22 ms·

Time to end the speed limit in US airspace?

225 points by danboarder 4y ago

noja 4y ago
"..there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority." -> benefit a minority?
gamblor956 4y ago
No justification is given for ending the ban. Supersonic places are expensive enough that supersonic flight will be the exclusive domain of the wealthy for years. I'm okay with not having to deal with the booms if it means the wealthy are stuck flying the same speed as the rest of us.
- chrisbrandow 4y ago
  The obvious retort is that many modern conveniences began as expensive goods that we eventually figured out how to scale, or make more cheaply. It’s not as obvious that this counter-argument is robust, given the known history that we have with the Concord3. But if the economic is won’t work out, they won’t work out. But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things. And I say that as someone who thinks we should be taxing the wealthy at much higher rates than we do.
  - nrb 4y ago
    > But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things Isn't this exactly a case of everyone having fewer nice things (such as peace and quiet) for the sake of a convenience for the very few? The author seems to actually propose a noise level of 90 PLdB with a straight face.
a0zU 4y ago
Even disregarding the sonic boom, why would we even want mediocre civil pilots to have access to aircraft thag are necessarily more dangerous and more destructive in the event of a crash?
- avidiax 4y ago
  Planes usually crash at takeoff and landing, hence supersonic or not doesn't matter for that case. Crashing at any other time, sure, there is potentially more energy in a supersonic plane. I doubt that people on the ground will know the difference between a plane crashing on them at 600mph vs 1200mph.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
What an amazing scientific experiment: "we flew a fighter jet over a Texas city to purposely annoy people, and asked how annoyed they were." Followed by: "only 17 people rated 'very annoyed' so that's a win." No mention of the number of people who put down any other annoyance level...
- dasil003 4y ago
  I'm sure they also have an airtight statistical regression to determine how annoyed people will be when it's happening 30 times a day!
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    In the NYC metro they have a capacity to launch 4200 flights a day, and to my understanding it’s about 3000 in actuality. So! Enjoy!
- hughw 4y ago
  And annoyed people won't be able to like, move away from Galveston and get away from it. It's going to be over the whole country. Several times a day. I could see suicides rising.
- charles_f 4y ago
  Immediately discarded by "and some people are always gonna be annoyed so f- those people".
rickydroll 4y ago
While I don't worry about the impact of sonic booms on humans, and were concerned about the impact on the rest of the natural world. Like low-level sonic booms, light pollution was never considered to be a big issue but eventually crossed the threshold where it now has significant negative impact on animals insects and plants. My concern is that once little sonic booms become commonplace and we start noticing the impact on the natural world, there will be too much money in play to stop the damage. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00665-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00665-7 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8322 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8322 [edit] just remembered another low-level fact that people did not think was important. Jet contrails significantly increase high-level cloud cover which alters weather patterns and holds more heat in the atmosphere. A simple change in flightpath by modifying altitude by couple thousand feet can eliminate 80% or more of cultural formation but the airlines won't do it because of the small amount of additional money it would cost.
jmclnx 4y ago
Well I am old enough to remember the Sonic Booms. We would get a warning in the local newspaper (sometimes) and as kids we will watch outside waiting for the boom and try and find the plane. We lived fairly close to a base that would test these planes. But, some people's windows would crack and some would break due to the boom, which they had to pay for. So, if this limit is changed, will the aircraft owners pay people for their broken windows. Back then seeing a plane at any speed was not common event. Now you look up at just about any time of day and the chances are very good (like 90%+) you can find a plane.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Can I ask; roughly speaking, how old are you? (Or rather: when was this?)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smolder 4y ago
    This is pretty easy to deduce given GP was a kid in the time leading up to the 1973 rule.
    - lambdaba 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - tiedieconderoga 4y ago
        Oof. I really hope we aren't moving towards a world where people start to copy/paste verbose AI-generated paragraphs without checking the results. Especially not to answer simple questions like, "about how old is someone who was a child 50+ years ago?" The AI's guess is off by about a decade. If GP remembers multiple booms, they were probably at least 10 by the 1973 ban. Most people can't recall memories back to the moment of their birth, but LLMs often ignore nuanced contextual facts like that. Or maybe this is another case of the model living a few years in the past, since there's a lag in being trained on new data. Who knows, but I am troubled that its incorrect answer was so readily accepted. This is not an important question, but it would have been easy to double-check. This comment may be a grim portent of things to come, if people continue to trust these models so implicitly.
AlphaCharlie 4y ago
The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. In a world where fossil fuel is needed to fly airplanes and where oil is causing a destruction of the world we inhabit, it's dangerous to suggest we should make the flying industry polluting more than they already are. If anything we should look at the trade-off benefits of flying with the least amount of fuel consumption per passenger and miles flown. Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?
- raincole 4y ago
  Maybe it should be replaced with a fuel-per-mile limit?
  - sroussey 4y ago
    Maybe fuel per passenger?
    - fortran77 4y ago
      Yes! And some passengers are more expensive to transport because of their mass. They should pay more.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. ... at the same altitude.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Oh interesting. Looking it up, the Concorde flew at 60,000 ft, compared to normal planes at 30,000 ft. And atmospheric pressure at 60k ft is less than a quarter of what it is at 30k. Is it possible to fly twice the speed of a regular aircraft but without using that much more fuel, by flying higher? Or does the plane have to burn even more fuel to get up to that altitude and maintain lift in a thinner atmosphere?
neilv 4y ago
For the convenience of the wealthy?
omeysalvi 4y ago
"Let's create a nuisance for everyone so that billionaires can save 20% time in the air"
- Clubber 4y ago
  >"Let's create a nuisance for everyone so that billionaires can save 20% time in the air" This is how I read it too. I've lived near an air show (jets) location and I've lived near shuttle booms, both are annoying AF. The shuttle booms would make you jump out of your skin every time like we were being shelled and that occurred at 60,000 feet and there were two of them because of how large the shuttle was. Everyone would be annoyed by the air show because they'd practice for a week before the show. If I was on a call, I'd have to say, "gimme 20 seconds, a plane is going overhead." You'd have to pause the TV or radio or conversation because you couldn't hear anything. No thanks. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DFRC.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DF... In all fairness to the billionaires (God knows how persecuted they are /s), it would be a lot faster than 20%. Probably 2-3x or more, depending on how fast they were allowed to go. You only pass the sonic boom threshold once.
Scaevolus 4y ago
