Given that supersonic travel has zero effect on time spent in the airport - which is a large fraction of travel time when flying domestically - I just don't think that the cost/benefit math comes even close to working out for most people. Especially for the famously cost-conscious airline industry [0].
If the premise of this article were true, then lifting the ban would be a major legislative priority for the airlines and likely already be lifted.
With coast-to-coast travel, time spent in the airport is a much lower fraction of travel time. That's why the coast-to-coast flights make sense for supersonic travel.
We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try.
Coast-to-coast is definitely the best case scenario. I recently flew SEA->ATL, and it took 4.5 hours at mach ~0.7. So with airport time, let's say ~6 hours total.
Even ignoring differences in sub/supersonic flight (i.e., being unrealistically conservative), doubling my cruise speed to mach 1.5 would've increased fuel consumption by 4x while bringing my total travel time down to around 4 hours. So it'd be (probably significantly more than) 4x the cost just to reduce my travel time by 30%. Again, that's for the "best case" of coast-to-coast travel.
How'd you manage to spend (average) only 45 minutes in the airport on each end? Even pre-TSA, I never managed to go from front door to jetway that fast.
I use O'Hare airport, one of the ten worst airports in the US. I never take a whole 45 minutes to get to my gate. Nor do I have any precheck or anything. I just pack light and check in online. Baggage dropoff and claim is what kills you.
I travel about once a month to the US and back to Canada... the security lineup can take up to an hour sometimes leaving SFO. So if I don't want to have a chance to miss my flight, I have to arrive 2 hours early really.
did you sign up for tsa precheck and/or clear? If you travel that much the amortized cost would make sense. You basically get inserted into the line right after the "check id" part and don't have to take off shoes/ laptops
I'm assuming this is the international terminal? I fly ATL->SFO every 3 weeks or so and SFO domestic is the fastest airport ever. I'll leave downtown SF at 1 and get to airport, drop my bag off and be at gate in ~30 minutes.
ATL on the other hand....even with TSA pre I can take a full hour.
Better training, more incentives to be passenger focused etc. might be the reasons.
In fact in some contests these private guards performed 5x better than TSA employees in catching the bad guys/bad items while actually doing it lot faster.
Wow, I just flew out of IAD and even though I arrived at 4AM for my 5:15 flight, security still took 45 minutes. The line was already twice as long by the time I got through.
I don't even want to think about trying to get through at a reasonable hour.
Oh, I always arrive early. No reason to take the risk, I can always sit and read a book. But I spend a lot more time waiting than I ever have getting to the gate. It's really just an overabundance of caution.
Many people (including me) consider the imposed waiting at the gate time part of the travel time. Whether from an abundance of caution or rational reaction to the wide variability of security procedures (and ground transport), it's still part of the total trip time.
That's fair. Though I've yet to actually need that time, so I feel arriving at the airport with less than an hour to go is a realistically acceptable thing I could do.
In Salt Lake City I recently saw on the local news that our airport recommended arriving 3 hours early for your flight. At the end of the report the news-caster said that SLC airport had below average wait times, as if that was suppose to make me feel better. It didn't.
"Things are bad here, but the good news is it's worse everywhere else." \s
I found BART to make this pretty straightfoward when I lived in Berkeley.
Also, when flying to Sacramento recently I took the Norwegian Air trip from Gatwick to Oakland and then capitol corridor to Sacramento. Didn't even need to get on BART; the airport connector took me to the catwalk to Amtrak.
The only airport in the bay that seems hard to access is San Jose, which has less service anyway.
This must be why I always Uber to the airport. On normal days (not big travel day like Thanksgiving time) you can get from SoMa to Standing Outside SFO With Luggage Out of Trunk in about 30min during the day. I've seen as low as 15min at night.
I may have always gotten lucky and when I actually plan the trip I try to go for more like 45min travel-to-airport-time. Just to be sure.
On Thanksgiving or such, the off-ramp from 101 to SFO takes about an hour. That's crazy.
Depended heavily on the airport layout and how close you want to cut it on the departure side. Avoiding checked bags is a significant timesaver.
I missed a few flights doing this but pre-9/11 it was definitely possible (but not advisable) to get to a smaller airport 30-45 minutes before departure and make the flight.
On the arrival side, back in the good old days (mid to late 90's?) with no checked luggage I could get from the arrival gate to Hertz #1 club gold rental car pickup (when it was in the terminal A garage) at SJC without breaking stride - probably 5 minutes max from the aircraft door to car door.
Post-9/11 it was often possible to make weekday morning flights at OAK arriving only 20 minutes before. (I did it a number of times!) Self-print Southwest boarding pass, almost no security line, everything is 3-4 minutes' walk from everything else.
Nowadays OAK has been expanded and the security lines are longer (and they have body scanners, which I opt out of, which also then takes longer).
I've gotten out of SFO in 30 mins (post-9/11), no checked bags obviously, boarding pass in hand, with most of that time spent in screening. This is also a good way to be the last person on the plane or miss it entirely.
Mid-1990s, traveling with my graduate advisor. His wife drop us off at the small airport, no more than about 15 minutes (!) before departure. We walked with our carry-on luggage through a quick metal detector/baggage X-ray, and checked in at the gate. About five minutes later the airplane door closed, for takeoff.
I still remember worrying about how close we cut it, but he'd done it many times and knew how long it would take.
I often fly out of a smaller airport in Upstate NY. For a morning flight, my routine is to set my alarm for 1:15 before the flight takes off. I get up, pack, and am out the door about with about an hour to go. I get to the airport with about 45 minutes to go, and arrive at the gate in time to wait 20 minutes to actually start the boarding process.
With precheck, most airports aren't much worse, other than the uncertainty of transport in. I've never had precheck take me longer than about 10 minutes in security. So as long as I'm not checking a bag, it's still pretty reasonable to arrive 45min before departure.
Many small airports outside of the U.S. work like this. I can turn up 20 minutes before a flight with luggage to check and board an intercity flight without any security. It depends on the size of the plane, small planes are deemed safe enough to fly without metal detecting the passengers.
You could get into Sacramento's airport in 45 minutes in the 90s, although that would be cutting it close. And even today, you can walk out with carry-on only in about 10 minutes, with the expensive parking close to the bridgeway into the terminal.
