Explain to me again why we don’t have supersonic airliners anymore.
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Sonic booms cause damage to things on the ground, and so supersonic flight is banned over most civilian areas. A plane that can only be used as intended over oceans is not cost effective. SSTs that don’t cause sonic boom problems and aren’t really small are a significant engineering challenge.
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They’re really expensive. The number of passengers you can carry versus the purchase and operating cost of a plane that only flies over oceans isn’t worth it.
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Existing airplanes work extremely well. If they sucked, you’d see more push to fix the problems inherent in SSTs. But in fact they work pretty well. 99% of flights AREN’T London to Sydney - a route for which no SST ever designed has the range form anyway - they’re London to Frankfurt, Denver to Chicago, or Qingdao to Shanghai, and cutting those flights by 45 minutes simply isn’t much or a marginal benefit to stop using the perfectly good airplanes they currently use.
A SST wouldn’t have anything resembling the range to do those kind of flights. They would have to stop for fuel probably multiple times. Which just makes the trip longer and more expensive.
Also, for people who could afford to fly on a supersonic airliner, a private jet is often faster. Not only is it always a direct flight, but you also skip the TSA.
Thanks to the Corona virus there’s a new distance record - Coronavirus travel restrictions lead to a new record for world's longest flight in distance
I’ve watched some really neat youtube videos on this sort of thing, but am having trouble finding the exact one I’m thinking of (it covered the longest non-stop flights and mentioned when each record was broken). Check out Wyndover Productions, Real Life Lore and Half as Interesting if you want to take a look - all three cover plane travel quite a lot on their channels.
On that note, try this for a character-builder: A November flight from NAS Whidbey (Oak Harbor, WA) to Beale AFB (near Sacramento, CA). 12 hours in an R4D (military version of the DC-3). An admittedly wonderful aircraft that made up in noise and fuel consumption for what it lacked in speed. 12 hours vibrating in a jump seat on an unheated plane tends to concentrate your thoughts in a remarkable way. :eek:
I don’t know about that - in all the history of dirigible flights, there have been only 13 paying passengers that have lost their lives in an accident, all on the Hindenburg. Now they kill them is wholesale lots of 100 - 200 passengers. And nobody bats an eye.
OMG–being confined on a flying tube for that long, I’d want to kill myself.
Latest update on NYC/Singapore - Singapore Airlines' world's longest flight just got longer | CNN Travel
That’s about a 14 hour drive. How did that bird stay in the air at such a low speed?
My mother has flown on a flight like that out of or into Sydney. I can’t remember the details – it might not have been completely empty in economy – but definitely a long-haul business-class flight flown mostly empty down the back to keep the weight down.
I’m 6’4". We’ve had threads here where I say ‘my legs don’t fit into the space between the seats, and it’s worse if the seat in front is reclined’, and people respond ‘just lay back if the seat in front is in your face’.
It sucks that I’m poor, tall, and have relatives on three continents.
On of my friends has memories of flying across the Australian outback, watching the cars overtake them…
For those without a passport you can still spend a lot of time in a metal tube in the sky.
So, the flights from Singapore to JFK have restarted, and I think they’ll be switching to Newark shortly.
I think the cool thing about that is that it doesn’t matter which route they take. From point A on the globe to Point B at the opposite point, there is no “long way around” All great-circle routes are the same length!
NY and Singapore aren’t actually at opposite points. But it’s close enough so that they fly the other way around if the wind’s right
The antipode of NYC is several hundred miles off the west coast of Australia; that of Singapore is near Quito, Ecuador. Not really relevant in this case, since the NY-SIN flight would be in the northern hemisphere at all times.
I almost had that happen on a train when I visited relatives in the San Francisco area and we took the regional train to the city. It shared a path part of the way with a highway, going in the median. The cars in the fast lane would slowly overtake us, only to stop pretty suddenly when they hit traffic. So we were still faster overall.
There is no traffic in the Australian outback 
Other than the occasional kangaroo I’d wager.