Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

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The best way to reinvent the airline industry is to fly private. Think about how terrible a bus is, and how most of us use cars because it's an immensely better experience. Going from commercial -> private is a similarly massive leap (I've never flown on a chartered private flight, but I am training for my pilot's license). You go to the FBO (the equivalent of the commercial terminal, but on the other side of the airport), sit down on a comfy couch, watch some TV on a nice flatscreen, grab some free snacks and drinks, then walk out onto the tarmac to your plane at your leisure. No backscatter machines, no metal detectors, and CSRs who give a crap and want to help you (since you're paying them!).

Of course, flying private is not viable for most people. I see the day approaching where owning a plane will be on the same order of magnitude of expense of owning a car. Two things make flying really expensive: fuel and maintenance (you can buy a flyable used plane for ~$50k). Fuel is a fairly intuitive expense: avgas runs about $6 / gallon in the northeast. Figure a small piston plane (4 people) burns ~12 gallons / hour, and you're talking ~$72/hr to operate a plane in fuel alone (note: you're traveling about 150mph in this piston plane, much slower than a jet). Maintenance is a huge issue as well. Every so-many thousand(~2k for a piston) hours of flying, you have to shell out a ton of money ($15k for a piston plane) to overhaul the engine(s). This is in addition to standard annual and 100-hour inspections.

One thing is going to change both of those factors: better battery technology is going to make electric planes viable. Energy cost goes down since energy from the grid is way cheaper than that generated from the ICE. Maintenance is hugely reduced as well. No oil changes. No engine overhauls (electric engines last for ~10x as long as their ICE counterparts and are way cheaper). Increased reliability (adding engines is a trivial cost and doesn't increase weight significantly). Recapturing potential energy during descent. Reduced drag (no nasty air inlets for that combustion reaction).

I don't think this change is going to happen overnight, but given the focus on battery technology for EVs, I think the requisite batteries will become available within 10 years (historically, battery density has doubled over 10y).

For many people, the bus/train is the better experience. It takes less time during rush hour, and you can read/nap/work during the ride. I imagine that private plane slots at an airport have a fairly limited availability, so if they become popular you'll have congestion issues too.

Indeed. In many parts of the world the normal intercity bus ride is a quite pleasurable experience, significantly better in many ways than flying a budget (or pretty much any) airline.

Three things:

(1) Private cars will go away eventually even in the states as we transition to self-driving cars (at least in the cities) that will be used more like taxis to avoid parking problems.

(2) We probably aren't that far away from self-driving planes, heck, we already have drones. One could imagine a fleet of small planes that are also used like taxis (or better yet, for ride shares).

(3) Its almost 2015 and we all saw Back to the Future, so we know what's going to happen (VTOL garbage powered Delorean anyone?). (this point is a joke, the first two are more serious)

I've heard that almost the entire flight can be/is automated now, including the landing and that most commercial pilots have to land the planes by hand just so they can keep their skills up. But I doubt the salary of pilots is really such a significant cost for airlines compared to their other expenses, otherwise we'd probably be seeing a push for autonomous aircraft.

Also: think of how much the TSA would love autonomous aircraft, you never need to worry about them being hijacked because they'll only go where the computer tells them too.

Salaries are not significant for bus drivers, but would be significant for taxi cab drivers. Automated small planes could really revolutionize the sector, especially if we could figure out how to make them fuel efficient and even electric.

Salaries are in fact a dominant expense of bus and rail fleets. In my area, WMATA pays out 78% of operating budget for buses towards personnel, and 72% of operating budget for trains towards personnel. Operating budget does not include capital expenses like rolling stock or infrastructure.

> Think about how terrible a bus is, and how most of us use cars because it's an immensely better experience.

Yeah but most of America is basically stuck in one at least twice a day, so you have a massive demand to make them comfortable. Whereas with a plane, your middle-class American gets in one 2-3 times a year and is willing to suck it up.

In order to be comparable to cars, you not only have to hypothesize an order of magnitude shift in cost to match cars, but also an order of magnitude shift in demand to match cars. While I fully admit that there is that sort of demand in limited markets (for example, commuting programmers to the valley), these markets are not on the same chart as car demand. I do not really see what could possibly motivate ordinary people to travel 600 miles twice per day.

Meanwhile, as you've been trying to leapfrog the car market, it has not remained stagnant. If you are a knowledge worker, a self-driving car is an effective substitute for flight, since the impact of additional passive travel time is negligible. (Even non-knowledge workers need sleep, so it will be of benefit to them too.) At the distances I generally travel (regional US), an uninterrupted block of 8 hours in a vehicle is actually preferable to a 2-hour block flying, so I would actually pay less to travel by plane.

I would add that the lack of space is also an issue for a lot of people when it comes to owning a plane, and I'm not very optimistic about this for the future (urbanization...).

I wish there was some way for someone to make a kind of "cost sharing" business based on this model. I.e. I pay a bit more than a normal ticket but not hundreds of times more and TFA and all that other crap just goes away for me.

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