46 ms·

Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)

142 points by sorentwo 2y ago

ant6n 2y ago
TLDR: Fuel Efficiency. If somebody actually develops supersonic private aircraft, we really need to start taxing aviation fuels. You could blow through your annual carbon budget in like an hour. Those costs need to be internalized.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- maxcan 2y ago
  We do. And I believe that private is taxed more than commercial. Most of the FAA's funding comes from this.
bombcar 2y ago
To be fair, road travel hasn’t really increased in speed since the 60s either. Once the freeways were built, truck and car speeds were about as fast as you can reasonably go. Trains still have some headroom.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Highway speed not at peak times has increased by a lot since even the 90s. Hell, the garbage trucks here go 70+ until they hit a hill.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Trains still have some headroom. Honestly, not much. 350km/h seems to be the peak practical operating speed (and that hasn't really changed since the 80s). Even the rather impractical Shanghai maglev no longer operates over that speed, though it did routinely run at over 400km/h for a while. Most high speed systems are in that general range today. _Maybe_ maglevs will eventually be practical, but I'd hate to bet on it. This is the only serious such project at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consump... (China seems to have largely lost interest in favour of conventional high-speed).
  - Muromec 2y ago
    Most trains run much slower than 350 km/h however.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    400 km/h seems to be practical. China started building trains that can go that fast. They must already have lines that support that speed, cause upgrading lines is the huge expense. There is less advantage to increasing speed. Is it worth the cost of maglev Shinkansen to save 30 minutes? How long would 400 km/h rail take instead? Maglevs have disadvantage that need dedicated route, while high speed rail can take existing rail into cities.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      _Trains_ which can do 400km/h have been around for a long time. SNCF (the French railway company) has a modified TGV set that can do 570km/h(!!!) But trains are just one part of the system.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  At least in the USA: Legally, road travel speeds have come along way from the 1974 federal speed limit of 55mph. States set their own limits now, and all fifty of them have a higher maximum limit. Safety-wise, cars are much safer in crashes than they were in the 60s, both at high and low speeds. Setting aside safety and the legal limits, raw top speeds of similar car models are much higher today than they were in the 60s and 70s. Acceleration and braking have vastly improved, too.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  A car from the '60's could do 0-60mph in ... an age. I'm 54 y/o and not off of the '60's but old enough to remember lead in petrol (gas). My modern EV can do 0-30 rather rapidly and 0-60 quite rapidly. It tops out at 120 or so. The US freeways are able to sustain high speeds but their older off ramps are proper old school and way too tight. Older bits of the German autobahns have the same issue - far too tight bends on "Ausfahrt". In France and Italy, Spain and well the rest of the EU I recall mostly decent on and off ramps. I think the UK has the best efforts - we generally have massively long and large slip lanes but I will grant that we have some horrible exits from A roads, which are dual carriageway and so look like motorway. For example A303 whilst running through Somerset.
  - m463 2y ago
    In the 60's (before mid 70's) many many roads in the united states had no speed limit "reasonable and prudent". now cars are significantly more capable, but speeds are limited by laws and congestion.
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      Quite a lot of German autobahns still don't have a speed limit. I lived there when it was West Germany. I remember 90mph in lane one being normal and that was in the 1980s. 120+ in lane two was normal. Petrol was cheap back then - even in the EU. In the US gas was nigh on free! (or so it seemed to us). I was given a scale model of an Audi Quattro rally car by a German chap when I turned 17 (1987). I still have it. That car destroyed all comers back in the day because it brought 4WD to the game. Nowadays I drive an EV - a Saic MG4. I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which is where the Morris Garage (MG) started off in around 1910. I can safely say that an MG4 is not a British thing at all.
regularization 2y ago
I would prefer Boeing to figure out how to prevent cabin doors from blowing off mid-flight, or DCA air traffic control to figure out how to prevent planes from colliding with Black Hawk helicopters before they figure out how to make planes go faster.
- LastTrain 2y ago
  That isn't ever going to happen, and modern airline safety is nothing short of a miracle. There are on the order of 10-20 million flights a year in the US, carrying 900 million passengers. You could take 5 million flights before you could statistically expect to die. This is one of those rare things in the world where a system has been developed that works, and it involves making slow changes with extreme planning and caution.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    This is a typical refrain that I can translate as "we'd solve horrific safety issues and the fear and paranoia about flying if we'd all stop following the news."
    - LastTrain 2y ago
      But there aren't "horrific" safety issues, as the numbers demonstrate. Stepping onto a US commercial airliner is literally about the safest thing you can do. Watch the news all you want, just understand what you're watching and that if it were normal it wouldn't be news. Nobody is saying there isn't room for improvement, continual improvement in safety is part of the process, and the numbers bear that out.
      - AStonesThrow 2y ago
        Indeed, I thought awhile about a way to rephrase that, and it's really just media shaping the perceptions about such. Being in an aircrash seems like a top national nightmare, so 9/11 was super effective in catching our attention.
  - 2y ago
namirez 2y ago
Physics has not changed since the 60s. Wave drag due to shock waves is still a thing.
- frostyel 2y ago
  By this reasoning, fighter planes shouldn't have improved either. We know that this is not the case. It's not the limits of physics holding us back.
  - namirez 2y ago
    And they have not! Both F22 and F33 are significantly slower than say F4, F104, or F106 all designed in the 50s.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Or the SR-71...
      - namirez 2y ago
        Indeed although it wasn’t a fighter; it was a reconnaissance aircraft.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        This is true, although it was tested in a fast response fighter role, overlying enemy aircraft and firing air-to-air missiles from high altitude.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    Going faster and improving are two different things. Planes have improved immensely since the 1960s, but they don't go faster. Commercial aircraft have much lower fuel use. Military aircraft have things like better radar and stealth.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
cies 2y ago
I did not read the article... But this is what I think is the reason: > As the speed increases, the air resistance increases exponentially. If you want faster travel, look at Hyperloop (in near vacuum iirc). Or how to make passing TSA less of a time sink :)
- ghaff 2y ago
  For a variety of reasons, I still leave a fair bit of slack at the airport but with pre-check, TSA is usually not a big deal.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Still, major airports all want you to arrive quite a long time before your flight's scheduled departure. Not much point in spending $$$$ on fuel to knock an hour off a 4-hour flight, if I end up with an hour-long wait at each end.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I don't really care what the airport wants. But stuff happens--e.g. there's construction in the tunnel leading to the airport or there's a holdup of some sort--so I essentially always arrive much earlier than I need to. I hate stressing myself for maybe a bit more sleep in the morning.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      > Still, major airports all want you to arrive quite a long time before your flight's scheduled departure. I think they still encourage this so that you'll spend $$ at the airport (the longer you're there, the more likely you are to spend), which is a major source of revenue these days.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Except that sometimes the Precheck line is longer than the regular line. Has happened to me a number of times. I still stay in the precheck line because I don't want to take off my shoes, but as precheck becomes more popular, the speed advantages decrease.
ColinWright 2y ago
(Posted: February 19, 2009) As soon as I saw the title I knew the answer ... economics. The vast majority of people buy the cheapest flights they can, and with modern jet engine technology it's cheaper to fly slightly slower. The same is true with ocean going cargo ships. They deliberately cruise[0] slower if they are under some nation's flags because the wages are lower for those nationals[1], and the balance between cost of wages versus cost of fuel shifts towards spending more time (higher wages) at a lower speed (less fuel). Roughly, steaming faster increases your fuel bill but lowers your wages bill, and vice versa. The exact balance point depends on the base rate for the wages of the crew. And the number of crew. The arithmetic is brutal, but unassailable. [0] The technical term is, believe it or not "steam" [1] It's complicated. Very complicated.
