1 MQD for every $10 you spend on the Reserve or $20 you spend on the Platinum. You get $2500 MQDs for each of those cards.
I got the other $7500 MQDs last year between flights and credit card spend.
Poorly worded question - I’m glad you guys know how to travel well together and often. The only thing I miss about my college girlfriend was when we got an overnight delay in Denver and the crazed associate told us “I don’t fucking know” when we asked about the details of our hotel she said: “I mean this sucks but it’ll be okay hahaha”
I try to perpetuate that mindset nowadays lol. End monologue
https://www.flightsfrom.com/CHS
If you don’t fly often, airline loyalty doesn’t matter. I just don’t hate myself enough to fly Southwest and deal with non assigned seats even though they do have the most non stop flights from our current airport
It is flightsfrom/airport code/optional airline code
For instance these are Delta flights from CHS.
Then if you are flying with another person there is no guarantee that you two can find a seat together.
Then you might be in the middle seat.
That's certainly the line that can't be compromised, ultimately you fly because you wanna get somewhere. But finding and choosing favorite airline(s) has many perks that aren't easily quantifiable, enough that many frequent flyers choose to focus their patronage for those benefits.
I'm personally a Delta fanboi because Northwest was my childhood airline on family vacations. My Delta SkyMiles account goes all the way back to 1998 when my dad opened it for me as a kid, back then it was Northwest WorldPerks.
Small tangent story: Delta SkyMiles was instrumental in my getting an AMEX credit card as my second ever card with merely 6 months credit history as a literal newcomer nobody to the credit world. It's been my favorite card to carry ever since.
Oops. You’re supposed to tip for those?
But here is more information about it
But we are talking about $85 for five years for PreCheck.
But as far as security, the only difference pre check makes is that you don’t have to take your belt and shoes off.
I mentioned earlier that newer scanners don’t require you to take electronics out of your bag whether or not you have PreCheck
I think PreCheck probably goes faster too because people with PreCheck mostly know the drill.
That hasn’t happen before or since. At that time I had a client laptop, my company’s laptop (working in consulting), my iPad, and an external USB powered portable monitor in my carryon.
What we don’t have is an expensive car - we bought a cheap new car that is less than half the median cost of a car in the US. We don’t have expensive housing - we downsized to a 1200 foot condo after our youngest graduated. We don’t have state taxes - we moved to state tax free Florida. We also don’t have any debt besides the condo that we put 30% down on. Our mortgage is much lower than the average mortgage.
In the grand scheme of things, our travel budget is less than 10% of our gross comp and I don’t work at BigTech (been there done that). Even half of that is offset by not having to pay state taxes which we did before we moved in 2022.
And you don't give two fucks about the negative environmental impact of flying? Or at least, feel a little shame or entitlement?
Ditto for a high-speed rail network throughout the continental US.
Until then, it's simply unhelpful to try to shame people for not opting out of employer-mandated travel or limiting their vacation days to a 300-mile radius (or insisting that they spend multiple of those days driving).
Then should I do nothing or should we all do nothing? The perfect is the enemy of the good.
And no one can answer the question of how my flying in a plane that was already going to fly reduces emissions.
I could also clutch my pearls and say people who drive into work instead of choosing a job that allows them to work remotely and refusing to be in an office would help climate change.
Of course that would be silly and self serving. I bet everyone criticizing me would love to be in a position to have unlimited PTO, work remotely and be able to travel more.
Not that we are rich - we are 50, empty nesters, downsized our home and moved to a state tax free state along with other fixed cost saving moves
you can worry about your carbon footprint or not - your choice - but this is about as silly of a statement as they come. this is like being nazi in Auschwitz and going “well someone else would commit these heinous crimes so what’s the difference if I do it.” you do your part - that is what you are in control in and what you can decide on based on your beliefs. but to say “well shit, this plane gonna take off anyways so imma just jump onboard and take a couple of seats that are available” is not an acceptable argument
Did you choose a job where you didn’t have to go to work and cause carbon emissions?
You purposefully chose a job where you decided to drive into work. Did you buy a house close enough to work to walk or ride a bike?
Whet sacrifices have you personally made to reduce your carbon footprint?
