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

This. In some places you used to be able to check your bags in advance. In Switzerland you could even check your bags at your local train station the day before so that you could just go to your flight and breeze through the airport.

I wouldn't assume that isn't going to happen. I've heard specifically that someone in the Trump camp wants to just have the airlines figure security out themselves.

too young to remember 9/11? :)

From that link, there were 137 hijacking attempts in the U.S. between 1968-1972, and 90 of them had Cuba as the destination. Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.

Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.

People are terrible at judging risk.

things i have had confiscated: the blades for my twin-blade razor, pocketknives, leathermans, bottles of water, supplements, liquids that are slightly over 3.4oz.

this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk.

"police state reduces crime" okay i do not care.

even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone.

p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.

Security does. But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. The whole shoe removal thing, belts, etc. It's the most pathetically over the top form of security, and totally unnecessary. It does not in any way shape or form provide any extra level of security that can't be covered by something much simpler, less invasive, slow or antiquated.

It is not only security, it is the lockable cockpit doors and entire set of changed assumptions. The airplane hijacking game was entirely ruined by Al-Qaeda on 9/11.

Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating.

Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip.

Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0].

So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite.

And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3161354.stm

Locking the cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. On a multi-hour flight someone could still just blow up the plane or start killing passengers.

I understand why all of this happened in the first place. 9/11 was truly shocking. Maybe more so because I was a kid, but watching those planes hit the buildings, the buildings collapsing, the Fallen Man, the recordings for United 93…it was a lot.

It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.

It seems like there are two problems:

1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong.

Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed.

2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns.

Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money.

Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed.

As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it.

It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.

Huh? The TSA has sovereign immunity.

> But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.

It's possible that it may make sense to establish a few business class only very fast point-to-point routes. But that also really depends on the vehicle taking people through space. There are a number of problems:

1. Currently, spacecraft are only licensed for experimental travel. Everyone signs an informed consent waiver and basically disclaims all liability. And the FAA is forbidden to regulate for passenger safety by congress (and has been for quite a long time) - they can only regulate for the safety of the general public.

This would have to be changed before any serious commercial spacecraft went into service

2. It's not clear that any spacecraft has the economics to pull this off. Maybe Starship can do it. But it's pretty far from clear that they can.

3. Spacecraft are orders of magnitude less safe than commercial aviation. Do you know the saying "regulations are written in blood"? If this starts happening, there'll be a lot of new regulations that happen over time.

And maybe that'll happen anyhow - I think that space tourism will certainly be a thing that becomes much more popular in the future, and that has the exact same problems (although it's much less readily comparable to commercial aviation).

But the limiting factor isn't whether you're in the airport, it's whether you can arrive at the airport with that much a time margin reliably. It does not take many traffic accidents or an unexpected rail disruption to mean you miss your flight, for example - the 2 hour window is essentially to force people to account for unexpected delays.

You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.

Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.

Some high speed trains (in Spain, for one) require security checks to board as well. But they're way less intrusive or time consuming than flight checks.

I worked for someone once (pre-9/11) who would do the go to airport 30 minutes before flight sort of thing. Absolutely hated it. Airport was close to downtown Boston but still not how I like to catch planes even if delays are rarely an issue.

> To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff.

Except it has changed in the last couple of decades (probably not due to 9/11, but still), because size and weight limits for hand luggage keep getting smaller and smaller. I have always travelled light and avoided checking in luggage except for very long stays abroad, but it's becoming increasingly difficult.

For example, both Qatar and Etihad (very common airlines to travel between Europe and Asia) now limit hand luggage to 7 kg (and in the case of Etihad, they don't even allow the typical "personal item"). 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2. Pack a laptop and you'll struggle to pack even summer clothes for a few days. Let alone winter clothes or -oh, the luxury!- buying some souvenirs at your destination.

Fortunately, in my experience, they mostly just don't look. But they could, if you're unlucky. And even if they don't, the dwindling limits also reduce practical slack, i.e. with a formal limit of 9 kg I would feel comfortable packing 10 or 11 because most airport staff probably wouldn't be strict about that, but with 7, packing 10 or 11 starts looking like a real gamble.

I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim.

I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.

JSX operates an entire airline as business-only. They use CRJ-900s, so not long-range, but there's no TSA (they are technically charter flights, you board at an FBO).

You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.

400 km/h seems to be practical. China started building trains that can go that fast. They must already have lines that support that speed, cause upgrading lines is the huge expense.

There is less advantage to increasing speed. Is it worth the cost of maglev Shinkansen to save 30 minutes? How long would 400 km/h rail take instead? Maglevs have disadvantage that need dedicated route, while high speed rail can take existing rail into cities.

Most trains run much slower than 350 km/h however.

I always liked Virgin's finger buffet, with scones, clotted cream and jam, before landing at the horror that is Newark NJ.

I believe the SR71 is still the fastest fighter jet?

And they have not! Both F22 and F33 are significantly slower than say F4, F104, or F106 all designed in the 50s.

Going faster and improving are two different things. Planes have improved immensely since the 1960s, but they don't go faster. Commercial aircraft have much lower fuel use. Military aircraft have things like better radar and stealth.

Yup. It feels delays have been totally normalised

It's why I typically travel by RV whenever I can. ;)

It's not fast, but it's a clean bathroom, great beer, and a really big suitcase I don't have to unpack.

Still worse than it used to be, even business. Maybe first if you get a bed (transoceanic flights).

I've flown business - it's still not really that comfortable, but yes, it's much much better than economy or premium economy.

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