Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)
689 comments
·February 10, 2025tyre
JoshTriplett
> The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
It prevents a lack of funding for security pork. The TSA is a massive funding boondoggle for many many snake-oil security salespeople.
Full agreement with the point here: lock the cockpit doors, and let everyone go through the same level of security checks as TSA Pre.
XorNot
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.
quesera
You're not wrong, but if you just want to kill large groups of airline passengers, it seems like the TSA line would be the easiest place to do it.
sdenton4
"Just killing passengers" isn't meaningfully worse/different than your average mall shooting... It sucks, but it's not quite as severe as turning the giant flying tube of jet fuel into an improvised ballistic missile (the 9/11 problem).
kortilla
But TSA does nothing to prevent that. Any rando can do that from outside of the plane. The things aren’t bullet proof and tailgating a vehicle into the general aviation gate of a major airport is trivial if you don’t care about eventually being caught.
beeflet
yeah but the same is pretty much true of a train or a bus, which don't require all of this TSA stuff. If you wanted to kill people for much lower effort you can just get in a car and run over pedestrians or something.
The justification for the TSA is that terrorist attacks like 9/11 could deal a disproportionate amount of damage compared to the effort needed to pull them off. But it's sort of a flawed premise because the 9/11 attacks relied on the element of surprise: the victims thought the attackers were pirates. Otherwise there's no way a couple of terrorists could fight off an entire plane with just box-cutters.
Vilian
And what would the pilot do?
SoftTalker
> I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
If you were picking someone up, you could also park in short-term parking, go all the way in to their arrival gate and meet them as they got off the plane, help them with their bags or just accompany them to your car. No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
majormajor
> No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
This hasn't really changed. If you're willing to pay to park you can still park and meet them at bag claim or another outside-security exit.
I think people are just more rushed and there are more flights so more contention for parking.
kortilla
Waiting at baggage claim sucks ass. The seating there is usually terrible and the dining/drink options on that side of the airport are comparable to a prison cafeteria.
scarface_74
Most airports have free cell phone parking lots. You just wait for them to call you and you drive up
smelendez
That helps but it’s still a mess, especially if the driver and passenger aren’t both familiar with the airport and can’t communicate well about where they’re meeting.
r00fus
I remember seeing this on a bunch of movies from the 90s & before.
massysett
Security prevents routine hijackings. During the late 1960s there was one attempted hijacking every 5.6 days.
nostrademons
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.
freeone3000
> Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.
Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
dralley
>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.
And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
insane_dreamer
Reminds me of the study that showed that the increase in US car fatalities in the 2 years after 9/11 because everyone was scared of flying was comparable to the number of people who died in 9/11. Right 9/11 was arguably the safest time to fly.
dinkumthinkum
That's pretty short-sighted. Plane hijackings are very dangerous situations and large death tolls, enormous investigations, threaten air travel, etc from a single event. I don't think the nerd calculus about the number of deaths from car crashes tells the whole story. 1968-1972 was also a different time from now and there is a lot more air travel and many more unstable people in this country. In the 1960s, the word "fascist" didn't mean "someone I didn't vote for" and words like genocide, oppression, etc mean far different things today and all this results in a lot more potential problems. Should TSA be a lot better, do they screw up a lot, is a lot of it a bit silly? Sure, but the idea that we just say "oh, well, there are a lot more car crashes so let's just no secure air travel" is just hard to take seriously. Sometimes doesn't simple nerd calculus doesn't tell the whole story. But, people always like to make claims like "people are so bad at determining" and it's a kind of unintended (usually) condescension but I think it's really a Dunning-Kruger thing. There are real reasons why simply comparing hijacking deaths to car crash deaths is not so simple that it leads to the conclusion that we shouldn't spend much money it. I've also seen ridiculous statements like that we only focus on airports because "lawmakers fly a lot more than normal people" it's crazy-talk.
_bin_
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.
warbaker
Terrorist hijackings were a major reason for sky marshals being put on planes. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine famously hijacked some planes and then blew them up on camera. This led directly to Nixon putting sky marshals on planes.
The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists).
JumpCrisscross
Things I’ve discovered in my carry-on (accidentally): a bottle of wine, box cutter, a weed pen, another weed pen, a large Anker battery, more wine, a chef’s knife.
esskay
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.
technothrasher
> But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater.
I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
leoedin
You can always tell Americans at security in a European airport because they take their shoes off. European airports don't bother with shoe removal.
Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
ghaff
I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.
toss1
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.
