17 ms·

We're Too Cheap to Fly Faster

127 points by msrpotus 13y ago

bradleyjg 13y ago
Let's run some numbers. It looks like the average round trip the last year it flew on the New York to London route on the Concorde was $12,000 and lasted 3.5 hours. You could fly that route on a regular plane for around $1,000 in a trip that takes 7.5 hours. So the implied value of your time if you took the Concorde was around $2,750 / hr. If you net that up to a standard work year (2000 hours) it's $5.5 million. 1 in 1000 households in the US declare income of more than $2 million a year. It's not that we are too cheap, it's that we aren't rich enough.
- seren 13y ago
  It is similar to the numbers calculated by Ivan Illich regarding car usage in the 1970's. If you take into account the car price, gasoline, insurance, repairs, etc, and the time spent to earn that amount of money, the average speed of a car for a worker was around a few miles per hour, so not better that simply walking or bycycling. It is an unorthodox but quite interesting perspective on the counter productivity of complex industrial societies. The better your pay is, the higher is your "average speed". The Concord is only the most extreme example of this trend.
  - acqq 13y ago
    Thank you for introducing me to: http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html
- Retric 13y ago
  The concord flew a lot faster than Mach 1 though.
  - scrumper 13y ago
    Mach 2 (and Concorde has a capital C and an e on the end, while we're chasing accuracy). It doesn't change the parent's point at all though: the trip took about 3.5 hours each way.
    - dragontamer 13y ago
      Not including modern inconveniences of the airport... like the TSA.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The analysis also implies that time spent on the airplane has no value. With powerful electronic devices and in-flight internet, this is getting less true. You'll be less productive on an airplane, surely, but the value of that time doesn't have to be zero. That increases the gap yet further.
icebraining 13y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768938
coin 13y ago
Nice article content, but why is pinchzoom disabled for mobile devices? What value could that possibly add?
- AlexanderDhoore 13y ago
  Why is that even a feature of browsers? On my desktop I can zoom whenever, wherever I want. Why should it be any different on mobile... Edit: In mobile safari I have a bunch of bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks) for enabling zoom, and to zoom the way desktop browsers do (increase text size and reflow text).
  - ianlevesque 13y ago
    It's for websites that want to mimic apps.
    - lukeschlather 13y ago
      Mimic apps that break on screen resolutions other than the tested ones?
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
verroq 13y ago
It is in the interests of airlines to have longer flights to maximise in flight spending. Customers never had a say in this. Most people probably spend more time in customs than on the plane anyway. A 20% decrease of air time isn't that big of a deal to most.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  I am very skeptical of this. The cost of fuel should dwarf the chance to buy an extra sandwich. Cite?
- pkfrank 13y ago
  I'm not sure I buy this. I think it's in the airlines' interests to minimize costs (fuel) by flying as efficiently as possible (maybe slower - maximizing air-time). I would be surprised if in-flight spending increased meaningfully over a flight that is ~15% longer.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    Yeah, I strongly doubt that in-flight spending on concessions and duty-free catalogs pays for the jet fuel expended over any appreciable time period during the flight.
- gaadd33 13y ago
  Is inflight spending that big of a profit center for airlines? I would think that being able to do (for example) 20% more trips full of paying customers in the same span of time would be far more profitable for the airline.
- ShabbyDoo 13y ago
  Given that flight crews have government-mandated work hour limits and most crew members are paid hourly, it would take a lot of WiFi and drink sales to make-up even the labor costs of an artificially lengthened flight.
smackfu 13y ago
Skips over the whole sonic boom issue, which basically prevents supersonic flight over the USA, and probably Europe. Anything that limits a plane's routes is not good.
- OlivierLi 13y ago
  Exactly, this coupled with it's very limited range kept it from taking anything other than east-coast to Europe routes.
- pkfrank 13y ago
  The article actually talks quite a bit about the additional challenges introduced when approaching Mach 1. Agreed, though, that additional regulations regarding those speeds weren't discussed.
  - tg3 13y ago
    It only really discussed the challenges from the plane's perspective, not the people on the ground when the plane broke the barrier. The regulations are in place because sonic booms can be not only a nuisance to those on the ground, but destructive.
- maaku 13y ago
  There is work being done on boom-less supersonic planes.
lbebber 13y ago
While faster flights would be nice, he is right in that price is more of a priority than speed. Besides, an even bigger concern would be safety.
sokoloff 13y ago
My POV is that if you want to improve door-to-door speed, focus on the airport experience (more time-efficient security, check-in, more predictability to let people "cut it closer", faster baggage handling and outbound logistics [rental car, etc]). I flew my family on a our current vacation on a multi-leg trip in a 175 mph airplane, and beat the 560 mph airlines door to door on every leg, because my ground logistics time is almost non-existent. (Rental car or family pickup waiting plane-side, no security checks, no waiting for bags, and no sense "getting there early" because it's obviously not taking off without me.) Suburb of Boston to suburb of Pittsburgh: 3h30m. From there to suburb of Cincy: 1h45m. There to Lexington, KY: 52m. There to Livingston, TN: 1h. Only on the BOS to PIT leg do the airlines have any hope of competing. Speeding up the airline experience doesn't have much to do with speeding up the airliners themselves, IMO.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  How did costs line up?
  - sokoloff 13y ago
