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According to Wikipedia, Air Nostrum "currently operates as a franchisee of Iberia as Iberia Regional [...]. Air Nostrum operates 91 domestic and international r

• sofixa 4y ago
  Especially considering Spain already has a serious high speed rail network.
  • arethuza 4y ago
    They fly to a lot of places outside of Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Air_Nostrum_destinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Air_Nostrum_destinatio... Even within Spain the Balearic islands and Canary islands are very popular destinations and probably not going to be on any high speed rail network any time soon. :-)
    • _visgean 4y ago
      Hmm according to this https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/our-aircraft/faq/ https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/our-aircraft/faq/ the max speed is 130kph, distance from valencia to palma is about 270km so its about 2 hour flight. Its 7:40 by ferry and 55m by plane... So this seems like a very good route for this type of aircraft. They also have good comparisons here: https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/news-and-media/overview/insights/airlander-10-will-provide-a-new-option-for-regional-travel/ https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/news-and-media/overview/in...
      • arethuza 4y ago
        I've flown between Tenerife and La Gomera and El Hiero a few times - I was curious if they did the inter island flights, which I don't think they do. Edit: I suspect the idea of flying around in airships looking up a huge volcano is just reminding me of Red|Green|Blue Mars.
  • jslaD 4y ago
    Yes, with a serious ticket price also. For most destinations inside the country, flights are cheaper (and faster, obviously).
    • ciberado 4y ago
      Considering the time you spend in airport, for < 500Km is usually faster and more convenient to use the train if you can. That is my experience in Spain, at least.
  • ricardobayes 4y ago
    Yes however this network is organized in a star layout, meaning there are few connections between the outer cities. If all you want is to visit Madrid from the coast, sure. But going from one coastal city to another, that's not happening. And don't get me started on the rail network towards Portugal.
    • froidpink 4y ago
      It is almost ridiculous that there's no easy rail connection between Madrid and Lisbon. I assume it's because, when push comes to shove, the governments never come to agree on who pays for what
      • bobthepanda 4y ago
        There was a plan that got derailed due to the European financial crisis which affected both countries.
    • roelschroeven 4y ago
      Sounds just like the TGV in France. Nice to travel between Paris and Bordeaux or Marseille for example, but travel between Bordeaux and Marseille would require going via Paris. It's hardly worth the name 'network' really. That's not even talking about the fact that the lines don't even all connect to each other at Paris. They often terminate in different stations necessitating cumbersome travel from one station to the other.
      • sofixa 4y ago
        That's a bit of a negative look. It's true that some city pairs are really poorly linked (e.g. Marseille / Bordeaux, it's just a regular slow train), however for many others the Paris-centric network is perfectly fine. Lille / Rennes / Bordeaux / Lyon / / Reims / Marseille going by Paris is not that much of an issue (direct high speed links between those wouldn't be financially worth it). The direct trains, which bypass the city of Paris itself and go on the Interconnection ring road, with its suburban (Massy, Marne la Vallée and CDG Airport) train stations, aren't frequent enough and that needs to be improved. The direct links between some cities also need improving, but there simply wouldn't be enough traffic for direct high speed rail for most city pairs.
  • BonitaPersona 4y ago
    It isn't serious for the very simple and immediately nullifying fact that it doesn't run the coast. If you check the population centers in Spain, it clearly should have the form of a bike wheel (full circle and radials), but it is an asterisk.
• Aaargh20318 4y ago
  > Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports The thing with air travel vs. trains is that with air travel you only need infrastructure at the origin and destination. This makes it fairly easy to add new routes. By contrast, for a train you need infrastructure all the way from origin to destination, necessarily crossing other types of infrastructure (e.g. roads and canals) which requires the construction of bridges and/or tunnels. The land also needs to be acquired and, depending on length, will likely require dealing with hundreds or thousands of existing land owners. If there is an existing rail line, that may help, depending on spare capacity. Adding additional tracks may also be slightly less difficult than constructing an entirely new track, assuming the existing property is wide enough to accommodate the additional track(s). A port for an airship is probably even easier to realise than a normal airport, as you don't need a long runway.
  • smcl 4y ago
    While it's true that if you are connecting a completely disconnected city to a network then you'll need to lay some new track to ensure you can get there to the intended destinations. But if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple. There may be reasons to add or update infrastucture, but not every pair of connected cities needs its own dedicated track
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple Trains accelerate slowly. Adding stops non-linearly increases travel time [1]. A few extra stops might thus make total travel time by train meaningfully more than by air. [1] https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-train-acceleration/ https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-...
      • smcl 4y ago
        Well yeah it's not the case that one can add a single line to connect a completely new destination to an existing rail network and everything will scale perfectly, but I didn't claim that. And as long as we're talking in abstract we can construct scenarios where one is faster or better. However my read the original comment was that that adding a new connection involves adding new infrastructure, which isn't always true. See the new European overnight routes that opened up post-Covid and which operate on the existing track
• horseAMcharlie 4y ago
  Although it is a cliché at this point, a carbon tax would allow the market to efficiently balance these two concerns.
  • have_faith 4y ago
    Assumedly, the price of air travel would go up, making it only available to to the middle class and above?
    • kubb 4y ago
      Political suicide.
    • FabHK 4y ago
      If air travel pollutes too much, and the goal is to reduce air travel, how else do you want to regulate it except by price? By restricting the number of flights one may take, or have a government office where one can apply for flight permits? That has not worked too well, historically. However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it. (That would still mean that the rich will fly as much as they want, but at least they'll pay the poor that don't travel for the privilege.)