Ferret7446
To put it in gaming terms, the hijacking meta changed. Before, you had relatively minimal consequences as a hijacker. Now if you try anything funny, EVERYONE is going to be your enemy.
You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.
insane_dreamer
But very very few had any casualties - which is why we didn’t collectively freak it about it and establish the TSA. Also the vast majority were outside the US.
insane_dreamer
It's the perception of safety.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
AdieuToLogic
> If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
If DOGE was a real agency, maybe it would.
kube-system
>It's the perception of safety.
You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
ksenzee
Anyone who is serious about breaching security at an airport can figure out within half an hour that it’s security theater.
xp84
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.
roenxi
One optomistic point is that a lot of stupid things persist because whoever gets rid of them would have to deal with a bad image. TSA is of that style; the other political party would almost be guaranteed to scream in cynical fashion that it is making people less safe.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
mullingitover
> If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
bdangubic
too young to remember 9/11? :)
insane_dreamer
I was 30 years old, saw it live on TV. So ... no
But as others have pointed out, a lot of the TSA processes (taking off shoes, laptops, liquids, etc.) are pointless.
What prevents another 9/11 are the cockpit doors, which have nothing to do with TSA.
dmitrygr
> too young to remember 9/11? :)
Too lazy to read the many GAO reports that all demonstrate TSA accuracy at finding dangerous items never topping 5%?
llm_trw
The summer of 9/11 I brought on a full suit of hoplite armor with shield and spear on board a regional plane. The stewardess told me I can't have it in the passenger compartment so I should just give it to the pilot before takeoff.
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
null
whatshisface
It's our punishment for allowing national security to function as a get-out-of-congressional-debate-free card.
tyre
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.
psunavy03
> It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.
That's . . . a take, considering that OBL's main beef with America was infidel troops on the soil of Saudi, because the Saudi royals were the guardians of Mecca. And the Saudis asked us to intervene against Saddam.
9/11 wasn't some coherent beef with US foreign policy; it was bog-standard religious extremism of the Salafist Islamic flavor.
II2II
> I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
I took flights in the 2010's that didn't feel all that different from boarding a bus. You went to the desk to check in and to give them any checked baggage, walked to the waiting area to wait with a couple of dozen people, then went outside to board the plane. Any plane that would eventually connect to an international airport would have passengers go through security, but otherwise no.
jacobgkau
What country were you in? I took two domestic flights within Japan last year, and it was crazy how similar it felt to boarding long-distance trains there. I showed my ticket, but did not need to present any form of personal ID, just the ticket. I checked two bags, then walked through a metal detector while passing my carry-on through a conveyor belt on the side.
When I take domestic flights within the US (between places like St. Louis, Denver, NYC, and LA), security takes far longer for several subtle reasons. Everyone has to show a government ID to a TSA employee (and get your photo checked against a database) before proceeding to the actual security lines. Then, most of the security lines use full-body scanners, not just metal detectors; some have moving parts and some don't, but they all require you to actually stand there for a second instead of just passing through. Every single person also has to take their shoes off before they go into those scanners, and you put your shoes through the same slower scanning system that the baggage goes through (which basically doubles the load and halves the bandwidth of the baggage conveyor belt).
In my experience, flying internationally out of/into the US (with both Japan and Canada as the other side) is no more security than flying domestically within the US. Which basically means we have full international-level security even for flying domestically here.
xattt
There’s regional differences in airports.
In a post-9/11 world, I took an airplane to university and back, and on a regular basis from [SMALL CITY] airport. I could, as a disorganized young adult, be at the airport within 10-15 before boarding time with luggage to check.
Pre-9/11, my family travelled internationally and it was always a 3+ hour, pack-a-lunch affair to be at [MAJOR CITY] airport.
jacobgkau
> pack-a-lunch affair
You can tell it was pre-9/11 because you didn't need to throw the lunch away before getting to the part where you have to wait the longest.
redmajor12
It depends if the plane is pressurized or not. There's no xray or other security theater for turbo prop flights.
kube-system
Should be if it's a commercial flight.
XorNot
> The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
And the results of those tests are widely misunderstood. Security isn't about a 100% success rate - that's the goal but not the outcome. It is about disrupting the planning process.
That someone, somewhere might sometimes get a gun through TSA security is one thing...but is that person intending to carry out a terrorist attack in doing so, or did they just leave it in their bag?
Is it possible for anyone to organize a coherent plan which involves as a first step smuggling weapons onto a plane in a way which is not more likely then not to be detected?
