9 ms·

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 co

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.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        And you can also bring an empty water bottle that there are often stations setup for the purpose of filling next to water fountains. Mind you, I'm annoyed at the liquids thing given I used to routinely bring bottles of wine or a local liqueur home in carry-on. And I can't any longer.
        cycomanic 2y ago
        I recall when those guys in the UK (?) had their plan to explode a plane by mixing some volatile chemicals in the plane toilet. IIRC this kicked off the whole no liquids requirements. At the time I remember reading an article by a chemist on the chances of actually pulling off what they wee planning to do, and it was comical. To not just make a giant poof that mainly singed off some hair they needed to carefully mix the liquids in an ice bath for about 1h (without anyone noticing) and every little shake could potentially mess up the whole thing. He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.
        throwway120385 2y ago
        I think the point of it was that our enemies had figured out that the way to destroy America wasn't to kill our leaders, but rather to convince us that our enemies were inside the country, and then watch us tear each other apart.
        Muromec 2y ago
        >He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating. So this is why we also can't bring own cocaine on board in addition to not having own booze. What a shame
      - twelve40 2y ago
        bingo! for long-haul flights (>10hrs) i'd even bring two zip locks. Relax and fall asleep right during takeoff while everyone else has to wait for the stupid cart forever.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town. Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive). Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)). But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop. Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
    - lordnacho 2y ago
      > Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that. I don't know why there isn't just a bunch of seats in the terminal laid out the same way as the plane. Sit there and wait, and then when it's time to board, the people at the end get on first, tada, everyone is boarded and we're not stopping each other from getting in.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        In practice, the airlines order status of various kinds when boarding which roughly correlates to how much money people spend with the airline.
        technothrasher 2y ago
        Yep, and the status folks want to both board first and be in the front of the plane, which clogs everything up during boarding.
  - thmsths 2y ago
    I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. Like 10 minutes average 20 minutes for the 95% percentile and a guarantee that it will never exceed 30 minutes. Seeing lines form around the block and passengers having to wait hours to clear security in some extreme cases is simply not acceptable.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      It isn't, but changes that require additional staffing simply aren't going to be tolerated. If you add more staff, that directly translates to higher ticket prices because passengers directly pay for most of the TSA costs. If you expand facilities, that takes away from the valuable real estate the airport would rather use to sell you magazines and duty free. It also harms their Clear revenue stream, who pays airports to make security lines worse as a means to convince people to sign up.
      - thmsths 2y ago
        Or we could streamline the process: remove steps that are taking too long for little benefit (typically asking people to remove their shoes) and automate more.
    - TuringNYC 2y ago
      >> I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. What they should really have is a line for clueless people. You know, the people ahead of you who walk thru metal detectors with belts. Then aw-shucks and waste another 5minutes. Then they forgot to take their laptops out of their bag. Aw-shucks again. Then they want to unlace their shoes. I'd love to have a line for clued-in travelers and one for people who arent.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        If only it was only a belt. I've had multiple times where I was behind someone with a concealed firearm that tried to walk through security who somehow "forgot" they had it. One time it seemed the person was on probation as well and shouldn't have even had access to firearms! Fun times in Texas.
  - cameldrv 2y ago