However, an hour and a half to get in with TSA "at your service" feels like cutting it really close, and I'm talking about "Smurf" (SMF), not San Francisco or San Jose.
I've been able to get from the airport entrance to my gate in under 30 minutes. It was around 2am going from LAX to PHL and there was a long-ish (maybe 20 min wait??) line behind us at security. We still waited another 45 minutes at the gate. So 1 hour on the departure end is reasonable. At arrival I don't see 1 hour being unreasonable either.
Probably not to people who remember travelling before 9/11 (and probably even less to people who remember travelling before the security measures implemented during the 1990 gulf crisis that continued until superceded by post-9/11 security.)
You used to be able to go through without showing any documents, and so friends and family members could come through security to meet arriving passengers at the gate (or say goodbye to departing passengers at the gate!).
One time as a non-passenger I went through security at BDL two or three times either because of confusion about where to meet someone or just in order to buy food on the other side. The security guards didn't seem to think this was improper.
I remember early-90s BDL also. The security guards were pretty relaxed. We enlisted their help in faking out a younger sibling who didn't know we were going to Disney World; they played along that we were just going to meet someone at the gate, and let someone else take all the bags through ahead of us. Wouldn't be remotely possible now.
Then again, I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit, either before takeoff or while cruising.
When I was a kid air travel was great fun! I got to visit the cockpit in every plane we flew in, including the Concorde. As a curious child, this was absolutely wonderful.
Ah well, it seems that those days will never return.
I still remember when I was fortunate enough to failover to a concorde when our 747 was grounded ~20 years ago and got to visit the cockpit in flight. There was a seam between two portions of the cockpit (a little less than an inch wide) that only existed when the plane was supersonic, and it closed tight when not.
Wouldn't have been able to scare a kid into thinking they could get their hand stuck in there if the plane was still on the ground ;)
Of course whether or not in-flight cockpit visits were still allowed, that particular experience wouldn't happen anymore.
Oh yeah, I remember being invited to visit the cockpit once as a kid (I don't remember whether it was on the ground or in-flight). I guess it was common on some airlines for the flight attendants to look around for kids and invite them up to meet the pilots.
Apparently in the 1960s to early 1970s, you could buy your ticket on the plane. (I wasn't around to have experienced that.)
<I also remember when kids were routinely let into the cockpit>
I wasn't a kid, but I got to hang out in the cockpit for a good-half hour on a cross-province Air Canada flight long after it was illegal in USA airspace (1990s). The amazing thing, apart from the scenery, was that you could see dozens of other jets in various headings and altitudes.
I used to walk through security barely slowing down and get on my flight without ever showing ID to anyone or checking in anywhere. And all the seats had actual knee room. I miss that feeling of freedom I used to get from air travel.
Yeah flying out at odd times and/or odd days can save you a lot of frustration dealing with the TSA lines. The worst of the lines are due to commuter or holiday traffic 99% of the time and the rest of the time you can breeze right up to the scanners and be through in a few minutes.
They kind of have to advertise the worst wait times though because if they say 1 hour non peak and 3 hours peak the times the airport or the traveler gets it wrong the airport will catch the blame.
Really? TSA pre-check, carry-on only or already have your baggage tags printed out, go through security like you've done it before (don't wait until you are about to go through the backscatter machine to take off shoes, belts, etc). Outside of the busiest airports or high-travel dates, shouldn't ever take more than 45 minutes.
I think cost/benefit is pretty well known. Getting empirical data though flight testing is definitely a large portion of building full performance numbers for the manual, but Boeing and Airbus has some solid expectations on performance numbers before the first rivet is ever put into place. I don't believe there are any real big "wait and see" mysteries on supersonic cost/performance.
> We don't know if the cost/benefit math works out until people are able to try.
That is true. If someone had told me about Uber 15 years ago I would have called that person mad. I never thought it was even possible to run a taxi company bypassing all the taxi regulations in place.
But having said that what really matters is the marginal value of time during coast to coast flight. At the moment it takes me on an average 10 hours to travel from SF to NY including the time spending in planning, traveling to airport, NSA bullshit etc. 4 hours is the actual flight time. If it is reduced to 2 hours I don't really benefit much. I still have to spend 8 hours.
Who said we were talking about domestic flights? This is a common problem on HN. Someone always tries to cherry pick the use case no one is talking about then create an endless pointless conversation.
There's a lot of international travel from the US:
Please read what I wrote again. I said nothing about flying from NYC to Europe or LAX to Asia. The point is that you can fly supersonic from NYC to Asia and from LAX to Europe.
NYC and LA are huge markets, and probably where you'd expect a lot of people willing to pay the extra cost of supersonic flight.
NYC to London wasn't enough of a savings with the Concorde for many people. NYC to Tokyo/Shanghai/Beijing/Sydney/Singapore/Seoul/Mumbai would probably have more value, for example.
Also, LAX to London or Paris is about 10.5 hours. I'd think a market that cuts that to under 5 hours would exist.
Pretty much the only land a great circle JFK-NRT flight passes over is northern Ontario, Nunavut/NWT/Yukon, a little bit of Alaska, and Kamchatka. A great circle JFK-TPE changes that to Quebec, Nunavut, far-east Sibera, and Manchuria. (Of course, planes would take different routes for reasons like 'weather patterns' and 'restricted airspaces' and similar.)
So basically my point is this: the FAA has no jurisdiction over the vast majority of those routes.
> Also, LAX to London or Paris is about 10.5 hours. I'd think a market that cuts that to under 5 hours would exist.
And very crudely, I think about 20% of the great circle route is over the US and hence in the FAA's jurisdiction. They're already allowed to fly supersonic over much of Northern Canada, and the great circle comes over Hudson Bay and to North Dakota (passing near Winnipeg)—that's the only section outwith the FAA's jurisdiction where they are not already allowed to fly supersonic I believe.
If supersonic flight can be made environmentally low-impact and cost-effective, they have the rest of the world to use as a proving ground first. Continental North America doesn't have to be the guinea pig for this.
Concorde demand wasn't typically driven by need; it was mostly driven by prestige.
That's an excellent point. For the price of a ticket on a supersonic transport you could probably charter a Falcon 900, Citation 10, or Gulfstream 4 to get you there much more comfortably and reliably albeit a bit slower. I would be willing to be home to hotel door times would be comparable.
