Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
antipope.org
antipope.org
I don't understand the conclusion, given the points. It's a very pessimistic essay about the future, where all air travel is horrible and nobody will want to fly. I don't buy it.
1. Concorde was on the verge of being replaced by a more efficient Model B version, which was quieter and cheaper to run. That was on the drawing board in the 1970s. Model C, D, E versions would have been cheaper and even more cost effective.
2. Concorde was actually killed by anticompetitive US politics. The story is too complex to detail here, but it's not a mystery in the aerospace biz.
3. If Stross thinks bizjets kill airliners, what's to stop the development of a hypersonic bizjet to give buyers the best of all possible worlds, and also provide the ultimate status symbol for those who care about such things?
4. Trrrrism? This part can be ignored, because the argument is silly.
5. Energy cost remains an issue. But if you're in the (literally) stratospheric biz set, you're not going to care about that.
6. Telepresence may kill some of the market, because I'm guessing 15 years from now it's going to be impressively immersive. But for some applications, including highly secure negotiations and ultra-speedy courier services, there's still no substitute for being there.
So in fact there's a perfectly viable, if innovative, business case, and the technology is looking at least potentially feasible.
I wouldn't be surprised to see these services running before 2030.
To put things into perspective, Bombardier have 243 net orders for the CSeries (an aircraft comparable in size if not capability) before the aircraft has been certified for commercial use. And the programme - involving comparatively simple technological innovation - isn't considered particularly commercially successful.
Yes, the US government's decision to limit its ability to operate in US airspace didn't help Concorde. And neither did the equivalent Soviet airliner spectacularly exploding at an air show. Or rising fuel costs. But what reason does any madman with enough billions to get a hypothetical hypersonic aircraft built and certified for commercial operations have to think that the same won't happen again?
1. re: First class dying. The reason is that, aside from some of the really high-end international options on e.g. Emirates, business class has effectively become first class. In general, today's business class accommodations are significantly better than first class in the old days with lie flat seats and personal entertainment systems.
2. Concorde was always pretty much a niche market. Saving a few hours in a comfortable first class seat is not a big win for just about anyone unless you're a high-priced lawyer doing an out and back to London for a day.
Together those three were what caused the towel to be thrown into the ring. Every time I visit Paris and I see it impaled on its stand it reminds me of a butterfly or something trying to escape. Such a sad image.
Yeah, congress only banned SSTs and supersonic civilian flight right as concorde came online, that can't have had any impact on it.
It's no coincidence it's main routes (London->JFK, Paris ->JFK) are 90% over the Ocean.
If you actually managed to get long distance hypersonic routes (such as London->Sydney, or even London->Beijing, London->Tokyo, etc.) at a significant time reduction, I can see it working.
America has often used sly tactics to crush superior British technology.
The thing with rockets and jets and the like is that they aren't going to rapidly improve, they are fundamentally limited by chemistry and simple hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense.
He assumes that technologically it will be practical, perhaps to a point that it's comparable to existing prices for high-end seats on a plane.
Even so, he points out that the security risks mean that it will never happen from existing airports, and that any time saved on suborbital flight will be used up taking the train back to the major city.
He gives a real-world example of the Concorde intercontinental routes being ditched... they didn't make enough money.
Rich people who can afford this want to go to LA and New York and Paris. Not New Mexico, rural Maine, and Scotland.
> It's a very pessimistic essay about the future, where all air travel is horrible and nobody will want to fly. I don't buy it.
Have you flown recently?
Then comes down to the other point, who does most of the traveling anyway? Those with the money and the time to do so. Hence why I would scoff as much at the LA to SF bullet trains as at hypersonic passenger planes. Neither will be cheap enough for the average person to just hop on and the average person probably doesn't have all that free time not already assigned out to use them. Getting somewhere faster is meaningless when you don't have the time to be there.
As for the terrorism angle, until you remove the ability to pilot the vehicle on board it always a possibility, more hollywood than fact though
I spend most of my time in meetings or calls and there is always a certain awkwardness that comes with not being in the same room, people are a lot less warm and you lose the little interactions that make us relate to each other.
On the other hand, I hate spending weeks in-between airports, and any kind of technology initiatives that improve long-distance travel sound great to me. There's definitely a market for this.
I might be alone, but I like that policy.
First off flight times are gate to gate (not airport to airport) so while the flight time is known and quantifiable there are a great many "ground issues" which are not. For example, the gate's motor malfunctions, push-back is delayed (while they "manually" move the gate back), and the aircraft misses its take-off slot.