    Good question, but complex to answer precisely. Short answer: same order of magnitude for four people. Longer answer: The airplane burns about $75 of gas & oil per hour, and I figure the total cost is about $250/hr. (I fly it about 125 hours a year, and all my costs, including hangar, charts, insurance, in-year maintenance/inspections, and maintenance reserves for long-lived items [engine, prop, avionics] come to around $30K/year.) My local flight school rents a newer version of my plane for $209/hr, but they fly more hours per year, so that indicates my cost estimates are in the right ballpark. This trip will be about 15 flight hours, or just under $4K in avg costs, or just over $1K in marginal costs. That's for a family of four (two adults, two kids 2 or over, so everyone needs an airline seat). In real terms, if we had to fly commercial, we'd have skipped seeing my very old grandparents (always possibly for the last time), and only flown into Lexington for the wedding, rented a car for the week at the lake, and driven the three hours down here like the rest of the family. Looking at far advance purchases on hipmunk, that looks to be $484pp on Delta, plus $100 in bag fees (2 bags, round trip), plus a rental car that we can avoid by having one of the family cars pick us up at the small airport just down the road from the lake. So, same order of magnitude: airline is more expensive than the marginal costs, less expensive than the average costs. (And there's a lot of "hobby time" to train, stay proficient, geek out on airplane forums, and light airplanes are not nearly as "almost all weather" as airliners.) Other less tangible items: Much safer statistically to fly Delta than a piston single. My kids know "Jeda and Baba", their late 80s great-grandparents, because they live 2 miles from a cheap-gas airport on the way to/from one set of their grand-parents, so we stop in for lunch/dinner and sometimes one overnight on those trips, including this one. I'm not especially sentimental, or extended-family oriented, but even still, that's worth a lot to me, as the day is coming all too soon when they won't be here and if we flew commercial, we'd literally never stop in to see them except for family funerals. Big one for my wife: my airplane has lavatories at "either end of the flight", but not on-board. Now, we can divert anytime and be on the ground inside of 10 minutes usually, but for a 2 or 4 year old, or a pregnant 30-something, that can be a long time...
dirktheman 13y ago
If I recall correctly (I worked in the travel industry once), the price for a one-way from Paris to NYC was about 12K. An astonishing price, and you'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "[Y]ou'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!" Nonesense! You could be a really well paid actor or a really well paid musician or maybe a politician on a junket or even an escort...
justinph 13y ago
Air travel is one of the least efficient and most polluting forms of travel. Going slower and burning less fuel is great, even if it isn't as fast as technically possible.
- blackaspen 13y ago
  The 787 can get up to 100 miles per passenger per gallon. That's pretty good. On par with a 25 MPG car with four people in it. Until you consider that car needs to drive a non-direct route. And stop and stay at hotels. And get food. And more gas. And all of that too has distribution costs and expenses. And takes significantly longer. If you really want to take a 36 hour train trip across the US go right ahead. I'll take my 7 hour flight and enjoy my extra day there.
  - themstheones 13y ago
    It depends what kind of trip you are taking. For some trips the journey is more important than the destination. I wouldn't trade my childhood road trips across the country in for the alternative.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - maaku 13y ago
      You must have had a better trip (or a better car) than my folks did.
- khuey 13y ago
  That's misleading. On CO2 per unit distance traveled air travel is pretty comparable to other forms of transportation. The long distances are what make the absolute contributions of air travel to CO2 emissions large.
  - bradleyjg 13y ago
    It's not just CO2. Contrails have their own warming effect, and then there is local air pollution by airports.
TheAnimus 13y ago
It's not just a case of being too cheap, but also it having negligable effect. If I have to be at Heathrow 90 min before departure, and it takes me 45 min to drive there, or 90 min on public transport, then at the other end it takes 30 mins for my bag to get on the belt, clear port control, and another 30-60 min to get to the city. I have a good 4 hours of fixed time involved with my flight. If the flight is just 8 hours, making it 7 hours isn't really going to change things, I've still lost the most of the day. So I'd sooner be able to sleep comfortably (ie space!) or be able to do some work (11 vaio Pro, 22 hours battery). Then we have the issue that even going supersonic, we can't just upsticks and do it. We have to get out to see. Climbing to FL390 takes a lot of time, descending from it does as well, otherwise people generally find it rather un-appealing. Add in busy hub airport traffic and we've got at least 2 hours that we can't really speed up. So our 12 hour total journy (4 hours travelling too / waiting at airports, 6 hours of cruise, 2 hours of holding an NDB) speeding up that 6 hours, doesn't have much effect. Hell go nuts, make it take 2 hours, go for mach 3. It is still going to take me, door to door, 8 hours. 8 vs 12 for the cost of that just isn't going to be worth it. Because ultimately I'll have my own work schedule, I'm not rich enough to have a private jet, and the stuff I fly you wouldn't want to be in for more than 4 hours anyway (well the fuel would run out too). So that means I want a regular, frequent service. I don't care that superfastjet leaves everyday at 1pm. I need to be around till 5pm. Obviously the geek in me would take the fast one, but I couldn't do that everytime. TLDR It isn't just about being cheaper. It is recognising the deminishing impact speed is having on being the deciding factor. We look at door to door time, not cruise performance. We want a frequent schedule, not one speedbird a day.
- bergie 13y ago
  Exactly the reason why the (much slower) train often makes more sense. Sure, the train from Amsterdam to Berlin is six hours. But you only have to be at the station to catch it before it leaves, and it both leaves and arrives right in the center. We tried this returning from a conference there last fall, and the hotel-door-to-home-door advantage of flying was less than 30 minutes. And on train there was more space, better food, and a bar. Not to mention that there was power and nobody told me to shut down my laptop at any point :-)
fomojola 13y ago
Odd: this one was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago as https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2.
- kristianp 13y ago
  It looks like medium.com uses a label/tag system, so an article can be discovered by looking at the "lift and drag" label or the "roaming the earth" label, for example: https://medium.com/roaming-the-earth/7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/roaming-the-earth/7885a299bca2
lewispb 13y ago
I wonder if something like this could be used for round-the-world passenger transportation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
kenkam 13y ago
Here the article forgets to mention airlines as an intermediary. Boeing and Airbus do not manufacture planes for us, they do it for the airlines. Airlines know that to make the most profit they need bigger and more fuel efficient planes over faster ones. And that's why we have them today. Also, slightly unrelated: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_everything.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_ever.... One of his points is interesting: if they had spent the billions of pounds on making the [eurostar] journey more enjoyable (by giving out free petrus served by models) than cutting travel time by a moderate amount, we'd all be asking for longer journey times! ... which _is_ what the article is saying: we don't want faster travel, we want more affordable and arguably more comfortable travelling.