Home to hotel doors would be better for most, since you'd leave when you wanted and not when the not particularly regular scheduled service was due to depart. On board internet connectivity has also made the idea that waking hours spent in a first class seat must be "wasted" seem rather archaic
Not to mention that small regional airports can often be significantly closer to your destination. General aviation for the masses would be a game-changer.
One way that you can deal with an 'externality' like this is to internalize it: rather than an outright ban, have the airline pay some money to those affected. Maybe that makes it too expensive to be worthwhile, maybe not, but at least it's no longer impossible.
> In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which have a major naval air station to the west and a large military air training space to the east, park officials take military commanders on a five-day "Wilderness Orientation Overflight Pack Trip" to demonstrate the effects of military jet noise on visitor experience in the parks. Before the program started in the mid-1990s, rangers reported as many as 100 prohibited "low flier" incidents involving military jets every year. Now the number of planes flying less than 3000 feet above the ground surface is a fourth to a fifth of that. Complaints are taken seriously, especially when, as has happened more than once, they're radioed in by irate military commanders riding on jet-spooked pack horses on narrow mountain trails. In that context, human cursing is generally regarded as a natural sound.
Back around 2008, there was an aviation startup (forgot the name, started by an ex-IBMer) based out of the Boca Raton Airport. In order to use Boca as the base hub [1] it had to pay for window upgrades (and A/C) for houses in the flight path.
My house was in the flight path (about a mile from the airport as the plane flies; neighbor across the street? Not so lucky). Unfortunately, the airline went out of business due to the downturn in the economy (pity). So it is possible to internalize it.
[1] It was a charter air service. I was really looking forward to it. Even if it was more expensive than economy, it wasn't as expensive as business or first class. You did have to have very flexible travel schedule to get cheaper flights.
While it's obviously not a perfect solution, it's likely better than a blanket ban.
> For example, if I have a recording studio under the flight path, do I get more compensation in order to add sound-proofing?
No, but maybe you could sell out and move somewhere without that noise, and someone who is noise-tolerant would happily take your place + the compensation on offer.
The "no" is why it isn't really an internalized cost.
It's the same with any sort of pollution - what's the minimum I can pay someone in order to put up a insert smelly, explosive, noisy, etc. factory? Or to put in off-shore windmills which affects peoples' sea views? Or schedule airport takeoffs at 2am?
(I forgot another complication: does the payment go to the landowner or to the resident? Or both?)
Regarding "likely better than a blanket ban", a goal is to develop methods that reduce the effect of the sonic boom "to make overland flight acceptable." This is also better than a blanket ban, and doesn't require a new way to approximate impact costs and manage payments.
> Regarding "likely better than a blanket ban", a goal is to develop methods that reduce the effect of the sonic boom "to make overland flight acceptable." This is also better than a blanket ban, and doesn't require a new way to approximate impact costs and manage payments.
You can't put the cart before the horse. You have to get rid of the ban in order to make the whole thing worthwhile.
I see now that "blanket ban" is an incorrect description. As I understand it, the current prohibition is that supersonic planes (except Concorde) are allowed, so long as they are below a given noise level. Here's the law, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.821 :
> Except for Concorde airplanes having flight time before January 1, 1980, no person may operate in the United States, a civil supersonic airplane that does not comply with Stage 2 noise limits of part 36 in effect on October 13, 1977, using applicable trade-off provisions.
> The policy underlying this regulation puts the burden of establishing the environmental acceptability of supersonic civil aircraft flight on the proponent, rather than on the affected public. However, the FAA has also made available reasonable opportunity for aircraft manufacturers to prove the environmental acceptability of supersonic flight if they are able to control sonic boom research without harmful effects on the public.
The problem appears to be that airplane manufacturers cannot meet the existing noise level, so instead want the FAA to say what higher level is allowed. This places the cost and responsibility on the government rather than the manufacturers. So of course the manufacturers would like to shift that expense to someone else.
This is silly, you could hear the noise for tens of miles to either side of the flight path. Think about how high the plane was and how far the noise has travelled.
So are you proposing the compensation be one-time and significantly greater than the standard transaction fees on real estate? For reference, they're around $10k on an inexpensive house.
It'd have to be ongoing, I think. It's probably not as simple as a few lines in a comment on HN, no, but is a blanket ban on something potentially useful a good idea, just because it's simple? My inclination is 'no'.
Sure, but the usual outcome of such proposals is merely to placate those affected with less compensation than the actual harm caused, and to erode such payments over time after the affected have lost their veto. Honestly carrying out such a plan costs more than businesses are generally willing to pay, especially when their dollars go much further by corrupting the political process directly.
Blanket bans have costs for people, too, though. In this case, we're not talking about dumping toxic sludge in a river, either, but about a sonic boom.
Pollution is all in the amount. One drop of toxic sludge in the Pacific is okay. One sonic boom a month (like when the Space Shuttle came in, or from military flights), is okay.
What about 1 per day? 10 per day? 100 per day? What are the limits? Who determines the limits? Who bears the burden of dealing with the pollution - sludge or noise - and how are their voices heard?
As I pointed out elsewhere, the existing prohibition does not appear to be a "blanket ban". If your supersonic plane is sufficiently quiet, I believe it is allowed to fly. The problem is that we don't know how to build planes which are that quiet. What's at issue is who pays for figuring out which higher noise levels are acceptable - industry or the government. And industry doesn't like the current government answer.
You're demonstrating my point itself, by switching to a completely different talking point rather than fleshing out methods to earnestly compensate those affected.
Because it's a HN comment, not a scientific study on exactly what the best methods are. Sheez! The point is: if you spend some time thinking about it, you can probably find something that works 'ok' even if it's not perfect, thus 1) allowing supersonic flight and 2) internalizing the cost so that the market functions and there's some consideration of the costs to people in the flight path.
I suspect that in the grand scheme of ways humans displace and cause problems for animals, sonic booms are not high on the list. I mean, you wrote that you lived there - so presumably you lived in a house, accessible from a paved road. Those things take habitat away from animals.
You want supersonic travel and sonic booms. I want the travel without the boom. It's then just an engineering exercise to remove it. Fly above the atmosphere. Travel in a vacuum tube. Make travelling more interesting so long travel times aren't an issue.
I just want people to be able to try stuff. I don't want sonic booms, but I think that the economic path from here to there is an evolutionary one, rather than making a quantum leap from booms to no booms. So to get there, you have to put up with some noise.
> Ultimate Air Shuttle offers various benefits to passengers that some other airlines do not. These services include no baggage fees, no cancellation fees, and the ability to arrive at the airport 15 minutes before scheduled departures.
I'm not saying charter is available and accessible for every route, but there are lots of options out there.
Time spent at the airport can be more productive though - catch up a few emails/tasks, walk around, shop etc. It's the long sitting flight hours, with constant interruptions that are very irritating.
If I'm flying long distance it's already a day where I'm not going to get anything else done. Might as well chill out at the airport with a book and the free drinks in the lounge.
Even if the noise problem has been fixed, supersonic travel has another huge problem: Fuel consumption. Concorde positively guzzled fuel compared to the jets of its day, and this (among other things) made it uneconomical to operate. The authors of this article never even touched this topic. Has it improved considerably?
Subsonic flight is cutting through cheese with a sharp knife. Supersonic flight is cutting through cheese with a hammer. There is no way it will ever be commercially economical with gas turbine engines and afterburners. Even super cruise without afterburners is incredibly inefficient and has very few uses outside of tactical aviation.
Drag in supersonic flight is not nearly as big an issue as you would think. The Concorde was inefficient mostly because it used afterburning turbojets that had poor efficiency at low speed.
As lift is also proportional to density, area and square of velocity, that whole term cancels out from the equation of fuel usage per distance, basically only L/D or cL/cD matters.
Perhaps better would be aircraft weight to number of passengers ratio.
Revenue wise the supersonic airliner flies faster, meaning you get more seat miles per day per seat.
That's true, but supersonic planes also travel higher (Concorde -> 18 km, XB-70 -> 22 km). The real problem is that L/D decreases at supersonic speeds. For example, the XB-70 had a L/D of about 7, while the 707 had a L/D over 18...
At supersonic cruise (M2) Concorde used fuel at the same rate as a Jumbo, a quick google search reveals this:
"BA said a 747 cost $100,000 to fly each way across the atlantic in wages, fuel, maintenace etc, before fixed costs. At the same time Concorde was costing $120,000".
Having read in the past the various Concorde threads on pprune.org, one view was that it was killed of by Airbus who didn't want to keep on supporting it as the manufacturer so helped get rid of the certificate of airworthiness. see this url http://www.concorde-spirit-tours.com/concorde.htm for at least one view.
I actually would think that could be done "safely". No sarcasm. I am expecting that if fusion ever becomes a reality we will go with electric motors which will certainly always be sub-sonic.
Electric motors have a top speed which is governed by the forces generated by induction. At higher speeds they spend more and more torque countering those forces. Contrast this with turbines, where a higher inlet speed translates into a higher output speed - the amount of energy a turbine uses to keep itself spinning is constant rather than proportional to airspeed. This is why electric motors would have issues flying at high speeds.
For a plane, make that a neutron-less kind of fusion.
After fusion becomes commercially viable, and the entire world concerts, we'll still be about as far as neutron-less fusion as we are from fusion right now.
Airplanes will go nuclear, but not with onboard reactors. There is simply no way to make onboard reactors sufficiently safe, especially in a crash. Instead nuclear power plants will be used to produce synthetic hydrocarbon liquid fuel for airplanes.
The market can figure that out. If the noise problem is solved (I can't read the article because it says I need to sign in), then allow it and let the airlines decide if they can make money doing it.
It's not so much the cost of fuel that is a concern, but the environmental impact. Unlike power generation and ground transport, global emissions from aviation are increasing rapidly at a time of growing concern about climate change.
While increased speed is nice if it can be done efficiently, innovation in aviation needs to remain focused on improving efficiency.
Banning a particular form of transportation seems a poor method for reducing emissions. Just tax the fuel properly and it will sort itself out. Flying is currently much too cheap compared to its environmental impact imho. How can it be cheaper to fly from Berlin to Munich than taking the car (or the train)?
We are afraid of possible feedback loops destabilizing ice sheets much earlier than predicted? Maybe the price should be 5x what it current is?
If emitting CO2 causes unknown massive harm, then it seems sane to figure out a CO2 neutral method to create these liquid fuels that jets require. That would seem very expensive, with current technology.
Defining "properly" when related to taxes is too difficult for a HN comment. Also, I'm neither a climate scientist nor do I consider myself an expert in economy. I'm rather concerned about climate change, so my numbers would likely be much higher than necessary.
But I'd suggest putting a bunch of scientists in a room for a while to figure out the environmental impact and define some acceptable limit of yearly pollution. Then raise taxes until we're under the limit. Or something similar.
Properly, in this context, simply means tax it like you tax fuel/energy for other modes of transportation.
Airlines have been very successful at getting special treatment by scaremongering "no more connections for you". Which is certainly a mostly empty threat, because connections will only go down by as much as demand elasticity reacts to the price difference.
Difficult to define it, but we can be pretty sure we're nowhere close with our current tax policies.
In theory you set the tax rate to counteract the net negative externalities. It's estimating those externalities that's the source of contention (as you hint at re: feedback loops). So assign ten teams to estimate it and take the median?
>How can it be cheaper to fly from Berlin to Munich than taking the car (or the train)?
I can't answer that specific case, but in general it's pretty simple, especially if you're comparing cars and planes: when you drive yourself in a car, you're not only transporting yourself and luggage, you're also taking a 3000-pound hunk of steel. On a plane, it's just you and some bags. You can pack a bunch of people and their crap into an aluminum tube when you give them sardine-sized seats. You get big economies of scale when you do things at larger sizes. And with an airplane, you don't have to take windy, indirect routes and stop at stoplights.
With trains, it's not so clear-cut: trains are generally more efficient than road-going vehicles, because they have lower friction (steel on steel rather than rubber on asphalt), less acceleration/deceleration (no stoplights), and economies of scale (lots of people can fit into a train). One possible problem is the tracks don't go the best route, as they have to conform to both local geography and also history, and tracks are expensive to build (airplanes go directly between airports and the only infrastructure they need is the airports, nothing in between).
