The future of ultra-fast passenger travel
spaceambition.substack.com
spaceambition.substack.com
Hardly fait to blame regulation here, the problem was that it was incredibly loud and unpleasant. You can try to make it sound like government overreach, but it takes some serious mental aerobatics.
Youre using reality after the fact to act like the choice wasnt self limiting
Sometimes one could read about broken windows indeed, but that depended more on how low they flew (While being supersonic).
Concorde @M2 somewhere between 12 to 16km altitude wouldn't do that.
Paywalled academic article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000736...
The boom levels experienced at these sites caused no greater response than the environment (weather, people, traffic).
At two of the sites no boom damage was observed, however at Castleward house on two occasions a few roof slates were cracked and loosened. No conclusions could be reached as to the cumulative effect on a building of a large number of booms.
Just from the abstract. No mention of altitude, could still have been relatively low, still climbing. Which always could be avoided by climbing slower.
There should be a name for the principle that one needn't look for more complicated explanations when economic ones suffice.
If anything it's a miracle how practical the Concorde was and how long it remained in operation
Fuck the rich, take normal airliner like everybody else if you are so poor to not have your own jet. We are not bending health standards to whims of few moderately wealthy individuals, sounds like some societal progress there.
A sort of self-regulating issue for a change.
And the overflight bans were a large part of the reason for all the sales to fall though. If the development/maintenance costs had been split over hundreds of craft as planned, they would have been much cheaper to both buy and maintain.
There is still the issue of high fuel costs, but fun fact, most of the cancellations came in months before the 1973 oil crisis.
Today, we see similar evidence in that Boom is being forced to develop their own engine because none of the actual engine makers want to make an engine suitable for a SST. I believe there is considerable skepticism that Boom will be able to do this, btw.
It should be noted that even subsonic airliners have gotten a bit slower over time. Fuel economy > travel time for them to some extent, even being subsonic.
They were also originally targeting the transcontinental market, so it would have exclusively flown over land, so the sonic boom issue was way more devastating.
They actually ran tests, flying supersonic military aircraft over Oklahoma City for months to see how regular supersonic booms would affect the public.
The public outcry was a large part of the reason why congress cancelled the SST project in 1971, long before 1973. They then immediately introduced the supersonic overflight ban to hinder operation of Concorde.
A supersonic bizjet is a possibility. It's not cost effective, but it's a status symbol.
Arguably we already have it already comparably good in the EU, but, rhe capacity and reliability is nowhere near the levels I'd like to see. Trains need to be the no-brainer-mode of transportation if not only for the reason they are the most energy efficient way of moving people in high numbers for reasonable distances.
I think "some marginal benefits here and there" and it's cool bro are not valid justifications for making this planet a worse place to live for all species.
We should not be slowing things down.
Yes, tools like zoom alleviate the problem somehow but not completely.
This means these VIPs might not be able to land where they want.
Another issue is that these planes fly higher and take longer to reach travel speed, which eats into the the travel time benefits for shorter flights.
I can absolutely see tech salespeople using this mode of travel for critical meetings. Fly out at 0600 ET from JFK, arrive into LHR at 0900 ET/1400 GMT for a 1500 GMT meeting, do dinner and such, then fly out at 0900 GMT the next day to arrive at 1200 GMT/0700 ET for a full business day. Minimal jet lag.
What you're describing is high-end private air travel (for the rich and not time sensitive) and cruises (for people looking for a vacation in a box).
He once told me of a story when some exotic piece of equipment broke, and there was NO replacement on in Europe. After a mad scrable, they did find something and they had to fly in that special camera rig thing on a private jet.
But there's a huge market in conventional tourists that have more flexibility and could choose from more options.
A typical tourist-class trip is going to be one day of "Travel Misery Time" followed by "Actual Vacation" followed by another full day of "Travel Misery Time".
Yeah, theoretically it might be less than a full day door-to-door, but if you're not an experienced traveler with expert experience in managing timing, baggage rules, TSA procedures du jour, and navigating the facilities, you're probably writing off the whole day of arrival and departure. Nibbling away a couple hours in the metal death cylinder doesn't solve that.
What if we said "we can swap one day of Travel Misery Time for two days of Resort on Wheels Time?" You might get fewer days at the destination, but an overall more enjoyable trip. Rail can offer that. Even today's Amtrak long-hauls offer a comfortable sleeper room, real food, and actual scenery, and no airport suffering, and there's no reason future offerings couldn't introduce other amenities (i. e. a spa car, or scheduled entertainment).
Which btw. could enable a whole bunch of other nice to have things, out there, on the high seas. Global HVDC grid. Communication lines. Pipelines of all sorts. Fish farms. Floating towns at the nodes...Resorts...Casinos...Stock Exchanges...Navy/Coast Guard/SAR bases, research hubs...
Just need to grow that stuff responsible and sustainable. Dunno. Genetically modified 'Turbo Coral', or some 'shrooms' doing in-situ utilization of microplastics? Imagine the possibilities...(Hyping the loop here, harr harr!)
Sure trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic travel are big routes but there’s also a huge amount of traffic that goes Europe, Asia, Australia / New Zealand
(I love high-speed rail; I enjoy it in Europe. I think Brightline's implementation may need some work before it's scaled up.)
Wouldn't comparing it with other high speed rail be a better approach?
Holy Shit. That's beyond just terrible.
That’ll always be the blocker with rail. Moving humans, even a lot of them, by rail isn’t cost effective by most company’s definition outside luxury pricing.
Rail wins when you need to move goods in bulk though.
Annoys the hell out of me. I much prefer train travel, even if it’s slower. But in the States, Amtrak is passable at best depending on the particular line. European rail was a lot more pleasant. Neither comes close to Japan though. Their high speed rail is a reason I’d consider living there long term.
