Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History
simpleflying.com
simpleflying.com
also, recorded history pulls double duty here limiting the record to earth. You never know what those shady schmucks in the delta quadrant are up to...
We have plenty of evidence to suggest that no other known thing that we have ever encountered on Earth either living or as fossils would have been capable of building an airplane
You're right that we have no direct evidence that there never were airplanes before humans existed, but with the evidence we do have it would be downright absurd to suggest we can't make a statement about that with some authority
Fantastic tautology. A+ in Logical Fallacies today.
I personally know 3 guys who say they work for Boeing, but I have no evidence that they aren’t lizard people.
I'm trying to say there might be stuff out there we don't know about, but we have no knowledge of it or reason to believe it exists so -who cares-. If we encounter that stuff later on we can adjust our priors at that time. What exactly is the fallacy there?
Once you include getting out of Stockholm to the airport, security, boarding, the flight itself, possible baggage collection, and the trip into Umeå, I would be surprised if the total were much below 4 hours. Comparable German domestic flights such as Hamburg–Munich usually took me around 4–4.5 hours in practice in the past when traveling for work before the pandemic.
That makes the train a 6–8 hour alternative to a roughly 4-hour flight journey. Whether that is viable depends on the traveller, but it is certainly more competitive than “1 hour versus 8 hours” suggests.
I admit that for me, living about an hour north of the Hamburg main station but only 15 minutes from the airport, the plance for a business trip in Munich can still be a viable (albeit seldom taken) option. More often than not, if time permits, I take the train, work on the train. But as said - there still are situations, that make flying such a distance viable (to me).
I just wanted to point out, that it is not as clear cut as 1 hour vs. 6 to 8 hours.
Of course there are a lot of variables, if instead I leave from my house the aircraft would actually be faster, mostly due to the extra time it takes to get to Central London and from Waterloo to Euston.
In reality we usually drive in about 6-8 hours because, as a family of 4 traveling, it's considerably cheaper even before you take into account having transport on the other end.
I and a friend once started at Stockholm Central station to Malmö Central Station at the same time. I boarded a bullet train; he took the bus to the airport ... We arrived at the same time six hours later.
I've been looking at travel in Japan recently. Between Hiroshima and Tokyo, the bullet train (fast Shinkansen) and flight are both about four hours.
A bullet train is much more comfortable than flight within these limits because there are so fewer steps: no travel to/from airport, fewer tickets to book and often no check-in or security checkpoint.
For rail? You're looking at an order of magnitude more for planning and construction, all new infrastructure, all new rail stock. It will take a much larger passenger base to justify the expense and effort.
Airplanes don't just shine for longer trips. There have been some interesting developments with commuter airplanes that are either all electric or hybrid with a 200-plus-mile range. If they are as energy efficient as they promise to be, we could see a resurgence in municipal airports for transportation between regional centers where rail is either unavailable or excessively expensive.
Some of those are amenable to high-speed variants, some less so. And once you've established transport corridors, much of the hard part (rights-of-way acquisition) is accomplished, so that adding a high-speed route becomes far more tractable.
For the most part, actual construction costs are fairly modest, modulo bridges and tunnels, both of which can of course be quite expensive.
I think increasing the viability of travel between smaller airports is a good thing for those times when you don't want to spend a lot of time traveling or waiting for a transit vehicle. If the equivalent of micromobility air travel comes to fruition, you'll see two- or three-person vehicles that get up and go when someone wants a ride. Another benefit could be the airport-to-airport delivery of packages with different-sized drone craft and autonomous navigation.
#IFoundMyFlyingCar
I think a lot of people do not understand just how massive the US is.
Sure some routes could have viable alternatives, but others just do not.
The thing is, a high speed corridor enabling that trip would, as you note, involve many stops of which each pairing represents another potential flight that the same train might replace. Many of those pairings will be short enough flights that a proper high speed rail corridor would easily compete with if not destroy the short-haul flight offerings.
To use your example, it looks like there are currently two flights between California and Maine, both run weekly by United between PWM and either LAX or SFO flying east on Saturday mornings and returning west on Sunday morning. A hypothetical high speed rail corridor connecting coast-to-coast between either of those city pairs might not replace a lot of flights across the whole country but one train running along that full route might have replaced one from Portland to Buffalo, another from Boston to Columbus, another from Cleveland to St. Louis, et cetera.
It’s also the activity least likely to be decarbonised.
Of course there are alternatives, I haven’t flown on a plane since 2001.
Air travel is a very recent modern invention(1960s, at least for everyday folk) and people act like flying around the world is a right.
Modern capitalism is an excess machine and it'll feed us constant excuses for why our reasons are valid. Air travel is a great example. Travel and tourism are seen as "musts" by people nowadays. It's insane how destructive and unnecessary it is. It's wild how entitled everyone is nowadays. I'll happily take down votes for calling out the insane excess that we have nowadays. We're killing ourselves one funco pop at a time and we all deserve that funco pop according to the latest excuse(won't someone blame the rich!!!)