And is the correct conclusion from "in a test (where we motivated someone to try a plan they couldn't be sure would succeed but which would have no personal consequences for failure) they succeeded" that the security is pointless, or is it that they need to modify their procedures to improve the detection rate?
thfuran
>That someone, somewhere might sometimes get a gun through TSA security is one thing...
I think you might be misunderstanding the scope of the issue. In testing, guns get through screening more often than they get stopped.
p_l
TSA allows a shift of liability for insurance purposes
nradov
Huh? The TSA has sovereign immunity.
epc
Pre–TSA each airport authority was responsible for security. In theory there was a common standard, in practice it varied greatly airport by airport and contractor by contractor.
Am pulling this completely out of foggy memory but one of the justifications for TSA was that potentially local airport authorities would be considered liable for acts of terrorism like 9/11.
p_l
A shift of liability for airline insurance and airport insurance needs.
CalChris
There's a similar phenomenon in ocean shipping called Slow Steaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
First, the hull shapes of container ships are tuned for a particular cruising speed. They accelerate up to that speed and cruise across the Pacific. In particular, the ship's bulbous bow is shaped to create an efficient counter bow wave at that speed.
Before 2007, that cruising speed was faster, maybe 27 knots. This is just like the 707 doing 525 knots in the article. It was faster but not efficient.
Enter Slow Steaming. They redesigned the hulls for a lower cruising speed, maybe 18 knots. They actually took ships into dry dock and re-nosed them. The result was better fuel economy. Fewer shippers (some still are) were willing to pay extra for the 27 knot speed. With Slow Steaming, the results are lower costs and significantly less pollution.
The economics of flying and shipping are largely the same in this case.
AdamN
I've always wanted turboprop planes to become more common for long haul flights. Many people would gladly pay for premium economy with spacious seating in the entire cabin if the price was competitive even if the flight took an extra 2 hours. In fact a 10 hour flight can be more nice than a 7 hour flight in terms of consuming a whole cycle of the day.
mnky9800n
I find the most onerous part of the flying experience to be the invasive searches at the airport followed by the corralling and grouping of people onto the plane penny pinching everything from a bottle of water to whether my bag goes in my lap or the overhead bin. The size of the seat area and length of the flight haven’t come to mind as travel complaints for a long time.
pipes
Yep. It's the feeling of being in constant high alert the whole way through the airport. I regularly take a 40 min flight and it leaves me exhausted because of this. My theory anyway!
Snoddas
You must be of size medium to small then because legroom is definitly an issue for me, especially for longer flights and I'm just 180cm. (just below average hight)
Or alternativly you can afford better seats than me.
smoe
For me, the size of the seat area is probably the biggest nuisance on a long flight. I'm not super tall, but above average and depending on my body position, either my knees or shins are always lightly pressed against some hard plastic or metal from the seat in front of me. Not painful, just a constant discomfort, especially if the person in front moves a lot.
The biggest quality-of-life improvement for flights, for me, was paying up each way for an emergency exit seat. A secondary benefit that I hadn’t initially considered but turned out to be huge is being able to get in and out of my seat at any time without making the entire row get up or having to get up for others.
bartread
Airport bullshit/overhead, and transit times, are why I massively prefer overland or over water transport for shorter journeys (up to say 1000 miles) even when it takes a few hours longer.
I’d rather be happier, less stressed, and get there more slowly, than go through all the nonsense. I can always read, work, play a game, or just watch the world go by so the time isn’t wasted (unlike so much of the dead time in a noisy and crowded airport).
It also has the increasingly important benefit of being more environmentally friendly.
tetha
Hence why I like going by train tbh. A long-distance train (well, long-distance for German standards. Probably grocery-distances in terms of the US standards) reaches the main company office in 5 hours or so, while a flight (including all of the stuff around it) takes about 3 hours.
Except with the train, I can just drop myself into the seat 10 minutes from home and go to sleep / work / do other things for those 5 hours without a care in the world.
WJW
How would a change in engine tech from jet to turboprop give more space to the passengers? Even if they are more efficient, that just means the airline can save on fuel but cram just as many paying passengers into the fuselage.
I also don't think "Many people would gladly pay for..." has been proven in the marketplace. If anything, the success of Ryanair, Easyjet and co has resoundingly proven that people will gladly suffer less spacious seating if it means paying less.
saelthavron
> I also don't think "Many people would gladly pay for..." has been proven in the marketplace. If anything, the success of Ryanair, Easyjet and co has resoundingly proven that people will gladly suffer less spacious seating if it means paying less.
Given the number of 7 hour flights I could find, I really don't think that proves anything except maybe people will pay more.
throw0101d
> I've always wanted turboprop planes to become more common for long haul flights.