      • froidpink 4y ago
        There are two ways to price carbon from the government point of view. One of them is a pure carbon tax on all carbon emitting sources, which is regressive: it will affect poorer people more while affluent people can just conveniently pay more to emit the CO2 they need. The other way is by specifically increasing taxes on income and wealth and using that money to invest in decarbonisation - for the most part by making solar, wind (and in some cases nuclear) cheaper, which eventually makes carbon more expensive in relative terms. Governments these days tend to focus on the second way, either because it's progressive and therefore perceived as fairer, or because they see the alternative as political suicide (Macron's Gillet Jaunes appeared because of a proposed carbon tax on petrol)
      • 4y ago
• eb0la 4y ago
  You cannot build a train track to Balearic or Canary islands. In fact, some islands like Minorca have very little flights except during summer. Sometimes it cheaper to fly from London to Minorca airport than from Madrid or Barcelona. I have traveled MAD-LGW-MAH (and stayed in london 1-2 days) because flight+hoter was cheaper than MAD-MAH.
  • pier25 4y ago
    Yeah absolutely. This would be great for the Balearic islands.
  • ForHackernews 4y ago
    It's cheaper to fly from Newcastle to London via Spain than it is to take the train: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/30/student-flies-london-via-spain-cheaper-train/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/30/student-flies-lo... TBH, we need to tax the hell out of short-haul airfare to stop nonsense like this. If you want people to make eco-friendly choices, the prices need to reflect externalities and real costs.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      this is called market failure and its what happens when you privatise a natural monopoly
• moffkalast 4y ago
  > the extra infrastructure that needs to be built A small landing spot on each end vs. tearing up the entire countryside, building tunnels and bridges, displacing thousands of people for an extra rail track? Yeah, no.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I think if people figure out carbon neutral ways to fly from A to B that are not too expensive, that would be preferable to trains. Installing rail is expensive and takes a lot of time. These air ships look like they should do the job. Train connections in Spain are nice though. I took a high speed train between Valencia and Madrid two weeks ago. Pretty nice experience. They have two generations of high speed trains in Spain. On the way to Madrid, the train was doing around 245 km/h between the two stops more or less consistently. It took a bit under two hours. On the way back, I had a different train that did 300 km/h over the same track. That train arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule even in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Total distance is 360 km (give or take). Both trains did their top speed most of the time and stopped twice. The average speed over that distance is well over 200 km/h for the newer train. That's way faster than the top speed of most normal trains and about the same as a small airplane would do (like a Cessna cruising at 110 knots/hour). And that's factoring in that getting in and out of the big cities takes some time before it can accelerate. You lose 5-10 minutes on both sides going relatively slowly. The in between stops take a few minutes as well but it gets back up to speed quickly. That kind of speed is not possible everywhere. You need special tracks and not too many detours/stops along the way. Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly country side outside of the big cities. High speed trains in Germany are a very different game. There are only a handful of proper high speed connections where the train can actually hit its maximum speed. Mostly it never gets over 160 km/h. Still, it's alright when you have the option.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    > Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly countryside Every time there is free real estate, “let’s use it for terraforming.” No. Let’s admit we are overpopulated and return more land to nature, before nature and wars do it naturally. It’s not because Spain is a half desert of sand that it’s not important for the Earth. I live in France and I’m appalled that our ideology is both to be a welcome land for immigrants and “The young generation doesn’t have housing, let’s densify habitat and make fields constructible! It’s a human right!” It’s a human right in direct contradiction with our kids’ human rights.
    • 4y ago
• themitigating 4y ago
  Will people use the trains? Trains already exist between European cities and people still choose to fly
  • spaniard89277 4y ago
    You can't go everywhere by train. I can't do Santiago -> Barcelona for example, I have to go through Madrid.
• pier25 4y ago
  > Decarbonizing short haul flights is great, but wouldn't trains be better suited for this purpose? Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports which will be served by these airships - concrete production also generates a lot of CO2... In terms of infrastructure wouldn't building railways, rail stations, and trains use a lot more resources and time?
  • TSiege 4y ago
    Short term vs long term. Trains will always be more energy efficient than planes. Once everything become electrified, we'll need to be smarter with what we use our energy for. Does it make sense to waste it on lifting something into the air or sailing it across metal?
    • pier25 4y ago
      But these are not really planes?
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      Term length matters since we have only a few decades to decarbonize. Moreover, bouyancy doesn't require energy to generate lift, so you can't make a naive "is it more efficient to sail across metal or lift into the air" comparison.
  • RugnirViking 4y ago
    I would be interested in an answer to your question because I suspect it may be less obvious than you think. It could go either way, especially given how rare airship handling equipment/staff is, not to mention helium gas & associated supply chain.
• moralestapia 4y ago
  Trains require infra which is prohibitively expensive nowadays. Also trains don't just go anywhere, while airships can fly to Ibiza.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    We arent gonna survive the next century if we cannot sort out our inability to build infrastructure.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      Sometimes people want to go where infrastructure isn't, and shouldn't be necessary either. We aren't going to survive the next century if every time someone wants to go from A to B, someone suggests that what we actually need is to spend years, billions of dollars and tonnes of carbon building infrastructure suitable for regular journeys between those points
• vvillena 4y ago
  The airships will probably be used to fly between islands in the Balearic and Canary archipelagos. Those routes are currently served by small propeller planes. One big advantage of the airships is that there's no need to have them land at standard airports, which will allow to serve multiple destinations in any given island.
• frr149 4y ago
  Yes, and Spain has the largest high speed train network after China. Too bad our power plants run mostly on natural gas...
• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Trains don't serve islands.
  • LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    Japan want's to have a word with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel