6 ms·

flying has made no progress since the 60's. planes still crawl along and it takes me 6 hours to get to the East Coast. I'll be wow'd when they make some progres

• ronnier 13y ago
  We have different outlooks on life. I'm thankful and amazed that I have hot water right in my home, grocery stores filled with selection, heaters to keep me warm. We are so lucky to have such things and it's amazing what it took to get us where we are now. Try to build a screw, a single screw that holds one of these planes together.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • grey-area 13y ago
    try to build a screw, a single screw That's pretty easy if you have a tap and die set, it doesn't require advanced machine tools. I agree fantastic progress has been made due to our cooperative societies and the division of labour though, even just in the last few decades, the advances are astounding. The Internet alone is an advance at the level of Gutenberg.
    • gaius 13y ago
      And a mine, and a smelter... If you had to start from scratch, could you even make a nail? I couldn't.
• superuser2 13y ago
  Concorde happened. The market didn't sustain it.
  • brc 13y ago
    I'm not going to defend the Concorde business model, but the ban on cross country flights due to noise made it impossible. I mentioned this in irony to a colleague recently as a maintenance guy blasted leaves outside with a leaf blower. I still think Concorde could have been made to work in the end if it had been improved over time.
  • yardie 13y ago
    Concorde was sustainable. Almost everyone of them left the ground full. But these were planes built in the 70s. The rest of AF and BA fleet are fairly new withe oldest being from the mid 90s. The planes were getting more expensive to maintain and there was nothing coming to replace them.
• ceejayoz 13y ago
  Air travel has gotten drastically cheaper and safer since the 60s.
• saryant 13y ago
  Lie-flat beds in business class? On-demand entertainment? Power outlets and wifi? Safety enhancements? Not to mention flying is much cheaper than it used to be, adjusted for inflation.
  • dingaling 13y ago
    > Lie-flat beds in business class? On-demand entertainment? Power outlets and wifi? Well those are certainly improvements, but they're basically hacks around the fact that flying is now slower than it was in the past. The biggest impediment to speed today is the dreaded 'Cost Index' which nearly all airlines now implement. I think Boeing have a different term, but it's the same idea; the crew are given a target CI which they punch into the flight management computer and which then determines the Mach number according to the cost-saving target. Flying from Belfast to London is now timetabled at 20 minutes longer than in 1973, regardless of the extra standing-in-line at either end.
  • abcd_f 13y ago
    Don't forget the cavity checks, a huge leap forward in safety.
• ubernostrum 13y ago
  flying has made no progress since the 60's. planes still crawl along and it takes me 6 hours to get to the East Coast. I'll be wow'd when they make some progress beyond allowing me to listen to my music during take off. The price of a cross-country fare, adjusted for inflation, is a small fraction of what it used to be. The planes themselves are massively more fuel-efficient, reliable and safe. You have on-board live television and internet on many flights. These are all significant gains. Meanwhile, passengers voted with their wallets on supersonic airliners; the time saved (4-4.5 hours on a transatlantic Concorde flight) were not seen as worth the significantly higher fares.
• joezydeco 13y ago
  You're too cheap to fly faster. https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2 https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2