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They will still use an enormous amount of fuel, carry fewer passengers, and heavily pollute the environment. I'm not too excited about the prospects.
But are they that much worse than private jets and helicopters on a per person level?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While on many routes a car is worse than a small to mid sized airliner if there are less than 3 people in the car. I never said cars. Cars are terrible. I would not complained if passenger-only cars were banned everywhere. > Similar for your suggestion that we should take ships over the ocean, because cruise ships are much more polluting per passenger mile than modern airliners. There are alternatives like wind pow…
Air travel is generally more energy efficient than trains, beyond a 300-400 mile range, depending on what you're traveling over/through. Track and right-of-way is a scarce resource with large amounts of embedded energy. The sky, not so much.
> These studies, along with tens of thousands of claims against the Air Force for property damage—horses and turkeys had supposedly died or gone insane—led the F.A.A. to ban civil overland supersonic flight, in 1973. There was also a political part involved. The Concorde was a British-French creation, not a Boeing. Had there been a Boeing supersonic passenger plane first there would probably have been different FAA r…
Indeed it was political. IMHO if a US supersonic commercial plane comes into service without an Airbus counterpart, it won't have access to the European skies. At least not the over french territory. The industry is still very salty that the Concorde market was taken from under them.
Whilst this was political to some extent the politics were very much local, as in people don’t want to hear booms.
I hope not mainly because where I live in south-eastern Canada we seem to be the tailpipe of North America. All aircraft heading east seem to go over my region. The summer in non-pandemic times) is a constant parade of large passenger jets flying over. The jets are high up and in the evening you hear the rumble as the aircraft highlighted by the sun fly over while the ground is in evening shadows. Even a dozen US mil…
That said they should be at cruising altitude by there. If you can hear them at 36k feet, it must be fairly quiet where you live!
I live close to the path of the Heathrow approach, and planes tend to fly over me at about 5k feet, and I have to say that it's pretty rare I even hear them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All overland passenger transport should be rail. Over the oceans I suppose we should strive for ships and dirigibles. That said, I find it hard to believe that plane travel can be eradicated for e.g. diplomacy. And frankly, if frequent contract between the powerful different countries is needed to avoid e.g. world wars, it's is worth it. In the short term, any carbon we can capture needs to go in back in ground and s…
Unless we dramatically increase vacation time or dramatically increase rail speeds, that would mean that many people would not be able to see their families and friends or travel to events.
however, it's going to happen regardless, since this way of living is not sustainable. The only choice that is ours is whether we prefer to anticipate this change and build a decent alternative, or whether we prefer to have it inflicted on us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your preferred solution is to restrict the allowed travel radius of people, a bit like with medieval serfs?
What a rhetoric device. Is your preferred solution to let people die in droves to a mass extinction ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, in a plane trip you have 3 lost hours before it starts and after it ends, so a normal train, running at 130km/h will be faster than a plane at 850km/h for any trip of less than ~460km. If you make it a fast train, at 350km/h, it will beat the plane on any trip up to 1700km. Most trips are short, so no, most trips can be done by train and people still spend less time on them than by plane.
I live in Southern California, with family in Kansas, Wisconsin, and New York. The closest one is 2500kms away. The longest is almost 5000kms A train would take a lot longer than a plane. Even more than just the distance, though, is the fact that there would be no practical way to have direct rail lines to every major city in the US. Trains are useful, but there is no way they could replace air travel in the US.
If trains could go 250km/h on average, that 5000km trip would take 20 hours - that's plausible for an overnight trip, leave 6pm, arrive 10am. A flight over this is distance is probably a much more stressful red eye.
Sure this is quite speculative, but perhaps less so than hyperloop dreams, or supersonic aircraft that somehow have no environmental impact.
> These studies, along with tens of thousands of claims against the Air Force for property damage—horses and turkeys had supposedly died or gone insane—led the F.A.A. to ban civil overland supersonic flight, in 1973. There was also a political part involved. The Concorde was a British-French creation, not a Boeing. Had there been a Boeing supersonic passenger plane first there would probably have been different FAA r…
Europe banned continental supersonic flights too which is why only the Atlantic route to NYC was an option you couldn’t do flights eastward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Military supersonic flight over land in the US only happens over unpopulated areas. Ie, parts of Idaho, Nevada desert etc. Most supersonic training is conducted over the oceans, eg >15nm from the east coast.
Military supersonic flight over land in the US is supposed to only happen over unpopulated areas. Having lived near a coastline (~1 mile from the shoreline) along a military flight path, I know they occasionally went a little early.
They will still use an enormous amount of fuel, carry fewer passengers, and heavily pollute the environment. I'm not too excited about the prospects.