If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.
See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.
In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
Didn't stop them from getting into a war
Not to put a too fine point on it, but climate change is an existencial global, international and inter-generational problem. It is about time we hold those accountable who contribute to it overly much, without loopholes.
If this comes across overly vindictive, consider that the rich will be the people who are least likely to be unable to avoid the consequences of global warming.
I assumed the history of noise externalities from supersonic aircraft might merit a broader discussion of externalities.
It’s great that they are talking about air pollution, but I’d still argue that there are many other externalities to supersonic air travel, (and sub sonic air travel, and ground transport, etc)
I just think we’d get saner transport policy and better innovation if we talked about them, and how to balance the benefits for people inside the vehicle for the costs to those outside the vehicle.
If this is too far a reach, then maybe self-driving motorhomes will fill a similar desire. I can definitely imagine a very lightweight motorhome - less like a bus, more like an overbuilt enormous e-bike - being viable, maybe even by solar power (say, 2 days to charge for every day on the road, something like that).
I mostly live in a school bus, but too much of my time is spent driving, and those driving times are mostly a) on highways, and b) at speeds which represent a constant threat to everything around me.
I'd love to have an autopilot to take us on country roads at much slower speeds.
But it did not explode, it crashed. The cause of the accident was FOD (Foreign Object Damage). Debris on the runway, a 17"x1" strip of titanium, caused damage to the tire which caused additional damage and ultimately the crash.
Perhaps less dramatically, but that's not a unique-to-Concorde kind of accident. FOD is taken seriously in the aviation industry.
At extremely increased cost. It's a hard sell in an industry that's competing for price efficiency.
Follow the money. Always.
Most of the big OEMs have one or two EVs and less less in a quarter than Tesla do in a day. (F150 lightning, Silverado, mustang mach e, muscle cars)
F150 Lightning sales are pathetic.
If we could go from SF to Tokyo in 2 hours, it would permanently change geopolitics. Imagine commuting between Shenzhen and SF. One foot in each of the two most innovative cities on Earth.
The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
Is there strong evidence that's true?
and the quicker disease can spread.
What causes an increase in adverse outcomes, at least for fast-moving pandemics such as respiratory pandemics, is spread between risk tiers. For example, in the case of a pathogen with a significant age-dependent morbidity/mortality rate, one of the most dire threats is spread within multigenerational households.
Providing resources, opportunities, and guidance to facilitate spread within the low-risk tier while briefly isolating that cohort from the high-risk tier is likely to produce better outcomes.
Stated more tersely: the human proclivity to travel and share immune information with peers is a strength, not a weakness.
hmm, ok, since your profile says you study epidemiology sometimes I guess that's a totally reasonable take I hadn't considered. I was of course going off the stuff that was going around during Covid's height when people would refer to theories that faster and increased international travel would lead to more pandemics, and that Covid worked as predicted by that theory.
To be clear: this is totally a hobby for me, although I have made friendly/collaborative inroads with many of the top minds in the field through correspondence going back about 15 years. During the covid19 pandemic, I found myself sitting-in on roundtables and discussions where I was often the only non-MD/MPH on the call.
> I was of course going off the stuff that was going around during Covid's height when people would refer to theories that faster and increased international travel would lead to more pandemics
This has been a topic of scholarly debate and discussion for sometime before covid19; it is a frequent concern regarding several types of pandemic, but especially respiratory pandemics and even more especially hemorrhagic fevers. Food-borne, fomite-borne, and sexually transmitted diseases less so. I think it's fair to say that arboviruses remain an unknown in this regard.
In the case of respiratory pandemics, as best I can tell, the science is very much settling to the conclusion that acute spread through low-risk tiers - which of course is bolstered by international travel - offers some protection against the kinds of pandemics we saw from the emergence of now-endemic H3N2, or the 1918 influenza pandemic, or the 1890's "Russian Flu", which I believe (and I believe most scientists who have studied this believe) was likely the emergence of now-endemic hcov-OC43.
My hope is that one of the key lessons of covid19 is that we need to utilize the population who quickly gain immunity as relief pitchers for the high-risk tier. For example, by the time we closed libraries and schools, there were already millions (perhaps 10 million or more) young and healthy people who had gained immunity from infection without even realizing it. These are the people that can run the libraries and cafeterias and shelters, and perform as substitute teachers and childcare providers, so that we're not turning our nation's poorest children to the streets.
A similar phenomenon occurs on college campuses - in the case of pathogens like coronaviruses where college-age people typically seem to be quite low risk, it makes sense to leave residence halls and similar infrastructure in place, to allow this cohort the option of quickly gaining immunity to be available to assist the higher-risk tiers in isolating. Of course this needs to be done with caution and empiricism - the 1918 pandemic reminds us that the age/risk correlation is sometimes inverted, and this can be very confounding to an orderly public health response.
Perhaps most importantly, any plan which delays spread in the low-risk tier, by definition, requires the high-risk tier to isolate commensurate with that delay, and this is a dire situation. Most poor people (who are disproportionately high-risk) simply don't have the means to survive prolonged isolation. Much better is to facilitate spread stratified by risk - ideally a complete spread through the low-risk tier in short order, so that this cohort can safely assist high-risk communities during their isolation.
This basic principle enjoyed what seemed like consensus prior to covid19, and became total hot lava. Hopefully we have returned to sanity and won't make this mistake again.
> and the quicker disease can spread.
HN has attracted its share of luddites. People who aren't interested in building a better future. But are very interested in tearing it down.
When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
As there as been a general broadening of discussion as to exactly what "a better future" means and I suppose more specifically to whom.