csbowe 2y ago
> “The main issue is fuel economy,” says aeronautics and astronautics professor Mark Drela. “Going faster eats more fuel per passenger-mile. Pretty simple - we care more about air travel being cheaper and safer than we care about it being faster.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 2y ago
  And even if not everyone does, operating entire flights at business class+ fares is probably not viable. Especially given that lie-flat seating (e.g. Polaris) with at least decent food is pretty comfortable for the people who are willing to pay a premium.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    JSX operates an entire airline as business-only. They use CRJ-900s, so not long-range, but there's no TSA (they are technically charter flights, you board at an FBO). You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      BA has, as I understand it, gone back and forth on London to New York business only flights. But that's not designing a whole new aircraft for the purpose.
      - devilbunny 2y ago
        A CRJ-900 is a very, very common regional jet. They just changed the seats. I'm not making a comment about the original topic, just the comment that operating an entire airline as business wasn't viable. Not on every route, no, but for the right route? Yeah, there are enough people who fly certain routes and will pay for a better seat that you could fill a plane with them.
    - 2y ago
OJFord 2y ago
Incremental improvement on flight time wouldn't even really benefit many passengers all that much, if I fly London to East coast US/Canada I spend more time getting to/from airports, and waiting in airport or on the field, than I do in the air. Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh? I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.
- ghaff 2y ago
  >Maybe more frequent smaller flights That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380. But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    The problem with the A380 was that only the biggest airports could accommodate them. Personally I always try to fly direct I absolutely HATE changing flights and apparently I'm not the only one.
amazingamazing 2y ago
Does it need to be faster? It needs to be more comfortable imo. also the process of boarding and deboarding a plane is more annoying and slower than the 60s.
- ghaff 2y ago
  All you need to do is buy a business class ticket.
  - amazingamazing 2y ago
    I've flown business - it's still not really that comfortable, but yes, it's much much better than economy or premium economy.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      A lot of domestic flights, business is more like economy plus. Trans-Atlantic I don't really have complaints although red-eyes are still disruptive. (I pretty much always do London as a day flight even though it means an ungodly early start.) I agree it's not a hotel room although I often don't sleep well the first night in a hotel room after an international flight either. AFAIK, there isn't anything even on the drawing board that could do trans-Pacific non-stop.
      - BobaFloutist 2y ago
        Wait what do you mean you can't do trans-Pacific non-stop? Are you not including California to Japan for some reason?
        ghaff 2y ago
        Referring to supersonic passenger designs. Obviously can do subsonic today.
        BobaFloutist 2y ago
mclau156 2y ago
https://boomsupersonic.com https://boomsupersonic.com
lordnacho 2y ago
There's not much point in getting faster. Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends. If I'm taking a 6 hour flight, it's actually a 10 hour flight. If the airplane gets there twice as fast, it's a 7 hour chunk of my time. I save three hours but how much am I willing to pay for that? It's still effectively a calendar day gone. For shorter flights, this is even worse. For super long flights like London to Sydney, maybe it would be useful to double the speed, so that you're not wasting two days instead of one, but doubling speed is also pretty far from possible.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  So reduce the fixed minimums at either end? It's absurd that getting onto a 3-dimensional bus takes ~1.5hr more per end than a normal bus. The fundamentals of embarking and disembarking passengers and their luggage is unchanged beyond needing to have all the luggage in a pile before you toss it on for weight distribution reasons.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town. Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      A shopping mall which you can't leave and in which you aren't allowed to bring your own drinks with few exceptions.
      - cwmma 2y ago
        can bring a quart zip lock bag stuffed to brim with nips (50ml bottles of booze) through TSA security. While you are technically not allowed to drink them on the plane absolutely nobody gives a shit as long as you are not an idiot about it.
xnx 2y ago
Recent and related "Airlines Are Padding Flight Times. It’s Not Your Imagination.: Flying in America has become slower even as official statistics have shown improvement.:" https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/upshot/airlines-flight-times-padding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/upshot/airlines-flight-ti...
- leoedin 2y ago
  All the European airlines do that - I think it's a response to compensation laws about delays. The schedule can eat a 30 minute delay without anyone even noticing.
  - switch007 2y ago
    Yup. It feels delays have been totally normalised
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Underpromise. Overdeliver. I do it with deadlines all the time.
tyre 2y ago
Flights feel like they’ve gotten much slower, in user space time. I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane. The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent. The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through. I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  It's our punishment for allowing national security to function as a get-out-of-congressional-debate-free card.
  - tyre 2y ago
    I understand why all of this happened in the first place. 9/11 was truly shocking. Maybe more so because I was a kid, but watching those planes hit the buildings, the buildings collapsing, the Fallen Man, the recordings for United 93…it was a lot. It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out. It seems like there are two problems: 1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong. Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed. 2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns. Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money. Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed. As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it. It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.
bloopernova 2y ago
I've sometimes wondered why there's not a ballistic trajectory plane. Something that boosts upward into the upper atmosphere, soars above dense air for a majority of the trip, then uses engines for a controlled landing. I kind of figured SpaceX or similar would cater to the billionaire class more by now.
- colonial 2y ago
  SpaceX wants to do that with Starship (they call it Earth-to-Earth) but I'm pretty sure even they acknowledge that it's something of a reach. Spaceflight is still where air travel was in the early 20th century - starting to become available "commercially", but still too dangerous and expensive for mass market adoption. If we see anything like Earth-to-Earth in the next decade or two, It'll almost certainly be military.
mft_ 2y ago
What would interest me more is innovation at the airport end of things. Much faster travel links, much faster security. Or are airport perversely incentivised to not do this to sell overpriced food and trinkets?
- tamcap 2y ago
  Many airports (in the US, at least) make much more money from parking fees than everything else. On top of that, at least some operate their retail in a royalties model too (ie 20% of all sales goes to the airport, before any costs). Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    That's what makes the 2-hour early 'rule' so egregious. Manipulating passengers to sit around in a Disneyland-priced mall because of the 1 in 5 chance the TSA screwed up their staffing that day.
    - rossriley 2y ago
      I think Singapore has a pretty good experience worked out now, the immigration is automated just with an iris scan. Additionally moving security to the gate rather than having a single security point for all flights also makes the wait here shorter and more importantly predictable. If I'm just taking a cabin bag I always arrive 35-40 minutes before a flight and have had no trouble with time, normally enough time to grab a coffee too before boarding.
zabzonk 2y ago
Back when (90s) I did fly the Atlantic frequently for work, I would have preferred to sit in comfort in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class (although 747s are pretty fast) and take some time about it rather than be squashed into a Concorde with nothing much to look out of. By the time you have factored in the hassle of getting to and from the airport, comfort (for me at least) takes priority if someone else is paying for it. I never got the choice and I must admit I would have liked to have flown Concorde once, just so I could say I had done - a beautiful aircraft, but then so is the 747.
- ghaff 2y ago
