We're Too Cheap to Fly Faster | Hacker News Reader

We're Too Cheap to Fly Faster

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127 pointsmsrpotus165 comments

It's not just a case of being too cheap, but also it having negligable effect.

If I have to be at Heathrow 90 min before departure, and it takes me 45 min to drive there, or 90 min on public transport, then at the other end it takes 30 mins for my bag to get on the belt, clear port control, and another 30-60 min to get to the city. I have a good 4 hours of fixed time involved with my flight. If the flight is just 8 hours, making it 7 hours isn't really going to change things, I've still lost the most of the day.

So I'd sooner be able to sleep comfortably (ie space!) or be able to do some work (11 vaio Pro, 22 hours battery).

Then we have the issue that even going supersonic, we can't just upsticks and do it. We have to get out to see. Climbing to FL390 takes a lot of time, descending from it does as well, otherwise people generally find it rather un-appealing. Add in busy hub airport traffic and we've got at least 2 hours that we can't really speed up.

So our 12 hour total journy (4 hours travelling too / waiting at airports, 6 hours of cruise, 2 hours of holding an NDB) speeding up that 6 hours, doesn't have much effect. Hell go nuts, make it take 2 hours, go for mach 3. It is still going to take me, door to door, 8 hours. 8 vs 12 for the cost of that just isn't going to be worth it. Because ultimately I'll have my own work schedule, I'm not rich enough to have a private jet, and the stuff I fly you wouldn't want to be in for more than 4 hours anyway (well the fuel would run out too). So that means I want a regular, frequent service. I don't care that superfastjet leaves everyday at 1pm. I need to be around till 5pm. Obviously the geek in me would take the fast one, but I couldn't do that everytime.

TLDR It isn't just about being cheaper. It is recognising the deminishing impact speed is having on being the deciding factor. We look at door to door time, not cruise performance. We want a frequent schedule, not one speedbird a day.

Exactly the reason why the (much slower) train often makes more sense. Sure, the train from Amsterdam to Berlin is six hours. But you only have to be at the station to catch it before it leaves, and it both leaves and arrives right in the center.

We tried this returning from a conference there last fall, and the hotel-door-to-home-door advantage of flying was less than 30 minutes. And on train there was more space, better food, and a bar. Not to mention that there was power and nobody told me to shut down my laptop at any point :-)

Well this is a great example of when I do pay for the premium.

If I am going to Amsterdamn from London, I'll fly CityJet from LCY. London City Airport is brilliant. Mostly because its only used by frequent travellers, no people pushing right up to the baggage belt here, people all know they can spot and politely walk up to grab.

If your going to Antwerpen, their local airport is brilliant as well. LCY if you've only got carry on, you need only arrive 15 min before your flight. Most routes flown have 6-10 flights a day.

I have left the city (London) at 6pm, and been checked in to my hotel, having a nice trappist beer by 9pm on more than one occasion.

When you consider you can do the London to Antwerpn route for £120, return, including baggage, it is really brilliant. It's a 45 min flight total. The thing here is, its the ground facilities that make it so painless.

this is my position. If I have internet and a power outlet, one place is as good as another, why take the hit on degrading security, exorbitant fee's, and cramped conditions for a few extra hours? Trains are efficient. We need to use them more.

Trains have degraded security though. Once a plane leaves, someone has to be on the plane or have had access to it beforehand to affect the flight. You can defend against this through security at those specific points. On a train, the entire trip is over miles of tracks which 'anyone' can access. Security at boarding doesn't affect the attack surface area as much.

That said, I might prefer train travel to flying.

"Degrading" security not "degraded" security. I think the post you are replying to is implying that they would rather take the small risk of being blown up on a train over the certainty of being treated like a terrorist at the airport.

On the other hand, if there is an issue with a train, it can break. Stopping a plane when there is an issue is a lot more hassle.

I'd rather face terrorists than TSA.

I wouldn't call it degraded security, it's just more appropriate to the risk vs convenience tradeoff.

> On a train, the entire trip is over miles of tracks which 'anyone' can access

Indeed, but trains, even high speed ones, are also very robust compared to airplanes.

Even if somebody does manage to get access to the track (not so trivial in many cases), and trigger an explosion on the track with good enough timing to catch the train as it goes by, and manage to derail it, there's still a good chance that all or most passengers would survive the crash.

Similarly, with the size of bomb one might smuggle on board a train, the likely effect would be to just kill a few passengers in the immediate vicinity of the explosion; the train itself would probably be just fine. So basically not much different than setting off an explosion at a random restaurant...

For a terrorist, the odds just aren't all that great with trains, which presumably is why there have been so few attempts at doing such a thing. One of the reasons terrorism is so scary on airplanes is that they feel (and are) so fragile that it magnifies the effect of any attack greatly.

This works better in Europe than it does in America. As most trips here on train or car take multiple days. Where as you can fly anywhere in the country in one day. Once you cross into multi-day territory, the train is often too impractical to be used. Which is a real shame, as I really enjoy travelling by train.

For Northeast travel in the US, the train is more practical. Pretty much anything from DC to Boston is less painful on the train. You get a seat an continuous alone time.

This holds less on broader travel.

Exactly. The American/Canada east coast and great lakes region is dense enough that an upgrade rail network could really work for us - Chicago, Boston, NYC, Pittsburgh, Detroit, DC, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa... each of these places have another major city about 3-4 hours drive away. Investment in the local passenger rail network could be worthwhile.

Not cheap, though. The train from DC to NY can cost twice that of a plane, depending on the specifics.

I may be wrong, but I put the medians at a similar price. Both systems can go cheaper or more expensive. This is a little frustrating because 1 hour between major metro areas can cost 50-100x the 1 hour subway ride from the Bronx to Coney Island. In part this is because the train sets it's prices based on competition from airplanes.

MTA is heavily subsidized (it only covers ~50% of its expenses from its operational income), AmTrak is probably not.

Also, a train e.g. from NYC to Philadelphia looks inside much more like a plane (seats, tables, power sockets, wifi) than like a subway train, and obviously moves much faster. This all ought to cost more, even at zero profit point.

Amtrak gets federal subsidies too, though I imagine they're far less than 50%. It certainly isn't a profitable enterprise.