- gcb0 13y ago
  Most Ted talks are baloney. But you're right on pointing the airlines as the cause. But for the same reason why mobile data took some 5yr to popularize... The middle man was too greedy and totally unrelated, dammit hackernews, make those downvotes harder to click by mistake!
- nickff 13y ago
  This is true, but misses the point that if another airline could enter the market with a desirable product, or an existing airline could add a fast service. The airline market is a highly competitive one, as all the vendors are distributing largely undifferentiated products The airlines and manufacturers regularly collaborate in the design of new aircraft.
  - kenkam 13y ago
    You are correct, and a pattern has emerged: there are the airlines that differentiates themselves on service that is tied to their country of origin (Singapore Airlines vs Emirates, both fly A380, but definitely different feel to them), and then there are no-frills airlines. The collaboration you speak of are mostly to do with cabin sizes, how many seats, which variants to make to satisfy the majority of customers -- these can all be changed when the main parts of the plane stay the same: e.g. fuselage, engine, etc. Rarely do an airline get Airbus/Boeing to change main parts of the planes: one exception is EasyJet when they bought an insane number (200?) of A320s from Airbus: Airbus made a fuselage specially designed for EasyJet that had more seats and they had to move their doors.
knodi 13y ago
No, the airline charge too much for the service. If the service was economically worth it for it value it provided there would be a market for it.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Let's see, flying on the Concorde cuts the transatlantic flight time in half, but you still have to deal with getting yourself and your luggage on and off the plane. So, the time savings isn't that great. The plane isn't as comfortable as first class on a bigger, slower jet. Supersonic or not, it takes a day to fly transatlantic. People that can afford Concorde flights can afford chartered flights, or have their own jet.
tshile 13y ago
If they were to ask what improvements I (as a customer) want now, I'd tell them: - speed up the security checks, being advised to show up 2 hours before boarding is ridiculous - work on making the system more flexible so I don't have 2-3 hour delays. Improving or reducing time for those two things would greatly improve my flying experience. Much more than cutting off 20% of my flight time. They shouldn't increase cost any more per ticket either.
13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
I'm also too cheap for bullet trains. Lots of people cheer-lead for high speed rail in America, but all I want is normal trains that run quite frequently.
- blackaspen 13y ago
  Enjoy your 36 hour commute across the US.
  - 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
    I was thinking more like Philadelphia to Charlotte.
  - samatman 13y ago
    Currently takes 6 hours by airplane. I don't see a bullet train beating that. OTOH, there are a number of < 1500 km routes that could easily be served by train, if we didn't have some of the worst train service in the world. Bullet trains would be nice, but require new grading in many cases. I too would be happy just to get our old train network back.
- MattLaroche 13y ago
  Depending on what your routes and usage, higher speed is better than more frequent service. For example, let's say your options are a 2 hour train that runs hourly, and an hour long ride that departs every other hour. * Fast train: best case, 1 hour. Worst case, 2:59. Average case - about 2 hours. * Slow train: best case, 2 hours. Worst case: 2:59. Average case - about 2.5 hours. Of course this is one example - but there are definitely cases where increased speed is strictly better than increased frequency. (Unless being on the train is better than whatever you could be doing waiting for the train)
  - randomknowledge 13y ago
    Not to mention if the trains are faster you will need fewer trains to transport the same number of people in the same time interval.
dllthomas 13y ago
Also, there's a huge difference between trading off high-value time for middling-value-time, versus actually spending the time. If I'm using my time on the plane to read or catch up on sleep or prepare for my presentation, it is less important to me that my flight be over quickly.
- 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
  I would pay more and tolerate slower flying times if the trade off was a less hellish flying experience. The TSA sucks. Flight attendants suck and the seats suck. Airport public transportation is usually lousy. In fact I often tolerate substantially longer travel times to ride on Amtrak rather than deal with the nightmare that is modern air travel.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Agreed, for most of my trips, especially if I could reliably get work done.
Sarien 13y ago
The fuel used to fly does not only cost money to buy but also costs environment to burn. I am quite happy if people are cheap when it comes to the environment. It is more likely that they are watching their wallets instead but in this rare case that seems to be win-win.
talmand 13y ago
Sorry buddy, Superman can go much faster than mach five.
FatalBaboon 13y ago
Moving around the world is something that has always been ridiculously expensive, and the price comparators hardly help, they just add noise. So yeah, it is about price, and if that problem is ever solved THEN people will discuss speed and other bonuses. It's like piss poor managers pushing agile when their developers don't even have a computer. Priorities matter.
sologoub 13y ago
The comparison to the computer age made me think about this in a different light - travel is now less valuable because of the on-set of great telecommunications tools than it was even 50 years ago. Today, huge deals can be negotiated largely over the phone/skype/webex/etc, making in person meetings less frequent. Therefore, if I can accomplish more by not traveling and communicating via Internet or phone, when I do travel, actual time spent flying is not as important, because I already made every effort to minimize travel in the first place, leaving only meetings that are truly worth it.
- mentos 13y ago
  my thoughts exactly we're already traveling at the speed of light
brendn 13y ago