  My dad got upgraded to Concorde once for some reason. His reaction was pretty much that it was cool to have done it once but he probably actually preferred his first class PanAm and getting a good dinner rather than arriving in London at rush hour.
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    I always liked Virgin's finger buffet, with scones, clotted cream and jam, before landing at the horror that is Newark NJ.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      EWR is better than it used to be although I don't know about the terminal Virgin uses/used. (I'm always on United.) Transport into the city is still terrible though.
Damogran6 2y ago
In pragmatic terms, I can be in a tiny town in Virginia at 4am, and then be in another tiny town in Washington state in about 12 hours...how much faster does it have to be?
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  The fact that you have to get up at 4am tells you one aspect of how much faster it could be.
  - Damogran6 2y ago
    It's why I typically travel by RV whenever I can. ;) It's not fast, but it's a clean bathroom, great beer, and a really big suitcase I don't have to unpack.
- standardUser 2y ago
  The ideal amount of time to travel between two places is almost always zero. Would you rather spend 12 hours going from VA to WA or zero hours?
  - Damogran6 2y ago
    I like the part where I don't die of dysentery and lose two children on the trip.
hx8 2y ago
F=MA^2 Going faster just simply requires more fuel, and fuel is a precious and limited resource. There are some optimizations we could make to aircraft design to improve fuel economy, but we've already done most of the optimizations given our constraints of safety standards and the general goal of comfortably transporting humans.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  You might want to recheck your equation here... The rest of your post is pretty accurate, except for the goal of comfortably transporting humans. That "comfortably" is suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
  - hx8 2y ago
    Ha, yeah it's f=ma not f=ma^2. The main point is that going faster requires more energy, and this is the primary limiting function of air transport speed.
- alright2565 2y ago
  a=0 at cruise. you're thinking of the drag equation, where force is proportional to velocity squared.
flint 2y ago
I remember, in the mid 90s getting up at 6:00 am, taking a taxi to LGA and catching a 7:00 am Shuttle to Washingto DC so I could be at a 9:00 am meeting.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  6am is about the time you'd need to get up if you lived in Front Royal and wanted to make a 9am meeting and that's assuming a pretty efficient workflow for leaving the house.
- ghaff 2y ago
  In part, that was partly because you could just walk on the next shuttle at 7:30 or whenever if you got delayed for some reason. Personally I'd probably take the train although a 9AM meeting might be tight.
- switch007 2y ago
  That's wild. I'm presuming shuttles were eg hourly so you wouldn't be that delayed if you missed the 7am?
DavidD 2y ago
Air travel can be revolutionized with a pod-based boarding system to reduce travel times and enhance safety. Passengers would have individual pods with built-in luggage compartments under their seats, allowing for fast, automated boarding and unloading. This system would eliminate the need for overhead storage and flight attendants, streamlining operations. In emergencies, each pod would feature a deployable parachute, offering increased survivability. By minimizing human touchpoints and maximizing automation, airlines could drastically cut boarding times, improve passenger privacy, and enhance overall efficiency in air travel.
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  The lugagge compartment also serves as toilet. It is on the passenger to bring luggage or have a toilet, or both in a pinch /joke
- BearOso 2y ago
  Wait just a minute. That would take up space that they could otherwise use to cram in an extra row of seats.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  If I have a 2-year old child and I need to feed him or change his diaper but he's enclosed in his own sealed pod do I just have to wait 8 hours before I can interact with him at the other end or something? And what if I am traveling with my wife and she wants to put her head on my shoulder?
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  Classic LLM innovation
- cmuguythrow 2y ago
  Air travel can be revolutionized with a vacuum-sealed passenger transport system, reducing total airport time to just 10 minutes while maximizing efficiency and safety. Upon arrival, passengers would undergo a rapid preparation process, where an oxygen-rich biofluid is introduced through both mouth and anus, ensuring full oxygenation without the need for active breathing. They would then be gently encased in a flexible, vacuum-sealed transport sheet, immobilizing them completely to eliminate security concerns and expedite boarding. These passenger sheets would be automatically sorted and loaded onto aircraft via a conveyor system, optimizing cabin space with a precision-stacked configuration. Without the need for traditional seating, aisles, or security screening, aircraft capacity could increase significantly, lowering ticket prices while enhancing operational efficiency. Upon landing, passengers would be swiftly unloaded, revived from stasis, and ready to continue their journey within minutes. This system would not only eliminate delays caused by baggage handling and TSA procedures but also enhance fuel efficiency by optimizing passenger distribution within the aircraft.
patapong 2y ago
One might equally ask why cars have barely gotten faster in the same time period. I think these systems settle into a (maybe local) optimum of safety, cost, pollution, infrastructure requirements etc, and are then very hard to adapt.
pithanyChan 2y ago
kidding: Error 401, unauthorized. can't go faster than the US can keep up until the US can't be caught up with, ... allegedly. theory: flying any faster would have increased flights and reduced travelling prices. it wasn't the tech, see concorde ...
joezydeco 2y ago
You're too cheap to fly faster. https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-faster-7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-fast...
- tim333 2y ago
  There's also CO2 emissions and global warming. There isn't a huge push to burn more fuel to get there slightly quicker.
aj7 2y ago
Faster? It’s gotten slower! Significantly slower. Haven’t you noticed that modern jetliners don’t really even have swept back wings any more? The sweet spot for fuel efficiency is around 530mph for modern, very high bypass turbofan engines. In the 60’s, turbojet 707’s and DC8’s regularly flew at >600 mph. Gas was 25c a gallon.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  OK, but how is it that jet engines haven't become more fuel efficient since the 60s. Cars certainly have.
  - MindSpunk 2y ago
    They have. But drag is drag and the price of fuel is the price of fuel. Drag increasing at higher speed means your fuel usage grows geometrically with speed. Slower is more efficient (to an extent, slower means higher angle-of-attack to maintain lift so your drag will start going up again if you get slow enough). No matter how efficient the engines get drag remains the same and going faster will still cost more. Engine efficiency just goes into reducing operating costs instead of travel times now.
- aceofspades19 2y ago
  What modern jetliners are you referring to? the 787 has a sweep back of 32 degrees and a 707 had a sweep back of 35 degrees so not really that much difference. The 737 has a sweep back of 25 degrees and it first flew in the 1960s.
dawnerd 2y ago
Also what annoys me is how much friction airlines have added to the whole process. They want you there early, but too early and you wont have anywhere to sit. Show up a little later and it's a cluster trying to check a bag. Then boarding times are always wrong. Everyone rushes and blocks the lines. Process takes longer too when everyone brings all their luggage as carry on and argues about gate checking.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  This. In some places you used to be able to check your bags in advance. In Switzerland you could even check your bags at your local train station the day before so that you could just go to your flight and breeze through the airport.
  - veeti 2y ago
    Think you can still do that in Hong Kong.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      I used that on my last trip to HK (10 years ago?), but we couldn’t check a musical instrument there. https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-airlines-offering-in-town-check-in-at-hong-kong-station-1535652#:~:text=Almost%20all%20airlines%20flying%20from,Kong%20Station%20and%20Kowloon%20Station. https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-airlines-offering-in-town-...
  - alex989 2y ago
    That doesn't really solve the problem of your bag not arriving at destination. So far my ratio is 3 out of 14 that had bagage problems when I didn't bring them in with me as carry on.
    - jajko 2y ago
      If you fly multiple hops, there is no way to guarantee this, service quality varies wildly ie across Europe. Some airports are known to be 'black holes' for luggage, from dealings with Swissport who handles lost&found everywhere, they mentioned that Fiumicino airport near Rome didn't have stellar reputation to say politely, and Barcelona wasn't that great neither. Had luggage lost on both in rather annoying way - both of them didn't have a clue where it was for more than a week, started saying goodbye to all rather costly equipment like paraglider set in it. But I've seen stuff get lost in places like Vienna multiple times, so one can't draw any simple conclusions. I see it as a massive room for improvement and automation via 'AI', but that should have been done a decade ago, ie automated barcode scanning isn't novel tech.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