And most people don't use the subway for an hour, it's usually less mileage per person. But the extremes do show a big case of opposites.

Why not have the best of both worlds? Rail based hypersonic transportation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

Generally speaking, a good means of transportation should not involve killing the travelers with high acceleration.

I'd settle for a regular train that is able to go at what most Europeans countries would consider a normal speed.

The US is huge! My mother back home in India still has a hard time believing that there are 4 time zones between San Francisco and New York.

In part because America is much larger: NYC to Los Angeles is similar in distance to a trip from London to Baghdad. At that scale, trains are always going to be inconvenient.

Now, that's not to say trains in the US are good, but they are never going to be the best form of transportation for a 3,000 mile trip.

I also blame our two-weeks-off-a-year culture.

If we had six weeks off, going four days each way in a train to spend two or three weeks somewhere could be a great vacation.

The US is large but our trains really do suck and up until the 2010 elections we were on track to build a regional fast speed train system that would connect Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and then east to DC and NYC. Tea Party governors and other GOP obstructionism killed it, especially in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida.

NYC to LA shouldnt be our metric for everything. A lot of travel is regional. Why do I need to get up at 5am in Chicago to get on a 10am flight that lasts 2 hours to DC? Or the 30 minutes to milwaukee? Or the 1.5 hr flight to Kansas City? With all the hassle of TSA, airport madness, restrictions, and the horrible crampedness of flying? Chicago > DC is about the same distance as Madrid to Paris. Sure, the train will take longer, but it sure beats flying.

Less politically-biased information about rail at Wikipedia[1].

Politically biased opinion: the Dems could have done anything from 2008-2010, and they chose healthcare. TSA didn't get any better, nor were trains built. More stringent mileage requirements were handed down, for those eco-friendly types out there, but we are not aggressively pursuing nuclear/fusion power generation like we should.

I would love to be able to grab a train from Houston to Dallas, as it would certainly beat the air travel experience, as other comments have mentioned the additional time required for check-in, security, etc. But the cost of new rail is in the billions per route, and we have lots of land to cover in America.

We are too cheap for high-speed aircraft, but we can (hopefully) do something to rid us of TSA and the accompanying security theatre, which would make air travel so much better.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_S...

What I always find funny with this type of discussion is that, when an article talks about the state of broadband connection in the US, someone (usually more than one person actually) will inevitably use the argument that the country is too sparsely populated and that's why we can't compare to Europe. While when an article talks about a possible train corridor between some major regional hubs, someone will inevitably mention that there are too many houses on the way and it's not practical :)

+10 for "the Dems could have done anything from 2008-2010, and they chose healthcare."

A decision the nation and the Democratic Party will be kicking themselves for for decades.

Compared to the urgency of high speed rail, they made the right choice!

I do not agree with the exact details of how they chose to tackle health care, but there is no question that it was the right priority at the time. Healthcare costs were at 18% of GDP and rising rapidly.

Even the hospitals and insurance companies recognized that something had to be done very soon. Between increasing poverty and companies dropping health care for their employees, they were losing patients at a record pace.

The risk of launching a startup was becoming almost unbearable. Many young entrepreneurs arbitrage the cost of their health risk by betting they won't get seriously ill and make themselves, their companies, and their investor funds go bankrupt. That is NOT a safe bet.

> our trains really do suck

You mean passenger trains. For the most part, the US rail network was constructed for and is primarily used for cargo transportation, where it excels.

The perpetual comparison of the US (cargo) train network to the other passenger train networks (Europe, Japan, China) is a tedius and misguided apples to oranges comparison.

Most of these comparisons blatently ignore the fact that population density is radically different between the US and these other systems, which is an important criteria in understanding the time/economic tradeoffs.

I like train travel a lot and living in the New York to Boston corridor I've always had easy access to commuter trains, the New York and Boston subway systems, and Amtrak for longer regional travel. Regardless, I don't think passenger rail makes much economic sense outside high-density areas and even then only survives with dubious tax subsidies.

In Europe, barges handle the freight traffic that fills the US railroads and trains handle the cross-continent traffic that runs in airplanes in the USA. It's mostly a result of Europe's many great rivers and the USA's vast open spaces.

That doesn't mean we can have great high speed rail from Boston to DC and Florida, from SF to LA, and from Chicago to New York, just like Europe can run freight trains under the Swiss Alps.

The main reason quality passenger rail doesn't get built and run well in the parts of the USA where it should is politics. The FRA regulations, the national transportation funding process, the state funding politics, the work rules, liability rules, labor regulations, safety regulations, and environmental regulations all work to make high speed rail five or more times as expensive per mile as in Europe. At that price, we should just live with the low quality infrastructure we've got. The only alternative is to reform the process and even supposed rail advocates like Obama haven't lifted a finger on the most obvious abuses, e.g. to loosen FRA buff strength standards or strict Buy American rules for rolling stock.

The entire interstate highway system is extremely heavily subsidized (along with gasoline). I'd be interested to see how it would compare with passenger trains without the subsidies, but I suspect it's not as lopsided as we think when it comes to a marginal passenger.

I understand what you are saying about the highway system being subsidized, but I'm not sure I understand your reference to gasoline.

Private energy companies explore, extract, refine, and sell gasoline, with all sorts of taxes (as opposed to subisidies) along the way. What subsidies are you refering to for gasoline?

The government creates foreign policy around the maintenance of oil supplies, which has a very large cost, and is largely a gift to the oil companies. This is reflected in income taxes rather than in the cost of gasoline. There are also large tax breaks given to oil companies. Domestic fossil fuels like coal and natural gas don't get quite the same treatment, since we have plenty.

It depends entirely where you are. Within the northeast corridor (Boston to DC, population of about 50 million, not too much smaller than France) there is almost no point in flying (unsurprisingly, Amtrak has captured 70% of the market between DC and NYC and 50% between NYC and Boston). The hour and a half flight from DC to Boston becomes a 4 hour exercise in self-flagellation versus a very comfortable 7 hour trip on the Acela.

If you can afford it. The Acela will run you $400-$500 round-trip BOS to WAS unless you take the 5am ones (and then it'll be $330 or so). Flying from BOS to DCA nowadays is $220 round-tip on JetBlue, say, at reasonable times of day.