Did you choose a job where you didn’t have to go to work and cause carbon emissions?
yes, I am a contractor and have been working from home-office since 2007
You purposefully chose a job where you decided to drive into work. Did you buy a house close enough to work to walk or ride a bike?
yes, I also chose a private school for my kid which is nearby and we bike to school weather-permitting roughly 75% of the time
Whet sacrifices have you personally made to reduce your carbon footprint?
I drive EV. My wife and I donate 10% of all our pre-tax earning significant portion of which goes to Oceana. I installed solar panels on my house long before it was even remotely economically feasible… We try to do our part, even in cases where it is a bit of theatre more so than actual benefit (recycling for instance)
Why? Why does everybody think that they've got the God-given right to fly thousands of miles away to just lie at a beach for 3 days and come back? Why don't they realize that they are probably already very fortunate in life and with that fotune comes some responsibility?
Maybe it's not helpful shaming them, but the more we de-normalize this behavior, the fewer people are going to do it.
Still hate the experience in comparison to modern rail.
But security theatre is apparently necessary, see "golden age of hijacking" 1968-72: over 300 events in five years, that's a hijack a week!
the problem with back to front is that people in the back would put their bags into overhead bins in the front, which they can easily pick up on the way out. However, you cant walk backwards for pickup, so the read overhead bins would be empty and inaccessible by the people boarding last.
I was a traveling consulting when people did such things. I got to see this silliness 2-3x/wk
I think it’s just that your eyes’s reach trends towards the front of the plane. If it’s busy when you try to stow away your bag, chances are you will prefer putting it in a meter towards the front of the plane (where you’re standing anyways, waiting for the person before you to stow away their bag) over cramming it in above your head, where the other bags already are.
Incentivize people back towards checking their bags, the process would be more efficient all around.
My biggest pet peeve is how they call groups successively, but dont actually let the lines exhaust before calling the next group. Successive groups realize that the lines are all mixed up, and people stop honoring groups and just all jump into line. Chaos ensues.
Some airlines give you gate checked bags right upon exit at the bridge. This is OK.
Others put it into the pile of luggage at Baggage Claim. This adds another 45min to your trip.
So your best strategy when you realize this is happening is to get in line to try to time getting to the front roughly when your zone will be called.
Delta gate agents very frequently do this and it’s super annoying because it defeats the point of their bajillion zones.
If I get a free upgrade to first class, I can already be sipping on my free prs board alcoholic beverage.
I do remember being on business in East Asia and how orderly these things operated.
- people needing extra time
- military
And then they are call by Zones
- 1st class boards first sho are at the front of the plane (Zone 1)
I think zone 2 is Diamond medallion. More than likely unless they bought a last minute ticket on a full plane, they would at least be C+
- Comfort+ boards next who are behind first class (Zone 3)
- Gold Medallion boards next and they are in the main cabin (Zone 4)
Those four zones above have a dedicated lane and should have plenty of overhead space close to their seat.
Below those four is where the upheaval starts especially if you fly out of Orlando like I do now with a lot of infrequent fliers. At that point, everyone is Main cabin jockeying for position and overhead space.
Even then Zone 5 isn’t bad. You get that by either having a cobranded credit card or being the lowest medallion level - Silver
Premium fliers would never go for the trade of “you get to pick between having a guaranteed overhead bin slot and sitting at the back of the plane”.
It works so much better when there is a system and everyone follows it.
I would be more willing to check bags if they return your baggage right after the flight, instead of losing the bags on a connecting flight and shipping it back to me a week later.
I think they are colluding to make business class more value.
Like some sort of class warfare enshitification.
The experience of flying first class is better than it's ever been, and all that extra comfort, convenience and luxury has come 100% at the expense of the experience of the unwashed masses flying "Economy" class. First class gets lie flat beds, priority boarding, lobster thermidor and hot towels, while economy seats keep shrinking, boarding times get longer, checked baggage that used to be free costs $100, and a child-sized bag of peanuts costs $5.
The reason airline travel sucks so much these days is because it's supposed to. If you're flying economy class, the airlines literally see you as a burden, rather than a valued customer, and are doing everything in their power to make your experience as awful as possible, while squeezing every last penny out of you in the process.
I kind of figured SpaceX or similar would cater to the billionaire class more by now.