The math doesn't seem to make sense for it: there's a maximum speed that can be hit with turboprop (x), and if you can only carry so much fuel (y) as part of your useful payload (to maximize carrying revenue-generating cargo), then you can only go a certain distance. That distance turns out to be <1500 nmi.
coredog64
The Breguet range equation is the first stop for roughly determining range. The three knobs are aerodynamic efficiency, structural efficiency, and fuel consumption.
Broadly speaking, fuel consumption has an outsized influence on range as the other two terms are usually fixed at a maximum value by state of the art.
wkat4242
Why would turboprops make sense? Jets/turbofans are more efficient at high altitudes where there's less air friction as well.
This is why turboprops are so common in ultra short haul where there's no point in climbing so high. They're more efficient at lower altitudes.
And I don't really see the relation between engine type and cabin space
pjc50
Turboprops are much noisier though. I don't think they're going to give you extra space either?
cjrp
I'm not sure turboprops would be efficient for a long-haul flight. They cruise at lower altitudes, which makes sense for short-haul (no point climbing to FL410 if you're going to immediately begin descent for arrival), but for a longer distance I think that would hurt efficiency.
_qua
I think the common thread in airline pricing for the past decade has been that consumers want to pay the absolute least they can for every flight, disregarding almost everything else about the flight/plane.
account42
I don't think that's a fair assessment when pretty much all upgrades are overpriced for what you get over the base service. And the markup is even more obscene once you discount bundled upgrades that you don't need. There isn't really an option to e.g. pay 10% more for 10% more seat pitch - and really the price increase should be less than 1:1 that if you keep the baggage allowance and food / other services the same.
kjkjadksj
If that was the case Delta wouldn’t have like 5 cabin classes.
Ylpertnodi
"What's the least it gonna cost me to maybe die, horribly?" Us nervous people fly, too.
leecarraher
while the cabin may be able to be more spacious (like dirigibles and blimps) the flight my not be more comfortable because a turboprop's ceiling has you flying well within the troposphere where the majority of weather occurs. that may also put wear and tear on the airframe, incurring costs additional to the extended crew hours.
newsclues
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262518765/prime-movers-of-globa...
This short book is a great work on the topic
consp
> The economics are largely the same.
Did the crackdown on cheap sulphurous bunker oil have no effect on it? Or was there no real crackdown and it was just media hype? (This is a genuine question).
rob74
The crackdown was so successful that some scientists attribute the even-warmer-than-expected weather we have had in the last few years to additional warming due to the lack of light-reflecting sulphur in the atmosphere (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...). Oops...
buildbot
Terrible hypothetical idea: Let’s engineer a bunker fuel additive with even more global cooling properties than sulfur!
We should probably just reduce consumption and emissions though.
CalChris
Bunker oil is an orthogonal issue. Generally, it's restricted to offshore use. For example, ships have to switch to low sulphur 60 miles outside of San Francisco Bay.
As for the IMO 2020 restrictions, I've read that they have significantly lowered pollution but that would be in addition to Slow Steaming.
eleveriven
Both industries optimized for efficiency once fuel costs and environmental concerns became bigger factors. The difference is that in shipping, slow steaming is more flexible
xhkkffbf
Is the cost of pushing the water out of the way proportional to the square or the cube of the speed?
I think with planes it's the cube.
But I think that's a naive model.
cyanydeez
What if galactic travel is the same and there's no tech out there to get anyone anywhere.
mrec
It's still kind of surprising that the optimal design / speed for fuel efficiency has plateaued though, given how much more powerful the modelling tools are now. The FAA certification overhead presumably has something to do with this.
I was very struck recently looking at the Wikipedia pages for the KC-135 Stratotanker (first flight 1956) and its ongoing replacement the KC-46 Pegasus (first flight 2015). Just from the pictures of the two planes, I'd have no idea that one was more modern than the other.
bell-cot
Modeling & optimization work just as well at slow speeds as at fast ones. They can't change the aerodynamic/hydrodynamic drag equations.
lordnacho
There's not much point in getting faster.
Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends.
If I'm taking a 6 hour flight, it's actually a 10 hour flight. If the airplane gets there twice as fast, it's a 7 hour chunk of my time. I save three hours but how much am I willing to pay for that? It's still effectively a calendar day gone.