    Security doesn’t have to be that variable. Flights are all planned weeks in advance. TSA can pretty exactly predict the passenger volume in time to schedule enough workers, it’s just that sometimes they don’t. If they were going to be short staffed and needed people to come early, they could notify the airline and the airline could notify you that you needed to come early that day.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Or you're traveling to an airport near the city from out of town. For me it's over an hour and the associated cost--rarely drive myself--is often as much as the flight.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    Solution: giant tunnel to underground downtown terminal. Planes land outside the city, taxi to the downtown terminal.
    - jacobgkau 2y ago
      Denver's airport is apart from the actual city, and there are light rail lines connecting it with downtown. That system... does not work very well, owing to crappy light rail and the fact that most people still aren't where they need to be even if they took that to Union Station. If you're suggesting this hypothetical giant tunnel would actually have the planes taxiing all the way to a whole airport underneath a city... I don't see that solving more problems than it would create.
      - pfannkuchen 2y ago
        Yes, the planes taxi to a terminal under the city. It would create problems, but the problems would be for the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure, not for the passengers. Airplanes are not fundamentally that much bigger than trains, which routinely go under the city.
        trothamel 2y ago
        Yes, they are - if you count wings, which are the main point of a plane.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        pfannkuchen 2y ago
        So as a reader one can assume that either a) I forgot about the wings (I guess I must be an idiot) or b) I am using a broader set of reference objects than simply "current passenger transportation modes". There are many man made objects much bigger than airplane wings. Fitting an aircraft carrier, or a container ship, or a skyscraper, moving under a city, would be much, much harder than fitting an airplane. Not to mention that if we strongly applied this engineering constraint, it's not beyond the realm of imagination that we could produce airliners with removable or foldable wings, or where the passenger compartment slides out, or tunnels with deep grooves for the wings, etc.
  - mattkrause 2y ago
    > Security also seems to be variable This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time. Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”
    - jesterson 2y ago
      Would you change your plans to arrive earlier/later if airport is chaotic/quiet? I wouldnt, doesn't matter if airport is in bloody state of war.
      - Mashimo 2y ago
        Yeah, I would. On a quiet day I measured 7 minutes from stepping out of the bus and being through security.
      - mattkrause 2y ago
        I wouldn’t change the flight itself, but I’d certainly use it to decide when I set out for the airport. Not by a ton but it’s easily the difference between a leisurely farewell breakfast and scarfing down a muffin on the run.
- timewizard 2y ago
  > a 3-dimensional bus It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it. Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled. Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around." Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.
_fat_santa 2y ago
IMHO we would be better served reducing the amount of time it takes you to go into an airport and board a flight. Right now they recommend 2 hours prior to takeoff but if you're in the right airport and know what you're doing then that time could be as little as 30 minutes (or less). Rather than trying to take time out of the "middle" of the journey (ie when you're on a plane), we would be better served as a society to take time out of the "ends" (before takeoff and after landing). But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space. It's possible that it may make sense to establish a few business class only very fast point-to-point routes. But that also really depends on the vehicle taking people through space. There are a number of problems: 1. Currently, spacecraft are only licensed for experimental travel. Everyone signs an informed consent waiver and basically disclaims all liability. And the FAA is forbidden to regulate for passenger safety by congress (and has been for quite a long time) - they can only regulate for the safety of the general public. This would have to be changed before any serious commercial spacecraft went into service 2. It's not clear that any spacecraft has the economics to pull this off. Maybe Starship can do it. But it's pretty far from clear that they can. 3. Spacecraft are orders of magnitude less safe than commercial aviation. Do you know the saying "regulations are written in blood"? If this starts happening, there'll be a lot of new regulations that happen over time. And maybe that'll happen anyhow - I think that space tourism will certainly be a thing that becomes much more popular in the future, and that has the exact same problems (although it's much less readily comparable to commercial aviation).
nordsieck 2y ago
> 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. To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff. But yeah - having to budget time to get through security is a pretty poor user experience. Especially during busy times of the year, when it's more uncertain just how much time is required.
- DoneWithAllThat 2y ago
  I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim. I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.
  - nordsieck 2y ago
    I don't know. At this point, I personally know multiple people who've "lost" luggage when flying. Thankfully it's not as big of a deal now that airtags/trackers are readily available.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I mostly disagree. There are times when I know I have to check a, usually, pretty small bag. But especially because of the delayed baggage issue or because of last minute changes to flights because of weather or whatever, I probably carry-on (with a light load) 9 times out of 10. Especially with dress being more casual these days I usually don't really need more than carry-on unless I'm activities requiring some amount of gear.
SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
Yeah, I take a bus trip regularly between cities for work. It's ~3.5 hrs from downtown to downtown and, even though the flight would only be just over an hour and about the same price, it ends up being not worth the effort.
- soco 2y ago
  Some high speed trains (in Spain, for one) require security checks to board as well. But they're way less intrusive or time consuming than flight checks.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    I think this is literally _just_ Spain, isn't it? Can't think of anywhere else that does it routinely.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Eurostar. London to the continent.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      Eurostar trains had security checks ~10 years ago. Not sure about now but I can't imagine they've stopped.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      China also has security checks, I believe.
    - MisterSandman 2y ago
      Canada doesn’t have high speed trains AND does insane security checks and luggage weigh-ins before you get on their trains. Worst of both worlds.
    - jesterson 2y ago
      China does. Singapore does spot checks for MRT.
bradlys 2y ago
One of the reasons I don't travel as much is due to this. I used to live in the peninsula in SFBA. I was about 20-30 minutes away from SFO. Unless it was an international flight or I had checked luggage, I would never get to the airport before the flight started boarding. I would walk through security at a lightning pace (SFO is one of those airports where sometimes TSA precheck is longer than regular!) and get to my flight just as my boarding group was getting called. It was so insanely efficient. I never spent a moment not moving in the airport. I'd often spend more time waiting on the plane to deboard than I would in the airport when leaving too. I miss SFO. I live in NYC for now and all the NYC airports suck for the fact they all take about an hour to get to (from Manhattan) and they all regularly have large and inefficient security lines with theater that is only rivaled by Belgian airports.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I worked for someone once (pre-9/11) who would do the go to airport 30 minutes before flight sort of thing. Absolutely hated it. Airport was close to downtown Boston but still not how I like to catch planes even if delays are rarely an issue.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    When I lived in Kyiv and airports were still a thing, flying from Zhuliany was a bliss. Something like 30 minutes from the apartment door to sitting at the gate. The fact that it's small and in city limits was a deciding factor.
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      What did you think of Boryspil?
      - Muromec 2y ago
        Boryspil' is twice the distance from the city center (whatever you pick for city center in Kyiv) and is quite nice and modern airport with all the problems of a big modern airport -- it's huge, lines are long and unpredictable and it doubles as a mall.
stevage 2y ago
Yep. Sometimes I take a 1 hour flight to Canberra. But it's really more like a 3.5 to 4 hours, from home to the city centre, and can cost $400. Alternatively, I can take the train. It takes 9 hours home to city centre, and costs $35. It's a much better experience all around.
- derr1 2y ago
  It takes 8hrs to do a 300km journey? Google says the train is only 4hrs!
  - stevage 2y ago
    300km from where? I didn't mention the city I'm travelling from, but it's Melbourne.
    - derr1 2y ago
      My bad. My brain somehow joined the parent conversation above and thought you said Sydney to Canberra!
      - stevage 2y ago
        Sydney to Canberra, 3 hour bus, easy.
- ravetcofx 2y ago
  I wish the train in Canada was that cheap for intercity rail. it's much more expensive than flying unfortunately
  - stevage 2y ago