Google Maps is ridiculously slow where I am so I'm not going to try finding the driving time between Berlin and Munich, but I'm guessing it's around 3-4 hours? Why a plane might be cheaper (I'm taking your word for it) probably comes down to differences in regulation between airlines and trains in Germany. I agree, it shouldn't be that way; trains should generally be cheaper. Here in the US, trains are generally terrible. Amtrak is actually OK in the northeast corridor, but outside that it mostly sucks: it's very slow, and typically very expensive compared to airfare. The trains frequently don't even have WiFi (outside the NE). They're really comfortable, though, I'll give them that. The coach seats are like 1st-class seats on airlines. But there's probably a bunch of reasons for all this: airlines are largely deregulated here in the US, and there's a ton of competition driving prices down. There's only one Amtrak, with zero competition. Amtrak has to rent space on the tracks from freight companies that own the tracks, and their trains take last place on the tracks (yep, freight gets priority here over passenger rail!). And their trains are generally horribly slow, since we don't have anything resembling high-speed rail, so they're not too attractive to anyone that values their time: no one really wants to spend 3 days (not exaggerating) on a train trip that they can do in 4 hours by airplane.
The competition thing alone is probably one big reason you're seeing that different in Germany. Government-owned agencies just cannot compete against private industry in most cases. When there's no competition and it's nearly impossible to get fired, that leads to an organizational culture which is bloated, ineffective, and overly expensive. I don't know if it's this bad in Germany, but here in the US, if you work at a government agency and need to just buy an office chair, it can take almost a year. Private companies don't work that way because they'd go out of business if they did.
The Concorde had never been optimized for fuel consumption. Even for a jet of its time, it was quite wasteful of fuel. I once was told by someone who had some insight into Boing, that they had a much more efficient supersonic airliner in development in the competition to the Concorde, when the project was cancelled. So yes, supersonic airplanes would use more fuel than subsonic ones, but how much we can't know until someone builds a modern supersonic aircraft.
> but how much we can't know until someone builds a modern supersonic aircraft.
You really think modern aircraft manufacturers are surprised by the fuel consumption (or any other performance characteristic) of their aircraft prior to them actually being built?
Oh, by the time they start to assemble physical parts they of course know exactly the performance figures, but that is pretty close to the end of the design process. Only after the design process you know these and I don't know how much of that is being done now.
That's true but there's enough history of supersonic aircraft design that it's not really much of a mystery what the general numbers are going to look like given speed, range, capacity, etc. targets. Sure, the designers won't know at a detailed level until they actually design the aircraft to some degree. But it's pretty much a certainty that they have (at a minimum) a back of the envelope idea of how things will look.
In fact, x-plane development is going to be funded by NASA Aeronautics for the production of a number of next-gen flight demonstrators, included a supersonic low-boom demonstrator.
Truss-braced wing configuration, hybrid-electric and all-electric are among the other contenders.
The article does touch on how newer designs could reduce sonic booms by making lighter aircraft. If a new supersonic jet is manufactured that is a fraction of the weight of a Concorde, it could be much more fuel efficient as well.
Concorde was more-or-less viable for BA (though not for AF). Specialized maintenance for such a small fleet (because it effectively only operated the transatlantic route due to regulations) was the thing that killed it economically.
It was viable in that it broke even on its running costs, but towards the end it wouldn't have covered the cost of actually acquiring the aircraft, nor any major expenditures such as upgrades required for safety or compatibility with newer systems.
Concorde used to serve a lot more than just the NYC-London/Paris route. It used to serve Bahrain, Rio de Janeiro, Dakar, Caracas, Washington DC, Miami, and Mexico City. Those faded away due to a lack of demand. (Ignoring Dallas and Singapore, as those failed due to restrictions on supersonic flight.)
I'm sure a new design could be a lot more economical. Of course, regular airliners have become a lot more economical as well, so it's a tougher bar to clear.
There was an extended forum thread (on pretty much all aspects of Concorde - went on for tens or hundreds of pages) that was linked from here once - afraid I don't have it to hand.
This was only for take off and acceleration through the trans-sonic regime. It certainly didn't use them for super-cruise at Mach 2; at this speed the engines were operating at their peak efficiency.
Gaz guzzling is not a foregone conclusion. For instance, recall that the SR-71 actually got better fuel mileage the faster it flew, due to insightful use of the energy found in the compression wave.
If you are concerned about fuel consumption you are probably not sufficiently wealthy. You probably even drive a Corolla or a Civic instead of a nice Hummer :-)
The WSJ is probably thinking about the supersonic bizjets being proposed for the 1%.[1] Bizjet passengers get to bypass the main TSA lines.
(Well, more like the 0.01%. Aereon's proposed price is $110 million for a 12 passenger supersonic aircraft. It's only Mach 1.6, while Concorde was over Mach 2. If you have to ask about operating cost, you can't afford it.)
most "private jets" are "fractional" timeshares, so you don't have to pay the full $110 million. See http://NetJets.com/
still, it's also "fractional" 1% anyway, 1% doesn't get you in a private plane. Evidence that we live in the time of oligarchs, they call the fast plane they want to get noise approval for BOOM
and BTW, for those thinking about it, even when you "own" it, the cost of every flight is much more than 1st class tickets.
They try to dismiss the idea of a sonic boom as a product of the imagination of a crazy environmentalist. But the sonic boom is a well documented and completely uncontroversial fact.
Then they try to set up a strawman by implying that the main concern is architectural damage and therefore if there is no architectural damage everything would be ok. But there is still the concern of health and quality of life damage to humans. Imagine if you lived by a major airport and you had to hear a sonic boom every couple of minutes.
Then the idea that modern materials and light-weighting would significantly reduce the sonic boom is rather unlikely. A passenger plane will have a limited benefit from lightweighting, because you cannot light-weight the cargo. You will probably get much quieter sonic booms if you have small business jet style planes, but it would still be there. Fighter planes are entirely too small and too expensive to be business jets and they still create quite a noticeable boom.
There has been a lot of research on how to minimize booms. It has not really resulted in anything acceptable. But, hey, if someone makes a supersonic passenger plane with a sonic boom that is too quiet to cause any issues, sure we should change the law.
But to change the law based on stary-eyed belief that the magic of lighweighting will make everything ok is just stupid.
Firstly, I wasn't aware there was a ban on supersonic flight. I thought Concorde was banned simply because it was too noisy, not because of concerns over sonic booms.
We anticipate that any future Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued by the FAA affecting the noise operating rules would propose that any future supersonic airplane produce no greater noise impact on a community than a subsonic airplane.