So apparently the issue is fuel economy -- going faster uses more fuel, so there's an optimum speed. But haven't jet engines become more fuel efficient in the past 50 years? You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.
- fransje26 2y ago
  > You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load. No. The problem is not engine efficiency. To my knowledge, Concorde still holds the title of having the best engine fuel-efficiency at cruise. Close to 60%. And although engine efficiencies at subsonic speeds have improved drastically since the 60s, the problem airplanes face when cruising closer to Mach 1 is that they start getting transonic effects around their wing and fuselage. And that greatly increase your drag. It is therefore more economical to stay below the speed threshold at which these effects start occurring. A high Mach 0.8+ could probably achieve that. Aircraft builders have settled for about Mach 0.82 for airliners. Private jet builders, in some cases, care less about fuel efficiency, and still build airplanes flying above Mach 0.9, as for example, the Cessna Citation X.
resters 2y ago
The biggest time delay is getting through security and boarding, then waiting for baggage claim. 1) TSA stuff doesn't keep anyone any safer 2) protectionism: foreign carriers are banned from flying many domestic routes. We'd have more capacity and throughput, as well as lower prices. 3) boarding algorithms are silly and could easily be improved by letting passengers self-select into fast vs slow boarders and letting fast get on/off first. 4) incentives for crew flight time / overtime / limits create scenarios where passengers are made to wait on the tarmac for no good reason.
linuxhansl 2y ago
Seems like a bigger delay is the #$%^&* hub and spoke model. Not too long ago I could catch a direct light to many, many cities in Europe. Now, I need to fly into a hub first - often passing right over my final destination (then having unboard, reboard, and fly back, easily another 1-2h). And don't even talk about the security theater. Sometimes twice (although that gotten better in that there isn't a 2nd check.) And, yes, I noticed that pure flight times got longer, about an hour on transcontinental flight. All this time I thought I made that up, but at speeds mentioned in the article this is about right.
justanotheratom 2y ago
"Boomless" Supersonic Flights https://x.com/bscholl/status/1888939430833975765 https://x.com/bscholl/status/1888939430833975765
ctrlp 2y ago
Commercial air travel has gotten worse in every way since TSA. Airports are filthy, passengers are treated like animals and act accordingly, packed in like sardines. Many are barely dressed; it feels like a forced sleepover. Even if you fly first class, you still have to share the airport facilities with the proles. Just awful.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Stop being poor and hire a private jet... Those can go faster too.
  - ctrlp 2y ago
    I'm trying, I'm trying.
harhargange 2y ago
Tl;DR - fuel efficiency, and cheaper, more optimal manufacturing.
coldtea 2y ago
Same reason we haven't built any better planes since the 1970s (only barely incrementally, and with lots of severe issues, see Boeing, F35 and so on). The skilled people are gone, and pointy haired managers took over.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Nope. Fuel efficiency dives as you approach the speed of sound, airliners were already going as close as you’d want to in the 70’s. Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably. Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either, and the few and far betweem (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues. Regarding the speed, we even had the Concord and lost it (and never improved upon it either). >Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings Analysts, Boeing insiders, and industry executives have spoken about the skills issue. Don't make things up based on your gut feelings.
    - fransje26 2y ago
      > Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either [..] We did, actually. Which is why the 777 is still being built, and the 747 is not. > (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues. Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s. We can look at [1]. Average airline accidents over the 60-70 period: 65.5 accidents a year, for an average of 1400 deaths a year. Average airline accidents over the 2011-2021 period: 20.1 accidents a year, for an average of 326.5 deaths a year. So just on pure numbers, the improvements are undeniable. What is hidden in those statistics is that the world air passenger traffic increase more than 60 fold since the 60s. [1] https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php
amai 2y ago
Train travel on the other side has gotten a lot faster since the 60s with the introduction of high speed trains.
CalChris 2y ago
There's a similar phenomenon in ocean shipping called Slow Steaming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming First, the hull shapes of container ships are tuned for a particular cruising speed. They accelerate up to that speed and cruise across the Pacific. In particular, the ship's bulbous bow is shaped to create an efficient counter bow wave at that speed. Before 2007, that cruising speed was faster, maybe 27 knots. This is just like the 707 doing 525 knots in the article. It was faster but not efficient. Enter Slow Steaming. They redesigned the hulls for a lower cruising speed, maybe 18 knots. They actually took ships into dry dock and re-nosed them. The result was better fuel economy. Fewer shippers (some still are) were willing to pay extra for the 27 knot speed. With Slow Steaming, the results are lower costs and significantly less pollution. The economics of flying and shipping are largely the same in this case.
- consp 2y ago
  > The economics are largely the same. Did the crackdown on cheap sulphurous bunker oil have no effect on it? Or was there no real crackdown and it was just media hype? (This is a genuine question).
  - rob74 2y ago
    The crackdown was so successful that some scientists attribute the even-warmer-than-expected weather we have had in the last few years to additional warming due to the lack of light-reflecting sulphur in the atmosphere (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...). Oops...
    - buildbot 2y ago
      Terrible hypothetical idea: Let’s engineer a bunker fuel additive with even more global cooling properties than sulfur! We should probably just reduce consumption and emissions though.
      - 2y ago
eleveriven 2y ago
So speed alone isn’t enough. And now we have noise restrictions, emissions rules and lack of infrastructure for supersonic flights. And I think commercial air travel will likely keep optimizing for efficiency rather than speed.
Earw0rm 2y ago
Optimization, people! If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are borderline incompetent at delivering this (or just not interested). And the other potential big saving is in airport transit time - but airports nowadays are optimised for "extract as much money as possible from each user", not "minimize user transit time from the station/car park to their assigned seat on the aircraft".
maurits 2y ago
Slightly tangent: "Web Design: The First 100 Years" [1] [1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
anacrolix 2y ago
why are we still using silicon transistors?
hemant1041 2y ago
Interesting read!
amelius 2y ago
Why hasn't single thread computing gotten any faster since the 00's?
- Yossarrian22 2y ago
  It has, partially through executing more instructions per cycle
  - amelius 2y ago
    https://www.man.com/technology/single-core-stagnation-and-the-cloud https://www.man.com/technology/single-core-stagnation-and-th... Yes you are right, but the curve is flattening.
GuB-42 2y ago
Reasons I can think of: - Most people want cheap flights over everything else, speed is expensive - The flight time only has a limited relative impact on the overall travel time. Time to get in and out of the airport, security, border controls, boarding, taxiing, etc... often take longer than the flight itself. - For passengers who are ready to pay more, you can always offer more comfort. The advantage with comfort is that you can divide the plane into classes, it is highly modular. Faster requires an entirely new plane design just for those who can afford it. - Arguably, comfort is more valuable than the kind of speed improvement we can get. For example, if you sleep better on the plane, that's less sleep you will need at your destination, saving you time overall. If you can work on the plane, that's also time you don't have to spend working at some other time.
anshumankmr 2y ago
Question is do we need to go faster? How many people really care if they can fly in about half the time cause regular jets are plenty fast.
floppiplopp 2y ago
Why? Because physics and economic efficiency, that's why.
dk1138 2y ago
Airlines are subject to enshittification just as all other things are: • Diminished airline status returns • Increasingly large/overpriced shops/restaurants • More discrete seat/class upgrade costs, worse experience for base fare overall. • Higher security friction • Explosion of travel cards that overload lounges • Increased nationwide traffic so even the drive to the airport is worse • Costs of food purchases on plane (in the 90's any transcontinental flight usually had a free meal). The only things that have gotten better are wifi and entertainment to act as recompense for less leg room.