The Concorde was an engineering marvel, but it was more than just increasingly cheap transatlantic fares that did it in. Noise regulations prevented it from flying over the Continental US. Maintenance became increasingly expensive as the fleet aged. (The technical problems with its air intakes and tires caused safety issues, too.) It's easy to say it's an entirely economic issue, but it isn't. The 2000 crash of Air France Flight 4590 shattered passenger confidence, the post-bubble recession meant fewer people had the disposable income to buy tickets, and the post-9/11 slump in air travel further reduced ticket sales. The article really only convincingly explains why we don't have a replacement Concorde, not why the Concorde went out of service. Jet fuel is expensive. Today, airlines and aircraft manufacturers spend trillions of dollars to improve fuel efficiency to keep up with rising fuel prices. It's not that we're too cheap, it's that the the industry was more interested in advances in conventional jet efficiency so that airlines could reap the benefit across a much, much larger fleet. There's always a desire to wrap up complex and multifaceted decisions in a neat little package. I don't think it's possible to point to a single issue (economic or otherwise) that made supersonic transport unviable.
ctdonath 13y ago
For almost 30 years there was a really fast way to fly, but we didn’t buy enough Concorde tickets to keep it going (I didn’t buy a single one). Over 30 years, we've gone from IBM PC to rMBP: about a hundred times the pixels, a thousand times faster processor speed, a million times more memory, a billion times more storage - all for 1/3rd the price. The physics involved could accommodate such an improvement. If we had likewise focused on travel speed instead of cost, methinks we would not have achieved NYC-to-London travel in 25 seconds.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Yeah, so... NY to London is 25 seconds is about 500,000 mph (~Mach 650) average. Perspective: Mach 32 gets you to escape velocity, and the nuclear manhole-cover (which may have been the fastest manmade object ever) is estimated as somewhere north of Mach 200 or so. That's right: not even an atomic bomb can get you the kind of speed you're asking for. :P Hmm. Assume an even acceleration profile, with your first 12.5s accelerating and the second 12.5s decelerating, 1 million MPH peak. That's ~1800 times the force of gravity. Forget physics; the biology involved can't accomodate such an improvement. :P In fact, you could probably put a floor on the travel time from anywhere to anywhere by assuming passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    That's my point: physics+biology just aren't conducive to anything close to a comparable increase in travel speed short of teleportation (read "Flash Crowds" as an interesting tangent). As others note, the best tolerable improvement in travel time is lost amid the fixed overhead of embarking/disembarking times getting people to and on the vehicle. passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations Assuming continuous 1G acceleration (halfway there, reverse thrust thereafter), NYC-to-London would peak at 1200km/h with travel time of 34 minutes. Ignoring overhead, that's about 1/15th the time for subsonic travel now; an impressive improvement for sure, yet still paltry when comparing computing improvements. Flipping the original argument and blathering on, consider if computing improvements over 30 years led to just a 72MHz processor as commercial top-of-the line: indeed in general we'd favor cost over speed. Likewise, the cost of a one-way London-NYC flight has plummeted from a quarter of one's annual salary to just a couple days' pay, a drop around two orders of magnitude; availability is also an issue, with comparable flights happening thousands of times daily at relatively amazing convenience, vs limited to a couple hundred per year.
mephi5t0 13y ago
Problem with Concorde was not price but reliability. They were dangerous to pilot and felt a few times, imagine that uncontrolled thing falling on some poor village? money is not the issue, usually, otherwise military would still fly a "Black bird", right? Technological challenges, like temperature of jets and ability to stay in control if something goes wrong is more important. If your Boing looses an engine, you will still land it. Try that with Concord.
zurn 13y ago
We're not nearly cheap enough: The plane ticket price doesn't capture the cost of flying, the majority of which comes from the greenhouse gas emissions. Further working in the wrong direction is the tax freeness of jet fuel and the 2-3x amplified effect of co2 when injected directly to the upper atmosphere.
frenchman_in_ny 13y ago
Very cool - you can see Mach diamonds in the picture of the X1.
thehme 13y ago
Well, when you consider that round trip tickets from the NY area to Chicago were going for $280 and now they are $360, the difference can make anyone think twice, especially if you are doing this 3 or more times a year and for 2 ppl. The cost per person + car rental + gas + hotel costs add up to much more than the math for driving (even with hotel, car, and gas costs), such that driving, although slower, becomes a money saving option. I would think that most people travel within the country they live in, and mostly for vacation, so paying more money to get to the destination faster, is not a good option vs saving the $ and getting there a little later. Then business people don't care to be at a location earlier for longer, they just want to go do what they have to do and call it a day of work, even if they only actually worked 1 hr and traveled the rest. Unless emergencies or extreme situations, I do not see much incentive for people to want to pay more to be at a close location faster. This is somewhat of a bummer for ppl who would like to travel at high speeds, but think about it, it is definitely expensive.
rdl 13y ago
The one route where supersonic probably makes sense is trans-pacific. Still no sonic boom, and would turn travel from "a complete day wasted both directions" to something better. Especially for something like NYC-HKG, if you could solve the sonic boom issue (although most of it is over Canada or oceans; not sure about the inland China part)
steamer25 13y ago
I was just flying for the first time in a decade last week and I saw an oversize tail on another plane while we were taxi-ing around the runway. The proportions struck me as non-obvious. That got me wondering if/how much we've begun to see data-mining/machine-learning algos and computational aero/fluid dynamics influence aircraft design. E.g., genetic algorithms that vary the tail/wing/nose/etc. size/position and runs virtual designs through a simulator to see if various combinations perform better than others. My next thought was, "how would you design the fitness function?". I.e., what are the right objective measures you can use to determine that one design is 'better' than another? I.e., How do you determine the optimal balance of speed vs. fuel efficiency vs. comfort/stability/safety vs. production/materials cost etc.?
electic 13y ago
One word: Hyperloop.
outericky 13y ago
I recently enrolled in ClearMe. So... for about $15 per month, I get to skip the security line at SFO. For a couple of bucks, I reduced my SFO portion of the trip time by about 20 mins. Much more economical.
fragmede 13y ago
Virgin America's entire fleet has Wifi (though it's not eh fastest) and AC outlets. (Other carriers only have wifi on select flights.) What's my rush again?