If you happen to be traveling as a family, the price situation is even worse, of course. At some point driving actually starts to look pretty attractive...

+1 for trains! I dread airplanes and airports! We need more Paneuropean train routes; nice, comfy trains running on electric power.

Damn you Western Europeans complaining about train routes. Here in the US the only remotely usable train corridor is from DC to Boston, and even there the best moment was when they deployed "high speed" trains that only exceed 200kph for very short stretches due to a design error.

[edited to fix 100 vs 200 kph typo]

I travel between Amsterdam and Berlin quite frequently and I've all but stopped flying. Yes, it's a bit faster, but it's much less comfortable.

It's actually cheaper and faster to fly 1st, cut through all lines and be able to board at the last minute than to fly at Mach 1.

Well Elon Musk has a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_L-39

But sadly, its not Mach1, but a hell of a lot more fun than an airliner. My goal is the much more reasonable SR-22 turbo, just need to get my instrument raiting first.

Nice - why is the safety record so bad on the SR-22? I thought it had a chute!

The chute might be why: false sense of security. As a safety measure, it's like an air bag in a car. It can turn some bad situations into ones that are somewhat less bad. But I get the impression that a lot of Cirrus pilots treat it as a get-out-of-jail-free card instead of the last-ditch safety measure that it is.

There's also the danger that comes with any expensive, high-powered, prestigious airplane, namely that people with more money than time will see it as a great place to start flying and will end up exceeding their abilities and experience. For an earlier example of this, see the Bonanza and its reputation as a "doctor killer". Flying is tough, flying high-performance aircraft is tougher, and people with lots of money may try to take shortcuts they really shouldn't.

Of course, as long as we're fantasizing about the toys for the rich, Larry Ellison owns a Mig-29, which is capable of Mach 2.25.

The SR22 is an excellent choice, however pardon me if I'll try to favour our European industry instead. :)

In the New York City area, there are millions of people within 50 miles of 3 major airports. I'm 20 minutes by cab from one of them. I'd love to cut a 6-7 hour trip to most places by half. Ideally, I should be able to land in JFK, take a 15 minute maglev to Newark and take a connecting flight.

Air travel could be so much better.

> It's not just a case of being too cheap, but also it having negligable effect.

For me this is not remotely true.

It's not an issue of spending N hours in travel. It's an issue of spending N hours cooped up in a tight and uncomfortable seat, unable to sleep and developing deep vein thrombosis, on a bumpy airplane filled with recycled oxygen and passengers with all sorts of airborne illnesses. Inevitably I have a variety of, erm, digestive issues after long flights.

For me it's bad enough that I have a special rule: the number of days I must stay at a remote destination must exceed the number of hours I spend flying to get there. This rule does not apply to trains or cars or buses, nor layovers in airports. Just planes.

Given the choice between spending 5 hours on a plane and 15 hours in an airport, or just 10 hours on a plane, I'd pick the former in a heartbeat.

Next time, you can get a comfortable, roomy seat that folds into a flat bed in the front section of the plane where they serve nice hot cooked food with caviar appetizers and ice cream sundae desserts and pump in a higher partial pressure of oxygen so you can get work done.

Sure, it's expensive. Still, it's a lot less expensive than the Concorde used to be and than supersonic travel would be if it were available today. So probably even you would choose against OP's high speed flight.

I'm going to apply your rule too from now on, but with different exceptions (writing this from an uncomfortable bus seat in the middle of 12-hour ride).

Okay, maybe buses.

My last sky trip from Dallas to Colorado: - 30 mins drive to airport - Another 15-30 bus from parking to terminal - 15-30 mins check-in and get through TSA. - At least 1 hr to walk to gate and wait for boarding. - 30 mins for boarding - At least another 30 mins for the plane taxing around that huge airport to reach the runway. then in Denver: - 15 mins taxing - 15 mins unboarding - 30 mins train to baggage claim and collect baggage - 30 mins bus to rental car - 1.5 hrs drive to mountain resort Total: 7.5 hrs of which only 1.5 are the actual flight (400% overhead)

Driving from Dallas to Breckenridge, CO takes 13 hrs so it's still half the time, unless there are delays at the airport (Btw, my trip back took 10 hrs)

Airports and planes are so huge the overhead is reaching ridiculous levels, and we are building bigger and more complex ones instead of evolving flight control technology to make flying itself easier and safer.

We still use the same basic principles of flight control invented 130+ years ago, unfortunately, unless we discover a way to defeat gravity without using thrust and/or lift, this is the best we've got.

> 8 vs 12 for the cost of that just isn't going to be worth it.

Which makes it exactly about cost. It's not worth it for that difference. If it was 10% more would you pay it? I would. But being 5x, 10x, 20x suddenly makes it too expensive. I'd rather pay less than get there that fast.

Let's run some numbers.

It looks like the average round trip the last year it flew on the New York to London route on the Concorde was $12,000 and lasted 3.5 hours. You could fly that route on a regular plane for around $1,000 in a trip that takes 7.5 hours.

So the implied value of your time if you took the Concorde was around $2,750 / hr. If you net that up to a standard work year (2000 hours) it's $5.5 million. 1 in 1000 households in the US declare income of more than $2 million a year.

It's not that we are too cheap, it's that we aren't rich enough.

It is similar to the numbers calculated by Ivan Illich regarding car usage in the 1970's. If you take into account the car price, gasoline, insurance, repairs, etc, and the time spent to earn that amount of money, the average speed of a car for a worker was around a few miles per hour, so not better that simply walking or bycycling. It is an unorthodox but quite interesting perspective on the counter productivity of complex industrial societies. The better your pay is, the higher is your "average speed". The Concord is only the most extreme example of this trend.

Thank you for introducing me to:

http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html

The concord flew a lot faster than Mach 1 though.

Mach 2 (and Concorde has a capital C and an e on the end, while we're chasing accuracy). It doesn't change the parent's point at all though: the trip took about 3.5 hours each way.

Not including modern inconveniences of the airport... like the TSA.

The analysis also implies that time spent on the airplane has no value. With powerful electronic devices and in-flight internet, this is getting less true. You'll be less productive on an airplane, surely, but the value of that time doesn't have to be zero. That increases the gap yet further.