142 points by sorentwo 2y ago

TLDR: Fuel Efficiency. If somebody actually develops supersonic private aircraft, we really need to start taxing aviation fuels. You could blow through your annual carbon budget in like an hour. Those costs need to be internalized.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maxcan 2y ago
We do. And I believe that private is taxed more than commercial. Most of the FAA's funding comes from this.

bombcar 2y ago

To be fair, road travel hasn’t really increased in speed since the 60s either. Once the freeways were built, truck and car speeds were about as fast as you can reasonably go. Trains still have some headroom.

potato3732842 2y ago
Highway speed not at peak times has increased by a lot since even the 90s. Hell, the garbage trucks here go 70+ until they hit a hill.
rsynnott 2y ago
> Trains still have some headroom. Honestly, not much. 350km/h seems to be the peak practical operating speed (and that hasn't really changed since the 80s). Even the rather impractical Shanghai maglev no longer operates over that speed, though it did routinely run at over 400km/h for a while. Most high speed systems are in that general range today. _Maybe_ maglevs will eventually be practical, but I'd hate to bet on it. This is the only serious such project at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consump... (China seems to have largely lost interest in favour of conventional high-speed).
- Muromec 2y ago
  Most trains run much slower than 350 km/h however.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  400 km/h seems to be practical. China started building trains that can go that fast. They must already have lines that support that speed, cause upgrading lines is the huge expense. There is less advantage to increasing speed. Is it worth the cost of maglev Shinkansen to save 30 minutes? How long would 400 km/h rail take instead? Maglevs have disadvantage that need dedicated route, while high speed rail can take existing rail into cities.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    _Trains_ which can do 400km/h have been around for a long time. SNCF (the French railway company) has a modified TGV set that can do 570km/h(!!!) But trains are just one part of the system.
ryandrake 2y ago
At least in the USA: Legally, road travel speeds have come along way from the 1974 federal speed limit of 55mph. States set their own limits now, and all fifty of them have a higher maximum limit. Safety-wise, cars are much safer in crashes than they were in the 60s, both at high and low speeds. Setting aside safety and the legal limits, raw top speeds of similar car models are much higher today than they were in the 60s and 70s. Acceleration and braking have vastly improved, too.
gerdesj 2y ago
A car from the '60's could do 0-60mph in ... an age. I'm 54 y/o and not off of the '60's but old enough to remember lead in petrol (gas). My modern EV can do 0-30 rather rapidly and 0-60 quite rapidly. It tops out at 120 or so. The US freeways are able to sustain high speeds but their older off ramps are proper old school and way too tight. Older bits of the German autobahns have the same issue - far too tight bends on "Ausfahrt". In France and Italy, Spain and well the rest of the EU I recall mostly decent on and off ramps. I think the UK has the best efforts - we generally have massively long and large slip lanes but I will grant that we have some horrible exits from A roads, which are dual carriageway and so look like motorway. For example A303 whilst running through Somerset.
- m463 2y ago
  In the 60's (before mid 70's) many many roads in the united states had no speed limit "reasonable and prudent". now cars are significantly more capable, but speeds are limited by laws and congestion.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    Quite a lot of German autobahns still don't have a speed limit. I lived there when it was West Germany. I remember 90mph in lane one being normal and that was in the 1980s. 120+ in lane two was normal. Petrol was cheap back then - even in the EU. In the US gas was nigh on free! (or so it seemed to us). I was given a scale model of an Audi Quattro rally car by a German chap when I turned 17 (1987). I still have it. That car destroyed all comers back in the day because it brought 4WD to the game. Nowadays I drive an EV - a Saic MG4. I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which is where the Morris Garage (MG) started off in around 1910. I can safely say that an MG4 is not a British thing at all.

regularization 2y ago

I would prefer Boeing to figure out how to prevent cabin doors from blowing off mid-flight, or DCA air traffic control to figure out how to prevent planes from colliding with Black Hawk helicopters before they figure out how to make planes go faster.

LastTrain 2y ago
That isn't ever going to happen, and modern airline safety is nothing short of a miracle. There are on the order of 10-20 million flights a year in the US, carrying 900 million passengers. You could take 5 million flights before you could statistically expect to die. This is one of those rare things in the world where a system has been developed that works, and it involves making slow changes with extreme planning and caution.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  This is a typical refrain that I can translate as "we'd solve horrific safety issues and the fear and paranoia about flying if we'd all stop following the news."
  - LastTrain 2y ago
    But there aren't "horrific" safety issues, as the numbers demonstrate. Stepping onto a US commercial airliner is literally about the safest thing you can do. Watch the news all you want, just understand what you're watching and that if it were normal it wouldn't be news. Nobody is saying there isn't room for improvement, continual improvement in safety is part of the process, and the numbers bear that out.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      Indeed, I thought awhile about a way to rephrase that, and it's really just media shaping the perceptions about such. Being in an aircrash seems like a top national nightmare, so 9/11 was super effective in catching our attention.
- 2y ago

namirez 2y ago

Physics has not changed since the 60s. Wave drag due to shock waves is still a thing.

frostyel 2y ago
By this reasoning, fighter planes shouldn't have improved either. We know that this is not the case. It's not the limits of physics holding us back.
- namirez 2y ago
  And they have not! Both F22 and F33 are significantly slower than say F4, F104, or F106 all designed in the 50s.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Or the SR-71...
    - namirez 2y ago
      Indeed although it wasn’t a fighter; it was a reconnaissance aircraft.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        This is true, although it was tested in a fast response fighter role, overlying enemy aircraft and firing air-to-air missiles from high altitude.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  Going faster and improving are two different things. Planes have improved immensely since the 1960s, but they don't go faster. Commercial aircraft have much lower fuel use. Military aircraft have things like better radar and stealth.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago

cies 2y ago

I did not read the article... But this is what I think is the reason: > As the speed increases, the air resistance increases exponentially. If you want faster travel, look at Hyperloop (in near vacuum iirc). Or how to make passing TSA less of a time sink :)

ghaff 2y ago
For a variety of reasons, I still leave a fair bit of slack at the airport but with pre-check, TSA is usually not a big deal.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Still, major airports all want you to arrive quite a long time before your flight's scheduled departure. Not much point in spending $$$$ on fuel to knock an hour off a 4-hour flight, if I end up with an hour-long wait at each end.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I don't really care what the airport wants. But stuff happens--e.g. there's construction in the tunnel leading to the airport or there's a holdup of some sort--so I essentially always arrive much earlier than I need to. I hate stressing myself for maybe a bit more sleep in the morning.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > Still, major airports all want you to arrive quite a long time before your flight's scheduled departure. I think they still encourage this so that you'll spend $$ at the airport (the longer you're there, the more likely you are to spend), which is a major source of revenue these days.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Except that sometimes the Precheck line is longer than the regular line. Has happened to me a number of times. I still stay in the precheck line because I don't want to take off my shoes, but as precheck becomes more popular, the speed advantages decrease.