Isn't the real killer of supersonic commercial flights the inefficiency? You're using ~5x more fuel to have a flight that's ~2x faster. I suppose you can recoup the fuel cost with expensive tickets, but should we encourage even less efficient flights? https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-burn-parity-or-environmental-parody/ https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-b...
- p_l 4y ago
  The myth of Concorde's inefficiency is pervasive, but Concorde was reasonably fuel efficient and generally brought a lot of income at least to British Airways. It's engines were efficient enough that it supercruised at Ma 2.0, something only matched by few models of Tu-144 (there were multiple with different engines, not all of them supercruising), combined with high altitude it could use many efficiencies not available to other airliners. Ultimately it was maintenance issues (which in turn were caused by corporate political fights) and 9/11 (which required expensive modifications) that killed Concorde, not fuel costs - all combined with BA finding out that they could well enough replace the super-profitable Concorde routes with other aircraft and still make a bank even if individual tickets had to be made cheaper.
  - abigail95 4y ago
    Yes you can sell Concorde tickets at profit, probably, but you can make more profit selling premium cabin seats on an A350, even if you fix the maintenance costs. Although I will say if you reengineered Concorde with 2020s tech, maybe it would close the gap. Maybe instead of "inefficiency" the better argument is opportunity cost. Hardly anyone flies pax 747s anymore, and I wonder how long Emirates will keep its A380s going.
gonehome 4y ago
Makes sense to focus on the actual issue (noise) and not speed. It’d be awesome to have supersonic commercial aircraft that were also quiet. I’m excited about YC’s Boom and their overature plane, but it’d be so cool to able to fly coast to coast at supersonic speeds. Hopefully something like this can pass.
panick21_ 4y ago
Isn't the whole problem with boom shaping that it requires a thinner fuselage meaning you transport even fewer people? I just don't see this being viable. Musk has talked for a long time about a supersonic jet that would fly higher and thus not be heard on the ground. However batteries would need to get quite a bit better still and it would be a massive expansive project.
gabereiser 4y ago
I live on my sailboat near Cape Canaveral, FL. I hear sonic booms when SpaceX lands their Falcon9 back on the pad. 1) it’s never at night, usually on weekends or evenings (thank you SpaceX!). 2) It’s an awesome feeling but can leave the less healthy feeling a bit distraught. 3) Because they are able to land a stage 1 back at the pad, and that is a huge feat of engineering excellence, I’ll allow it. So awesome! edit my point is there are people that aren’t as bothered by it as others and would like to see us do great things as a species
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history. Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth. Seriously, f this guy. I suppose he's in favor of letting us chuck all of our garbage out of open windows while we drive, too. I've heard sonic booms before at air shows, and it's not some quiet little "beep". They're loud and disturbing. As someone who values silence, hearing these frequently at any hour of the day would drive me insane. I don't doubt there is technology that can make booms quieter, but until it's 0, STFU. Sick of people arguing that creating technology for the benefit of a tiny few (as others have mentioned, supersonic travel will always be inherently more inefficient) is OK, the externalities on the rest of the populace be damned.
- mastax 4y ago
  Were those sonic booms from airplanes at cruising altitude, or from low flying jets showing off?
- eviks 4y ago
  Non sonic boom noise from the airplanes > 0, ban them all?
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    You only hear them if you live near an airport, and only if you’re right under the landing approach or takeoff route. But not when they’re cruising at 30,000ft, or even if you live within visual range of the airport but not under the takeoff/landing path.
    - eviks 4y ago
      So what? The 0 rule is more compassionate than you are, so it cares about the groups of people you mentioned too!
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      The French used to fly Mirage jets over the sea near where my family used to go on seaside holidays - no airport anywhere near. I don't know what altitude they were flying at, but you could see them clearly - as long as you looked at the opposite side of the bay from where the sound came from. To be clear, they boomed, and it was loud and annoying.
jedberg 4y ago
I think a lot of people here are missing the author's point. It's not about letting people go faster per se. It's about the fact that the ban doesn't actually target the right thing. The purpose of the Mach 1+ ban is to reduce noise. But if the goal is to reduce noise, why not just set noise limits? We have the ability to measure noise, so if the goal is to reduce noise, set a limit on noise. Then let the airplane operators innovate however makes sense for their business. If you're worried about pollution (which is a good thing to worry about!) then there should be a separate fuel per mile limit or a carbon tax. Then they can innovate within both constraints. But the whole point is that the metric being used is wrong -- it should be noise output, not speed.
- ccooffee 4y ago
  This is a good summary of the author's point. In a historical context, it may be the case that the only useful way to enforce "quiet skies" was to put a speed limit, but that doesn't account for changes in technology that may enable quiet booms. Most commenters in this thread seem to take issue with the author's assumption that there is no other justification for a speed limit other than noise reduction. Honestly, I find the author's premise to be vaguely reasonable, but the whole thing is undermined by the god-awful chart which extrapolates historical aircraft speeds to imply that without the "speed limit" rule, we would have commercial aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean at 2500 mph. (Per wikipedia[0], the fastest manned aircraft in history, a SR-71 blackbird flight, capped out below 2200 mph.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_airspeed_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_airspeed_record
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Yeah this is a good point. The military was never capped by speed limits nor fuel costs or pollution limits. And even they didn't go faster than 2200mph as far as we know. Which either means there was no reason to figure out how to go faster, or they just couldn't do it. If the former, maybe with commercial pressures there would be a reason to go faster, but that's unlikely. And with the latter, well I'm not sure a commercial entity would out-innovate the military-industrial complex.
flerchin 4y ago
In any spot in the country, you can look up and see aircraft, or contrails, every day, all day. Unless near an airport, you generally do not hear them at all. Even with boom reduction technology, booms would be heard by everyone, everyday. This is _not cool_. The author makes a valid point that the restriction should be on the noise generated, not the speed, but even the mitigated booms would not pass a reasonable test.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  There is also the qualitative aspect. I live near an Air Force base that luckily doesn’t do supersonic stuff. Constant white noise, even at a pretty high level is something that can be tuned out pretty easily. I’m not sure the same can be said of singular events like a sonic boom. I think of it like the difference between a lawnmower half a block away, and a subwoofer the same distance.
  - hypomanic 4y ago
    Constant background noise isn't really tuned out though. It leads to a lot of stress and negative health outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise
shpx 4y ago
> He was briefly startled but went back to fishing in under one second. This was laugh-out-loud funny to me, something a character on the Silicon Valley show would say.
danboarder 4y ago
"Fifty years ago today, on March 23, 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history. ... The rule imposed a speed limit on US airspace. Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit." Imagine how quiet hypersonic planes would be now if the rule had been a based on loudness instead of speed. I imagine getting from LA to NY in an an hour in near-silence... That would be awesome!