127 points by msrpotus 13y ago

Let's run some numbers. It looks like the average round trip the last year it flew on the New York to London route on the Concorde was $12,000 and lasted 3.5 hours. You could fly that route on a regular plane for around $1,000 in a trip that takes 7.5 hours. So the implied value of your time if you took the Concorde was around $2,750 / hr. If you net that up to a standard work year (2000 hours) it's $5.5 million. 1 in 1000 households in the US declare income of more than $2 million a year. It's not that we are too cheap, it's that we aren't rich enough.

seren 13y ago
It is similar to the numbers calculated by Ivan Illich regarding car usage in the 1970's. If you take into account the car price, gasoline, insurance, repairs, etc, and the time spent to earn that amount of money, the average speed of a car for a worker was around a few miles per hour, so not better that simply walking or bycycling. It is an unorthodox but quite interesting perspective on the counter productivity of complex industrial societies. The better your pay is, the higher is your "average speed". The Concord is only the most extreme example of this trend.
- acqq 13y ago
  Thank you for introducing me to: http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html
Retric 13y ago
The concord flew a lot faster than Mach 1 though.
- scrumper 13y ago
  Mach 2 (and Concorde has a capital C and an e on the end, while we're chasing accuracy). It doesn't change the parent's point at all though: the trip took about 3.5 hours each way.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    Not including modern inconveniences of the airport... like the TSA.
mikeash 13y ago
The analysis also implies that time spent on the airplane has no value. With powerful electronic devices and in-flight internet, this is getting less true. You'll be less productive on an airplane, surely, but the value of that time doesn't have to be zero. That increases the gap yet further.

icebraining 13y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768938

coin 13y ago

Nice article content, but why is pinchzoom disabled for mobile devices? What value could that possibly add?

AlexanderDhoore 13y ago
Why is that even a feature of browsers? On my desktop I can zoom whenever, wherever I want. Why should it be any different on mobile... Edit: In mobile safari I have a bunch of bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks) for enabling zoom, and to zoom the way desktop browsers do (increase text size and reflow text).
- ianlevesque 13y ago
  It's for websites that want to mimic apps.
  - lukeschlather 13y ago
    Mimic apps that break on screen resolutions other than the tested ones?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]

verroq 13y ago

It is in the interests of airlines to have longer flights to maximise in flight spending. Customers never had a say in this. Most people probably spend more time in customs than on the plane anyway. A 20% decrease of air time isn't that big of a deal to most.

jessriedel 13y ago
I am very skeptical of this. The cost of fuel should dwarf the chance to buy an extra sandwich. Cite?
pkfrank 13y ago
I'm not sure I buy this. I think it's in the airlines' interests to minimize costs (fuel) by flying as efficiently as possible (maybe slower - maximizing air-time). I would be surprised if in-flight spending increased meaningfully over a flight that is ~15% longer.
- kyllo 13y ago
  Yeah, I strongly doubt that in-flight spending on concessions and duty-free catalogs pays for the jet fuel expended over any appreciable time period during the flight.
gaadd33 13y ago
Is inflight spending that big of a profit center for airlines? I would think that being able to do (for example) 20% more trips full of paying customers in the same span of time would be far more profitable for the airline.
ShabbyDoo 13y ago
Given that flight crews have government-mandated work hour limits and most crew members are paid hourly, it would take a lot of WiFi and drink sales to make-up even the labor costs of an artificially lengthened flight.

smackfu 13y ago

Skips over the whole sonic boom issue, which basically prevents supersonic flight over the USA, and probably Europe. Anything that limits a plane's routes is not good.

OlivierLi 13y ago
Exactly, this coupled with it's very limited range kept it from taking anything other than east-coast to Europe routes.
pkfrank 13y ago
The article actually talks quite a bit about the additional challenges introduced when approaching Mach 1. Agreed, though, that additional regulations regarding those speeds weren't discussed.
- tg3 13y ago
  It only really discussed the challenges from the plane's perspective, not the people on the ground when the plane broke the barrier. The regulations are in place because sonic booms can be not only a nuisance to those on the ground, but destructive.
maaku 13y ago
There is work being done on boom-less supersonic planes.

lbebber 13y ago

While faster flights would be nice, he is right in that price is more of a priority than speed. Besides, an even bigger concern would be safety.

sokoloff 13y ago

My POV is that if you want to improve door-to-door speed, focus on the airport experience (more time-efficient security, check-in, more predictability to let people "cut it closer", faster baggage handling and outbound logistics [rental car, etc]). I flew my family on a our current vacation on a multi-leg trip in a 175 mph airplane, and beat the 560 mph airlines door to door on every leg, because my ground logistics time is almost non-existent. (Rental car or family pickup waiting plane-side, no security checks, no waiting for bags, and no sense "getting there early" because it's obviously not taking off without me.) Suburb of Boston to suburb of Pittsburgh: 3h30m. From there to suburb of Cincy: 1h45m. There to Lexington, KY: 52m. There to Livingston, TN: 1h. Only on the BOS to PIT leg do the airlines have any hope of competing. Speeding up the airline experience doesn't have much to do with speeding up the airliners themselves, IMO.