    It's particularly cheap in around Melbourne because the government introduced a daily fare cap across the whole state. So it's $10 from Melbourne to the state border, then the other $25 is for the much shorter trip from the border to Canberra.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
There might be soon. IF (yes, still a reasonably big IF) they could just automate highway driving, a large segment of air trips become really a wash, especially if you consider that taking your car someplace gets you a car for your destination, while if you flew it is an additional hassle/expense/delay. So the exercise to me is: how far does it have to be before you would rather fly? If I had reliable highway automated driving, you're already dealing with a 3-4 hour drive being reasonably equivalent to the time and hassle of a 1 hour flight. Plus with a car you can leave on a whim with no prescheduling, pack more with less restrictions, will be cheaper generally (especially if carpooling/family driving), can stop and eat more conveniently, have better internet access typically, can stop and see friends or other places along the way, and again, you have your car for transport when you get there. A self-driving sprinter van converted to an RV would be even better: sleep overnight, have a place to stay at a minimum when you get there. Anyway, I suspect this might hollow out quite a lot of flight demand when it becomes a reality (any decade now). Airlines will be forced to reexamine their policies if an overnight self-driving trip gets you the vast majority of the way to a destination.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  I doubt this is a huge viable market. Lately a couple of companies have started up attempting to bring plush lie flat seats to the intercity bus, but a lot of those have since folded.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Plush buses are still buses - you will need to rent a car or take a ride at the end to get where you are going. A self-driving car that takes you from door to door? Yeah, that's completely different. You live in Pittsburgh. You want to go to NYC for a show. You hop in the car, it takes you to the theater, you get out, it drives itself to a parking lot in NJ to wait. You call for it half an hour before you need it, it picks you up, and it drives you home. That's currently the province of the very rich or the very extravagant. A car that drives itself can do that every night.
- nsxwolf 2y ago
throwawayffffas 2y ago
There is a point in getting faster. The Concorde run profitably for the later 20 years of it's lifetime. At its best it did the New York to London route in under 3 hours. At more than double the speed of a subsonic flight. I have taken multiple 7 hour and 3 and a half hour flights and I would pay a significant premium to cut the 7 hours in half. It's not that I would have more of the day available. It's that I would spend less time in the plane. Being in a plane for a long haul is miserable. In the nineties if flew profitably for a 10% markup over regular business class. I would wager a supersonic jet liner could make a lot of money crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific even today. Sure for short hauls it makes no sense. Btw, Boom is working on supersonic private jets,they recently flew a scaled down experimental jet at supersonic speeds.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  Concorde’s problem was once the lie flat business seat was invented in 2000, it was substantially more comfortable than what was, by all accounts, a plush but very narrow seat due to the narrow fuselage. Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.
TheDong 2y ago
I think with how unergonomic airplane seats have gotten, there's a real health benefit to minimizing the time people are crammed in those cramped seats. If they made airline seats reasonably sized and ergonomic, sure, the flight time matters less, but right now the longer the flight portion is, the longer my back will complain afterwards. I'm not even unusually tall or heavy-set. Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins, but if the planes are faster, they can run more flights and pay the pilots/flight-attendants for fewer hours, so that feels like it's a solution that's more likely to happen than the real solution, of making it so the seats aren't designed to destroy your back until you pony up for business/first class.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Pilots are not paid per hours of flight. They usually stay overnight for long trips, so making the trip a little shorter makes no difference on that front. Same for the staff
  - remh 2y ago
    Not sure about pilots but Flight Attendants are paid when doors are closed and engines are running.
- rs999gti 2y ago
  > Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins They would, but would non-business and non-wealthy consumers pay what it costs?
eleveriven 2y ago
For most trips, shaving off a couple of hours isn't game-changing unless you're flying ultra-long-haul

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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And you can also bring an empty water bottle that there are often stations setup for the purpose of filling next to water fountains. Mind you, I'm annoyed at the liquids thing given I used to routinely bring bottles of wine or a local liqueur home in carry-on. And I can't any longer.
      - cycomanic 2y ago
        I recall when those guys in the UK (?) had their plan to explode a plane by mixing some volatile chemicals in the plane toilet. IIRC this kicked off the whole no liquids requirements. At the time I remember reading an article by a chemist on the chances of actually pulling off what they wee planning to do, and it was comical. To not just make a giant poof that mainly singed off some hair they needed to carefully mix the liquids in an ice bath for about 1h (without anyone noticing) and every little shake could potentially mess up the whole thing. He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.
        throwway120385 2y ago
        I think the point of it was that our enemies had figured out that the way to destroy America wasn't to kill our leaders, but rather to convince us that our enemies were inside the country, and then watch us tear each other apart.
        Muromec 2y ago
        >He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating. So this is why we also can't bring own cocaine on board in addition to not having own booze. What a shame
    - twelve40 2y ago
      bingo! for long-haul flights (>10hrs) i'd even bring two zip locks. Relax and fall asleep right during takeoff while everyone else has to wait for the stupid cart forever.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town. Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive). Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)). But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop. Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    > Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that. I don't know why there isn't just a bunch of seats in the terminal laid out the same way as the plane. Sit there and wait, and then when it's time to board, the people at the end get on first, tada, everyone is boarded and we're not stopping each other from getting in.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      In practice, the airlines order status of various kinds when boarding which roughly correlates to how much money people spend with the airline.
      - technothrasher 2y ago
        Yep, and the status folks want to both board first and be in the front of the plane, which clogs everything up during boarding.
- thmsths 2y ago
  I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. Like 10 minutes average 20 minutes for the 95% percentile and a guarantee that it will never exceed 30 minutes. Seeing lines form around the block and passengers having to wait hours to clear security in some extreme cases is simply not acceptable.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    It isn't, but changes that require additional staffing simply aren't going to be tolerated. If you add more staff, that directly translates to higher ticket prices because passengers directly pay for most of the TSA costs. If you expand facilities, that takes away from the valuable real estate the airport would rather use to sell you magazines and duty free. It also harms their Clear revenue stream, who pays airports to make security lines worse as a means to convince people to sign up.
    - thmsths 2y ago
      Or we could streamline the process: remove steps that are taking too long for little benefit (typically asking people to remove their shoes) and automate more.
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    >> I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. What they should really have is a line for clueless people. You know, the people ahead of you who walk thru metal detectors with belts. Then aw-shucks and waste another 5minutes. Then they forgot to take their laptops out of their bag. Aw-shucks again. Then they want to unlace their shoes. I'd love to have a line for clued-in travelers and one for people who arent.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      If only it was only a belt. I've had multiple times where I was behind someone with a concealed firearm that tried to walk through security who somehow "forgot" they had it. One time it seemed the person was on probation as well and shouldn't have even had access to firearms! Fun times in Texas.
- cameldrv 2y ago
  Security doesn’t have to be that variable. Flights are all planned weeks in advance. TSA can pretty exactly predict the passenger volume in time to schedule enough workers, it’s just that sometimes they don’t. If they were going to be short staffed and needed people to come early, they could notify the airline and the airline could notify you that you needed to come early that day.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Or you're traveling to an airport near the city from out of town. For me it's over an hour and the associated cost--rarely drive myself--is often as much as the flight.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  Solution: giant tunnel to underground downtown terminal. Planes land outside the city, taxi to the downtown terminal.
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    Denver's airport is apart from the actual city, and there are light rail lines connecting it with downtown. That system... does not work very well, owing to crappy light rail and the fact that most people still aren't where they need to be even if they took that to Union Station. If you're suggesting this hypothetical giant tunnel would actually have the planes taxiing all the way to a whole airport underneath a city... I don't see that solving more problems than it would create.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      Yes, the planes taxi to a terminal under the city. It would create problems, but the problems would be for the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure, not for the passengers. Airplanes are not fundamentally that much bigger than trains, which routinely go under the city.
      - trothamel 2y ago
        Yes, they are - if you count wings, which are the main point of a plane.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        pfannkuchen 2y ago
        So as a reader one can assume that either a) I forgot about the wings (I guess I must be an idiot) or b) I am using a broader set of reference objects than simply "current passenger transportation modes". There are many man made objects much bigger than airplane wings. Fitting an aircraft carrier, or a container ship, or a skyscraper, moving under a city, would be much, much harder than fitting an airplane. Not to mention that if we strongly applied this engineering constraint, it's not beyond the realm of imagination that we could produce airliners with removable or foldable wings, or where the passenger compartment slides out, or tunnels with deep grooves for the wings, etc.
- mattkrause 2y ago
  > Security also seems to be variable This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time. Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”
  - jesterson 2y ago
    Would you change your plans to arrive earlier/later if airport is chaotic/quiet? I wouldnt, doesn't matter if airport is in bloody state of war.
    - Mashimo 2y ago
      Yeah, I would. On a quiet day I measured 7 minutes from stepping out of the bus and being through security.
    - mattkrause 2y ago
      I wouldn’t change the flight itself, but I’d certainly use it to decide when I set out for the airport. Not by a ton but it’s easily the difference between a leisurely farewell breakfast and scarfing down a muffin on the run.
timewizard 2y ago
> a 3-dimensional bus It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it. Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled. Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around." Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.

_fat_santa 2y ago

IMHO we would be better served reducing the amount of time it takes you to go into an airport and board a flight. Right now they recommend 2 hours prior to takeoff but if you're in the right airport and know what you're doing then that time could be as little as 30 minutes (or less). Rather than trying to take time out of the "middle" of the journey (ie when you're on a plane), we would be better served as a society to take time out of the "ends" (before takeoff and after landing). But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.

nordsieck 2y ago
> But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space. It's possible that it may make sense to establish a few business class only very fast point-to-point routes. But that also really depends on the vehicle taking people through space. There are a number of problems: 1. Currently, spacecraft are only licensed for experimental travel. Everyone signs an informed consent waiver and basically disclaims all liability. And the FAA is forbidden to regulate for passenger safety by congress (and has been for quite a long time) - they can only regulate for the safety of the general public. This would have to be changed before any serious commercial spacecraft went into service 2. It's not clear that any spacecraft has the economics to pull this off. Maybe Starship can do it. But it's pretty far from clear that they can. 3. Spacecraft are orders of magnitude less safe than commercial aviation. Do you know the saying "regulations are written in blood"? If this starts happening, there'll be a lot of new regulations that happen over time. And maybe that'll happen anyhow - I think that space tourism will certainly be a thing that becomes much more popular in the future, and that has the exact same problems (although it's much less readily comparable to commercial aviation).

nordsieck 2y ago

> 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. To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff. But yeah - having to budget time to get through security is a pretty poor user experience. Especially during busy times of the year, when it's more uncertain just how much time is required.

DoneWithAllThat 2y ago
I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim. I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  I don't know. At this point, I personally know multiple people who've "lost" luggage when flying. Thankfully it's not as big of a deal now that airtags/trackers are readily available.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I mostly disagree. There are times when I know I have to check a, usually, pretty small bag. But especially because of the delayed baggage issue or because of last minute changes to flights because of weather or whatever, I probably carry-on (with a light load) 9 times out of 10. Especially with dress being more casual these days I usually don't really need more than carry-on unless I'm activities requiring some amount of gear.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago

Yeah, I take a bus trip regularly between cities for work. It's ~3.5 hrs from downtown to downtown and, even though the flight would only be just over an hour and about the same price, it ends up being not worth the effort.

soco 2y ago
Some high speed trains (in Spain, for one) require security checks to board as well. But they're way less intrusive or time consuming than flight checks.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I think this is literally _just_ Spain, isn't it? Can't think of anywhere else that does it routinely.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Eurostar. London to the continent.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Eurostar trains had security checks ~10 years ago. Not sure about now but I can't imagine they've stopped.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    China also has security checks, I believe.
  - MisterSandman 2y ago
    Canada doesn’t have high speed trains AND does insane security checks and luggage weigh-ins before you get on their trains. Worst of both worlds.
  - jesterson 2y ago
    China does. Singapore does spot checks for MRT.

bradlys 2y ago

One of the reasons I don't travel as much is due to this. I used to live in the peninsula in SFBA. I was about 20-30 minutes away from SFO. Unless it was an international flight or I had checked luggage, I would never get to the airport before the flight started boarding. I would walk through security at a lightning pace (SFO is one of those airports where sometimes TSA precheck is longer than regular!) and get to my flight just as my boarding group was getting called. It was so insanely efficient. I never spent a moment not moving in the airport. I'd often spend more time waiting on the plane to deboard than I would in the airport when leaving too. I miss SFO. I live in NYC for now and all the NYC airports suck for the fact they all take about an hour to get to (from Manhattan) and they all regularly have large and inefficient security lines with theater that is only rivaled by Belgian airports.

ghaff 2y ago
I worked for someone once (pre-9/11) who would do the go to airport 30 minutes before flight sort of thing. Absolutely hated it. Airport was close to downtown Boston but still not how I like to catch planes even if delays are rarely an issue.
- Muromec 2y ago
  When I lived in Kyiv and airports were still a thing, flying from Zhuliany was a bliss. Something like 30 minutes from the apartment door to sitting at the gate. The fact that it's small and in city limits was a deciding factor.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    What did you think of Boryspil?
    - Muromec 2y ago
      Boryspil' is twice the distance from the city center (whatever you pick for city center in Kyiv) and is quite nice and modern airport with all the problems of a big modern airport -- it's huge, lines are long and unpredictable and it doubles as a mall.

stevage 2y ago

Yep. Sometimes I take a 1 hour flight to Canberra. But it's really more like a 3.5 to 4 hours, from home to the city centre, and can cost $400. Alternatively, I can take the train. It takes 9 hours home to city centre, and costs $35. It's a much better experience all around.