The nice part about building in 10 minutes extra is that worst case scenario you arrive EARLY and you have to kick around for 10 minutes. Best case, you arrive on the stated time and your expectations are met.
Regardless this seems win/win. They're better meeting or exceeding your expectations more of the time, and the only cost is that you aren't able to min/max your travel quite to the same extent (e.g. build in even shorter transfers between flights).
Currently the minimum authorised transfer window is around 30 minutes for most airlines. While at some airports 30 minutes is fine (Dallas) at others it is terrible (Chicago). Arriving on time in the latter type of airports is a "must" if you want to make your second flight at all.
Are you sure about that? Landing from orbit consists mostly of deceleration. If you manage to skip that, it's as dangerous as a meteorite. Fuel tanks are not needed when you have sheer kinetic energy.
1) slow enough to be relatively safe
or
2) fast enough to cause disintegration of a craft designed for atmosphere re-entry.
I have no aerospace knowledge, so in the absence of anyone doing the maths, I'm going to go with "maybe so, maybe not".
If you respond as if the hijackers are suicide bombers, when they really only want a ransom, then you risk some or all of the hostages getting injured or dyeing, as well as the potential for the plane, which would otherwise have landed safely, to crash into a populated area as the hijackers are distracted from piloting the plane, or the passenger may decide to be heroes and take over (crashing either deliberately or by accident).
Eight years ago, you could have made an equivalent list about electric cars. Well, we have electric cars now and that situation is looking pretty good.
Imagine you are an Elon-Musk-alike who wants to make fast air travel happen. Then this article isn't a list of why it's impossible, it is a list of problems you need to solve in order to make it work. I think we have enough examples in recent years to show that if someone with sufficient inventiveness attacks the problem hard, many of these kinds of things really are solvable.
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.
I believe that the phrase is "functionally equivalent to a kinetic impact weapon".
I think that Mr Stross has relaxed his thinking on sub-orbital hypersonic craft, i.e. he suggests that they might actually be allowed, but only if they come down far from a desirable location.
There was, briefly, a rather grand project implementing a "fast ferry" between Toronto (Canada) to Rochester (New York). This cut the previously 3-hour drive around the intervening lake down to about 30-45 minutes, and included the luxury of enjoying the view/bar/games/social. Price wasn't bad (comparable to gas cost for the long trip), but certainly not trivial. Anyone coming to Rochester discovered "they come down far from a desirable location": having no personal transportation immediately available, it was upwards of an hour to take a bus from the port to downtown Rochester - turning an ~80% reduction in travel time to ~40%. The project was scrapped - twice[1] - after enormous expense.
When throwing lots of money at diminishing returns, encroachments on those returns are very costly.
[1] - There was huge political capital invested in the ferry's success. Upon completion, ridership was dismal and the project went bankrupt within a couple months and the boat went up for auction (few want such a specialized vessel). City-scale egos intervened and bought the boat back (!) at the auction, pressed it back into service. The mayor et al were promptly voted out of office, and the replacement sold the boat and permanently shut the project down.
Like, the plane is always landed from the ground, not the air. That idea introduces new problems, but you can start thinking about those too. Come on, people.
If something like the Sabre existed I can guarantee that high net-worth people in Europe/America with urgent business meetings (or a desire to maximise their holiday) in Australia would use it even if it meant needing to charter a helicopter to/from the space port to the centre of the city. Whether or not there would be enough demand to keep a regularly scheduled service going is another question. Stross is right when he says it's hard to see how it could compete with existing air transport options between shorter range locations (e.g. London - New York).
Sabre (or similar) would have advantages for New York (or London) to Beijing though, so, who knows, in another 10 or 20 years maybe there will be enough demand for a few well chosen scheduled routes. In any case, I don't buy the terrorism angle at all. The problem will be (as is often the case in commercial aviation) finding and pricing route(s) to produce a viable passenger yield. Tricky if the only routes that make sense are long-haul ones with a high density of frequent first class business flyers (that's a pretty small pool).
You don't need a fighter jet to intercept it from the point it came from. It's that simple.
"and indeed, active radar can't even track it effectively"
Without providing any reason why, I doubt it. Oh I think it's using "active radar" as "secondary radar". Also primary radar can detect it. No problem.
And airliners cross the ocean without much radar coverage TODAY, so there's that as well.
Not to mention it can only fly at high speeds on high altitudes. You CAN'T come at Mach 5 or whatever and fly it on a building. Your plane will disintegrate first.
Business jets make actual sense when you're doing a multi-stop itinerary, lots of last-minute changes, and flying into secondary and tertiary airports. They make a lot less sense for hub to hub intercontinental flights.