lumb63 4y ago
The glaring issue I see with this proposal is the author supposes that people who say that they could “live indefinitely with sonic booms” have all the facts needed to make that assessment and are correct, or that they want to live indefinitely with sonic booms. People could “live indefinitely” with ionizing radiation (and non-ionizing, I might add), but that does not mean it does not impact their health or wellbeing. There are detriments outside of the immediately obvious “loud noise bothers someone”, such as property damage, ecological destruction, environmental concerns, health impacts, passenger safety, etc. I couldn’t disagree more with this.
Bloating 4y ago
Taxes! Raise Taxes! But, just raise that other guys taxes and, it needs to be cheaper
dghlsakjg 4y ago
It was never all about the noise, SST/Concorde failed on cost. Sure it would be cool to fly across the continent in 1/2 the time, but not at the expense of tens of millions of people having to know about it
Awelton 4y ago
The low boom aircraft designs are something I haven't seen and are quite interesting. I have been under a few "non low boom" supersonics, and they rattle entire buildings and set off car alarms.
frompdx 4y ago
I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force. This seems like a hasty conclusion to make. There are plenty of things that correlate with the stagnation of economic growth. I'm aware the author goes on to say almost the same thing after making this statement, but it is clear the author is trying to offer the ban on supersonic flight over soil to be the cause of economic stagnation in America. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority. I fail to see how there has been a complete halt on the development of supersonic technology. A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology. We need to get back to doing great things. Who says we aren't? If we want growth—if we want greatness—it’s time to make America boom again. I can't agree with the author's conclusion. Besides, they don't really make an effort in their article to tie the development of supersonic flight over land to economic growth. This is more of a "build it and they will come" conclusion. I don't buy it.
- macintux 4y ago
  > A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology. I am not defending the author's economic arguments, but this sentence is quite dubious. Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits? (Edit: remove superfluous word.)
  - frompdx 4y ago
    Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits? Militaries, for one. But that doesn't mean supersonic flight is completely off limits to passenger flight. There used to be regular flights across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds operated by Air France and British Airways. The last one was in 2003. Did the Concorde program fail because they couldn't fly over the CONUS?
2-718-281-828 4y ago
if that restriction is lifted then the sonic boom is going to be the next status symbol of the top .1%ers. also - can someone give a tl;dr why that guy is so passionate about that to begin with? > I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force. seems like is onto something ... > The speed limit cannot be responsible for the entirety of the Great Stagnation, of course. oh, really, no kidding?
verandaguy 4y ago
This article comes off as _very_ optimistic, to the point of making some really bad assumptions and misrepresenting data. The bit about sitting in a sonic boom simulator chamber is just silly — the author's subjective opinion about the loudness of a sonic boom has no bearing on reality, and fails to factor in that sonic booms during e.g. Bongo II (1964) shattered windows not because of the sheer volume of the sonic booms, but because this pressure wave would strike the large surface area of a window nearly all at once, putting a fair amount of energy into it in doing so. Almost as silly is the line extrapolating speed trends in commercial aviation over time; it reads like xkcd#605. It completely ignores the different regimes of high-speed flight and the limitations posed by it. 2,500mph is roughly Mach 3.2 at sea level, or nearly 3.8 at 60,000ft. At Mach 2, you need to start seriously considering thermal issues caused by friction related to parasitic drag and the paint/coating of the aircraft; at Mach 3, these become primary design constraints, and active cooling systems have to be deeply integrated into the airframe. This is to say nothing of the exotic engine design decisions that have to be made in these regimes. Much north of Mach 4, transporting any useful load becomes borderline impractical in-atmosphere with current technology. Ignoring fuel economy issues since I brought this up in a separate comment: since the introduction of the Concorde, the major focuses of aviation development have been on safety, reliability, and automation (all of which are strongly linked). "We live in the safest era of aviation in history" is an evergreen statement thanks to those advancements, and aviation incidents — while tragic and unfortunately not completely eliminated yet — claim fewer lives with each passing year (as a proportion of passenger-miles travelled).
thejenk 4y ago
> Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit. Is enforcing a perceived noise, or even a measured decibel limit on the ground even realistic? It would be difficult to investigate reported infractions unless they're consistently coming from a scheduled route, because the noise level on the ground depends on more than just the plane. "Supersonic jets that don't have a lot of headroom on the noise limits in a dry, flat desert shouldn't fly supersonic through this area because the the land underneath is shaped like a parabola and it's very humid." is much more difficult for a pilot to manage and a regulation body to enforce than "Don't fly faster than this airspeed." especially when the effect was the same back when the bill was introduced.
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dan-robertson 4y ago
I think the author is right in wanting laws to try to directly control the thing they care about rather than indirectly affecting it. I’m confused about the other point though. Did this rule affect transatlantic flights? Somehow Concorde was allowed and I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now). I think the extrapolation of the max speed graph doesn’t really make sense. It may have made sense to do that in the ’60s or ’70s, as I think that people in the aviation industry reasonably thought that was the direction planes were going. The 747 was designed to become a cargo plane once supersonic planes replaced it. But apart from Concorde, supersonic civilian jets didn’t happen so is the claim here that the rule prevented them from being developed because of the extra economies of scale from selling a few more planes to fly between the east and west coast? That is: I think this argument would have been more convincing if transatlantic supersonic flight was also banned and Concorde hadn’t existed. Given that that’s not what happened, I think it must make a stronger case for that rule hindering the development of supersonic civil aviation rather than other things like consumers preferring comfort to speed or the increased speed only affecting time in the air and not travel to the airport, waiting there, baggage claim, and travel from the airport. Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >consumers preferring comfort to speed And mainstream consumers preferring the lowest price to both. But, yeah, if you're going to be any significant premium over lie-flat seating that's a tough sell for anyone for whom a small number of hours != losing money. (i.e. almost everyone.). Saving a few hours coast to coast for NY to London is not worth thousands of dollars to most people.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    I thought Concorde was priced similarly to business class tickets on regular planes so I thought the trade off was speed vs lie-flat seating rather than speed vs dollars.[1] There used to be a flight (BA1?) that showed a market desire for faster transatlantic flights: it took off from London City airport (lower travel time, potentially much lower; also less time in the airport as it’s smaller), all business class, flew to Ireland to refuel (runway is too short for it to take off fully loaded), passengers would do US passport control and customs in Ireland while the plane refuelled, then land in JFK and get transport to the city. I don’t think it has been reinstated since covid though. In the reverse direction, one could take a helicopter from downtown Manhattan to JFK, which improves speed except you need to arrive in advance of the flight and get a flight at a certain time, but you would go through security (and check-in?) in the heliport and so be on the post-security side when you got to JFK. I think they only have a midtown heliport now. You can book it through Uber, I think, and it is sometimes cheaper than an Uber to the airport. So, I think there is some interest amongst frequent travellers for faster flights. I personally don’t sleep very well on flights so if I had a choice between a 7 hour lie-flat redeye from New York to London and a 3.5 hour[2] non-lie-flat flight at the same price, I would prefer the latter. But this would matter more if the travel/waiting time before/after the flight were reduced. [1] I looked it up and I was wrong here. The cost was 10-15% more than first class which would have been more expensive than business class. [2] I’m not sure what the right number to write down here is.