My POV is that if you want to improve door-to-door speed, focus on the airport experience (more time-efficient security, check-in, more predictability to let people "cut it closer", faster baggage handling and outbound logistics [rental car, etc]).

I flew my family on a our current vacation on a multi-leg trip in a 175 mph airplane, and beat the 560 mph airlines door to door on every leg, because my ground logistics time is almost non-existent. (Rental car or family pickup waiting plane-side, no security checks, no waiting for bags, and no sense "getting there early" because it's obviously not taking off without me.)

Suburb of Boston to suburb of Pittsburgh: 3h30m. From there to suburb of Cincy: 1h45m. There to Lexington, KY: 52m. There to Livingston, TN: 1h. Only on the BOS to PIT leg do the airlines have any hope of competing.

Speeding up the airline experience doesn't have much to do with speeding up the airliners themselves, IMO.

How did costs line up?

Good question, but complex to answer precisely.

Short answer: same order of magnitude for four people.

Longer answer: The airplane burns about $75 of gas & oil per hour, and I figure the total cost is about $250/hr. (I fly it about 125 hours a year, and all my costs, including hangar, charts, insurance, in-year maintenance/inspections, and maintenance reserves for long-lived items [engine, prop, avionics] come to around $30K/year.) My local flight school rents a newer version of my plane for $209/hr, but they fly more hours per year, so that indicates my cost estimates are in the right ballpark.

This trip will be about 15 flight hours, or just under $4K in avg costs, or just over $1K in marginal costs. That's for a family of four (two adults, two kids 2 or over, so everyone needs an airline seat).

In real terms, if we had to fly commercial, we'd have skipped seeing my very old grandparents (always possibly for the last time), and only flown into Lexington for the wedding, rented a car for the week at the lake, and driven the three hours down here like the rest of the family.

Looking at far advance purchases on hipmunk, that looks to be $484pp on Delta, plus $100 in bag fees (2 bags, round trip), plus a rental car that we can avoid by having one of the family cars pick us up at the small airport just down the road from the lake.

So, same order of magnitude: airline is more expensive than the marginal costs, less expensive than the average costs. (And there's a lot of "hobby time" to train, stay proficient, geek out on airplane forums, and light airplanes are not nearly as "almost all weather" as airliners.)

Other less tangible items: Much safer statistically to fly Delta than a piston single.

My kids know "Jeda and Baba", their late 80s great-grandparents, because they live 2 miles from a cheap-gas airport on the way to/from one set of their grand-parents, so we stop in for lunch/dinner and sometimes one overnight on those trips, including this one. I'm not especially sentimental, or extended-family oriented, but even still, that's worth a lot to me, as the day is coming all too soon when they won't be here and if we flew commercial, we'd literally never stop in to see them except for family funerals.

Big one for my wife: my airplane has lavatories at "either end of the flight", but not on-board. Now, we can divert anytime and be on the ground inside of 10 minutes usually, but for a 2 or 4 year old, or a pregnant 30-something, that can be a long time...

It sounds like you have a healthy attitude towards the whole thing. Basically it's a hobby that has some nice side effects.

The real economic benefit is when you fly to multiple locations on a single short trip, more than convenient driving distance apart, served only poorly by commercial airports/airlines (either no nearby non-GA airport, or a bunch of spokes served by different hubs). In those cases, sometimes even chartering a Caravan or even a private jet makes sense, even if you can't fly it yourself.

Except only sort of.

I really want to be able to fly supersonically. When I picture myself on a transcontinental flight (which I take quite often), I picture an asthmatic plane wheezing it's way across the United States. Plane speed is an issue. It does not take 2.5 hours to fly from San Francisco to Denver. It should take under two hours(rarely it does, but barely).

Then there is the last mile issue. In one hour of travel I can get from San Jose to San Francisco or from SJC to LAX. In two hours of travel I can get from San Jose to Berkeley or SFO to DEN.

I already have my airport time down to a science (PreCheck + airport locations + not checking bags). The overhead on me being in an airport is easily less than an hour. Now just give me my faster planes.

People would object to sonic booms over land.

I fly Seattle to Beijing enough, there aren't that many people inthe Russian Far East to care.

I agree, but something like the Sonic Cruiser and better acceleration/deceleration profiles so that more time in the air could be spent at something like Mach .99 adds up pretty well. LAX-JFK @ Mach .85 is 4:24. @.99: 3:47. United quotes 5:25 for the flight.

Okay, so forgive me as I only fly VFR piston if I am mistaken with some of the airways routing.

But, I don't care that its 2,200 nm straight line. It's going to be a lot more than that.

United have quoted that time because they have added up how long they will spend climbing and descending. Odds are that the plane that has never existed will need to get high to be able to go fast. This takes time. Generally they don't go for more than 1,000ft per min.

The whole best rate of climb and performance thing is hard to discuss because this craft doesn't exist. But lets say it takes 30 min, and has a Y speed of 450nm on average.

Going back to the united one, not knowing what they fly, lets just use 550knots because thats kinda faster side of common. They are able to do 3,000nm in that time, yet the straight line distance is just 2,200nm. All that time spent climbing/descending smoothly, then don't forget holding a few NDBs before entering the main patern. Circuit Speed isn't going to change much.

I would just suggest then that no matter what happens, we've 1hour of 'slow' time for that flight. That gives us about 1800nm to go faster on. That is about 3:20 with current gen stuff. Lets go for the best case, just subsonic. That is 660~knots. So we can now do it in 2:45, a massive saving of 35 min. So now that time could be 4:50. Add in security, baggage, transport to and from airport.

Not going to make much difference. Having more (maybe smaller) planes a day will be better for people who's time is very valuable. I believe Musk has his own Yakk which is capable of some 1000knot+ speeds.

I'm not trying to disagree with you, but to share a really neat site, and in the course of doing so, provide some data related to your post.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL19/history/20130617/14...

And http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL19/history/20130617/14...

Are track log (showing rate of climb and ground speed) and flight path for American 19 today JFK->LAX

Rate of climb is just under 2000fpm, and step-climbs to altitude are in the 25 minute range (with several periods of level flight prior to being cleared higher).

The direct route is 2148nm. The airways routing is 2214, or about 3% longer. In good weather, visual arrivals tend to be fairly direct and hold-free.