bradleyjg 13y ago
How did costs line up?
- sokoloff 13y ago
  Good question, but complex to answer precisely. Short answer: same order of magnitude for four people. Longer answer: The airplane burns about $75 of gas & oil per hour, and I figure the total cost is about $250/hr. (I fly it about 125 hours a year, and all my costs, including hangar, charts, insurance, in-year maintenance/inspections, and maintenance reserves for long-lived items [engine, prop, avionics] come to around $30K/year.) My local flight school rents a newer version of my plane for $209/hr, but they fly more hours per year, so that indicates my cost estimates are in the right ballpark. This trip will be about 15 flight hours, or just under $4K in avg costs, or just over $1K in marginal costs. That's for a family of four (two adults, two kids 2 or over, so everyone needs an airline seat). In real terms, if we had to fly commercial, we'd have skipped seeing my very old grandparents (always possibly for the last time), and only flown into Lexington for the wedding, rented a car for the week at the lake, and driven the three hours down here like the rest of the family. Looking at far advance purchases on hipmunk, that looks to be $484pp on Delta, plus $100 in bag fees (2 bags, round trip), plus a rental car that we can avoid by having one of the family cars pick us up at the small airport just down the road from the lake. So, same order of magnitude: airline is more expensive than the marginal costs, less expensive than the average costs. (And there's a lot of "hobby time" to train, stay proficient, geek out on airplane forums, and light airplanes are not nearly as "almost all weather" as airliners.) Other less tangible items: Much safer statistically to fly Delta than a piston single. My kids know "Jeda and Baba", their late 80s great-grandparents, because they live 2 miles from a cheap-gas airport on the way to/from one set of their grand-parents, so we stop in for lunch/dinner and sometimes one overnight on those trips, including this one. I'm not especially sentimental, or extended-family oriented, but even still, that's worth a lot to me, as the day is coming all too soon when they won't be here and if we flew commercial, we'd literally never stop in to see them except for family funerals. Big one for my wife: my airplane has lavatories at "either end of the flight", but not on-board. Now, we can divert anytime and be on the ground inside of 10 minutes usually, but for a 2 or 4 year old, or a pregnant 30-something, that can be a long time...

dirktheman 13y ago

If I recall correctly (I worked in the travel industry once), the price for a one-way from Paris to NYC was about 12K. An astonishing price, and you'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!

dllthomas 13y ago
"[Y]ou'd have to be a really well-paid executive to justify the price difference between a regular flight!" Nonesense! You could be a really well paid actor or a really well paid musician or maybe a politician on a junket or even an escort...

justinph 13y ago

Air travel is one of the least efficient and most polluting forms of travel. Going slower and burning less fuel is great, even if it isn't as fast as technically possible.

blackaspen 13y ago
The 787 can get up to 100 miles per passenger per gallon. That's pretty good. On par with a 25 MPG car with four people in it. Until you consider that car needs to drive a non-direct route. And stop and stay at hotels. And get food. And more gas. And all of that too has distribution costs and expenses. And takes significantly longer. If you really want to take a 36 hour train trip across the US go right ahead. I'll take my 7 hour flight and enjoy my extra day there.
- themstheones 13y ago
  It depends what kind of trip you are taking. For some trips the journey is more important than the destination. I wouldn't trade my childhood road trips across the country in for the alternative.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - maaku 13y ago
    You must have had a better trip (or a better car) than my folks did.
khuey 13y ago
That's misleading. On CO2 per unit distance traveled air travel is pretty comparable to other forms of transportation. The long distances are what make the absolute contributions of air travel to CO2 emissions large.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  It's not just CO2. Contrails have their own warming effect, and then there is local air pollution by airports.

TheAnimus 13y ago

It's not just a case of being too cheap, but also it having negligable effect. If I have to be at Heathrow 90 min before departure, and it takes me 45 min to drive there, or 90 min on public transport, then at the other end it takes 30 mins for my bag to get on the belt, clear port control, and another 30-60 min to get to the city. I have a good 4 hours of fixed time involved with my flight. If the flight is just 8 hours, making it 7 hours isn't really going to change things, I've still lost the most of the day. So I'd sooner be able to sleep comfortably (ie space!) or be able to do some work (11 vaio Pro, 22 hours battery). Then we have the issue that even going supersonic, we can't just upsticks and do it. We have to get out to see. Climbing to FL390 takes a lot of time, descending from it does as well, otherwise people generally find it rather un-appealing. Add in busy hub airport traffic and we've got at least 2 hours that we can't really speed up. So our 12 hour total journy (4 hours travelling too / waiting at airports, 6 hours of cruise, 2 hours of holding an NDB) speeding up that 6 hours, doesn't have much effect. Hell go nuts, make it take 2 hours, go for mach 3. It is still going to take me, door to door, 8 hours. 8 vs 12 for the cost of that just isn't going to be worth it. Because ultimately I'll have my own work schedule, I'm not rich enough to have a private jet, and the stuff I fly you wouldn't want to be in for more than 4 hours anyway (well the fuel would run out too). So that means I want a regular, frequent service. I don't care that superfastjet leaves everyday at 1pm. I need to be around till 5pm. Obviously the geek in me would take the fast one, but I couldn't do that everytime. TLDR It isn't just about being cheaper. It is recognising the deminishing impact speed is having on being the deciding factor. We look at door to door time, not cruise performance. We want a frequent schedule, not one speedbird a day.

bergie 13y ago
Exactly the reason why the (much slower) train often makes more sense. Sure, the train from Amsterdam to Berlin is six hours. But you only have to be at the station to catch it before it leaves, and it both leaves and arrives right in the center. We tried this returning from a conference there last fall, and the hotel-door-to-home-door advantage of flying was less than 30 minutes. And on train there was more space, better food, and a bar. Not to mention that there was power and nobody told me to shut down my laptop at any point :-)

fomojola 13y ago

Odd: this one was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago as https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2.

kristianp 13y ago
It looks like medium.com uses a label/tag system, so an article can be discovered by looking at the "lift and drag" label or the "roaming the earth" label, for example: https://medium.com/roaming-the-earth/7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/roaming-the-earth/7885a299bca2

lewispb 13y ago

I wonder if something like this could be used for round-the-world passenger transportation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

kenkam 13y ago

Here the article forgets to mention airlines as an intermediary. Boeing and Airbus do not manufacture planes for us, they do it for the airlines. Airlines know that to make the most profit they need bigger and more fuel efficient planes over faster ones. And that's why we have them today. Also, slightly unrelated: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_everything.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_ever.... One of his points is interesting: if they had spent the billions of pounds on making the [eurostar] journey more enjoyable (by giving out free petrus served by models) than cutting travel time by a moderate amount, we'd all be asking for longer journey times! ... which _is_ what the article is saying: we don't want faster travel, we want more affordable and arguably more comfortable travelling.