Spaceflight is still where air travel was in the early 20th century - starting to become available "commercially", but still too dangerous and expensive for mass market adoption.
If we see anything like Earth-to-Earth in the next decade or two, It'll almost certainly be military.
Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh?
I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.
That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380.
But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
Yes you are right, but the curve is flattening.
The only things that have gotten better are wifi and entertainment to act as recompense for less leg room.
Error 401, unauthorized. can't go faster than the US can keep up until the US can't be caught up with, ... allegedly.
theory:
flying any faster would have increased flights and reduced travelling prices. it wasn't the tech, see concorde ...
If somebody actually develops supersonic private aircraft, we really need to start taxing aviation fuels. You could blow through your annual carbon budget in like an hour. Those costs need to be internalized.
> As the speed increases, the air resistance increases exponentially.
If you want faster travel, look at Hyperloop (in near vacuum iirc).
Or how to make passing TSA less of a time sink :)
Not much point in spending $$$$ on fuel to knock an hour off a 4-hour flight, if I end up with an hour-long wait at each end.
I think they still encourage this so that you'll spend $$ at the airport (the longer you're there, the more likely you are to spend), which is a major source of revenue these days.
The skilled people are gone, and pointy haired managers took over.
Fuel efficiency dives as you approach the speed of sound, airliners were already going as close as you’d want to in the 70’s. Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably.
Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings.
Regarding the speed, we even had the Concord and lost it (and never improved upon it either).
>Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings
Analysts, Boeing insiders, and industry executives have spoken about the skills issue.
Don't make things up based on your gut feelings.
We did, actually. Which is why the 777 is still being built, and the 747 is not.
> (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues.
Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s. We can look at [1].
Average airline accidents over the 60-70 period: 65.5 accidents a year, for an average of 1400 deaths a year.
Average airline accidents over the 2011-2021 period: 20.1 accidents a year, for an average of 326.5 deaths a year.
So just on pure numbers, the improvements are undeniable. What is hidden in those statistics is that the world air passenger traffic increase more than 60 fold since the 60s.
[1] https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php
The 777 design itself is over 3 decades old by this point - not exactly an argument for how better we fare now. That would be for the 787 - if such an argument could be made. As for 777X, it'ss still facing issues before even launching.
As for the 747 design, far from a failure, it served for like 60 years or so, and 747 models were still being produced until recently (and for 373, there are also more in service than any later model).
>*Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s.
The improvements still occurred with the majority of the planes in 2011-2021 still being the same old 40 and 50+ year old runs (they are not merely explained away by new designs replacing the old). So what part of it was improvements in radars, monitoring, ATC, and so on rather than new plane designs?
And how many of the airliners in the olden years were smaller propeller aircraft and not the jet designs under discussion? (most routes in my parts sure were still up to 1990 at least).
They were, in fact, going to close to it. Which is why they now cruise at lower speeds.
> Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably.
Absolutely.
Going faster just simply requires more fuel, and fuel is a precious and limited resource. There are some optimizations we could make to aircraft design to improve fuel economy, but we've already done most of the optimizations given our constraints of safety standards and the general goal of comfortably transporting humans.
The rest of your post is pretty accurate, except for the goal of comfortably transporting humans. That "comfortably" is suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
The main point is that going faster requires more energy, and this is the primary limiting function of air transport speed.
you're thinking of the drag equation, where force is proportional to velocity squared.
However, on average there's that many car crash victims in the US in less than 24 hours.
There's been ~10 times as many fatalities from car crashes (going by averages here) since the Potomac crash as there was in the Potomac crash.
And yet there aren't huge news articles about how we're investigating and going to fix it...
Of course we ain't. How else could Tesla be so efficient?
These passenger sheets would be automatically sorted and loaded onto aircraft via a conveyor system, optimizing cabin space with a precision-stacked configuration. Without the need for traditional seating, aisles, or security screening, aircraft capacity could increase significantly, lowering ticket prices while enhancing operational efficiency. Upon landing, passengers would be swiftly unloaded, revived from stasis, and ready to continue their journey within minutes.
This system would not only eliminate delays caused by baggage handling and TSA procedures but also enhance fuel efficiency by optimizing passenger distribution within the aircraft.