Given that, I expect that, if a manufacturer shows up with a supersonic plane that fits that bill, the FAA almost has to allow it to fly over the US.
The noise of the engine is not that big of a problem as the sonic boom. This one is loud and becomes annoying and distracting pretty fast. In fact this is why Concorde routes were over the ocean: there was nobody to complain there about the sonic boom.
> Current research is dedicated toward reducing the impact of sonic booms before they reach the ground, in an effort to make overland flight acceptable. Recent research has produced promising results for low boom intensity, and has renewed interest in developing supersonic civil aircraft that could be considered environmentally acceptable for supersonic flight over land.
Drop the silly security theater and the need to be at the airport hours in advance of the flight. That will do a lot more for speeding up airtravel than enabling supersonic flight for the happy few and it will apply to all flights.
I'm at the airport 30 min before departure from a small domestic airport, 1h before departure for a domestic flight from a large airport, and maybe 1.5h, max, before departure for an international flight. For none of them do I expect more than 5 minutes of security.
Unless I'm flying to the US in which case the security charade takes hours.
This is a TSA problem not a general problem with air travel.
It is a problem because the actual checks take minutes but all the delays turn those minutes into hours. And probably those hours translate into opportunities to bypass the various checks.
By "5 minutes of security" I meant all the queuing for bag drops, security checks etc, not just the actual check.
By delay you mean standing in line, waiting for the security check? From what I hear the time in security has become worse in later years in the US, what is the reason for that? Less staff at checkpoints? More thurough checks?
A lot of airports just have fine print because they want to point at it when someone misses their flight because one odd day there was a massive rush at security and queues spiked to 3h. I have not been at CDG 3h early for flights (though haven't been there in the last year).
The stories from the US now seem to indicate that the long waits are the rule rather than the exception which to me indicates a change from just a few years ago.
Several years ago, I read Erik Conway's "High Speed Dreams", and learned about an important feedback loop that operates in the SST world.
What happens is, you design an SST, figure out the noise profile, and are horrified. You pour a ton of research effort into making it quieter. The aero engine industry adopts your awesome quieting technology across the board, subsonic aircraft get much quieter, people's expectations adjust, and for all your effort, your SST is still the noisiest bird in the sky. Because you're this huge outlier, you get a lot of negative regulatory attention, which manifests in the form of flight-path and operating-hour restrictions.
You can make SSTs quieter, but they'll never be the quietest.
This isn't about sonic booms directly, but it's absolutely relevant, SSTs still have to take off and land, and you can't use engines with those giant fans on the front and hope to perform.
The technical solution, if it exists, is to come up with an engine-quieting technology that somehow _only_ works for high-thrust low-bypass SST engines. That will break you out of the loop. AFAIK, no such technology exists.
I thought another problem was that there is no market for shorter flights if they are still too long to do in a single day?
To give an example - Concorde's 3h flight time from London to New York was perfect, because there were people actually interested in going to US/UK for a day for business and coming back the same night. But Concorde wasn't very popular on longer routes, because if you were going to spend 6 hours on a plane you might as well spend 12 and fly overnight, getting some good sleep, and saving yourself a tonne of money.
Agreed, and this is why it makes sense to allow the Concorde to (noisily) zoom over the Atlantic while not necessarily subjecting flyover state Americans to sonic booms from New York to LA.
As for the longer flights, the 16 hour Los Angeles->Sydney experience is hellish. Depending on the price, I would certainly shell out to get there quicker.
In business or first, I wouldn't describe trans-Pacific flights as "hellish." More like long and boring. But you almost certainly get into range issues with supersonic on those routes. A longer non-stop flight in a premium class is probably going to be preferable to a flight that has to stop in, say, Anchorage to refuel.
I wonder what the hull loss rate is for aerial refueling is (or could be if civilian aircraft were doing it). That might allow significant reductions in departure runway requirements (and noise profile due to increased climb rates) and still give you the range and reserves needed.
Surprisingly, there is research being done into the potential aerial refuelling for civilian aircraft.
http://www.cruiser-feeder.eu/
If I was a betting man I'd say the chances of it being approved for commercial airliners isn't all that great, particularly not for the purpose of extending the range of thirsty supersonic jets over open ocean routes already more safely operated by regular passenger aircraft.
FAA approvals are rarely "purpose limited". If aerial refueling is legal for subsonic flight, it's likely to be legal for aircraft capable of supersonic flight as well.
I agree that it's an unlikely approval, but probably because of rules around passenger-carrying commercial aircraft engaging in formation flight period, not around the max speed of the aircraft.
FAR 91.111.c: (excerpting mine)
§91.111 Operating near other aircraft.
(c) No person may operate an aircraft, carrying passengers for hire, in formation flight.
I can live with a cramped seat for 4 hours, plus I get an extra day at home on each end in place of travel time. And I don't end up at a hotel at 10AM waiting for my room to be ready.
>plus I get an extra day at home on each end in place of travel time.
That seems optimistic. East coast US to western Europe (which is the 3-4 hr scenario you mention for supersonic flight) you're cutting a get-in-late flight (or a redeye) to an SST leaving in the morning to arrive in the evening. Which isn't gaining a day.
Returning, you can already get a direct flight from Europe that leaves in the AM and arrives early PM. An SST still isn't gaining you a day.
Theoretical long haul routes over the Pacific potentially gain you more but now you're potentially sitting in seats for 8+ hours and it's pretty much a guarantee that no carrier is going to offer that sort of flight with cramped seats.
Yes, but I think it's fair to say that any supersonic service would cost more than business/first in subsonic planes today. Therefore, it doesn't make a lot of sense to look at supersonic passenger flight as a fix for traveling trans-Pacific in coach.
I can think of a ton more people who want to go from SF to NY (LA to DC, etc) or vice versa for the day than I can people who want to go to London for the day. Flying supersonic, you could actually get some work done on the other end. My guess, is that supersonic flight would be a huge boon to California, making it much more practical to locate 2,000 miles away from the geographic concentration of customers.
Sure, but it reminds me of the issues French railways were facing recently after introducing new super-fast trains. Turns out, there's a lot more people interested in trains that take 12 hours to get somewhere but which arrive at reasonable time(say, leave at 8pm, arrive at 8am) than trains that are much quicker, but arrive at 3am at night, which is a stupid time - it's too early to stay up, too late to go to a hotel. Overnight flights are similar .
