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Comment by atdt | Hacker News Reader

Shaving a few hours won't open new markets or otherwise fundamentally alter our relationship with distance. It's telling that "convenience" is the selling point, which implies a difference of degrees rather than kind, and shows a lack of ideas of what we could do with this technology.

The next great hop in transportation would have to be instant or near-instant teleportation. And faster jets don't meaningfully bring us closer to that.

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While cutting time in the air by half may not make a fundamental difference, cutting it by five or six times could. Point-to-point sub-orbital services have the potential to do this, though there are challenges for this type of flight that bring its difficulties closer to orbital operations than the (mostly) straight up and down trajectories that will be flown by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, etc.

I think that the big win in convenience would have to be found in fundamental airport redesigns. The way they move people around is just terrible.

One huge problem I see is that the security is government-based. Getting of a plane, HAVING TO GO THROUGH SECURITY and boarding the same fucking plane takes 30+ minutes. Why does it have to happen at all ? Of course, the reason is government regulation : "security", so that it costs millions of people hours of inconvenience regularly is no argument. Can we please just get rid of this entirely ?

Walking around in airports, well I just really hate it ... why are we having these distances (I've walked 3 km already to get to a flight). Why the constant breaks ? Why don't we have a baggage drop off (without people, and enough to not have lines) that checks you in, gives you a "flasher" token, then 20 cafes to choose from (ideally complimentary, but I wouldn't mind paying that much). 5 minutes before the flight that token starts flashing you walk up to an elevator, and you walk out of the elevator into the plane. And security figures out how to "scan" the elevator in .001 second without any visible change to the people inside. Bonus points if these checkin stations are simply in the middle of parking space.

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