gcb0 13y ago
Most Ted talks are baloney. But you're right on pointing the airlines as the cause. But for the same reason why mobile data took some 5yr to popularize... The middle man was too greedy and totally unrelated, dammit hackernews, make those downvotes harder to click by mistake!
nickff 13y ago
This is true, but misses the point that if another airline could enter the market with a desirable product, or an existing airline could add a fast service. The airline market is a highly competitive one, as all the vendors are distributing largely undifferentiated products The airlines and manufacturers regularly collaborate in the design of new aircraft.
- kenkam 13y ago
  You are correct, and a pattern has emerged: there are the airlines that differentiates themselves on service that is tied to their country of origin (Singapore Airlines vs Emirates, both fly A380, but definitely different feel to them), and then there are no-frills airlines. The collaboration you speak of are mostly to do with cabin sizes, how many seats, which variants to make to satisfy the majority of customers -- these can all be changed when the main parts of the plane stay the same: e.g. fuselage, engine, etc. Rarely do an airline get Airbus/Boeing to change main parts of the planes: one exception is EasyJet when they bought an insane number (200?) of A320s from Airbus: Airbus made a fuselage specially designed for EasyJet that had more seats and they had to move their doors.

knodi 13y ago

No, the airline charge too much for the service. If the service was economically worth it for it value it provided there would be a market for it.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Let's see, flying on the Concorde cuts the transatlantic flight time in half, but you still have to deal with getting yourself and your luggage on and off the plane. So, the time savings isn't that great. The plane isn't as comfortable as first class on a bigger, slower jet. Supersonic or not, it takes a day to fly transatlantic. People that can afford Concorde flights can afford chartered flights, or have their own jet.

tshile 13y ago

If they were to ask what improvements I (as a customer) want now, I'd tell them: - speed up the security checks, being advised to show up 2 hours before boarding is ridiculous - work on making the system more flexible so I don't have 2-3 hour delays. Improving or reducing time for those two things would greatly improve my flying experience. Much more than cutting off 20% of my flight time. They shouldn't increase cost any more per ticket either.

13b9f227ecf0 13y ago

I'm also too cheap for bullet trains. Lots of people cheer-lead for high speed rail in America, but all I want is normal trains that run quite frequently.

blackaspen 13y ago
Enjoy your 36 hour commute across the US.
- 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
  I was thinking more like Philadelphia to Charlotte.
- samatman 13y ago
  Currently takes 6 hours by airplane. I don't see a bullet train beating that. OTOH, there are a number of < 1500 km routes that could easily be served by train, if we didn't have some of the worst train service in the world. Bullet trains would be nice, but require new grading in many cases. I too would be happy just to get our old train network back.
MattLaroche 13y ago
Depending on what your routes and usage, higher speed is better than more frequent service. For example, let's say your options are a 2 hour train that runs hourly, and an hour long ride that departs every other hour. * Fast train: best case, 1 hour. Worst case, 2:59. Average case - about 2 hours. * Slow train: best case, 2 hours. Worst case: 2:59. Average case - about 2.5 hours. Of course this is one example - but there are definitely cases where increased speed is strictly better than increased frequency. (Unless being on the train is better than whatever you could be doing waiting for the train)
- randomknowledge 13y ago
  Not to mention if the trains are faster you will need fewer trains to transport the same number of people in the same time interval.

dllthomas 13y ago

Also, there's a huge difference between trading off high-value time for middling-value-time, versus actually spending the time. If I'm using my time on the plane to read or catch up on sleep or prepare for my presentation, it is less important to me that my flight be over quickly.

13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
I would pay more and tolerate slower flying times if the trade off was a less hellish flying experience. The TSA sucks. Flight attendants suck and the seats suck. Airport public transportation is usually lousy. In fact I often tolerate substantially longer travel times to ride on Amtrak rather than deal with the nightmare that is modern air travel.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Agreed, for most of my trips, especially if I could reliably get work done.

Sarien 13y ago

The fuel used to fly does not only cost money to buy but also costs environment to burn. I am quite happy if people are cheap when it comes to the environment. It is more likely that they are watching their wallets instead but in this rare case that seems to be win-win.

talmand 13y ago

Sorry buddy, Superman can go much faster than mach five.

FatalBaboon 13y ago

Moving around the world is something that has always been ridiculously expensive, and the price comparators hardly help, they just add noise. So yeah, it is about price, and if that problem is ever solved THEN people will discuss speed and other bonuses. It's like piss poor managers pushing agile when their developers don't even have a computer. Priorities matter.

sologoub 13y ago

The comparison to the computer age made me think about this in a different light - travel is now less valuable because of the on-set of great telecommunications tools than it was even 50 years ago. Today, huge deals can be negotiated largely over the phone/skype/webex/etc, making in person meetings less frequent. Therefore, if I can accomplish more by not traveling and communicating via Internet or phone, when I do travel, actual time spent flying is not as important, because I already made every effort to minimize travel in the first place, leaving only meetings that are truly worth it.