For shorter flights, this is even worse. For super long flights like London to Sydney, maybe it would be useful to double the speed, so that you're not wasting two days instead of one, but doubling speed is also pretty far from possible.
throwawayffffas
There is a point in getting faster. The Concorde run profitably for the later 20 years of it's lifetime. At its best it did the New York to London route in under 3 hours. At more than double the speed of a subsonic flight. I have taken multiple 7 hour and 3 and a half hour flights and I would pay a significant premium to cut the 7 hours in half. It's not that I would have more of the day available. It's that I would spend less time in the plane. Being in a plane for a long haul is miserable. In the nineties if flew profitably for a 10% markup over regular business class.
I would wager a supersonic jet liner could make a lot of money crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific even today. Sure for short hauls it makes no sense.
Btw, Boom is working on supersonic private jets,they recently flew a scaled down experimental jet at supersonic speeds.
bobthepanda
Concorde’s problem was once the lie flat business seat was invented in 2000, it was substantially more comfortable than what was, by all accounts, a plush but very narrow seat due to the narrow fuselage.
Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.
TheDong
I think with how unergonomic airplane seats have gotten, there's a real health benefit to minimizing the time people are crammed in those cramped seats.
If they made airline seats reasonably sized and ergonomic, sure, the flight time matters less, but right now the longer the flight portion is, the longer my back will complain afterwards. I'm not even unusually tall or heavy-set.
Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins, but if the planes are faster, they can run more flights and pay the pilots/flight-attendants for fewer hours, so that feels like it's a solution that's more likely to happen than the real solution, of making it so the seats aren't designed to destroy your back until you pony up for business/first class.
rs999gti
> Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins
They would, but would non-business and non-wealthy consumers pay what it costs?
whiplash451
Pilots are not paid per hours of flight.
They usually stay overnight for long trips, so making the trip a little shorter makes no difference on that front.
Same for the staff
remh
Not sure about pilots but Flight Attendants are paid when doors are closed and engines are running.
bradlys
One of the reasons I don't travel as much is due to this.
I used to live in the peninsula in SFBA. I was about 20-30 minutes away from SFO. Unless it was an international flight or I had checked luggage, I would never get to the airport before the flight started boarding. I would walk through security at a lightning pace (SFO is one of those airports where sometimes TSA precheck is longer than regular!) and get to my flight just as my boarding group was getting called.
It was so insanely efficient. I never spent a moment not moving in the airport. I'd often spend more time waiting on the plane to deboard than I would in the airport when leaving too.
I miss SFO. I live in NYC for now and all the NYC airports suck for the fact they all take about an hour to get to (from Manhattan) and they all regularly have large and inefficient security lines with theater that is only rivaled by Belgian airports.
ghaff
I worked for someone once (pre-9/11) who would do the go to airport 30 minutes before flight sort of thing. Absolutely hated it. Airport was close to downtown Boston but still not how I like to catch planes even if delays are rarely an issue.
Muromec
When I lived in Kyiv and airports were still a thing, flying from Zhuliany was a bliss. Something like 30 minutes from the apartment door to sitting at the gate. The fact that it's small and in city limits was a deciding factor.
_fat_santa
IMHO we would be better served reducing the amount of time it takes you to go into an airport and board a flight. Right now they recommend 2 hours prior to takeoff but if you're in the right airport and know what you're doing then that time could be as little as 30 minutes (or less).
Rather than trying to take time out of the "middle" of the journey (ie when you're on a plane), we would be better served as a society to take time out of the "ends" (before takeoff and after landing).
But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.
nordsieck
> 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).
_fat_santa
Yeah I totally agree with your points. If space travel ever becomes commonplace it won't be anytime soon, my gut says it would be "in the next 100 years".
timewizard
Insane idea: Load people like cargo.
Seriously. Just have the whole passenger section setup like cargo pallets and wheel them in and out of the plane. Why bother walking up and down a narrow aisle? Just have a "passenger marshalling facility" away from the airport, have the interior section in parts there, have everyone comfortably load up, put that on a bus, wheel that straight to the plane, then load them in like large scale cargo through a huge side door.
Lock them down and send them wherever. Do the same in reverse at the destination.
alwa
I’m reminded of Eero Saarinen’s “mobile lounges” at Washington’s Dulles Airport
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dulles-airport-mobile-lo...
robotresearcher
Each one has to be a pressure vessel, so either we have a bunch more pressure doors on the plane, or each one has its own toilet, galley and staff. Sounds expensive.
XorNot
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.
Jach
Having faster flights could also increase the frequency of such flights, which lowers the impact of a missed flight, which lets people be more loose with getting there early enough.
TheCapeGreek
>the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched.