ColinWright 2y ago

(Posted: February 19, 2009) As soon as I saw the title I knew the answer ... economics. The vast majority of people buy the cheapest flights they can, and with modern jet engine technology it's cheaper to fly slightly slower. The same is true with ocean going cargo ships. They deliberately cruise[0] slower if they are under some nation's flags because the wages are lower for those nationals[1], and the balance between cost of wages versus cost of fuel shifts towards spending more time (higher wages) at a lower speed (less fuel). Roughly, steaming faster increases your fuel bill but lowers your wages bill, and vice versa. The exact balance point depends on the base rate for the wages of the crew. And the number of crew. The arithmetic is brutal, but unassailable. [0] The technical term is, believe it or not "steam" [1] It's complicated. Very complicated.

csbowe 2y ago

> “The main issue is fuel economy,” says aeronautics and astronautics professor Mark Drela. “Going faster eats more fuel per passenger-mile. Pretty simple - we care more about air travel being cheaper and safer than we care about it being faster.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 2y ago
And even if not everyone does, operating entire flights at business class+ fares is probably not viable. Especially given that lie-flat seating (e.g. Polaris) with at least decent food is pretty comfortable for the people who are willing to pay a premium.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  JSX operates an entire airline as business-only. They use CRJ-900s, so not long-range, but there's no TSA (they are technically charter flights, you board at an FBO). You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    BA has, as I understand it, gone back and forth on London to New York business only flights. But that's not designing a whole new aircraft for the purpose.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      A CRJ-900 is a very, very common regional jet. They just changed the seats. I'm not making a comment about the original topic, just the comment that operating an entire airline as business wasn't viable. Not on every route, no, but for the right route? Yeah, there are enough people who fly certain routes and will pay for a better seat that you could fill a plane with them.
  - 2y ago

OJFord 2y ago

Incremental improvement on flight time wouldn't even really benefit many passengers all that much, if I fly London to East coast US/Canada I spend more time getting to/from airports, and waiting in airport or on the field, than I do in the air. Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh? I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.

ghaff 2y ago
>Maybe more frequent smaller flights That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380. But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
- Yeul 2y ago
  The problem with the A380 was that only the biggest airports could accommodate them. Personally I always try to fly direct I absolutely HATE changing flights and apparently I'm not the only one.

amazingamazing 2y ago

Does it need to be faster? It needs to be more comfortable imo. also the process of boarding and deboarding a plane is more annoying and slower than the 60s.

ghaff 2y ago
All you need to do is buy a business class ticket.
- amazingamazing 2y ago
  I've flown business - it's still not really that comfortable, but yes, it's much much better than economy or premium economy.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    A lot of domestic flights, business is more like economy plus. Trans-Atlantic I don't really have complaints although red-eyes are still disruptive. (I pretty much always do London as a day flight even though it means an ungodly early start.) I agree it's not a hotel room although I often don't sleep well the first night in a hotel room after an international flight either. AFAIK, there isn't anything even on the drawing board that could do trans-Pacific non-stop.
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      Wait what do you mean you can't do trans-Pacific non-stop? Are you not including California to Japan for some reason?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Referring to supersonic passenger designs. Obviously can do subsonic today.
        BobaFloutist 2y ago

mclau156 2y ago

https://boomsupersonic.com https://boomsupersonic.com

lordnacho 2y ago

There's not much point in getting faster. Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends. If I'm taking a 6 hour flight, it's actually a 10 hour flight. If the airplane gets there twice as fast, it's a 7 hour chunk of my time. I save three hours but how much am I willing to pay for that? It's still effectively a calendar day gone. For shorter flights, this is even worse. For super long flights like London to Sydney, maybe it would be useful to double the speed, so that you're not wasting two days instead of one, but doubling speed is also pretty far from possible.

potato3732842 2y ago
So reduce the fixed minimums at either end? It's absurd that getting onto a 3-dimensional bus takes ~1.5hr more per end than a normal bus. The fundamentals of embarking and disembarking passengers and their luggage is unchanged beyond needing to have all the luggage in a pile before you toss it on for weight distribution reasons.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town. Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    A shopping mall which you can't leave and in which you aren't allowed to bring your own drinks with few exceptions.
    - cwmma 2y ago
      can bring a quart zip lock bag stuffed to brim with nips (50ml bottles of booze) through TSA security. While you are technically not allowed to drink them on the plane absolutely nobody gives a shit as long as you are not an idiot about it.

xnx 2y ago

Recent and related "Airlines Are Padding Flight Times. It’s Not Your Imagination.: Flying in America has become slower even as official statistics have shown improvement.:" https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/upshot/airlines-flight-times-padding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/upshot/airlines-flight-ti...

leoedin 2y ago
All the European airlines do that - I think it's a response to compensation laws about delays. The schedule can eat a 30 minute delay without anyone even noticing.
- switch007 2y ago
  Yup. It feels delays have been totally normalised
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Underpromise. Overdeliver. I do it with deadlines all the time.

tyre 2y ago

Flights feel like they’ve gotten much slower, in user space time. I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane. The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent. The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through. I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.

whatshisface 2y ago
It's our punishment for allowing national security to function as a get-out-of-congressional-debate-free card.
- tyre 2y ago
  I understand why all of this happened in the first place. 9/11 was truly shocking. Maybe more so because I was a kid, but watching those planes hit the buildings, the buildings collapsing, the Fallen Man, the recordings for United 93…it was a lot. It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out. It seems like there are two problems: 1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong. Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed. 2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns. Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money. Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed. As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it. It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.

bloopernova 2y ago

I've sometimes wondered why there's not a ballistic trajectory plane. Something that boosts upward into the upper atmosphere, soars above dense air for a majority of the trip, then uses engines for a controlled landing. I kind of figured SpaceX or similar would cater to the billionaire class more by now.

colonial 2y ago
SpaceX wants to do that with Starship (they call it Earth-to-Earth) but I'm pretty sure even they acknowledge that it's something of a reach. Spaceflight is still where air travel was in the early 20th century - starting to become available "commercially", but still too dangerous and expensive for mass market adoption. If we see anything like Earth-to-Earth in the next decade or two, It'll almost certainly be military.

mft_ 2y ago

What would interest me more is innovation at the airport end of things. Much faster travel links, much faster security. Or are airport perversely incentivised to not do this to sell overpriced food and trinkets?

tamcap 2y ago
Many airports (in the US, at least) make much more money from parking fees than everything else. On top of that, at least some operate their retail in a royalties model too (ie 20% of all sales goes to the airport, before any costs). Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
- standardUser 2y ago
  That's what makes the 2-hour early 'rule' so egregious. Manipulating passengers to sit around in a Disneyland-priced mall because of the 1 in 5 chance the TSA screwed up their staffing that day.
  - rossriley 2y ago
    I think Singapore has a pretty good experience worked out now, the immigration is automated just with an iris scan. Additionally moving security to the gate rather than having a single security point for all flights also makes the wait here shorter and more importantly predictable. If I'm just taking a cabin bag I always arrive 35-40 minutes before a flight and have had no trouble with time, normally enough time to grab a coffee too before boarding.

zabzonk 2y ago

Back when (90s) I did fly the Atlantic frequently for work, I would have preferred to sit in comfort in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class (although 747s are pretty fast) and take some time about it rather than be squashed into a Concorde with nothing much to look out of. By the time you have factored in the hassle of getting to and from the airport, comfort (for me at least) takes priority if someone else is paying for it. I never got the choice and I must admit I would have liked to have flown Concorde once, just so I could say I had done - a beautiful aircraft, but then so is the 747.

ghaff 2y ago
My dad got upgraded to Concorde once for some reason. His reaction was pretty much that it was cool to have done it once but he probably actually preferred his first class PanAm and getting a good dinner rather than arriving in London at rush hour.
- zabzonk 2y ago
  I always liked Virgin's finger buffet, with scones, clotted cream and jam, before landing at the horror that is Newark NJ.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    EWR is better than it used to be although I don't know about the terminal Virgin uses/used. (I'm always on United.) Transport into the city is still terrible though.

Damogran6 2y ago

In pragmatic terms, I can be in a tiny town in Virginia at 4am, and then be in another tiny town in Washington state in about 12 hours...how much faster does it have to be?