fwlr 4y ago
The author’s thesis is interesting but unfortunately he makes terrible arguments for it. Here’s a completely different and much better argument: For the past half-century, this one law has ensured that the entire field of supersonic flight has been explored by just one actor, the military, which has a completely different set of incentives and interests to all other actors in the field of flight. Fuel efficiency, noise pollution, passengers per flight, economic benefits of faster commercial travel - the military doesn’t care about these at all. But commercial aerospace engineers care a great deal about these things, they have made huge strides in improving them*, and this law effectively completely bars all of them from investigating supersonic flight because no matter what they might discover, they will not be permitted to implement any of it. There is no way even in principle to get around this law because it does not care about anything except the speedometer reading. ( *: ”Revenue passenger kilometers per kilogram of CO2” is a statistic that tries to capture the combined effects of a wide range of efficiency improvements. Wikipedia says it has gone from 0.4 in the 1950s to 8.4 in the 2010s, a 20x improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft The FAA says that in 1975, one person on the ground experienced significant noise exposure for every 30 people taking a flight. Today, one person experiences significant noise exposure for every 2,100 people taking a flight, a 70x improvement. The threshold for ‘significant noise exposure’ has not changed in this time. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noise/history https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noi...) For all we know there might be some particular combination of aircraft shape, speed, route, and cruising height that lets an aircraft skip along the upper surface of some obscure transition boundary in the atmosphere and you could fly a thousand passengers from London to New York in three hours using one-tenth of the fuel, and all the sound energy bounces off that boundary and is reflected into the upper atmosphere, never reaching the ground. We will never know because no company will pay any engineer to look for it because even if they found it they wouldn’t be allowed to test it, much less fly it commercially. They can’t even properly investigate it intellectually since there’s almost no research material because, again, it’s illegal in principle. It’s hard to come up with an analogous law for other fields. It would be like banning any computation faster than one megaflop per second, because at the time of the law being passed we only had vacuum tubes and getting that speed out of a vacuum tube computer required a building the size of a football stadium and the tubes tended to explode and kill technicians. It would be like making it illegal for any person to travel at any speed greater than 20mph, because trying to go faster tended to harm the horses we were riding at the time. We should repeal this law against supersonic flight (and replace it with an equivalent law that cares about the consequences of supersonic flight), to signal to aerospace companies that we will, in principle, let them do it - if they can do it well.
dghnn 4y ago
I’d rather someone fix regular air travel—ban dynamic pricing and dangerously cramped seats first.
Johnny555 4y ago
Until such time as the FAA creates standards that allow supersonic aircraft to operate over the United States, civil supersonic flight shall be allowed as long as mean cruise sonic boom directly beneath the flight track is less than 90 PLdB for daytime operations or 80 PLdB for nighttime operations. Wouldn’t this just encourage designs that create a sonic boom null zone directly below the aircraft and make it louder 10 or 20 degrees to the sides? If the proposed new standard is already impossible to meet, why not continue with the current permitting system and when quieter craft are on the horizon, make meaningful standards?
greedo 4y ago
Wow, a Koch funded think tank wants to roll back regulations. Shocked...
- blululu 4y ago
  Yeah, more on that: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Growth_and_Opportunity https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Growt...
zone411 4y ago
Here's a good comment from Marginal Revolution about this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/end-speed-limits-on-aircraft.html?commentID=160584434 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/en...
dogmatism 4y ago
I'll just leave this here: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2023.100262 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2023.100262 Road noise increases incidence of hypertension maybe this should be studied before the regulation is changed
- hypomanic 4y ago
  Yes we need to be aggressively reducing noise. Being able to cross the country in 3 hours instead of 5 is a much lower priority.
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rgmerk 4y ago
Stratospheric supersonic aircraft will have other significant and very poorly understood environmental effects, with complicated tradeoffs between damaging the ozone layer and contributing to climate change: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ea/d1ea00081k https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ea/d1ea0... Supersonic passenger transport is hardly an urgent global need, so can we at least do some more science to understand the risks and appropriately regulate first?
causality0 4y ago
What it would do is signal to the aviation industry that America is open for business. It’s time to build new low-boom aircraft This is completely idiotic. There is not a single goddamn reason to operate supersonic civilian aircraft except to cater to the whims of the wealthy. This jackass read a study and sat in a simulator and thinks he has even the slightest idea of what it's like to grow up getting boomed every day. I did. It's not fun having your house rattle all the time at random. I cannot even imagine what it would be like around a commercial airport that had dozens of supersonics every day instead of a handful of small military jets.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
I was a kid before 1973 and grew up within 100 miles of a couple of air force bases. I heard sonic booms almost every day. We'd be out playing in the yard and hear a kaboom sound, look up and see the contrail of a fighter jet. (It was always too high to hear the engine.) It was just a normal part of life. Everybody was used to it and I never heard anybody complain about it. I've been in thunderstorms that were much louder. Granted these jets were very high. If they had been going Mach 1 close to the ground, people would have complained about broken windows. And I'm not suggesting my experience was the norm. Just that in some cases sonic booms were a part of life that nobody really paid much attention to.
mlqafy 4y ago
"Yet, the ban is not unrelated to economic stagnation. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority. With boom-shaping technology we know is possible, a tiny vocal minority. The cultural forces that led to and sustain the ban have certainly halted other progress." Straight from the Silicon Valley comedy show. Next: "Why sonic booms are actually a good thing." Noise leads to health problems and should be outlawed.
EricE 4y ago
Unchecked overregulation once again stifling innovation.

