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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think you might be misunderstanding the scope of the issue. In testing, guns get through screening more often than they get stopped.
Except now with a subscription fee.
Pick your fallacy:
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. Surely we wouldn't have done that unless it worked.
- We've spent billions of dollars on this stuff. It'd be a shame to let that go to waste.
- The TSA isn't perfect, but for every 30 handguns they let slip through they also successfully catch 1. That one could have taken over a plane.
...
> eventually everyone will have [pre-check]
How do those two things follow? The government does a /bad/ job yet I have to submit to even /more/ monitoring to fix it? They're the greatest exploiters of the transport monopoly we have in the USA and so strong is their grip people don't even avail themselves of the obvious solution.
Think of it like this. Suppose 1% of handguns get through security, and you are a terrorist. Do you really want to take on an assignment that has a 99% chance of ignominous failure and jail for life?
I remember as a kid in the 60s I was invited into the cockpit of the 707 to watch them fly. Of course, my dad being in his AF officer uniform probably helped :-/
I try to take the train whenever I can afford it (money and time-wise)
You man the bathroom sink... right?
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.
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.
Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.
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.
They would, but would non-business and non-wealthy consumers pay what it costs?
They usually stay overnight for long trips, so making the trip a little shorter makes no difference on that front.
Same for the staff
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah - having to budget time to get through security is a pretty poor user experience. Especially during busy times of the year, when it's more uncertain just how much time is required.
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.
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.
Has a plane ever been hijacked by a couple of European descent traveling with their own children? The lengths we go to to pretend everyone is the same is mind boggling.
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.
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.
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.
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
This short book is a great work on the topic
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).
As for the IMO 2020 restrictions, I've read that they have significantly lowered pollution but that would be in addition to Slow Steaming.
I think with planes it's the cube.
But I think that's a naive model.
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.
My biggest pet peeve is how they call groups successively, but dont actually let the lines exhaust before calling the next group. Successive groups realize that the lines are all mixed up, and people stop honoring groups and just all jump into line. Chaos ensues.
It works so much better when there is a system and everyone follows it.
I would be more willing to check bags if they return your baggage right after the flight, instead of losing the bags on a connecting flight and shipping it back to me a week later.
The experience of flying first class is better than it's ever been, and all that extra comfort, convenience and luxury has come 100% at the expense of the experience of the unwashed masses flying "Economy" class. First class gets lie flat beds, priority boarding, lobster thermidor and hot towels, while economy seats keep shrinking, boarding times get longer, checked baggage that used to be free costs $100, and a child-sized bag of peanuts costs $5.
The reason airline travel sucks so much these days is because it's supposed to. If you're flying economy class, the airlines literally see you as a burden, rather than a valued customer, and are doing everything in their power to make your experience as awful as possible, while squeezing every last penny out of you in the process.
For the frequent traveler who is loyal to an airline, a lot of those problems go away.
We are Delta loyalists and both Platinum Medallion.
1. When we buy a main cabin seat, we get upgraded immediately to Comfort+ for free.
2. When we go to the airport, if we don’t use curbside check in (and tip), we get to use the Sky Priority Checkin line and have two free checked bags
3. We have TSA Pre-Check and Clear to skip the line
4. After check-in, we head straight to the Delta, Amex Centurion or Priority Pass lounge where we have plenty of seating free food and drinks (alcoholic and non alcoholic)
5. When boarding, we get to board early because of our C+ upgrade (Zone 3) or worse case Zone 4 and have plenty of overhead space if we need it and get to be situated early.
Poorly worded question - I’m glad you guys know how to travel well together and often. The only thing I miss about my college girlfriend was when we got an overnight delay in Denver and the crazed associate told us “I don’t fucking know” when we asked about the details of our hotel she said: “I mean this sucks but it’ll be okay hahaha”
I try to perpetuate that mindset nowadays lol. End monologue
Still hate the experience in comparison to modern rail.
But security theatre is apparently necessary, see "golden age of hijacking" 1968-72: over 300 events in five years, that's a hijack a week!
And you don't give two fucks about the negative environmental impact of flying? Or at least, feel a little shame or entitlement?
I think they are colluding to make business class more value.
Like some sort of class warfare enshitification.
Pretty simple - we care more about air travel being cheaper and safer than we care about it being faster.
You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.
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.
Once the freeways were built, truck and car speeds were about as fast as you can reasonably go.
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).
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.
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.
now cars are significantly more capable, but speeds are limited by laws and congestion.
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.
Hell, the garbage trucks here go 70+ until they hit a hill.