Reading this unlocked memories of the (after googling it) September 2005 National Geographic Kids magazine, which was centered around future life in 2035. One of the things in it was exactly this: travel time cut by launching into orbit and flying around the planet to cut travel time down to ~1h.
account42
For most people, reducing the pre-checking time would require full refunds if they can't make it in time for some reason. This is especially true if the airport isn't even in the same city.
stevage
Yep. Sometimes I take a 1 hour flight to Canberra. But it's really more like a 3.5 to 4 hours, from home to the city centre, and can cost $400.
Alternatively, I can take the train. It takes 9 hours home to city centre, and costs $35. It's a much better experience all around.
ravetcofx
I wish the train in Canada was that cheap for intercity rail. it's much more expensive than flying unfortunately
stevage
It's particularly cheap in around Melbourne because the government introduced a daily fare cap across the whole state. So it's $10 from Melbourne to the state border, then the other $25 is for the much shorter trip from the border to Canberra.
potato3732842
So reduce the fixed minimums at either end?
It's absurd that getting onto a 3-dimensional bus takes ~1.5hr more per end than a normal bus. The fundamentals of embarking and disembarking passengers and their luggage is unchanged beyond needing to have all the luggage in a pile before you toss it on for weight distribution reasons.
lordnacho
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.
mattkrause
> Security also seems to be variable
This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time.
Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”
throwway120385
A shopping mall which you can't leave and in which you aren't allowed to bring your own drinks with few exceptions.
thmsths
I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. Like 10 minutes average 20 minutes for the 95% percentile and a guarantee that it will never exceed 30 minutes. Seeing lines form around the block and passengers having to wait hours to clear security in some extreme cases is simply not acceptable.
rsynnott
> You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.
Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive).
Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)).
But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop.
Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
ghaff
Or you're traveling to an airport near the city from out of town. For me it's over an hour and the associated cost--rarely drive myself--is often as much as the flight.
cameldrv
Security doesn’t have to be that variable. Flights are all planned weeks in advance. TSA can pretty exactly predict the passenger volume in time to schedule enough workers, it’s just that sometimes they don’t. If they were going to be short staffed and needed people to come early, they could notify the airline and the airline could notify you that you needed to come early that day.
pfannkuchen
Solution: giant tunnel to underground downtown terminal.
Planes land outside the city, taxi to the downtown terminal.
timewizard
> a 3-dimensional bus
It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it.
Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled.
Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around."
Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.
AtlasBarfed
There might be soon.
IF (yes, still a reasonably big IF) they could just automate highway driving, a large segment of air trips become really a wash, especially if you consider that taking your car someplace gets you a car for your destination, while if you flew it is an additional hassle/expense/delay.
So the exercise to me is: how far does it have to be before you would rather fly? If I had reliable highway automated driving, you're already dealing with a 3-4 hour drive being reasonably equivalent to the time and hassle of a 1 hour flight.
Plus with a car you can leave on a whim with no prescheduling, pack more with less restrictions, will be cheaper generally (especially if carpooling/family driving), can stop and eat more conveniently, have better internet access typically, can stop and see friends or other places along the way, and again, you have your car for transport when you get there.
A self-driving sprinter van converted to an RV would be even better: sleep overnight, have a place to stay at a minimum when you get there.
Anyway, I suspect this might hollow out quite a lot of flight demand when it becomes a reality (any decade now). Airlines will be forced to reexamine their policies if an overnight self-driving trip gets you the vast majority of the way to a destination.
nsxwolf
My wife and I really don't start regretting our 18 our drives to and from Florida until the last couple hours. The kids sleep for more than half of the trip and the air travel experience is just a whole other kind of exhaustion.
bobthepanda
I doubt this is a huge viable market.
Lately a couple of companies have started up attempting to bring plush lie flat seats to the intercity bus, but a lot of those have since folded.
devilbunny
Plush buses are still buses - you will need to rent a car or take a ride at the end to get where you are going. A self-driving car that takes you from door to door? Yeah, that's completely different.
You live in Pittsburgh. You want to go to NYC for a show. You hop in the car, it takes you to the theater, you get out, it drives itself to a parking lot in NJ to wait. You call for it half an hour before you need it, it picks you up, and it drives you home. That's currently the province of the very rich or the very extravagant. A car that drives itself can do that every night.
eleveriven
For most trips, shaving off a couple of hours isn't game-changing unless you're flying ultra-long-haul
csbowe
> “The main issue is fuel economy,” says aeronautics and astronautics professor Mark Drela. “Going faster eats more fuel per passenger-mile.