225 points by danboarder 4y ago

noja 4y ago

"..there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority." -> benefit a minority?

gamblor956 4y ago

No justification is given for ending the ban. Supersonic places are expensive enough that supersonic flight will be the exclusive domain of the wealthy for years. I'm okay with not having to deal with the booms if it means the wealthy are stuck flying the same speed as the rest of us.

chrisbrandow 4y ago
The obvious retort is that many modern conveniences began as expensive goods that we eventually figured out how to scale, or make more cheaply. It’s not as obvious that this counter-argument is robust, given the known history that we have with the Concord3. But if the economic is won’t work out, they won’t work out. But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things. And I say that as someone who thinks we should be taxing the wealthy at much higher rates than we do.
- nrb 4y ago
  > But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things Isn't this exactly a case of everyone having fewer nice things (such as peace and quiet) for the sake of a convenience for the very few? The author seems to actually propose a noise level of 90 PLdB with a straight face.

a0zU 4y ago

Even disregarding the sonic boom, why would we even want mediocre civil pilots to have access to aircraft thag are necessarily more dangerous and more destructive in the event of a crash?

avidiax 4y ago
Planes usually crash at takeoff and landing, hence supersonic or not doesn't matter for that case. Crashing at any other time, sure, there is potentially more energy in a supersonic plane. I doubt that people on the ground will know the difference between a plane crashing on them at 600mph vs 1200mph.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

What an amazing scientific experiment: "we flew a fighter jet over a Texas city to purposely annoy people, and asked how annoyed they were." Followed by: "only 17 people rated 'very annoyed' so that's a win." No mention of the number of people who put down any other annoyance level...

dasil003 4y ago
I'm sure they also have an airtight statistical regression to determine how annoyed people will be when it's happening 30 times a day!
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  In the NYC metro they have a capacity to launch 4200 flights a day, and to my understanding it’s about 3000 in actuality. So! Enjoy!
hughw 4y ago
And annoyed people won't be able to like, move away from Galveston and get away from it. It's going to be over the whole country. Several times a day. I could see suicides rising.
charles_f 4y ago
Immediately discarded by "and some people are always gonna be annoyed so f- those people".

rickydroll 4y ago

While I don't worry about the impact of sonic booms on humans, and were concerned about the impact on the rest of the natural world. Like low-level sonic booms, light pollution was never considered to be a big issue but eventually crossed the threshold where it now has significant negative impact on animals insects and plants. My concern is that once little sonic booms become commonplace and we start noticing the impact on the natural world, there will be too much money in play to stop the damage. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00665-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00665-7 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8322 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8322 [edit] just remembered another low-level fact that people did not think was important. Jet contrails significantly increase high-level cloud cover which alters weather patterns and holds more heat in the atmosphere. A simple change in flightpath by modifying altitude by couple thousand feet can eliminate 80% or more of cultural formation but the airlines won't do it because of the small amount of additional money it would cost.

jmclnx 4y ago

Well I am old enough to remember the Sonic Booms. We would get a warning in the local newspaper (sometimes) and as kids we will watch outside waiting for the boom and try and find the plane. We lived fairly close to a base that would test these planes. But, some people's windows would crack and some would break due to the boom, which they had to pay for. So, if this limit is changed, will the aircraft owners pay people for their broken windows. Back then seeing a plane at any speed was not common event. Now you look up at just about any time of day and the chances are very good (like 90%+) you can find a plane.

tpmx 4y ago
Can I ask; roughly speaking, how old are you? (Or rather: when was this?)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smolder 4y ago
  This is pretty easy to deduce given GP was a kid in the time leading up to the 1973 rule.
  - lambdaba 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tiedieconderoga 4y ago
      Oof. I really hope we aren't moving towards a world where people start to copy/paste verbose AI-generated paragraphs without checking the results. Especially not to answer simple questions like, "about how old is someone who was a child 50+ years ago?" The AI's guess is off by about a decade. If GP remembers multiple booms, they were probably at least 10 by the 1973 ban. Most people can't recall memories back to the moment of their birth, but LLMs often ignore nuanced contextual facts like that. Or maybe this is another case of the model living a few years in the past, since there's a lag in being trained on new data. Who knows, but I am troubled that its incorrect answer was so readily accepted. This is not an important question, but it would have been easy to double-check. This comment may be a grim portent of things to come, if people continue to trust these models so implicitly.

AlphaCharlie 4y ago

The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. In a world where fossil fuel is needed to fly airplanes and where oil is causing a destruction of the world we inhabit, it's dangerous to suggest we should make the flying industry polluting more than they already are. If anything we should look at the trade-off benefits of flying with the least amount of fuel consumption per passenger and miles flown. Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?

raincole 4y ago
Maybe it should be replaced with a fuel-per-mile limit?
- sroussey 4y ago
  Maybe fuel per passenger?
  - fortran77 4y ago
    Yes! And some passengers are more expensive to transport because of their mass. They should pay more.
panick21_ 4y ago
> The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. ... at the same altitude.
- deleted 4y ago
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- crazygringo 4y ago
  Oh interesting. Looking it up, the Concorde flew at 60,000 ft, compared to normal planes at 30,000 ft. And atmospheric pressure at 60k ft is less than a quarter of what it is at 30k. Is it possible to fly twice the speed of a regular aircraft but without using that much more fuel, by flying higher? Or does the plane have to burn even more fuel to get up to that altitude and maintain lift in a thinner atmosphere?

neilv 4y ago

For the convenience of the wealthy?

omeysalvi 4y ago

"Let's create a nuisance for everyone so that billionaires can save 20% time in the air"

Clubber 4y ago
>"Let's create a nuisance for everyone so that billionaires can save 20% time in the air" This is how I read it too. I've lived near an air show (jets) location and I've lived near shuttle booms, both are annoying AF. The shuttle booms would make you jump out of your skin every time like we were being shelled and that occurred at 60,000 feet and there were two of them because of how large the shuttle was. Everyone would be annoyed by the air show because they'd practice for a week before the show. If I was on a call, I'd have to say, "gimme 20 seconds, a plane is going overhead." You'd have to pause the TV or radio or conversation because you couldn't hear anything. No thanks. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DFRC.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DF... In all fairness to the billionaires (God knows how persecuted they are /s), it would be a lot faster than 20%. Probably 2-3x or more, depending on how fast they were allowed to go. You only pass the sonic boom threshold once.