These passenger sheets would be automatically sorted and loaded onto aircraft via a conveyor system, optimizing cabin space with a precision-stacked configuration. Without the need for traditional seating, aisles, or security screening, aircraft capacity could increase significantly, lowering ticket prices while enhancing operational efficiency. Upon landing, passengers would be swiftly unloaded, revived from stasis, and ready to continue their journey within minutes.
This system would not only eliminate delays caused by baggage handling and TSA procedures but also enhance fuel efficiency by optimizing passenger distribution within the aircraft.
It's not fast, but it's a clean bathroom, great beer, and a really big suitcase I don't have to unpack.
> As the speed increases, the air resistance increases exponentially.
If you want faster travel, look at Hyperloop (in near vacuum iirc).
Or how to make passing TSA less of a time sink :)
Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
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.
Going faster just simply requires more fuel, and fuel is a precious and limited resource. There are some optimizations we could make to aircraft design to improve fuel economy, but we've already done most of the optimizations given our constraints of safety standards and the general goal of comfortably transporting humans.
The rest of your post is pretty accurate, except for the goal of comfortably transporting humans. That "comfortably" is suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
you're thinking of the drag equation, where force is proportional to velocity squared.
https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-fast...
But haven't jet engines become more fuel efficient in the past 50 years? You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.
No.
The problem is not engine efficiency. To my knowledge, Concorde still holds the title of having the best engine fuel-efficiency at cruise. Close to 60%.
And although engine efficiencies at subsonic speeds have improved drastically since the 60s, the problem airplanes face when cruising closer to Mach 1 is that they start getting transonic effects around their wing and fuselage. And that greatly increase your drag. It is therefore more economical to stay below the speed threshold at which these effects start occurring.
A high Mach 0.8+ could probably achieve that. Aircraft builders have settled for about Mach 0.82 for airliners. Private jet builders, in some cases, care less about fuel efficiency, and still build airplanes flying above Mach 0.9, as for example, the Cessna Citation X.
I kind of figured SpaceX or similar would cater to the billionaire class more by now.
Spaceflight is still where air travel was in the early 20th century - starting to become available "commercially", but still too dangerous and expensive for mass market adoption.
If we see anything like Earth-to-Earth in the next decade or two, It'll almost certainly be military.
Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh?
I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.
That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380.
But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
If somebody actually develops supersonic private aircraft, we really need to start taxing aviation fuels. You could blow through your annual carbon budget in like an hour. Those costs need to be internalized.
The skilled people are gone, and pointy haired managers took over.
Fuel efficiency dives as you approach the speed of sound, airliners were already going as close as you’d want to in the 70’s. Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably.
Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings.
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.
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".
- Most people want cheap flights over everything else, speed is expensive
- The flight time only has a limited relative impact on the overall travel time. Time to get in and out of the airport, security, border controls, boarding, taxiing, etc... often take longer than the flight itself.
- For passengers who are ready to pay more, you can always offer more comfort. The advantage with comfort is that you can divide the plane into classes, it is highly modular. Faster requires an entirely new plane design just for those who can afford it.
- Arguably, comfort is more valuable than the kind of speed improvement we can get. For example, if you sleep better on the plane, that's less sleep you will need at your destination, saving you time overall. If you can work on the plane, that's also time you don't have to spend working at some other time.
And don't even talk about the security theater. Sometimes twice (although that gotten better in that there isn't a 2nd check.)
And, yes, I noticed that pure flight times got longer, about an hour on transcontinental flight. All this time I thought I made that up, but at speeds mentioned in the article this is about right.
As soon as I saw the title I knew the answer ... economics. The vast majority of people buy the cheapest flights they can, and with modern jet engine technology it's cheaper to fly slightly slower.
The same is true with ocean going cargo ships. They deliberately cruise[0] slower if they are under some nation's flags because the wages are lower for those nationals[1], and the balance between cost of wages versus cost of fuel shifts towards spending more time (higher wages) at a lower speed (less fuel).
Roughly, steaming faster increases your fuel bill but lowers your wages bill, and vice versa. The exact balance point depends on the base rate for the wages of the crew. And the number of crew.
The arithmetic is brutal, but unassailable.
[0] The technical term is, believe it or not "steam"
[1] It's complicated. Very complicated.
[1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
The only things that have gotten better are wifi and entertainment to act as recompense for less leg room.
Error 401, unauthorized. can't go faster than the US can keep up until the US can't be caught up with, ... allegedly.
theory:
flying any faster would have increased flights and reduced travelling prices. it wasn't the tech, see concorde ...