Also, on travel, I think there's a lot to be said for the value of travel and being exposed to other cultures and societies. "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness[..]" and all that.
Just having a carbon tax, that accurately prices the cost of carbon, is enough. It's one of the few taxes that has broad support among economists. However in a democracy like the US I don't see how it ever gets implemented and even if it does, it will get ripped up 2-4 years later.
I have a highly specialized skill set that require me to be at site.
What am I supposed to do, no longer go home?
Further than removing subsidies, if flight cost would include its negative externalities, few would fly.
So is the private (ICE) motorcar. ~4000kg of CO2/y for typical US use.
A lot of
A lot if not most airplane traffic is holiday related, and only a handful of rich people actually get to enjoy it. There's no need for it.
Give yourself an edgy name, like the Children of Kali, to make it stick.
Honestly, if you think the stakes are that high then you implicate yourself with anything but fully committed action. Anything less, and you just seem preachy and screechy.
PS: It's a book called The Ministry of the Future. Try reading once in a while. Whoosh.
This argument has been made so often and in so much detail that I’m surprised to still see people suggest climate terrorism in, presumably, good faith.
I don't know if there was really a 'message' more than just reporting what 'happened'. But, I have to say I came away with the idea that that kind of political violence is futile. Non-violent political action seemed to have MUCH more beneficial action than any bomb. (of course it wasn't as clear-cut between non-violent groups and revolutionary groups at the time)
Maybe thats only because I just read the ONE book.
There is a reason Rosa Parks was chosen to start the bus boycott - she comes off as "just like me" to the average person. Thus when she couldn't take it anymore the rest of America didn't write her off.
However, there have been a number of criticisms to the paper about data coding, methodology, and interpretation/motivated reasoning. Recently, the author has also acknowledged that governments have adapted since 2006: her data says nonviolent resistance is still more effective, but that the success rate has cratered.
I tried to find some of the criticisms, but it's recent, so all AI generated, so I won't link before reading, but the criticisms I'm aware of I think are robust. All this to say, the idea that nonviolent resistance is more effective is comfortable and feels better, and there is a paper that says so, but your examples and those of a child comment are not about resistance to armed colonial oppression and it's not enough to form a blanket opinion about violent resistance.
There was a tremendous amount of violence in the labour movement from the late 18th through mid-20th centuries, including numerous armed conflicts. This was perpetrated by both sides, though my sense is that capital was somewhat more prone to exacting violence on labour than vice versa.
The ANTIFA movement of the 1930s--1940s was a worldwide violent struggle, which ultimately proved effective. Nonviolent movements (say, the White Rose resistance in Germany) proved utterly ineffectual. It's useful to remember Gandhi's observation that ahimsa is predicated on an opponent with a conscience which can be shamed. That wasn't the case against Nazi Germany.
Civil rights, across multiple jurisdictions, has seen both violent and non-violent movements. The US civil rights movement of the 1960s is often seen as offering White America a choice between MLK's non-violent movement and the far more radical path pursued by the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and others.
The story is ... complex.
The total average across the industry in 2018 was between 67 and 81 mpg. Modern planes are in the 100-120mpg range.
If you could fill a train track as much as a road is filled, it would be very cheap
I believe a general minimum practical headway allows about 10--12 trainsets per hour on a given track. At 400 passengers/trainset, that's roughly 4,000 to 4,800 passengers/hour, per track.
That compares with about 1,500 vehicles/hour per highway lane, or about 2,550 passengers/hour at the U.S. average of 1.7 passengers/vehicle.
I've seen some suggestion that headways could be reduced to 3--4 minutes, or 15--20 trainsets/hour. I know that some urban rapid transit systems (e.g., BART in San Francisco) achieve this, but only on a small section of the system (Colma to Oakland, transiting downtown SF, IIRC). Train speeds there peak at 70 MPH, and I believe are much slower for most of this portion of track.
The New York subway has a top speed of 55 mph (88 kmh), but an average speed of 17.8 mph (28 kmh). I'm not sure what downtown intra-station peaks are, but suspect they're low on shorter sections. The London Underground is similar, with an average of 33 kmh (20 mph), max ~100 kmh (60 mph). This varies considerably by lines, the Bakerloo stock peaks at 45 mph; the Circle line averages just 24 kmh (15 mph). Chicago's 'L' is similar to NYC: max 55 mph, average ~20--25 mph.[3]
Note that averages include acceleration, deceleration, and dwell times (standing still at stations). But central portions of subways probably achieve low headways with relatively low peak speeds for congested track segments.