Biggest point was flightaware is cool. Check it out. :)

Well that is a lovely one for watching isn't it! Thanks.

Have you seen www.skyvector.com you can select the high or low routes if you wish. Whilst the mapping isn't 100% (ie don't fly from it, make very rough plans from it before going to your golden source state issued maps) it is really cool, espesually because it covers the world.

I have a dream of spending 6 months flying a little light aircraft along the silk route, visiting and exploring all the hops on my journy. One day maybe I'll have the means and the political situation will be suitable. That website lets you quickly see what such a mission would entail.

Concorde's specs were up to 5000 fpm climb. With some tweaking to the aerodynamics, flight planning and whatnot, I'm sure you could be supersonic 150nm into the flight instead of 250nm. (same goes for anything else getting up to cruising altitude)

In general, you don't want to fly in the transsonic zone (Mach 0.8 to Mach 1). The flow over parts of the wing goes supersonic, and while aero engineers can deal with supersonic and subsonic flows separately, we can't really deal with them together, the approximations flip (things go from being proportional to speed to inversely proportional). Most jetliners cruise right below the transsonic zone specifically to avoid this. The 777 uses specially designed wings to let it go further into the transsonic zone, so it can cruise at 0.85. If you design a plane to go any quicker either you need really long wings to lower the pressure differentials or to just go supersonic.

I mean, so what? It's doable with design.

No, it's not, that's the point. Unless you find some way to fly without creating pressure differentials, a plane with wings that are miles wide, or a usable description of airflow transitioning from subsonic to supersonic, you aren't flying at Mach 0.99.

How did they ever get people in Long Island (hello, Jackson Height!) to agree having a train rattle by and interrupt conversations every five minutes?

Most people moved to Long Island to commute to Manhattan. The train, in fact, came first, and then people moved there because the rattling train gave them access to Manhattan: http://images.nycsubway.org/i77000/img_77458.jpg

Many moved from noiser Manhattan for more space and more quiet, especially back when Manhattan had even more elevated trains. Others might have moved from elsewhere in the world for access to high Manhattan wages, and accept the noise as the price of that access.

People will accept some noise when it's less noise than they dealt with previously or if it provides other benefits, but most people don't fly enough for sonic booms to be worthwhile in daily life. Even subsonic planes are unpleasant to live near.

A train running by is very, very different to a sonic boom. If you don't like the sound of a train, you can move a few hundred meters from the tracks and the inverse square law will do the rest. The sound of the train going by, even for people right next to the tracks, doesn't regularly break windows.

Those are fixable.

How? By eliminating the people?

I suspect any solution to eliminating sonic booms while travelling at supersonic speed with respect to the nearby environment is immediately publishable.

NASA is researching this (at Ames, in silicon valley).

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/sonic_boom_t...

Essentially a form of Amdahl's Law.

Even if planes travelled at the speed of light, it would still take ~2 hours (an hour and a half to check in and go through security, 30 minutes to deboard and get get luggage). The maximum speedup possible is ((time spent in the airport) + ( time spend on the plane))/(time spent in the airport). That would be ~4x for a cross country flight, and ~7x for a LA to London.

That works short-ish continental flights (similar to high-speed train in fact). Try competing with an airliner on LA to Tokyo, or even just NY to LA, might be slightly more difficult.

NY to LA is, what, 6 hours? There's easily 2-3 hours of wasted time around each end of that period.

Getting to the airport (because airports are insanely far from anywhere anyone usually is), getting through security, baggage, mandatory check-in cutoff times, etc etc. These all collectively end up eating 4-5 hours in additional time besides time in flight.

That's a total travel time on the order of 9-11 hours. Even if we halved the flight time it'd still be 6-9 hours.

I don't know about you, but getting from anywhere in Manhattan out to JFK takes me about an hour via public transit. About 40 minutes via cab in decent traffic.

These things add up. What I care about is door to door travel time, not just one portion of it. The moment someone invents a plane I can show up to 15 minutes before departure, walk on, and sit down, that'd be a revolution.

They do, it's called private jets, and they are awesome.

And there's actually some interesting innovation going on in the space, with netjets, flexjet, jetsuite, and so on.

Being able to "cut it closer" is not just a function of predictability, but also of frequency and of the consequences for missing your intended departure. If I miss the local city bus, it's not a big deal, because I can get another one ten or fifteen minutes later for the same price, so I usually only get to the stop about 90 seconds before I need to be there. During rush hour, I get to the caltrain about 3-5 minutes early, and in the evenings, when the trains only run once an hour, I aim for 5-10 minutes. But if I miss a plane, the next flight might not be for 6 hours, and it could cost me an extra several hundred dollars. So even if the airport experience is made more time-efficient, the nature of the airline timetable will still result in people waiting in airports.

And this is, of course, another symptom of people valuing money more than time when it comes to air travel. Why are flights usually infrequent? Because airlines fly large airplanes less frequently rather than small airplanes more frequently, because it's cheaper. Why does it cost a lot of money to change your flight? Because airlines run their aircraft at close to 100% capacity, because it's cheaper.

Cut the average airliner size in half, increase the flight frequency by four, and average 50% full, and you'll have no problem missing a flight and getting on a later one. You'll also pay 3-4x as much for the ticket, of course.

Can major hub airports handle 4x the traffic of smaller planes vs large planes (I honestly don't know)? In the NYC area, in particular, air traffic congestion is a huge problem so "adding more flights" is not a practical option (unless those flights can be stacked more densely).

There have been many solutions proposed to this problem (usually expanding smaller, "nearby" airports) but it seems to me a better option would be to expand and improve regional passenger rail to reduce demand for short and medium-leg flights thus freeing capacity for longer distance flights.

> in a 175 mph airplane

What's that, an SR20?

The numbers are still reasonable but for the sake of completeness let's bear in mind the chance of a fatal crash in one of them is a full four times higher than flying commercial.

I think people make too big a deal about it - the drive to the airport is still probably the most dangerous part of the trip - but still. Damn piston engines!

A Skylane (Cessna 182) with a STC'd larger engine (PPonk O-520). It'll do 145-150 kts in the 4-8K feet range if you put the spurs to it. (I'm still breaking in the new engine, and that is best done at max continuous power: full throttle, 2700 RPM, in this case. At slightly more sane power settings post-break-in, I'll be doing 165-170 mph.)