JoshTriplett 2y ago
The fact that you have to get up at 4am tells you one aspect of how much faster it could be.
- Damogran6 2y ago
  It's why I typically travel by RV whenever I can. ;) It's not fast, but it's a clean bathroom, great beer, and a really big suitcase I don't have to unpack.
standardUser 2y ago
The ideal amount of time to travel between two places is almost always zero. Would you rather spend 12 hours going from VA to WA or zero hours?
- Damogran6 2y ago
  I like the part where I don't die of dysentery and lose two children on the trip.

hx8 2y ago

F=MA^2 Going faster just simply requires more fuel, and fuel is a precious and limited resource. There are some optimizations we could make to aircraft design to improve fuel economy, but we've already done most of the optimizations given our constraints of safety standards and the general goal of comfortably transporting humans.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
You might want to recheck your equation here... The rest of your post is pretty accurate, except for the goal of comfortably transporting humans. That "comfortably" is suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
- hx8 2y ago
  Ha, yeah it's f=ma not f=ma^2. The main point is that going faster requires more energy, and this is the primary limiting function of air transport speed.
alright2565 2y ago
a=0 at cruise. you're thinking of the drag equation, where force is proportional to velocity squared.

flint 2y ago

I remember, in the mid 90s getting up at 6:00 am, taking a taxi to LGA and catching a 7:00 am Shuttle to Washingto DC so I could be at a 9:00 am meeting.

potato3732842 2y ago
6am is about the time you'd need to get up if you lived in Front Royal and wanted to make a 9am meeting and that's assuming a pretty efficient workflow for leaving the house.
ghaff 2y ago
In part, that was partly because you could just walk on the next shuttle at 7:30 or whenever if you got delayed for some reason. Personally I'd probably take the train although a 9AM meeting might be tight.
switch007 2y ago
That's wild. I'm presuming shuttles were eg hourly so you wouldn't be that delayed if you missed the 7am?

DavidD 2y ago

Air travel can be revolutionized with a pod-based boarding system to reduce travel times and enhance safety. Passengers would have individual pods with built-in luggage compartments under their seats, allowing for fast, automated boarding and unloading. This system would eliminate the need for overhead storage and flight attendants, streamlining operations. In emergencies, each pod would feature a deployable parachute, offering increased survivability. By minimizing human touchpoints and maximizing automation, airlines could drastically cut boarding times, improve passenger privacy, and enhance overall efficiency in air travel.

catlikesshrimp 2y ago
The lugagge compartment also serves as toilet. It is on the passenger to bring luggage or have a toilet, or both in a pinch /joke
BearOso 2y ago
Wait just a minute. That would take up space that they could otherwise use to cram in an extra row of seats.
throwway120385 2y ago
If I have a 2-year old child and I need to feed him or change his diaper but he's enclosed in his own sealed pod do I just have to wait 8 hours before I can interact with him at the other end or something? And what if I am traveling with my wife and she wants to put her head on my shoulder?
senordevnyc 2y ago
Classic LLM innovation
cmuguythrow 2y ago
Air travel can be revolutionized with a vacuum-sealed passenger transport system, reducing total airport time to just 10 minutes while maximizing efficiency and safety. Upon arrival, passengers would undergo a rapid preparation process, where an oxygen-rich biofluid is introduced through both mouth and anus, ensuring full oxygenation without the need for active breathing. They would then be gently encased in a flexible, vacuum-sealed transport sheet, immobilizing them completely to eliminate security concerns and expedite boarding. These passenger sheets would be automatically sorted and loaded onto aircraft via a conveyor system, optimizing cabin space with a precision-stacked configuration. Without the need for traditional seating, aisles, or security screening, aircraft capacity could increase significantly, lowering ticket prices while enhancing operational efficiency. Upon landing, passengers would be swiftly unloaded, revived from stasis, and ready to continue their journey within minutes. This system would not only eliminate delays caused by baggage handling and TSA procedures but also enhance fuel efficiency by optimizing passenger distribution within the aircraft.

patapong 2y ago

One might equally ask why cars have barely gotten faster in the same time period. I think these systems settle into a (maybe local) optimum of safety, cost, pollution, infrastructure requirements etc, and are then very hard to adapt.

pithanyChan 2y ago

kidding: Error 401, unauthorized. can't go faster than the US can keep up until the US can't be caught up with, ... allegedly. theory: flying any faster would have increased flights and reduced travelling prices. it wasn't the tech, see concorde ...

joezydeco 2y ago

You're too cheap to fly faster. https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-faster-7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-fast...

tim333 2y ago
There's also CO2 emissions and global warming. There isn't a huge push to burn more fuel to get there slightly quicker.

aj7 2y ago

Faster? It’s gotten slower! Significantly slower. Haven’t you noticed that modern jetliners don’t really even have swept back wings any more? The sweet spot for fuel efficiency is around 530mph for modern, very high bypass turbofan engines. In the 60’s, turbojet 707’s and DC8’s regularly flew at >600 mph. Gas was 25c a gallon.

insane_dreamer 2y ago
OK, but how is it that jet engines haven't become more fuel efficient since the 60s. Cars certainly have.
- MindSpunk 2y ago
  They have. But drag is drag and the price of fuel is the price of fuel. Drag increasing at higher speed means your fuel usage grows geometrically with speed. Slower is more efficient (to an extent, slower means higher angle-of-attack to maintain lift so your drag will start going up again if you get slow enough). No matter how efficient the engines get drag remains the same and going faster will still cost more. Engine efficiency just goes into reducing operating costs instead of travel times now.
aceofspades19 2y ago
What modern jetliners are you referring to? the 787 has a sweep back of 32 degrees and a 707 had a sweep back of 35 degrees so not really that much difference. The 737 has a sweep back of 25 degrees and it first flew in the 1960s.

dawnerd 2y ago

Also what annoys me is how much friction airlines have added to the whole process. They want you there early, but too early and you wont have anywhere to sit. Show up a little later and it's a cluster trying to check a bag. Then boarding times are always wrong. Everyone rushes and blocks the lines. Process takes longer too when everyone brings all their luggage as carry on and argues about gate checking.

insane_dreamer 2y ago
This. In some places you used to be able to check your bags in advance. In Switzerland you could even check your bags at your local train station the day before so that you could just go to your flight and breeze through the airport.
- veeti 2y ago
  Think you can still do that in Hong Kong.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I used that on my last trip to HK (10 years ago?), but we couldn’t check a musical instrument there. https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-airlines-offering-in-town-check-in-at-hong-kong-station-1535652#:~:text=Almost%20all%20airlines%20flying%20from,Kong%20Station%20and%20Kowloon%20Station. https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-airlines-offering-in-town-...
- alex989 2y ago
  That doesn't really solve the problem of your bag not arriving at destination. So far my ratio is 3 out of 14 that had bagage problems when I didn't bring them in with me as carry on.
  - jajko 2y ago
    If you fly multiple hops, there is no way to guarantee this, service quality varies wildly ie across Europe. Some airports are known to be 'black holes' for luggage, from dealings with Swissport who handles lost&found everywhere, they mentioned that Fiumicino airport near Rome didn't have stellar reputation to say politely, and Barcelona wasn't that great neither. Had luggage lost on both in rather annoying way - both of them didn't have a clue where it was for more than a week, started saying goodbye to all rather costly equipment like paraglider set in it. But I've seen stuff get lost in places like Vienna multiple times, so one can't draw any simple conclusions. I see it as a massive room for improvement and automation via 'AI', but that should have been done a decade ago, ie automated barcode scanning isn't novel tech.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

So apparently the issue is fuel economy -- going faster uses more fuel, so there's an optimum speed. But haven't jet engines become more fuel efficient in the past 50 years? You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.