Scaevolus 4y ago

Isn't the real killer of supersonic commercial flights the inefficiency? You're using ~5x more fuel to have a flight that's ~2x faster. I suppose you can recoup the fuel cost with expensive tickets, but should we encourage even less efficient flights? https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-burn-parity-or-environmental-parody/ https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-b...

p_l 4y ago
The myth of Concorde's inefficiency is pervasive, but Concorde was reasonably fuel efficient and generally brought a lot of income at least to British Airways. It's engines were efficient enough that it supercruised at Ma 2.0, something only matched by few models of Tu-144 (there were multiple with different engines, not all of them supercruising), combined with high altitude it could use many efficiencies not available to other airliners. Ultimately it was maintenance issues (which in turn were caused by corporate political fights) and 9/11 (which required expensive modifications) that killed Concorde, not fuel costs - all combined with BA finding out that they could well enough replace the super-profitable Concorde routes with other aircraft and still make a bank even if individual tickets had to be made cheaper.
- abigail95 4y ago
  Yes you can sell Concorde tickets at profit, probably, but you can make more profit selling premium cabin seats on an A350, even if you fix the maintenance costs. Although I will say if you reengineered Concorde with 2020s tech, maybe it would close the gap. Maybe instead of "inefficiency" the better argument is opportunity cost. Hardly anyone flies pax 747s anymore, and I wonder how long Emirates will keep its A380s going.

gonehome 4y ago

Makes sense to focus on the actual issue (noise) and not speed. It’d be awesome to have supersonic commercial aircraft that were also quiet. I’m excited about YC’s Boom and their overature plane, but it’d be so cool to able to fly coast to coast at supersonic speeds. Hopefully something like this can pass.

panick21_ 4y ago

Isn't the whole problem with boom shaping that it requires a thinner fuselage meaning you transport even fewer people? I just don't see this being viable. Musk has talked for a long time about a supersonic jet that would fly higher and thus not be heard on the ground. However batteries would need to get quite a bit better still and it would be a massive expansive project.

gabereiser 4y ago

I live on my sailboat near Cape Canaveral, FL. I hear sonic booms when SpaceX lands their Falcon9 back on the pad. 1) it’s never at night, usually on weekends or evenings (thank you SpaceX!). 2) It’s an awesome feeling but can leave the less healthy feeling a bit distraught. 3) Because they are able to land a stage 1 back at the pad, and that is a huge feat of engineering excellence, I’ll allow it. So awesome! edit my point is there are people that aren’t as bothered by it as others and would like to see us do great things as a species

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history. Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth. Seriously, f this guy. I suppose he's in favor of letting us chuck all of our garbage out of open windows while we drive, too. I've heard sonic booms before at air shows, and it's not some quiet little "beep". They're loud and disturbing. As someone who values silence, hearing these frequently at any hour of the day would drive me insane. I don't doubt there is technology that can make booms quieter, but until it's 0, STFU. Sick of people arguing that creating technology for the benefit of a tiny few (as others have mentioned, supersonic travel will always be inherently more inefficient) is OK, the externalities on the rest of the populace be damned.

mastax 4y ago
Were those sonic booms from airplanes at cruising altitude, or from low flying jets showing off?
eviks 4y ago
Non sonic boom noise from the airplanes > 0, ban them all?
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  You only hear them if you live near an airport, and only if you’re right under the landing approach or takeoff route. But not when they’re cruising at 30,000ft, or even if you live within visual range of the airport but not under the takeoff/landing path.
  - eviks 4y ago
    So what? The 0 rule is more compassionate than you are, so it cares about the groups of people you mentioned too!
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    The French used to fly Mirage jets over the sea near where my family used to go on seaside holidays - no airport anywhere near. I don't know what altitude they were flying at, but you could see them clearly - as long as you looked at the opposite side of the bay from where the sound came from. To be clear, they boomed, and it was loud and annoying.

jedberg 4y ago

I think a lot of people here are missing the author's point. It's not about letting people go faster per se. It's about the fact that the ban doesn't actually target the right thing. The purpose of the Mach 1+ ban is to reduce noise. But if the goal is to reduce noise, why not just set noise limits? We have the ability to measure noise, so if the goal is to reduce noise, set a limit on noise. Then let the airplane operators innovate however makes sense for their business. If you're worried about pollution (which is a good thing to worry about!) then there should be a separate fuel per mile limit or a carbon tax. Then they can innovate within both constraints. But the whole point is that the metric being used is wrong -- it should be noise output, not speed.

ccooffee 4y ago
This is a good summary of the author's point. In a historical context, it may be the case that the only useful way to enforce "quiet skies" was to put a speed limit, but that doesn't account for changes in technology that may enable quiet booms. Most commenters in this thread seem to take issue with the author's assumption that there is no other justification for a speed limit other than noise reduction. Honestly, I find the author's premise to be vaguely reasonable, but the whole thing is undermined by the god-awful chart which extrapolates historical aircraft speeds to imply that without the "speed limit" rule, we would have commercial aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean at 2500 mph. (Per wikipedia[0], the fastest manned aircraft in history, a SR-71 blackbird flight, capped out below 2200 mph.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_airspeed_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_airspeed_record
- jedberg 4y ago
  Yeah this is a good point. The military was never capped by speed limits nor fuel costs or pollution limits. And even they didn't go faster than 2200mph as far as we know. Which either means there was no reason to figure out how to go faster, or they just couldn't do it. If the former, maybe with commercial pressures there would be a reason to go faster, but that's unlikely. And with the latter, well I'm not sure a commercial entity would out-innovate the military-industrial complex.

flerchin 4y ago

In any spot in the country, you can look up and see aircraft, or contrails, every day, all day. Unless near an airport, you generally do not hear them at all. Even with boom reduction technology, booms would be heard by everyone, everyday. This is _not cool_. The author makes a valid point that the restriction should be on the noise generated, not the speed, but even the mitigated booms would not pass a reasonable test.

dghlsakjg 4y ago
There is also the qualitative aspect. I live near an Air Force base that luckily doesn’t do supersonic stuff. Constant white noise, even at a pretty high level is something that can be tuned out pretty easily. I’m not sure the same can be said of singular events like a sonic boom. I think of it like the difference between a lawnmower half a block away, and a subwoofer the same distance.
- hypomanic 4y ago
  Constant background noise isn't really tuned out though. It leads to a lot of stress and negative health outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise

shpx 4y ago

> He was briefly startled but went back to fishing in under one second. This was laugh-out-loud funny to me, something a character on the Silicon Valley show would say.

danboarder 4y ago

"Fifty years ago today, on March 23, 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history. ... The rule imposed a speed limit on US airspace. Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit." Imagine how quiet hypersonic planes would be now if the rule had been a based on loudness instead of speed. I imagine getting from LA to NY in an an hour in near-silence... That would be awesome!

lumb63 4y ago

The glaring issue I see with this proposal is the author supposes that people who say that they could “live indefinitely with sonic booms” have all the facts needed to make that assessment and are correct, or that they want to live indefinitely with sonic booms. People could “live indefinitely” with ionizing radiation (and non-ionizing, I might add), but that does not mean it does not impact their health or wellbeing. There are detriments outside of the immediately obvious “loud noise bothers someone”, such as property damage, ecological destruction, environmental concerns, health impacts, passenger safety, etc. I couldn’t disagree more with this.