derr1 2y ago
It takes 8hrs to do a 300km journey? Google says the train is only 4hrs!
- stevage 2y ago
  300km from where? I didn't mention the city I'm travelling from, but it's Melbourne.
  - derr1 2y ago
    My bad. My brain somehow joined the parent conversation above and thought you said Sydney to Canberra!
    - stevage 2y ago
      Sydney to Canberra, 3 hour bus, easy.
ravetcofx 2y ago
I wish the train in Canada was that cheap for intercity rail. it's much more expensive than flying unfortunately
- stevage 2y ago
  It's particularly cheap in around Melbourne because the government introduced a daily fare cap across the whole state. So it's $10 from Melbourne to the state border, then the other $25 is for the much shorter trip from the border to Canberra.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

There might be soon. IF (yes, still a reasonably big IF) they could just automate highway driving, a large segment of air trips become really a wash, especially if you consider that taking your car someplace gets you a car for your destination, while if you flew it is an additional hassle/expense/delay. So the exercise to me is: how far does it have to be before you would rather fly? If I had reliable highway automated driving, you're already dealing with a 3-4 hour drive being reasonably equivalent to the time and hassle of a 1 hour flight. Plus with a car you can leave on a whim with no prescheduling, pack more with less restrictions, will be cheaper generally (especially if carpooling/family driving), can stop and eat more conveniently, have better internet access typically, can stop and see friends or other places along the way, and again, you have your car for transport when you get there. A self-driving sprinter van converted to an RV would be even better: sleep overnight, have a place to stay at a minimum when you get there. Anyway, I suspect this might hollow out quite a lot of flight demand when it becomes a reality (any decade now). Airlines will be forced to reexamine their policies if an overnight self-driving trip gets you the vast majority of the way to a destination.

bobthepanda 2y ago
I doubt this is a huge viable market. Lately a couple of companies have started up attempting to bring plush lie flat seats to the intercity bus, but a lot of those have since folded.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  Plush buses are still buses - you will need to rent a car or take a ride at the end to get where you are going. A self-driving car that takes you from door to door? Yeah, that's completely different. You live in Pittsburgh. You want to go to NYC for a show. You hop in the car, it takes you to the theater, you get out, it drives itself to a parking lot in NJ to wait. You call for it half an hour before you need it, it picks you up, and it drives you home. That's currently the province of the very rich or the very extravagant. A car that drives itself can do that every night.
nsxwolf 2y ago

throwawayffffas 2y ago

There is a point in getting faster. The Concorde run profitably for the later 20 years of it's lifetime. At its best it did the New York to London route in under 3 hours. At more than double the speed of a subsonic flight. I have taken multiple 7 hour and 3 and a half hour flights and I would pay a significant premium to cut the 7 hours in half. It's not that I would have more of the day available. It's that I would spend less time in the plane. Being in a plane for a long haul is miserable. In the nineties if flew profitably for a 10% markup over regular business class. I would wager a supersonic jet liner could make a lot of money crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific even today. Sure for short hauls it makes no sense. Btw, Boom is working on supersonic private jets,they recently flew a scaled down experimental jet at supersonic speeds.

bobthepanda 2y ago
Concorde’s problem was once the lie flat business seat was invented in 2000, it was substantially more comfortable than what was, by all accounts, a plush but very narrow seat due to the narrow fuselage. Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.

TheDong 2y ago

I think with how unergonomic airplane seats have gotten, there's a real health benefit to minimizing the time people are crammed in those cramped seats. If they made airline seats reasonably sized and ergonomic, sure, the flight time matters less, but right now the longer the flight portion is, the longer my back will complain afterwards. I'm not even unusually tall or heavy-set. Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins, but if the planes are faster, they can run more flights and pay the pilots/flight-attendants for fewer hours, so that feels like it's a solution that's more likely to happen than the real solution, of making it so the seats aren't designed to destroy your back until you pony up for business/first class.

whiplash451 2y ago
Pilots are not paid per hours of flight. They usually stay overnight for long trips, so making the trip a little shorter makes no difference on that front. Same for the staff
- remh 2y ago
  Not sure about pilots but Flight Attendants are paid when doors are closed and engines are running.
rs999gti 2y ago
> Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins They would, but would non-business and non-wealthy consumers pay what it costs?

eleveriven 2y ago

For most trips, shaving off a couple of hours isn't game-changing unless you're flying ultra-long-haul