fransje26 2y ago
> You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load. No. The problem is not engine efficiency. To my knowledge, Concorde still holds the title of having the best engine fuel-efficiency at cruise. Close to 60%. And although engine efficiencies at subsonic speeds have improved drastically since the 60s, the problem airplanes face when cruising closer to Mach 1 is that they start getting transonic effects around their wing and fuselage. And that greatly increase your drag. It is therefore more economical to stay below the speed threshold at which these effects start occurring. A high Mach 0.8+ could probably achieve that. Aircraft builders have settled for about Mach 0.82 for airliners. Private jet builders, in some cases, care less about fuel efficiency, and still build airplanes flying above Mach 0.9, as for example, the Cessna Citation X.

resters 2y ago

The biggest time delay is getting through security and boarding, then waiting for baggage claim. 1) TSA stuff doesn't keep anyone any safer 2) protectionism: foreign carriers are banned from flying many domestic routes. We'd have more capacity and throughput, as well as lower prices. 3) boarding algorithms are silly and could easily be improved by letting passengers self-select into fast vs slow boarders and letting fast get on/off first. 4) incentives for crew flight time / overtime / limits create scenarios where passengers are made to wait on the tarmac for no good reason.

linuxhansl 2y ago

Seems like a bigger delay is the #$%^&* hub and spoke model. Not too long ago I could catch a direct light to many, many cities in Europe. Now, I need to fly into a hub first - often passing right over my final destination (then having unboard, reboard, and fly back, easily another 1-2h). And don't even talk about the security theater. Sometimes twice (although that gotten better in that there isn't a 2nd check.) And, yes, I noticed that pure flight times got longer, about an hour on transcontinental flight. All this time I thought I made that up, but at speeds mentioned in the article this is about right.

justanotheratom 2y ago

"Boomless" Supersonic Flights https://x.com/bscholl/status/1888939430833975765 https://x.com/bscholl/status/1888939430833975765

ctrlp 2y ago

Commercial air travel has gotten worse in every way since TSA. Airports are filthy, passengers are treated like animals and act accordingly, packed in like sardines. Many are barely dressed; it feels like a forced sleepover. Even if you fly first class, you still have to share the airport facilities with the proles. Just awful.

Ekaros 2y ago
Stop being poor and hire a private jet... Those can go faster too.
- ctrlp 2y ago
  I'm trying, I'm trying.

harhargange 2y ago

Tl;DR - fuel efficiency, and cheaper, more optimal manufacturing.

coldtea 2y ago

Same reason we haven't built any better planes since the 1970s (only barely incrementally, and with lots of severe issues, see Boeing, F35 and so on). The skilled people are gone, and pointy haired managers took over.

colechristensen 2y ago
Nope. Fuel efficiency dives as you approach the speed of sound, airliners were already going as close as you’d want to in the 70’s. Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably. Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings.
- coldtea 2y ago
  Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either, and the few and far betweem (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues. Regarding the speed, we even had the Concord and lost it (and never improved upon it either). >Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings Analysts, Boeing insiders, and industry executives have spoken about the skills issue. Don't make things up based on your gut feelings.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    > Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either [..] We did, actually. Which is why the 777 is still being built, and the 747 is not. > (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues. Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s. We can look at [1]. Average airline accidents over the 60-70 period: 65.5 accidents a year, for an average of 1400 deaths a year. Average airline accidents over the 2011-2021 period: 20.1 accidents a year, for an average of 326.5 deaths a year. So just on pure numbers, the improvements are undeniable. What is hidden in those statistics is that the world air passenger traffic increase more than 60 fold since the 60s. [1] https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php https://asn.flightsafety.org/statistics/period/stats.php

amai 2y ago

Train travel on the other side has gotten a lot faster since the 60s with the introduction of high speed trains.

CalChris 2y ago

There's a similar phenomenon in ocean shipping called Slow Steaming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming First, the hull shapes of container ships are tuned for a particular cruising speed. They accelerate up to that speed and cruise across the Pacific. In particular, the ship's bulbous bow is shaped to create an efficient counter bow wave at that speed. Before 2007, that cruising speed was faster, maybe 27 knots. This is just like the 707 doing 525 knots in the article. It was faster but not efficient. Enter Slow Steaming. They redesigned the hulls for a lower cruising speed, maybe 18 knots. They actually took ships into dry dock and re-nosed them. The result was better fuel economy. Fewer shippers (some still are) were willing to pay extra for the 27 knot speed. With Slow Steaming, the results are lower costs and significantly less pollution. The economics of flying and shipping are largely the same in this case.

consp 2y ago
> The economics are largely the same. Did the crackdown on cheap sulphurous bunker oil have no effect on it? Or was there no real crackdown and it was just media hype? (This is a genuine question).
- rob74 2y ago
  The crackdown was so successful that some scientists attribute the even-warmer-than-expected weather we have had in the last few years to additional warming due to the lack of light-reflecting sulphur in the atmosphere (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...). Oops...
  - buildbot 2y ago
    Terrible hypothetical idea: Let’s engineer a bunker fuel additive with even more global cooling properties than sulfur! We should probably just reduce consumption and emissions though.
    - 2y ago

eleveriven 2y ago

So speed alone isn’t enough. And now we have noise restrictions, emissions rules and lack of infrastructure for supersonic flights. And I think commercial air travel will likely keep optimizing for efficiency rather than speed.

Earw0rm 2y ago

Optimization, people! If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are borderline incompetent at delivering this (or just not interested). And the other potential big saving is in airport transit time - but airports nowadays are optimised for "extract as much money as possible from each user", not "minimize user transit time from the station/car park to their assigned seat on the aircraft".

maurits 2y ago

Slightly tangent: "Web Design: The First 100 Years" [1] [1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

anacrolix 2y ago

why are we still using silicon transistors?

hemant1041 2y ago

Interesting read!

amelius 2y ago

Why hasn't single thread computing gotten any faster since the 00's?

Yossarrian22 2y ago
It has, partially through executing more instructions per cycle
- amelius 2y ago
  https://www.man.com/technology/single-core-stagnation-and-the-cloud https://www.man.com/technology/single-core-stagnation-and-th... Yes you are right, but the curve is flattening.

GuB-42 2y ago

Reasons I can think of: - Most people want cheap flights over everything else, speed is expensive - The flight time only has a limited relative impact on the overall travel time. Time to get in and out of the airport, security, border controls, boarding, taxiing, etc... often take longer than the flight itself. - For passengers who are ready to pay more, you can always offer more comfort. The advantage with comfort is that you can divide the plane into classes, it is highly modular. Faster requires an entirely new plane design just for those who can afford it. - Arguably, comfort is more valuable than the kind of speed improvement we can get. For example, if you sleep better on the plane, that's less sleep you will need at your destination, saving you time overall. If you can work on the plane, that's also time you don't have to spend working at some other time.

anshumankmr 2y ago

Question is do we need to go faster? How many people really care if they can fly in about half the time cause regular jets are plenty fast.

floppiplopp 2y ago

Why? Because physics and economic efficiency, that's why.

dk1138 2y ago

Airlines are subject to enshittification just as all other things are: • Diminished airline status returns • Increasingly large/overpriced shops/restaurants • More discrete seat/class upgrade costs, worse experience for base fare overall. • Higher security friction • Explosion of travel cards that overload lounges • Increased nationwide traffic so even the drive to the airport is worse • Costs of food purchases on plane (in the 90's any transcontinental flight usually had a free meal). The only things that have gotten better are wifi and entertainment to act as recompense for less leg room.