Notes:
________________________________
1. <https://parkingday.org/how-fast-do-new-york-subway-trains-tr...>
2. <https://tubenotifications.co.uk/insights/how-fast-is-the-tub...>
3. <https://parkingday.org/how-fast-does-the-subway-go-in-chicag...>
The single best thing you can do to drive down train cost is to put more people on each train.
Based on these sources: https://www.statista.com/chart/20169/gb-rail-fare-spending-b...
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download/f5c82d86-23...
It is often cheaper to take a connecting flight to an airport and flying from there than to start from that airport. That disincentivises taking a low-carbon-emission train to the airport and experiencing more of (and spending more in) the city near the airport than just its airport.
Often, for longer flights, the more stops, the cheaper the total ticket gets. Planes consume more fuel at take-off and landing, making the the carbon footprint increase with these cheaper tickets. And the more you fly, the more points you get that could pay for more flights.
It should be the other way around: air-travel carbon tax should be progressive. You should pay more each time if you fly more often. That would reduce the number of flights in total while still allowing everyone to take that "trip of a life-time".
People who complain about aviation do more harm than good.
We would accomplish more by closing a few coal power plants and replacing them with renewables or nuclear. And no one would even notice.
Can you believe it’s almost 2030 and we still haven’t reached peak coal.
I find this a bit hard to swallow. It speaks to a sense of impunity wrt emissions for a demographic that very arguably drives much of the rest of the way energy is consumed. It is one of many choice this demographic has the privelage of making, in contrast to much of the rest of the population.
Have you ever met a coal or oil exec who was shy about flying? If anything, the latter would no doubt lobby hard against efforts to reign in flights, as it's directly tied to the interests of their industry.
It’s ridiculous the amount of fossil fuels we still burn for electricity.
This “shame, shame” garbage that people did never worked.
In either case, I think we can be expected to walk and chew gum; to see every source of emissions as its own individual problem (scaled to proportion, ofc) AND recognize that they inevitably feed into each other. To do less is counterproductive, IMO.
Except this isn't happening. Oil is subsidised (and not just by the constant action for the last 50 years to keep oil flowing from the middle east), and has been for decades. Even coal is subsidised in the US
Renewables are increasingly banned in the US.
I agree the nonsense about the tree botherers saying "we need to be vegetarian and use no more than 1kWh a day of energy" are twats that do more harm than good, but the US specifically has an agenda against renewable energy, presumably because it's not the subscription model that the US loves. You buy your solar panel and it works for decades. You buy a gallon of gas and you're back the next day to buy it again.
In my experience it's been vegan even :P And yes, agreed, this is indeed counterproductive virtue signalling.
"oh you use almond milk, that's terrible you should use soya"
"oh you use soya, that's terrible you should drink black tea"
"oh you're having tea, how dare you continue plantation slavery"
and wasn't there talk in europe of jet fuel shortages. and governments everywhere are supposed to run out of emergency oil supplies in the next 1 to 6 months?
i'm a bit confused.
Most people fly because they have to, family gatherings, planned vacations, business trips.
The number of people genuinely deterred by a small amount in price is still going to be small.
Also, inflation adjusted, fuel isn't that expensive. 80/90$ a barrel are prices we've seen already decades ago.
The downside is that it doesn't scale beyond the biggest city pairs: you'd need N^2 direct flights vs 2N flights via a hub.
Even if you are not alarmed about the environmental impact of flights as a share of global emissions, it’s no reason to spend our global oil reserves for useless travel. Airlines already optimize flights and routes, but the gap can be closed even further if we simply let go of the immediate convenience of booking flights.
My expectations are low and yet airlines somehow manage to fail. I made the mistake of booking a flight with frontier and they "delayed" the flight several times before eventually canceling the whole flight.
I am a current airline pilot, and I end up flying on all of them in order to get to and from work. Trust me, they all do this. The impact to you may be less if it’s an airline with more flights, because that airline has more options to recover and fix your experience, but they all do it.
The best you can do is look at specific carriers, and more importantly specifically what aircraft you'll be flying on.
A cross country flight in economy is going to be more comfortable in a Delta A220 than a United 737 Max. However, because of hubs and lack of competition many non-mega metros don't really have a large amount of choice.
ULCCs thrive when they can maximize their time in the sky across as many different flights as possible. Filling up the day with many different flights allows them to rake in checked-baggage fees, reserved seat fees etc more often than longer mainline carrier flights. All of this went out the window when a large portion of their A320 fleet was grounded because of the P&W engine issues. This absolutely killed their utilization percentage.
Spirit died way more because of business management than it did because customers didn't choose on price.
Im not sure how accurate this is, so willing to be shown differently!
It didn't seem busy at all. Everything was on time, quick, and smooth on both sides. My partner and I commented on how smooth everything went.
This level of profligacy is simply not sustainable.