271–280 of 283 posts
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Yeah, much more excited if there were talk of high-speed rail criss-crossing the U.S.
High-speed rail isn't high speed enough. Even with way faster than current tech and NO stops you'd still be looking at taking 12+ hours for what a plane can do in 5. That's ignoring the trillions it would cost. The US does not have the population density to make HSR viable.
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Building an entire airline around it is stupid. Building certain premium flights around it, not necessarily; Singapore Airlines operates a 67-seat business class on a plane from Newark to Singapore that only has business and premium economy. BA operates a 32-seat business-only flight from London City to New York via Shannon. And these are just the subsonic flights. JAL is one of the bigger investors in this project,…
They’re almost always money-losing ego flights. BA1 rarely flies full. The ego is right there in the number. It’s a novelty. SQ hasn’t operated business class only since like 2011. It has 67 business seats and 94 premium economy seats. And still probably loses money. The one you didn’t mention was Stavenger to Houston which... only flies when oil is flying high. Because it’s not profitable otherwise.
Theoretically speaking, if the seat cost per mile is as low as advertised some airline might want to take some business class seats out and put some premium economy in. What a plane does with seating layouts is its own concern.
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It also ran on only two routes for most of that time, with all others shut down because airlines lost money operating Concorde on them even without having to pay off the capital costs.
The Concorde was also blocked from flying a lot of profitable routes because of sonic boom concerns, some justified, others less so. In particular, you can't legally fly over any part of the US at Mach 1 or faster unless you're military.
You can read about the supersonic experiments over Oaklahoma City in the 1960's to learn about the effects of sonic booms, and why people don't like them.
For reference, the Space Shuttle generated annoying sonic booms over west Los Angeles when landing at Edwards Airforce Base. The approach path to Edwards is more than 30 miles from west LA. So, for any supersonic airway, you'd need to set aside a roughly 60-70 mile wide swath of land. That's a lot of people voting to shut down your SST operation (or suing you).
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> The reason for that is that the concorde used afterburners (basically, pump fuel into the high speed exhaust for extra thrust) which are incredibly inefficient. To put things in perspective, Concorde was using two Olympus engines designed originally in the 50s. It was already a marvel that they can run for such a range at Mach 2.0 when designed 70 years ago. A lot of things improved since. Most fighter jets can sup…
Concorde used four engines. Two engine ETOPS over water wasn't a thing back then, first real relaxation of that rule was in '76. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
From my understanding a big problem with Concorde was the sonic boom which happened near takeoff and bothered urban residents. I've always wondered why they can't fly at normal airline speeds until over a rural area or an ocean before accelerating to sound barrier speeds.
> I've always wondered why they can't fly at normal airline speeds until over a rural area or an ocean before accelerating to sound barrier speeds. Because geometry and engines which are efficient at very high speed are extremely inefficient at low speeds, so you want to avoid subsonic flight as much as possible. Variable geometry (mostly variable-sweep wings) bridge that issue, but they're weak points, and significa…
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I think the real problem is that the Concorde wasn't fast enough to justify the cost. Whether you can fly JFK-CDG in 8 hours or 4 hours, when you factor in how irritating airports are, parking, security line ups, waiting for baggage, etc, it still takes all day to make the trip. Might as well save several thousand dollars and take a longer flight. I believe they would have to cut the flight time down to about an hour…
The concorde didn't fail because it was expensive. It ran profitably for 27 years. [0] It failed because it crashed and killed 109 people 3 years before they threw in the towel. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Operating_economics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
And realistically it also failed because while flying west makes sense as you could land "before" you took off, going east didn't work like that. Sure you're losing less time either way compared to a regular flight but flying east, you might as well take a slow flight to get some shuteye.
This problem still hasn't been solved.
From my understanding a big problem with Concorde was the sonic boom which happened near takeoff and bothered urban residents. I've always wondered why they can't fly at normal airline speeds until over a rural area or an ocean before accelerating to sound barrier speeds.
There were few countries were you could go supersonic over land: Russia and Saudi Arabia comes to mind.
And when BA last flew one of its Concorde from NYC to Seattle, it flew supersonic over Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways
The final flight of a Concorde in the US occurred on 5 November 2003 when G-BOAG flew from New York's JFK Airport to Seattle's Boeing Field to join the Museum of Flight's permanent collection. The plane was piloted by Mike Bannister and Les Broadie, who claimed a flight time of three hours, 55 minutes and 12 seconds, a record between the two cities.
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> I've always wondered why they can't fly at normal airline speeds until over a rural area or an ocean before accelerating to sound barrier speeds. Because geometry and engines which are efficient at very high speed are extremely inefficient at low speeds, so you want to avoid subsonic flight as much as possible. Variable geometry (mostly variable-sweep wings) bridge that issue, but they're weak points, and significa…
Thanks, that makes sense.
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The new 787 has made her lag a lot better with better air quality, timed, dimming cabin lights and a few other comfort trucks, it definitely takes the edge off.
One of the biggest factors is cabin altitude. Both the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 XWB have a lower (than previous airliners) cabin altitude of 1,800 m. Note that some private jets do quite a bit better again: the Gulfstream G650 has ~1480 meters.
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Fast electric trains are also, well, electric already. Powering planes in a sustainable marrer is not a solved problem.
So I think that’s not really true. Even existing battery chemistry could do 1000km per stop (although it still needs certification for aircraft) and at comparable speed as HSR. That’s much longer than the California HSR project that was canceled, plus you just need a recharge (or swap) to continue on your way. With further efficiency improvements and battery chemistries in development right now like Li-S, we could po…