I'm guessing that the people wanting this are going to charter smaller planes, where you walk into a small airport, the clerk at the desk says "Good morning, Mr Warbucks", and you walk out the back 2 minutes later onto your chartered plane.
Things like the cost and TSA don't apply to these people, they just want to get across the country and back in a single day, and still have time to check on how their minions are operating their interests outside of the NYC - DC region.
At least, that's what I would want if I could affort it :-)
I got to ride the company plane once at my previous job, and that's pretty much exactly what the scene was, other than having to show my work badge since the clerk of course didn't know a minion like me.
That plane (a turboprop) "only" went about 300 MPH or so (on a longer trip), rather than Mach +, but to get from the Sacramento area to the east bay, you make pretty good time - about 15 to 20 minutes in the air.
There is a Concorde that is being returned to service, although not in the US. So I guess we'll be able to see with first hand evidence whether or not business will actually "boom".
As far as I'm aware, Airbus have shown no interest in paying for the type certificate to be reinstated (they withdrew it after AF/BA withdrew them). Without that, there's no question about it flying.
The cost of speed rises exponentially while the returns are linear. This is true even in subsonic flight, but above mach 1 the penalties are prohibitive. No gas turbine, jet fuel powered aircraft will ever make this commercially viable without being subsidized.
Most of the components of the cost are at most cubic with speed, not exponential. Fuel consumption is quadratic with speed and power required is cubic (roughly).
Growing up near a few Air Force bases (Holloman/White Sands and Kirtland) you'd occasionally hear sonic booms. They'd do quite a number on sliding glass doors with tons of visible wobble.
Another factor is that with advances in global communication is that it may be hard to justify the need to physically go from JFK to LAX at mach 2 just to conduct business.
In terms of regulation, wouldn't it make more economic and comfort sense to enable sleeper-only flights where everyone lies down, ala Japanese capsule hotels? Tight spaces are much more comfortable when I'm lying down than when I'm sitting.
These used to exist (and still do on some flights). I flew on Singapore Airlines from LAX to SIN when they still had their Airbus A340-500 flying nonstop in about 18 hours between Singapore and Newark or Los Angeles. The whole plane was just 100 seats, business, lie-flat only. Frankly with the odd wide seating they have, you could have easily put 140-150 in there.
Doesn't even need to be sleeper-only flights. Just book business class on pretty much any international flight. (Which is actually much more comfortable than seat configurations for most of the time the Concorde was flying--much less the Concorde itself which was rather cramped.)
My old car was a humble Honda, but the fact that it had their F1 Technology filtering down into the engine made it a really great car (9000 RPM redline + VTEC cam switching). I could see a modernization of cross atlantic/pacific flights from military technologies filtering down into private/passenger jets.
Yes, you have to pay more but at my stage in life I am willing to trade money for more time.
I'd rather pay double for a flight for a doubling in speed (business speed) than a doubling in comfort (business class.)
A 5 hour flight from NYC to Asia would be amazing!
Please don't. Think about the environment. Let the industry focus on fuel efficiency rather than speed. If the ban is lifted, a lot of R&D money will go into speed.
That's only true if you can't make any use of the time while you're at the airport or in the air. You absolutely can, even if you're 'only' reading a physical document.
I don't think you have much to worry about. The airline industry has been focused on fuel efficiency for a long time now, and as a result, coast-to-coast flights already take significantly more time because they fly slower (for fuel efficiency). Unlike the 60s, air travel is no longer the domain of the upper-middle class and up, almost everyone does it, and the airlines profit through sheer volume, and live with a lot of competition. This is why they're always trying to weasel more profit with little fees for everything, because consumers are so price-conscious. They're not going to get that many takers if they start offering flights that are 2-3x the speed but 6x the ticket price.
Only if speed actually pays off. With fuel as expensive as it is (and if it's too cheap, just tax it some more), that won't necessarily be the case. And if it is, then getting people to fly less on economy flights is a better and economically more efficient way to reduce fuel consumption. Set an environmental goal and let the market sort out the process. Don't regulate the process itself.
I remember hearing the boom from the STS117 space shuttle in San Diego when it was landing at Edwards back in the summer of the 2007. Shit's loud, even at 100 miles.
And many of those economic reasons were caused (or influenced) by regulations.
The Concorde was only allowed to fly supersonic over water, making many potential flight routes are impossible. The New York to Mexico City route Required it to drop from mach 2 to mach 0.95 while flying over Florida before accelerating back up to mach 2, wasting a huge amount of fuel in the process.
Originally it wasn't even allowed to land in the US, with Congress banning it outright. It wasn't allowed into New York until a year after its introduction.
Sure, the larger issue was that it made too much noise in supersonic flight, maybe you could fix that in a newer aircraft. But with all the regulatory issues Concorde faced in it's lifetime, companies are disidentified from trying.
I have no love for this article, but everyone should be able to agree on a couple of points: (1) Cutting the size of the potential market by an order of magnitude can be the difference between economical and uneconomical. (2) Limitations on negative noise externalities should be implemented based on actual noise produced (dB, or whatever), not on whether the aircraft is supersonic per se.
The argument is the ban on over-land travel reduced the market for supersonic flight to a level that was economically unsustainable in the long-term. With the ban, there was no incentive to invest in upgrades or replacements for the Concorde.
So, yes, economics killed the Concorde. But, it was the regulatory environment put in place 30-odd years ago that created those economic conditions.
The entire pricing model of airplane tickets has changed dramatically in thirty years. People seem completely unwilling to pay a premium for anything. It's as if they'd gladly give up another three inches of legroom for another $40 savings.
The economic conditions were created by airlines mismanaging expectations.
While that's certainly true, I often wonder what would have happened if super-sonic development continued. Certainly, at my income level, I would never pay for a Concorde ticket.
But, if it were $800 vs $1200 for a 9-hour vs 4-hour flight (and all else equal), I might be tempted. That would allow a very early departure from DC and still be in Rome for lunch. Currently, the best option is usually an overnight flight, but I never sleep well on those.
An AM supersonic flight from the US east coast to western Europe gets you in around dinnertime. As I recall, that was what the Concorde did to London from NYC. My dad told me once after he got upgraded to the Concorde from the 747 he was on that he didn't care all that much for it because, rather than having a nice first class dinner on the plane, he was arriving in London at rush hour :-)
Seriously. Physics killed the Concorde. The 787 can carry 2-3x as many passengers from London to New York using less than half the fuel of the Concorde. Engineering could have improved that somewhat, but not nearly enough.