Bloating 4y ago

Taxes! Raise Taxes! But, just raise that other guys taxes and, it needs to be cheaper

dghlsakjg 4y ago

It was never all about the noise, SST/Concorde failed on cost. Sure it would be cool to fly across the continent in 1/2 the time, but not at the expense of tens of millions of people having to know about it

Awelton 4y ago

The low boom aircraft designs are something I haven't seen and are quite interesting. I have been under a few "non low boom" supersonics, and they rattle entire buildings and set off car alarms.

frompdx 4y ago

I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force. This seems like a hasty conclusion to make. There are plenty of things that correlate with the stagnation of economic growth. I'm aware the author goes on to say almost the same thing after making this statement, but it is clear the author is trying to offer the ban on supersonic flight over soil to be the cause of economic stagnation in America. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority. I fail to see how there has been a complete halt on the development of supersonic technology. A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology. We need to get back to doing great things. Who says we aren't? If we want growth—if we want greatness—it’s time to make America boom again. I can't agree with the author's conclusion. Besides, they don't really make an effort in their article to tie the development of supersonic flight over land to economic growth. This is more of a "build it and they will come" conclusion. I don't buy it.

macintux 4y ago
> A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology. I am not defending the author's economic arguments, but this sentence is quite dubious. Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits? (Edit: remove superfluous word.)
- frompdx 4y ago
  Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits? Militaries, for one. But that doesn't mean supersonic flight is completely off limits to passenger flight. There used to be regular flights across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds operated by Air France and British Airways. The last one was in 2003. Did the Concorde program fail because they couldn't fly over the CONUS?

2-718-281-828 4y ago

if that restriction is lifted then the sonic boom is going to be the next status symbol of the top .1%ers. also - can someone give a tl;dr why that guy is so passionate about that to begin with? > I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force. seems like is onto something ... > The speed limit cannot be responsible for the entirety of the Great Stagnation, of course. oh, really, no kidding?

verandaguy 4y ago

This article comes off as _very_ optimistic, to the point of making some really bad assumptions and misrepresenting data. The bit about sitting in a sonic boom simulator chamber is just silly — the author's subjective opinion about the loudness of a sonic boom has no bearing on reality, and fails to factor in that sonic booms during e.g. Bongo II (1964) shattered windows not because of the sheer volume of the sonic booms, but because this pressure wave would strike the large surface area of a window nearly all at once, putting a fair amount of energy into it in doing so. Almost as silly is the line extrapolating speed trends in commercial aviation over time; it reads like xkcd#605. It completely ignores the different regimes of high-speed flight and the limitations posed by it. 2,500mph is roughly Mach 3.2 at sea level, or nearly 3.8 at 60,000ft. At Mach 2, you need to start seriously considering thermal issues caused by friction related to parasitic drag and the paint/coating of the aircraft; at Mach 3, these become primary design constraints, and active cooling systems have to be deeply integrated into the airframe. This is to say nothing of the exotic engine design decisions that have to be made in these regimes. Much north of Mach 4, transporting any useful load becomes borderline impractical in-atmosphere with current technology. Ignoring fuel economy issues since I brought this up in a separate comment: since the introduction of the Concorde, the major focuses of aviation development have been on safety, reliability, and automation (all of which are strongly linked). "We live in the safest era of aviation in history" is an evergreen statement thanks to those advancements, and aviation incidents — while tragic and unfortunately not completely eliminated yet — claim fewer lives with each passing year (as a proportion of passenger-miles travelled).

thejenk 4y ago

> Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit. Is enforcing a perceived noise, or even a measured decibel limit on the ground even realistic? It would be difficult to investigate reported infractions unless they're consistently coming from a scheduled route, because the noise level on the ground depends on more than just the plane. "Supersonic jets that don't have a lot of headroom on the noise limits in a dry, flat desert shouldn't fly supersonic through this area because the the land underneath is shaped like a parabola and it's very humid." is much more difficult for a pilot to manage and a regulation body to enforce than "Don't fly faster than this airspeed." especially when the effect was the same back when the bill was introduced.

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dan-robertson 4y ago

I think the author is right in wanting laws to try to directly control the thing they care about rather than indirectly affecting it. I’m confused about the other point though. Did this rule affect transatlantic flights? Somehow Concorde was allowed and I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now). I think the extrapolation of the max speed graph doesn’t really make sense. It may have made sense to do that in the ’60s or ’70s, as I think that people in the aviation industry reasonably thought that was the direction planes were going. The 747 was designed to become a cargo plane once supersonic planes replaced it. But apart from Concorde, supersonic civilian jets didn’t happen so is the claim here that the rule prevented them from being developed because of the extra economies of scale from selling a few more planes to fly between the east and west coast? That is: I think this argument would have been more convincing if transatlantic supersonic flight was also banned and Concorde hadn’t existed. Given that that’s not what happened, I think it must make a stronger case for that rule hindering the development of supersonic civil aviation rather than other things like consumers preferring comfort to speed or the increased speed only affecting time in the air and not travel to the airport, waiting there, baggage claim, and travel from the airport. Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.