Pretty simple - we care more about air travel being cheaper and safer than we care about it being faster.
ghaff
And even if not everyone does, operating entire flights at business class+ fares is probably not viable. Especially given that lie-flat seating (e.g. Polaris) with at least decent food is pretty comfortable for the people who are willing to pay a premium.
devilbunny
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.
V99
JSX operates based on a loophole in the part 135 rules, but that only allows 30 seats. A CRJ doesn't have the range for (nonstop) transatlantic, bigger planes would be impractical, and smaller ones with the range won't hold 30 people.
ghaff
BA has, as I understand it, gone back and forth on London to New York business only flights. But that's not designing a whole new aircraft for the purpose.
null
dehrmann
True, but you also need fewer planes if you go faster, though plane costs are linear and fuel costs are square.
whiplash451
At constant demand, going faster does not reduce the number of planes.
toast0
Sure it does.
If you have demand for 10,000 passengers to be transported on a route daily, and a plane carries 200 people, you would need 50 trips. If the round trip is 4 hours, you could do 6 trips per plane and you'd need 9 planes to service the route.
If the round trip time is 8 hours, you could only do 3 trips per day and you'd need 17 planes.
elric
It might. Going faster likely increases wear on moving parts, which would presumably result in longer ground times for more frequent maintenance?
blitzar
But then you need more fuel, so fewer passengers and more planes.
eleveriven
Yep, speed is a luxury, but affordability and safety are necessities
psytrancefan
We take the affordability completely for granted also.
It looks like in the 70s a flight from NY to LA was $1000 USD adjusted for inflation.
My grandfather took a flight one time in his life, near the end of his life. Why? Because most of his life he couldn't afford it.
bombcar
To be fair, road travel hasn’t really increased in speed since the 60s either.
Once the freeways were built, truck and car speeds were about as fast as you can reasonably go.
Trains still have some headroom.
rsynnott
> Trains still have some headroom.
Honestly, not much. 350km/h seems to be the peak practical operating speed (and that hasn't really changed since the 80s). Even the rather impractical Shanghai maglev no longer operates over that speed, though it did routinely run at over 400km/h for a while. Most high speed systems are in that general range today.
_Maybe_ maglevs will eventually be practical, but I'd hate to bet on it. This is the only serious such project at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consump... (China seems to have largely lost interest in favour of conventional high-speed).
Muromec
Most trains run much slower than 350 km/h however.
ianburrell
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.
rsynnott
_Trains_ which can do 400km/h have been around for a long time. SNCF (the French railway company) has a modified TGV set that can do 570km/h(!!!)
But trains are just one part of the system.
gerdesj
A car from the '60's could do 0-60mph in ... an age. I'm 54 y/o and not off of the '60's but old enough to remember lead in petrol (gas). My modern EV can do 0-30 rather rapidly and 0-60 quite rapidly. It tops out at 120 or so.
The US freeways are able to sustain high speeds but their older off ramps are proper old school and way too tight. Older bits of the German autobahns have the same issue - far too tight bends on "Ausfahrt". In France and Italy, Spain and well the rest of the EU I recall mostly decent on and off ramps.
I think the UK has the best efforts - we generally have massively long and large slip lanes but I will grant that we have some horrible exits from A roads, which are dual carriageway and so look like motorway. For example A303 whilst running through Somerset.
m463
In the 60's (before mid 70's) many many roads in the united states had no speed limit "reasonable and prudent".
now cars are significantly more capable, but speeds are limited by laws and congestion.
gerdesj
Quite a lot of German autobahns still don't have a speed limit. I lived there when it was West Germany.
I remember 90mph in lane one being normal and that was in the 1980s. 120+ in lane two was normal. Petrol was cheap back then - even in the EU. In the US gas was nigh on free! (or so it seemed to us).
I was given a scale model of an Audi Quattro rally car by a German chap when I turned 17 (1987). I still have it. That car destroyed all comers back in the day because it brought 4WD to the game.
Nowadays I drive an EV - a Saic MG4. I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which is where the Morris Garage (MG) started off in around 1910. I can safely say that an MG4 is not a British thing at all.
ryandrake
At least in the USA:
Legally, road travel speeds have come along way from the 1974 federal speed limit of 55mph. States set their own limits now, and all fifty of them have a higher maximum limit. Safety-wise, cars are much safer in crashes than they were in the 60s, both at high and low speeds. Setting aside safety and the legal limits, raw top speeds of similar car models are much higher today than they were in the 60s and 70s. Acceleration and braking have vastly improved, too.
potato3732842
Highway speed not at peak times has increased by a lot since even the 90s.