mentos 13y ago
my thoughts exactly we're already traveling at the speed of light

brendn 13y ago

The Concorde was an engineering marvel, but it was more than just increasingly cheap transatlantic fares that did it in. Noise regulations prevented it from flying over the Continental US. Maintenance became increasingly expensive as the fleet aged. (The technical problems with its air intakes and tires caused safety issues, too.) It's easy to say it's an entirely economic issue, but it isn't. The 2000 crash of Air France Flight 4590 shattered passenger confidence, the post-bubble recession meant fewer people had the disposable income to buy tickets, and the post-9/11 slump in air travel further reduced ticket sales. The article really only convincingly explains why we don't have a replacement Concorde, not why the Concorde went out of service. Jet fuel is expensive. Today, airlines and aircraft manufacturers spend trillions of dollars to improve fuel efficiency to keep up with rising fuel prices. It's not that we're too cheap, it's that the the industry was more interested in advances in conventional jet efficiency so that airlines could reap the benefit across a much, much larger fleet. There's always a desire to wrap up complex and multifaceted decisions in a neat little package. I don't think it's possible to point to a single issue (economic or otherwise) that made supersonic transport unviable.

ctdonath 13y ago

For almost 30 years there was a really fast way to fly, but we didn’t buy enough Concorde tickets to keep it going (I didn’t buy a single one). Over 30 years, we've gone from IBM PC to rMBP: about a hundred times the pixels, a thousand times faster processor speed, a million times more memory, a billion times more storage - all for 1/3rd the price. The physics involved could accommodate such an improvement. If we had likewise focused on travel speed instead of cost, methinks we would not have achieved NYC-to-London travel in 25 seconds.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
Yeah, so... NY to London is 25 seconds is about 500,000 mph (~Mach 650) average. Perspective: Mach 32 gets you to escape velocity, and the nuclear manhole-cover (which may have been the fastest manmade object ever) is estimated as somewhere north of Mach 200 or so. That's right: not even an atomic bomb can get you the kind of speed you're asking for. :P Hmm. Assume an even acceleration profile, with your first 12.5s accelerating and the second 12.5s decelerating, 1 million MPH peak. That's ~1800 times the force of gravity. Forget physics; the biology involved can't accomodate such an improvement. :P In fact, you could probably put a floor on the travel time from anywhere to anywhere by assuming passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  That's my point: physics+biology just aren't conducive to anything close to a comparable increase in travel speed short of teleportation (read "Flash Crowds" as an interesting tangent). As others note, the best tolerable improvement in travel time is lost amid the fixed overhead of embarking/disembarking times getting people to and on the vehicle. passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations Assuming continuous 1G acceleration (halfway there, reverse thrust thereafter), NYC-to-London would peak at 1200km/h with travel time of 34 minutes. Ignoring overhead, that's about 1/15th the time for subsonic travel now; an impressive improvement for sure, yet still paltry when comparing computing improvements. Flipping the original argument and blathering on, consider if computing improvements over 30 years led to just a 72MHz processor as commercial top-of-the line: indeed in general we'd favor cost over speed. Likewise, the cost of a one-way London-NYC flight has plummeted from a quarter of one's annual salary to just a couple days' pay, a drop around two orders of magnitude; availability is also an issue, with comparable flights happening thousands of times daily at relatively amazing convenience, vs limited to a couple hundred per year.

mephi5t0 13y ago

Problem with Concorde was not price but reliability. They were dangerous to pilot and felt a few times, imagine that uncontrolled thing falling on some poor village? money is not the issue, usually, otherwise military would still fly a "Black bird", right? Technological challenges, like temperature of jets and ability to stay in control if something goes wrong is more important. If your Boing looses an engine, you will still land it. Try that with Concord.

zurn 13y ago

We're not nearly cheap enough: The plane ticket price doesn't capture the cost of flying, the majority of which comes from the greenhouse gas emissions. Further working in the wrong direction is the tax freeness of jet fuel and the 2-3x amplified effect of co2 when injected directly to the upper atmosphere.

frenchman_in_ny 13y ago

Very cool - you can see Mach diamonds in the picture of the X1.

thehme 13y ago

Well, when you consider that round trip tickets from the NY area to Chicago were going for $280 and now they are $360, the difference can make anyone think twice, especially if you are doing this 3 or more times a year and for 2 ppl. The cost per person + car rental + gas + hotel costs add up to much more than the math for driving (even with hotel, car, and gas costs), such that driving, although slower, becomes a money saving option. I would think that most people travel within the country they live in, and mostly for vacation, so paying more money to get to the destination faster, is not a good option vs saving the $ and getting there a little later. Then business people don't care to be at a location earlier for longer, they just want to go do what they have to do and call it a day of work, even if they only actually worked 1 hr and traveled the rest. Unless emergencies or extreme situations, I do not see much incentive for people to want to pay more to be at a close location faster. This is somewhat of a bummer for ppl who would like to travel at high speeds, but think about it, it is definitely expensive.

rdl 13y ago

The one route where supersonic probably makes sense is trans-pacific. Still no sonic boom, and would turn travel from "a complete day wasted both directions" to something better. Especially for something like NYC-HKG, if you could solve the sonic boom issue (although most of it is over Canada or oceans; not sure about the inland China part)

steamer25 13y ago

I was just flying for the first time in a decade last week and I saw an oversize tail on another plane while we were taxi-ing around the runway. The proportions struck me as non-obvious. That got me wondering if/how much we've begun to see data-mining/machine-learning algos and computational aero/fluid dynamics influence aircraft design. E.g., genetic algorithms that vary the tail/wing/nose/etc. size/position and runs virtual designs through a simulator to see if various combinations perform better than others. My next thought was, "how would you design the fitness function?". I.e., what are the right objective measures you can use to determine that one design is 'better' than another? I.e., How do you determine the optimal balance of speed vs. fuel efficiency vs. comfort/stability/safety vs. production/materials cost etc.?

electic 13y ago

One word: Hyperloop.

outericky 13y ago

I recently enrolled in ClearMe. So... for about $15 per month, I get to skip the security line at SFO. For a couple of bucks, I reduced my SFO portion of the trip time by about 20 mins. Much more economical.

fragmede 13y ago

Virgin America's entire fleet has Wifi (though it's not eh fastest) and AC outlets. (Other carriers only have wifi on select flights.) What's my rush again?