ghaff 4y ago
>consumers preferring comfort to speed And mainstream consumers preferring the lowest price to both. But, yeah, if you're going to be any significant premium over lie-flat seating that's a tough sell for anyone for whom a small number of hours != losing money. (i.e. almost everyone.). Saving a few hours coast to coast for NY to London is not worth thousands of dollars to most people.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I thought Concorde was priced similarly to business class tickets on regular planes so I thought the trade off was speed vs lie-flat seating rather than speed vs dollars.[1] There used to be a flight (BA1?) that showed a market desire for faster transatlantic flights: it took off from London City airport (lower travel time, potentially much lower; also less time in the airport as it’s smaller), all business class, flew to Ireland to refuel (runway is too short for it to take off fully loaded), passengers would do US passport control and customs in Ireland while the plane refuelled, then land in JFK and get transport to the city. I don’t think it has been reinstated since covid though. In the reverse direction, one could take a helicopter from downtown Manhattan to JFK, which improves speed except you need to arrive in advance of the flight and get a flight at a certain time, but you would go through security (and check-in?) in the heliport and so be on the post-security side when you got to JFK. I think they only have a midtown heliport now. You can book it through Uber, I think, and it is sometimes cheaper than an Uber to the airport. So, I think there is some interest amongst frequent travellers for faster flights. I personally don’t sleep very well on flights so if I had a choice between a 7 hour lie-flat redeye from New York to London and a 3.5 hour[2] non-lie-flat flight at the same price, I would prefer the latter. But this would matter more if the travel/waiting time before/after the flight were reduced. [1] I looked it up and I was wrong here. The cost was 10-15% more than first class which would have been more expensive than business class. [2] I’m not sure what the right number to write down here is.

fwlr 4y ago

The author’s thesis is interesting but unfortunately he makes terrible arguments for it. Here’s a completely different and much better argument: For the past half-century, this one law has ensured that the entire field of supersonic flight has been explored by just one actor, the military, which has a completely different set of incentives and interests to all other actors in the field of flight. Fuel efficiency, noise pollution, passengers per flight, economic benefits of faster commercial travel - the military doesn’t care about these at all. But commercial aerospace engineers care a great deal about these things, they have made huge strides in improving them*, and this law effectively completely bars all of them from investigating supersonic flight because no matter what they might discover, they will not be permitted to implement any of it. There is no way even in principle to get around this law because it does not care about anything except the speedometer reading. ( *: ”Revenue passenger kilometers per kilogram of CO2” is a statistic that tries to capture the combined effects of a wide range of efficiency improvements. Wikipedia says it has gone from 0.4 in the 1950s to 8.4 in the 2010s, a 20x improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft The FAA says that in 1975, one person on the ground experienced significant noise exposure for every 30 people taking a flight. Today, one person experiences significant noise exposure for every 2,100 people taking a flight, a 70x improvement. The threshold for ‘significant noise exposure’ has not changed in this time. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noise/history https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noi...) For all we know there might be some particular combination of aircraft shape, speed, route, and cruising height that lets an aircraft skip along the upper surface of some obscure transition boundary in the atmosphere and you could fly a thousand passengers from London to New York in three hours using one-tenth of the fuel, and all the sound energy bounces off that boundary and is reflected into the upper atmosphere, never reaching the ground. We will never know because no company will pay any engineer to look for it because even if they found it they wouldn’t be allowed to test it, much less fly it commercially. They can’t even properly investigate it intellectually since there’s almost no research material because, again, it’s illegal in principle. It’s hard to come up with an analogous law for other fields. It would be like banning any computation faster than one megaflop per second, because at the time of the law being passed we only had vacuum tubes and getting that speed out of a vacuum tube computer required a building the size of a football stadium and the tubes tended to explode and kill technicians. It would be like making it illegal for any person to travel at any speed greater than 20mph, because trying to go faster tended to harm the horses we were riding at the time. We should repeal this law against supersonic flight (and replace it with an equivalent law that cares about the consequences of supersonic flight), to signal to aerospace companies that we will, in principle, let them do it - if they can do it well.

dghnn 4y ago

I’d rather someone fix regular air travel—ban dynamic pricing and dangerously cramped seats first.

Johnny555 4y ago

Until such time as the FAA creates standards that allow supersonic aircraft to operate over the United States, civil supersonic flight shall be allowed as long as mean cruise sonic boom directly beneath the flight track is less than 90 PLdB for daytime operations or 80 PLdB for nighttime operations. Wouldn’t this just encourage designs that create a sonic boom null zone directly below the aircraft and make it louder 10 or 20 degrees to the sides? If the proposed new standard is already impossible to meet, why not continue with the current permitting system and when quieter craft are on the horizon, make meaningful standards?

greedo 4y ago

Wow, a Koch funded think tank wants to roll back regulations. Shocked...

blululu 4y ago
Yeah, more on that: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Growth_and_Opportunity https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Growt...

zone411 4y ago

Here's a good comment from Marginal Revolution about this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/end-speed-limits-on-aircraft.html?commentID=160584434 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/en...

dogmatism 4y ago

I'll just leave this here: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2023.100262 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2023.100262 Road noise increases incidence of hypertension maybe this should be studied before the regulation is changed

hypomanic 4y ago
Yes we need to be aggressively reducing noise. Being able to cross the country in 3 hours instead of 5 is a much lower priority.

deleted 4y ago

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rgmerk 4y ago

Stratospheric supersonic aircraft will have other significant and very poorly understood environmental effects, with complicated tradeoffs between damaging the ozone layer and contributing to climate change: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ea/d1ea00081k https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ea/d1ea0... Supersonic passenger transport is hardly an urgent global need, so can we at least do some more science to understand the risks and appropriately regulate first?

causality0 4y ago

What it would do is signal to the aviation industry that America is open for business. It’s time to build new low-boom aircraft This is completely idiotic. There is not a single goddamn reason to operate supersonic civilian aircraft except to cater to the whims of the wealthy. This jackass read a study and sat in a simulator and thinks he has even the slightest idea of what it's like to grow up getting boomed every day. I did. It's not fun having your house rattle all the time at random. I cannot even imagine what it would be like around a commercial airport that had dozens of supersonics every day instead of a handful of small military jets.

dreamcompiler 4y ago

I was a kid before 1973 and grew up within 100 miles of a couple of air force bases. I heard sonic booms almost every day. We'd be out playing in the yard and hear a kaboom sound, look up and see the contrail of a fighter jet. (It was always too high to hear the engine.) It was just a normal part of life. Everybody was used to it and I never heard anybody complain about it. I've been in thunderstorms that were much louder. Granted these jets were very high. If they had been going Mach 1 close to the ground, people would have complained about broken windows. And I'm not suggesting my experience was the norm. Just that in some cases sonic booms were a part of life that nobody really paid much attention to.

mlqafy 4y ago

"Yet, the ban is not unrelated to economic stagnation. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority. With boom-shaping technology we know is possible, a tiny vocal minority. The cultural forces that led to and sustain the ban have certainly halted other progress." Straight from the Silicon Valley comedy show. Next: "Why sonic booms are actually a good thing." Noise leads to health problems and should be outlawed.

EricE 4y ago

Unchecked overregulation once again stifling innovation.