Hell, the garbage trucks here go 70+ until they hit a hill.
resters
The biggest time delay is getting through security and boarding, then waiting for baggage claim.
1) TSA stuff doesn't keep anyone any safer
2) protectionism: foreign carriers are banned from flying many domestic routes. We'd have more capacity and throughput, as well as lower prices.
3) boarding algorithms are silly and could easily be improved by letting passengers self-select into fast vs slow boarders and letting fast get on/off first.
4) incentives for crew flight time / overtime / limits create scenarios where passengers are made to wait on the tarmac for no good reason.
mft_
What would interest me more is innovation at the airport end of things. Much faster travel links, much faster security. Or are airport perversely incentivised to not do this to sell overpriced food and trinkets?
tamcap
Many airports (in the US, at least) make much more money from parking fees than everything else. On top of that, at least some operate their retail in a royalties model too (ie 20% of all sales goes to the airport, before any costs).
Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
standardUser
That's what makes the 2-hour early 'rule' so egregious. Manipulating passengers to sit around in a Disneyland-priced mall because of the 1 in 5 chance the TSA screwed up their staffing that day.
rossriley
I think Singapore has a pretty good experience worked out now, the immigration is automated just with an iris scan.
Additionally moving security to the gate rather than having a single security point for all flights also makes the wait here shorter and more importantly predictable.
If I'm just taking a cabin bag I always arrive 35-40 minutes before a flight and have had no trouble with time, normally enough time to grab a coffee too before boarding.
namirez
Physics has not changed since the 60s. Wave drag due to shock waves is still a thing.
est
It's more like regulation has not changed since the 60s in aviation industry
refulgentis
No, this is absolutely wild free-association. That's entirely unrelated.
frostyel
By this reasoning, fighter planes shouldn't have improved either. We know that this is not the case. It's not the limits of physics holding us back.
namirez
And they have not! Both F22 and F33 are significantly slower than say F4, F104, or F106 all designed in the 50s.
mitthrowaway2
Or the SR-71...
DiogenesKynikos
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.
pjc50
Fighter planes don't have to worry about cost, noise, or environmental impact.
insane_dreamer
I believe the SR71 is still the fastest fighter jet?
zabzonk
Back when (90s) I did fly the Atlantic frequently for work, I would have preferred to sit in comfort in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class (although 747s are pretty fast) and take some time about it rather than be squashed into a Concorde with nothing much to look out of. By the time you have factored in the hassle of getting to and from the airport, comfort (for me at least) takes priority if someone else is paying for it.
I never got the choice and I must admit I would have liked to have flown Concorde once, just so I could say I had done - a beautiful aircraft, but then so is the 747.
ghaff
My dad got upgraded to Concorde once for some reason. His reaction was pretty much that it was cool to have done it once but he probably actually preferred his first class PanAm and getting a good dinner rather than arriving in London at rush hour.
Earw0rm
Optimization, people!
If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are borderline incompetent at delivering this (or just not interested).
And the other potential big saving is in airport transit time - but airports nowadays are optimised for "extract as much money as possible from each user", not "minimize user transit time from the station/car park to their assigned seat on the aircraft".
xnx
Recent and related "Airlines Are Padding Flight Times. It’s Not Your Imagination.: Flying in America has become slower even as official statistics have shown improvement.:" https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/upshot/airlines-flight-ti...
aj7
Faster? It’s gotten slower! Significantly slower. Haven’t you noticed that modern jetliners don’t really even have swept back wings any more? The sweet spot for fuel efficiency is around 530mph for modern, very high bypass turbofan engines. In the 60’s, turbojet 707’s and DC8’s regularly flew at >600 mph. Gas was 25c a gallon.
aceofspades19
What modern jetliners are you referring to? the 787 has a sweep back of 32 degrees and a 707 had a sweep back of 35 degrees so not really that much difference. The 737 has a sweep back of 25 degrees and it first flew in the 1960s.
insane_dreamer
OK, but how is it that jet engines haven't become more fuel efficient since the 60s. Cars certainly have.
MindSpunk
They have. But drag is drag and the price of fuel is the price of fuel. Drag increasing at higher speed means your fuel usage grows geometrically with speed. Slower is more efficient (to an extent, slower means higher angle-of-attack to maintain lift so your drag will start going up again if you get slow enough). No matter how efficient the engines get drag remains the same and going faster will still cost more. Engine efficiency just goes into reducing operating costs instead of travel times now.
Flights feel like they’ve gotten much slower, in user space time.
I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.