You could solve all the security issues of intercepting a supersonic aircraft by having a failsafe override (optionally self-destruct). No need to build a Mach 5 interceptor when you can do it at c.
In general, there is an economic optimum for most solutions. It's fuzzy because factors like comfort come into play. But it's there. It's a company's job to find it.
Clearly you've never travelled with a two year old =)
There are many cases where travel just isn't worth it, and the limiting factor is time rather than money.
The key to all future transport seems to be turning it away from disciplined travel as the primary activity. Doesn't matter if its bizjets or cruise ships or trains or my crazy balloon idea.
A cultural moving away from "travel for 4 hours strapped into a seat in a car or old fashioned airplance" but "hang out at the bar for 8 hours or play video games or post on facebook for 8 hours, or join the mile high club all night, oh, and at the same time as traveling from pt A to pt B but its not the primary activity"
As for the limiting factor being time, rather than money, Stross's article gives good examples of there not being enough people willing to pay the exorbitant costs.
There were about 18000 returns filed with the IRS above that AGI in 2010 according to some google searches.
Honestly I don't think there's enough people in the world at that income level to develop and sell.
Its also based heavily on the cultural assumption that nothing can be accomplished while traveling. Its not like they're being sedated and put into restraints for all 22 hours of that flight.
Its fairly telling about the mentality of the board in general that the only use "we" can discuss for a "magic people mover" is a plaything for the ultra-rich. Because god only knows, they don't have enough favorable treatment over us mere proles, and they don't have enough other playthings to toy with. Kind of like the military industrial complex sycophants can't think of any reason for a vehicle to exist other than to drop a bomb from it or mount a gun on it. Some slightly more socially acceptable ideas for a passenger suborbital would be "extreme medivac" where no matter where you are on the planet if you get horrifically sick you're at the CDC isolation ward in 3 hours, "instant medical supply delivery" when you really really need a donor organ across the planet in 3 hours, and "extreme blue collar" like ship both a special factory floor machine tool part and a technician from the plant to install it because many factory floors cost far more than $40K/day if they're shut down.
Getting the size right is a problem I'm glad I don't have, but best not to make it too small or have too few flights bearing in mind your dollar development costs will be measured in 10s of billions.
We may not see sub-orbital airliners for a long time, but those working on early analysis now can make a comfortable living on it.
It's sad that the 747-400 which was introduced in 1988 is still the fastest commercial aircraft currently.
Aviation reminds me of the Formula 1 of the skies in its current rule set! (All about fuel saving)
There were faster in that time, but they all went out of business.
Goals in greater efficiently have never been as exciting as goals for greater speed (with disregard for efficiency).
Now for what I feel was one of his bad arguments:
"None of today's military aircraft are up to the job of intercepting it, and indeed, active radar can't even track it effectively—for that, you'd need something on the order of a cold war ballistic missile warning radar system, designed to provide advance notice of an ICBM strike."
In one sentence he outlines both the problem and the solution. Doesn't the west already have missile defense systems?
When people list problems, I see temporary obstacles. Even mountains can be overcome: http://www.odditycentral.com/news/dashrath-manjhi-the-man-wh...
Once we are talking about traveling to a destination and not simply going "straight" up and down, the costs, maintenance issues, safety requirements, development time, thermal management, mission management, guidance systems, etc., get within spitting distance of actually developing an orbital vehicle.
Future technology improvements and cost reductions cannot be ruled out, of course, but given the basic physics and what we know of the near future of aerospace technology, it seems a stretch (at least) to expect a profitable, safe point-to-point suborbital system to be a viable undertaking.
And once we are talking about orbital systems, where the cost and risk/reward equation at least seem to be more desirable and unrelated to point-to-point travel, the question of suborbital point-to-point fades into the background.
Today, I can buy a ticket for about the same price as dinner for two, maybe three. Back in the day say the 50s and 60s it was only the elite who could purchase a ticket because the rates were so expensive. Then, bus travel ala Greyhound was the way to go for long distance travel before commercial airlines really became more affordable.
ADDENDUM: okay maybe a really nice dinner for two or three.
As for sociopolitical factors, well it might not matter at all at the rate we're going. As soon as a suicide bomber gets hold of a nuke, it's pretty much all over. From then on martial law will be the rule of the land(s), and no one will be doing much of anything.
But the author's points about competition from subsonic high-end flights, as well as the potential for high fidelity video conference systems of the future to compete, are more compelling.
The rest always gets the bad end of the stick. But it will happen in a few generations. That and Mars.