The 787 is about 30 years newer than the 767, and only about 20% more efficient (both as a design target and in achieved performance). Jet-powered flight is very mature.
I can't recall even a single war in the last hundred years that was over ideology.
Almost all wars used a lot of ideology in the propaganda to motivate the soldiers and workers, but the actual reasons for starting them pretty much always come down to gaining or ensuring control over resources, or realpolitik - incite a conflict that we get some advantage in the global game, so that some strategic oil line doesn't get built, or overthrow their government so that their trade policies are the way we want.
I find the wars for oil in the conspiracy realm. People will say the American Revolution and Civil War was over commodities but I HIGHLY disagree i.e. French Revolution happened over the same ideology.
To your point (4), I would counter that while WW2 Hitler was certainly ideology, WW2 Japan may indeed have been oil. Remember that the UK & US were squeezing Japan's oil access (90% of oil came from US imports which we blocked) and their only option was to assert themselves militarily and conquer the East Indies for oil. The rest is escalation.
Prior to the US Embargo was the Invasion of "Manchuria" and China. Heck Japan had been ruling Korea since 1910.
> In 1937 Japan invaded Manchuria and China proper. Under the guise of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, with slogans as "Asia for the Asians!" Japan sought to remove the Western powers' influence in China and replace it with Japanese domination.[24][25]
The ongoing conflict in China led to a deepening conflict with the U.S., where public opinion was alarmed by events such as the Nanking Massacre and growing Japanese power. Lengthy talks were held between the U.S. and Japan. When Japan moved into the southern part of French Indochina, President Roosevelt chose to freeze all Japanese assets in the U.S. The intended consequence of this was the halt of oil shipments from the U.S. to Japan, which had supplied 80 percent of Japanese oil imports.
Lebensraum (German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] ( listen), "living space") refers to conceptions and policies of a form of settler colonialism connected with agrarianism that existed in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. One variant of this policy was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany.
Hitler's war was absolutely about resources. He wanted land in Eastern Europe for lebensraum. The purpose of the genocide was to depopulate the land to allow for German settlement.
Oh good grief. Wars are almost always fought over resources of some kind, as well as (closely related) trade and power and influence.
1) ISIS is an unforeseen by-product of Bush's Iraq war (and incompetence).
1a) Bush's Iraq war is still a bit recent for us to know the real reasons; there's charges of it being due to Saddam trading Iraqi oil for Euros instead of Dollars, which weakens US hegemony and the power of the petrodollar as the global reserve currency. Even if this wasn't the real cause, setting up a US-friendly regime in a country with significant oil resources is obviously attractive to globalists in the US.
1b) Afghanistan has no oil, but it has significant mineral resources. It also has a strategic location, which is exactly why the Soviets invaded, because they wanted to build a pipeline through it.
2) Vietnam was a proxy war about hegemony. The USA and USSR were fighting a cold war to gain more power globally. Vietnam is next door to China; the US wanted to stop the spread of USSR-friendly (and Maoist-friendly) regimes, and push for US-friendly regimes.
3) Korea was much the same as Vietnam. Also, our new ally Japan is right next door. By defeating Japan and setting up a friendly government there, we now had a strong presence in that region which we wanted to protect. By the 50s, Japan was already a significant and growing trade partner.
4) Japan and Hitler weren't ideology, they were about power and control and resources. Why do you think Hitler invaded the rest of Europe? It wasn't to exterminate people (though some people in his administration took the opportunity to do that, plus that was a convenient way to steal their wealth as Jews tended to be richer), it was to gain control of all the land and resources around them. Go read about "Lebensraum": the Germans had dreams of conquering everything around them, eliminating or enslaving all the people living there, and then colonizing those lands themselves. They thought that before long, they'd have Germans living in the Ukraine or wherever, with each family having several Slavic slaves. The Japanese wanted to take control over the Pacific Rim, just like the Chinese are doing right now to an extent (though, like Germany, Japan wanted to do it the old-fashioned way where you set up an empire by invading the other countries and occupying them and turning their occupants into slaves or people of limited rights).
5) WWI was all about resources: it was a massive land-grab by all the European powers. They all wanted to take over their neighbors and grow their borders and establish control. The US should have just stayed out of it; none of the Europeans were in the right there, except probably the small countries that got bowled over like Belgium.
The American Revolution was about power and money: the colonial aristocrats wanted more power and lower taxes for themselves, and the British government didn't want to give it up because the whole reason you have colonies in the first place is so that the mother country can exploit the resources of the colonial lands. The Civil War was over trade and resources: the agricultural resources of the South were too valuable to allow to secede. Gulf War I was over oil and hegemony: the US didn't want Saddam having too much power in that oil-rich region. The French Revolution (as I understand it) mainly was a class war: the lower classes were sick of the upper classes screwing them over (which is also about resources; in a society where the elites have too much power, they also control all the resources and wealth) so they stuck them all in the guillotine.
Wars are not about ideology; they only appear to be because the ideology is inseparably intertwined in the competing nations' leadership, and allies tend to have similar ideologies (e.g. US and Australian and UK ideology are very similar and compatible, however these nations also have historical and ethnic reasons for being allies, which also led to them having similar ideologies).
I've wondered about the idea of a wiki of wars that focuses on discussing what the wars were "about" according to different people. Wikipedia doesn't exactly do this, because they usually focus a lot more on what happened during and after the war than on views of participants or others about reasons and justifications.
Wars are more often over resources, with ideology and identity (secular or religious) as a tool for the elites that want the resources to motivate the non-elites that aren't getting the resources one way or another to fight on their behalf.
Ideology and resources are an intertwined pair. Ideologies are exploited to gain resources. E.g. Islamic terrorism is a selected and nurtured subset of Islam for negative memes as a side effect of conflict of oil. The large, underlying cultural ideology is "we need lots of transportation."
I wish HN would ban or at least officially frown upon posting links that are behind a pay wall. How can you reasonably discuss an article you can't read?
If the premise of this article were true, then lifting the ban would be a major legislative priority for the airlines and likely already be lifted.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=7E-c6ni5MfYC&pg=PA107&lpg=...