Thanks for the shout-out! I thought about just coming in on this thread about it anyway, so I’m glad that anyone here who doesn’t browse the Game Room can see it.
It’s been decades since I’ve seen her in person, but judging from her website, she seems to be as busy as ever.
There’s an adage about compromise. I may have even posted it, but I haven’t had enough coffee to remember it. Something like, ‘You can have speed, payload/comfort, economy, or price. Pick two.’ Like a Cessna 150/152 was inexpensive to buy and economical to fly. But it was slow, and the passengers could only be 170 pounds each if you wanted full tanks. A Bonanza is fast and comfortable, but it’s expensive to buy and operate. A Mooney is fast, and relatively economical for its speed, but not as comfortable as a Bonanza.
That makes sense. Still, the aerodynamics and other tech involved in these new planes are sufficiently different that I thought its fuel efficiency might scale differently. After all, a 2026 Honda Civic has better mileage at 80 mph than a 1967 Pontiac GTO has at 40 mph, so faster isn’t always less efficient.
Agree. I would generally expect a 2026 supersonic transport design to have better inherent aerodynamic efficiency than, say, Concorde.
OTOH, it’s unclear (to me at least) whether the low-boom tech itself helps or hurts efficiency vs. current state of art supersonic designs w typical boom signatures.
AIUI, the key innovation isn’t exactly reducing the shockwave (and hence drag) at the airplane source. But rather creating two similar shockwaves at carefully chosen points on the airframe that result in destructive interference which mostly cancels and spreads the boom front on the way down to the ground. So the perception is more of a distant thunder rumble than a nearby thunderclap BANG or WHUMP. Which rumble may well be lost in the normal noise of 21st Century living.
This post is of interest to aviation, but isn’t exclusive to aviation:
Doesn’t anyone have a sense of impending doom here? Doesn’t anyone here have any clout and can prevent this catastrophe from happening?
[For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about this thread will reach 10,000 posts in a very few days and will be closed. While a new thread will be created it won’t have the history of this one.]
Well yes. But the OP of the new thread includes a backlink. And one’s bookmarks sure can too.
In spirit it’s the same thread, even if Discourse likes it in smaller chunks.
In a way it’s sorta cool to get to Part 2 (or Part 4). It proves at a glance we can have a coherent conversation spanning a long time and a lot of subtopics.
The only downside I can see is it’s a bit more trouble to backlink to specific posts in the previous Part. Searching in [this] thread is less clicks than searching in [some other specific] thread.
You mean it’s going to crash? Whatever shall we do? 
On a related note, I’m bummed - there was a recent localish screening of Airplane! with Robert Hays & Julie Hagerty there to do a Q&A afterwards; wish I had made it. 
But the top post in the new thread is auto-generated and will include a link back to this one, if you want to review 15-year old posts.
Surely you could have made more of an effort to get there.
Maybe the new thread will capitalise General, and ‘General Aviation’ is a different thing from ‘general aviation’.
There’s no grammatical reason why the last two words of the title (and only them) shouldn’t be capitalized, anyway. Either capitalize all the words, or just “general”.
‘General Aviation’ and ‘general aviation’ are two different things. General Aviation, or GA, comprises civilian, non-commercial (i.e., not airlines) aviation. Lowercase ‘general aviation’ means aviation in general, including airlines and military. Admittedly, the Wikipedia article does not capitalise General Aviation; but doing so makes it clear whether you’re talking about General Aviation (GA) or aviation in general. (Also, the OP started the thread to focus on GA.)
That’s what I said. The proper way to write the title would be -
The great ongoing aviation thread (General and other)
Correct?
Quite. And when the thread was started, the title was different and it was explicitly about General Aviation.
At some point years later, the actual ongoing content had morphed towards aviation in general. So, as shown by the mod comment at the top of the thread, puzzlegal elected to rearrange the title words to better reflect the actual content. Which of course also amounted to permission for the thread’s focus to formally change. And yes, introduced a casing error along the way.
Whether we ought to have had a thread for aviation in general distinct from General Aviation for the last 15 years is an interesting question, but IMO moot. Given 2026’s membership numbers and posting rate, creating two threads for the future amounts to each of them almost dying of disinterest. Better IMO to keep the combined thread going.
If you’re providing air transport to people who just outrank colonels, that, too, would be general aviation.
Navy and Coast Guard have entered the conversation
If you wanna start an admiral aviation thread, knock yourself out!
Can we court martial someone who is not in the military? 