The fatal rate is probably much worse than "only 4x". Per mile, all factors included, it's comparable to riding a motorcycle. Now, "all factors" includes running out of fuel, flying into weather beyond the capability of the plane or pilot, and CFIT, all of which the prudent pilot has some means to control/influence to a far greater extent than a motorcyclist does. Still, it's not for the completely risk-averse, and my wife hasn't yet let me fly with me and the kids (and without her), because she doesn't want to think about living after a possible 3-fatal scenario.

I borrowed a "crew car" (free, short term loaner car) yesterday to run an errand, and it was an old, clapped out Dodge Ram van that hadn't seen a tire balancer or front-end service in who knows how long. Driving that thing to/from the airport was almost certainly the most dangerous part of my travel... ;)

Better rail connections between airports and city centres would be another big one.

The Concorde was an engineering marvel, but it was more than just increasingly cheap transatlantic fares that did it in. Noise regulations prevented it from flying over the Continental US. Maintenance became increasingly expensive as the fleet aged. (The technical problems with its air intakes and tires caused safety issues, too.)

It's easy to say it's an entirely economic issue, but it isn't. The 2000 crash of Air France Flight 4590 shattered passenger confidence, the post-bubble recession meant fewer people had the disposable income to buy tickets, and the post-9/11 slump in air travel further reduced ticket sales.

The article really only convincingly explains why we don't have a replacement Concorde, not why the Concorde went out of service. Jet fuel is expensive. Today, airlines and aircraft manufacturers spend trillions of dollars to improve fuel efficiency to keep up with rising fuel prices.

It's not that we're too cheap, it's that the the industry was more interested in advances in conventional jet efficiency so that airlines could reap the benefit across a much, much larger fleet.

There's always a desire to wrap up complex and multifaceted decisions in a neat little package. I don't think it's possible to point to a single issue (economic or otherwise) that made supersonic transport unviable.

Skips over the whole sonic boom issue, which basically prevents supersonic flight over the USA, and probably Europe. Anything that limits a plane's routes is not good.

Exactly, this coupled with it's very limited range kept it from taking anything other than east-coast to Europe routes.

The article actually talks quite a bit about the additional challenges introduced when approaching Mach 1. Agreed, though, that additional regulations regarding those speeds weren't discussed.

It only really discussed the challenges from the plane's perspective, not the people on the ground when the plane broke the barrier.

The regulations are in place because sonic booms can be not only a nuisance to those on the ground, but destructive.

There is work being done on boom-less supersonic planes.

The comparison to the computer age made me think about this in a different light - travel is now less valuable because of the on-set of great telecommunications tools than it was even 50 years ago.

Today, huge deals can be negotiated largely over the phone/skype/webex/etc, making in person meetings less frequent. Therefore, if I can accomplish more by not traveling and communicating via Internet or phone, when I do travel, actual time spent flying is not as important, because I already made every effort to minimize travel in the first place, leaving only meetings that are truly worth it.

my thoughts exactly

we're already traveling at the speed of light

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768938

Nice article content, but why is pinchzoom disabled for mobile devices? What value could that possibly add?

Why is that even a feature of browsers? On my desktop I can zoom whenever, wherever I want. Why should it be any different on mobile...

Edit: In mobile safari I have a bunch of bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks) for enabling zoom, and to zoom the way desktop browsers do (increase text size and reflow text).

It's for websites that want to mimic apps.

Mimic apps that break on screen resolutions other than the tested ones?

If I recall correctly (I worked in the travel industry once), the price for a one-way from Paris to NYC was about 12K. An astonishing price, and you'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!

"[Y]ou'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!"

Nonesense! You could be a really well paid actor or a really well paid musician or maybe a politician on a junket or even an escort...

If they were to ask what improvements I (as a customer) want now, I'd tell them: - speed up the security checks, being advised to show up 2 hours before boarding is ridiculous - work on making the system more flexible so I don't have 2-3 hour delays.

Improving or reducing time for those two things would greatly improve my flying experience. Much more than cutting off 20% of my flight time. They shouldn't increase cost any more per ticket either.

Here the article forgets to mention airlines as an intermediary. Boeing and Airbus do not manufacture planes for us, they do it for the airlines. Airlines know that to make the most profit they need bigger and more fuel efficient planes over faster ones. And that's why we have them today.

Also, slightly unrelated: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_ever.... One of his points is interesting: if they had spent the billions of pounds on making the [eurostar] journey more enjoyable (by giving out free petrus served by models) than cutting travel time by a moderate amount, we'd all be asking for longer journey times! ... which _is_ what the article is saying: we don't want faster travel, we want more affordable and arguably more comfortable travelling.

Most Ted talks are baloney. But you're right on pointing the airlines as the cause. But for the same reason why mobile data took some 5yr to popularize... The middle man was too greedy

and totally unrelated, dammit hackernews, make those downvotes harder to click by mistake!

This is true, but misses the point that if another airline could enter the market with a desirable product, or an existing airline could add a fast service. The airline market is a highly competitive one, as all the vendors are distributing largely undifferentiated products The airlines and manufacturers regularly collaborate in the design of new aircraft.

You are correct, and a pattern has emerged: there are the airlines that differentiates themselves on service that is tied to their country of origin (Singapore Airlines vs Emirates, both fly A380, but definitely different feel to them), and then there are no-frills airlines.

The collaboration you speak of are mostly to do with cabin sizes, how many seats, which variants to make to satisfy the majority of customers -- these can all be changed when the main parts of the plane stay the same: e.g. fuselage, engine, etc. Rarely do an airline get Airbus/Boeing to change main parts of the planes: one exception is EasyJet when they bought an insane number (200?) of A320s from Airbus: Airbus made a fuselage specially designed for EasyJet that had more seats and they had to move their doors.

If you look at almost any modern airliner's development cycle, you will see that a significant period of time was spent simply developing the specifications in collaboration with the airlines. I am not familiar with any commercial jet that has been developed without commitments from airlines to buy it.

Even the DC-3 was developed in response to a request from TWA for something similar to the Boeing 247.

It's not about satisfying the needs of one or two airlines though. BA reportedly made a profit operating Concorde in the latter years: it was a very nice niche product for them. The British and French governments lost a fortune on a programme that only saw 14 aircraft ever delivered to end customers.

Compare that with the hundreds of new commercial aircraft orders today (it's the first day of the Paris Air Show) from aircraft with a more widespread demand. The A380 is regarded as a niche aircraft with not-entirely-satisfactory sales figures, and it confirmed 20 orders today to add to an existing order book of over 260

I was just flying for the first time in a decade last week and I saw an oversize tail on another plane while we were taxi-ing around the runway. The proportions struck me as non-obvious. That got me wondering if/how much we've begun to see data-mining/machine-learning algos and computational aero/fluid dynamics influence aircraft design.

E.g., genetic algorithms that vary the tail/wing/nose/etc. size/position and runs virtual designs through a simulator to see if various combinations perform better than others.

My next thought was, "how would you design the fitness function?". I.e., what are the right objective measures you can use to determine that one design is 'better' than another? I.e., How do you determine the optimal balance of speed vs. fuel efficiency vs. comfort/stability/safety vs. production/materials cost etc.?

Air travel is one of the least efficient and most polluting forms of travel. Going slower and burning less fuel is great, even if it isn't as fast as technically possible.

The 787 can get up to 100 miles per passenger per gallon. That's pretty good. On par with a 25 MPG car with four people in it.

Until you consider that car needs to drive a non-direct route. And stop and stay at hotels. And get food. And more gas. And all of that too has distribution costs and expenses. And takes significantly longer.

If you really want to take a 36 hour train trip across the US go right ahead. I'll take my 7 hour flight and enjoy my extra day there.

It depends what kind of trip you are taking. For some trips the journey is more important than the destination. I wouldn't trade my childhood road trips across the country in for the alternative.

You must have had a better trip (or a better car) than my folks did.

That's misleading. On CO2 per unit distance traveled air travel is pretty comparable to other forms of transportation. The long distances are what make the absolute contributions of air travel to CO2 emissions large.

It's not just CO2. Contrails have their own warming effect, and then there is local air pollution by airports.

Cars put out smog and non-CO2 air pollution, as well.

A fully loaded 747 uses considerably less fuel per passenger-mile than a car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transporta...

False.

A 65% full 737 produces 184 grams of CO2 per passenger mile. An 80% full 747 produces 162 gCO2/ per passenger mile. [1]

A car produces between 390 and 600 grams of CO2 per mile. [2]

So if your car is efficient, and you're carrying more then two people, you can barely beat the efficiency of 40+ year old aircraft.

[1] http://www.carbonindependent.org/sources_aviation.htm [2] http://www.carbonindependent.org/sources_car.htm

I just want to point out that those car CO2 figures don't go to very high fuel efficiency rates. I have a prius c (high on the efficiency scale, I know) and I just calculated about 290 grams of CO2 per mile (about 50mpg). Still not amazing, but a good bit better than 390g CO2/mile. That's just for one passenger as well.

Good point. Of course, modern 787s and A380s are also far more fuel efficient then then '60s and 70s era aircraft. According to Wikipedia, the 787 is 20% more efficient then a 767

People don't use cars to travel thousands of miles - especially as this topic was about speed of travel. So this per-mile statistic doesn't make flying any better as a form of travel. It's like comparing safety of moon rockets vs bicycling per mile of traveled.

Secondly, the co2 injected directly into the upper atmosphere has ~3x the warming effect as co2 emissions released by cars.

If we look at an hour of flying vs an hour of driving, the air traveler contributes 20-30x as much to global warming.

Of course 1-2 passanger car travel is horrendously bad as well, especially if you do it daily...

Let's see, flying on the Concorde cuts the transatlantic flight time in half, but you still have to deal with getting yourself and your luggage on and off the plane. So, the time savings isn't that great. The plane isn't as comfortable as first class on a bigger, slower jet. Supersonic or not, it takes a day to fly transatlantic. People that can afford Concorde flights can afford chartered flights, or have their own jet.

Well, when you consider that round trip tickets from the NY area to Chicago were going for $280 and now they are $360, the difference can make anyone think twice, especially if you are doing this 3 or more times a year and for 2 ppl. The cost per person + car rental + gas + hotel costs add up to much more than the math for driving (even with hotel, car, and gas costs), such that driving, although slower, becomes a money saving option. I would think that most people travel within the country they live in, and mostly for vacation, so paying more money to get to the destination faster, is not a good option vs saving the $ and getting there a little later. Then business people don't care to be at a location earlier for longer, they just want to go do what they have to do and call it a day of work, even if they only actually worked 1 hr and traveled the rest.

Unless emergencies or extreme situations, I do not see much incentive for people to want to pay more to be at a close location faster. This is somewhat of a bummer for ppl who would like to travel at high speeds, but think about it, it is definitely expensive.

The one route where supersonic probably makes sense is trans-pacific. Still no sonic boom, and would turn travel from "a complete day wasted both directions" to something better. Especially for something like NYC-HKG, if you could solve the sonic boom issue (although most of it is over Canada or oceans; not sure about the inland China part)

We're not nearly cheap enough: The plane ticket price doesn't capture the cost of flying, the majority of which comes from the greenhouse gas emissions. Further working in the wrong direction is the tax freeness of jet fuel and the 2-3x amplified effect of co2 when injected directly to the upper atmosphere.

Also, there's a huge difference between trading off high-value time for middling-value-time, versus actually spending the time. If I'm using my time on the plane to read or catch up on sleep or prepare for my presentation, it is less important to me that my flight be over quickly.

I would pay more and tolerate slower flying times if the trade off was a less hellish flying experience. The TSA sucks. Flight attendants suck and the seats suck. Airport public transportation is usually lousy.

In fact I often tolerate substantially longer travel times to ride on Amtrak rather than deal with the nightmare that is modern air travel.

Agreed, for most of my trips, especially if I could reliably get work done.

Odd: this one was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago as https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2.

It looks like medium.com uses a label/tag system, so an article can be discovered by looking at the "lift and drag" label or the "roaming the earth" label, for example:

https://medium.com/roaming-the-earth/7885a299bca2

Problem with Concorde was not price but reliability. They were dangerous to pilot and felt a few times, imagine that uncontrolled thing falling on some poor village? money is not the issue, usually, otherwise military would still fly a "Black bird", right? Technological challenges, like temperature of jets and ability to stay in control if something goes wrong is more important. If your Boing looses an engine, you will still land it. Try that with Concord.

Moving around the world is something that has always been ridiculously expensive, and the price comparators hardly help, they just add noise.

So yeah, it is about price, and if that problem is ever solved THEN people will discuss speed and other bonuses.

It's like piss poor managers pushing agile when their developers don't even have a computer. Priorities matter.

The fuel used to fly does not only cost money to buy but also costs environment to burn. I am quite happy if people are cheap when it comes to the environment. It is more likely that they are watching their wallets instead but in this rare case that seems to be win-win.

I wonder if something like this could be used for round-the-world passenger transportation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

I recently enrolled in ClearMe. So... for about $15 per month, I get to skip the security line at SFO. For a couple of bucks, I reduced my SFO portion of the trip time by about 20 mins. Much more economical.

Virgin America's entire fleet has Wifi (though it's not eh fastest) and AC outlets. (Other carriers only have wifi on select flights.)

What's my rush again?

While faster flights would be nice, he is right in that price is more of a priority than speed. Besides, an even bigger concern would be safety.

It is in the interests of airlines to have longer flights to maximise in flight spending. Customers never had a say in this. Most people probably spend more time in customs than on the plane anyway. A 20% decrease of air time isn't that big of a deal to most.

I am very skeptical of this. The cost of fuel should dwarf the chance to buy an extra sandwich. Cite?

I'm not sure I buy this. I think it's in the airlines' interests to minimize costs (fuel) by flying as efficiently as possible (maybe slower - maximizing air-time). I would be surprised if in-flight spending increased meaningfully over a flight that is ~15% longer.

Yeah, I strongly doubt that in-flight spending on concessions and duty-free catalogs pays for the jet fuel expended over any appreciable time period during the flight.

Is inflight spending that big of a profit center for airlines? I would think that being able to do (for example) 20% more trips full of paying customers in the same span of time would be far more profitable for the airline.

Given that flight crews have government-mandated work hour limits and most crew members are paid hourly, it would take a lot of WiFi and drink sales to make-up even the labor costs of an artificially lengthened flight.

Very cool - you can see Mach diamonds in the picture of the X1.

No, the airline charge too much for the service. If the service was economically worth it for it value it provided there would be a market for it.

One word: Hyperloop.

Sorry buddy, Superman can go much faster than mach five.

I'm also too cheap for bullet trains. Lots of people cheer-lead for high speed rail in America, but all I want is normal trains that run quite frequently.

Enjoy your 36 hour commute across the US.

I was thinking more like Philadelphia to Charlotte.

Currently takes 6 hours by airplane. I don't see a bullet train beating that.

OTOH, there are a number of < 1500 km routes that could easily be served by train, if we didn't have some of the worst train service in the world. Bullet trains would be nice, but require new grading in many cases. I too would be happy just to get our old train network back.

Depending on what your routes and usage, higher speed is better than more frequent service.

For example, let's say your options are a 2 hour train that runs hourly, and an hour long ride that departs every other hour.

* Fast train: best case, 1 hour. Worst case, 2:59. Average case - about 2 hours. * Slow train: best case, 2 hours. Worst case: 2:59. Average case - about 2.5 hours.

Of course this is one example - but there are definitely cases where increased speed is strictly better than increased frequency. (Unless being on the train is better than whatever you could be doing waiting for the train)

Not to mention if the trains are faster you will need fewer trains to transport the same number of people in the same time interval.

The reality though is that high speed trains aren't nearly as fast as you'd think from the claims of 250-300 km/h top speeds. Particularly in Germany, 130kph average speed on a route is very good. Replacing a 100kph train with a 130kph train doesn't make an enormous difference. In order to get double the usual speed, you need to have totally dedicated tracks, end-to-end, and they haven't done that in most places. Having trains run more often makes a huge difference in convenience and also allows you to not worry too much about missing your train.

They have done that on a lot of routes in France.

For almost 30 years there was a really fast way to fly, but we didn’t buy enough Concorde tickets to keep it going (I didn’t buy a single one).

Over 30 years, we've gone from IBM PC to rMBP: about a hundred times the pixels, a thousand times faster processor speed, a million times more memory, a billion times more storage - all for 1/3rd the price. The physics involved could accommodate such an improvement. If we had likewise focused on travel speed instead of cost, methinks we would not have achieved NYC-to-London travel in 25 seconds.

Yeah, so... NY to London is 25 seconds is about 500,000 mph (~Mach 650) average.

Perspective: Mach 32 gets you to escape velocity, and the nuclear manhole-cover (which may have been the fastest manmade object ever) is estimated as somewhere north of Mach 200 or so. That's right: not even an atomic bomb can get you the kind of speed you're asking for. :P

Hmm. Assume an even acceleration profile, with your first 12.5s accelerating and the second 12.5s decelerating, 1 million MPH peak. That's ~1800 times the force of gravity. Forget physics; the biology involved can't accomodate such an improvement. :P In fact, you could probably put a floor on the travel time from anywhere to anywhere by assuming passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations.

That's my point: physics+biology just aren't conducive to anything close to a comparable increase in travel speed short of teleportation (read "Flash Crowds" as an interesting tangent). As others note, the best tolerable improvement in travel time is lost amid the fixed overhead of embarking/disembarking times getting people to and on the vehicle.

passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations

Assuming continuous 1G acceleration (halfway there, reverse thrust thereafter), NYC-to-London would peak at 1200km/h with travel time of 34 minutes. Ignoring overhead, that's about 1/15th the time for subsonic travel now; an impressive improvement for sure, yet still paltry when comparing computing improvements.

Flipping the original argument and blathering on, consider if computing improvements over 30 years led to just a 72MHz processor as commercial top-of-the line: indeed in general we'd favor cost over speed. Likewise, the cost of a one-way London-NYC flight has plummeted from a quarter of one's annual salary to just a couple days' pay, a drop around two orders of magnitude; availability is also an issue, with comparable flights happening thousands of times daily at relatively amazing convenience, vs limited to a couple hundred per year.

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