Everything is better: Computers, cars, phones, medicine, etc. How come air travel isn’t seeing the same gains as other industries?
Today, my computer runs at 2000X the speed it did ten years ago. Hybrid cars use 50% less gas than cars 20 years ago (albeit with the same cost but in electricity instead of gas.) Phone technology means I not only can call my family, but some random homeless guy in a third world country for essentially free.
Everything is better, cheaper and/or faster, why not air travel?
The last time I traveled (2012) compared to the first time I traveled (1990) I didn’t see any major improvements in time, yet saw major de-improvements in dealing with the airports.
I do realize security has been a big problem since 9/11, but why hasn’t the technology improved to get us where we’re going faster?
Because people don’t want faster, they want cheaper. Boeing had a look at a faster jet but the airlines were telling them they wanted something more economical, not something that goes faster. We have had something significantly faster, the Concorde, and it was never something Joe Public could afford.
Also aerodynamics is a mature field, the gains have already been made. The gains being made in air travel now is in stuff that isn’t obvious to the public such as better air traffic control sequencing, use of GPS for navigation, flexible routes to make the best use of prevailing winds, and so on. Gains are also being made in fuel efficiency of the engines. The end result of all this is that nearly anyone can afford to fly, whereas before it was only for the privileged. And when we do fly we are more likely to get to our destination safely.
Edit: I see you mention cheaper in your OP. It is cheaper, much cheaper, you just don’t realise it because you’ve come to expect it.
Physics and economics. Airliners are somewhat more fuel efficient than they were twenty years ago, but it takes a lot of energy to shove a winged metal cylinder through the air at 500 mph. Concorde proved supersonic air travel is feasible 35 years ago, but it also proved it is not cost effective.
Hence the demise of the phrase “jet set.” I saw once a stern reprimand from the copy desk of t**he Times for using the phrase after it had become archaic (so quickly!).
I’m pretty sure aircraft safety has improved vastly since the early days. As have the distances you are able to travel non-stop and the level of in-flight entertainment.
i) Security as you say. 9/11 brought it to the fore, but even before then, security was increasing from the 1980’s onwards.
ii) Super sonic transport was a bust, with the US staying out, the Europeans offering being too expensive, too small and too short range and the Russians having technical difficulties.
Airlines operate a very narrow profit margin, reducing the incentive for greater innovation.
Further from 3, you have only two real aircraft manufacturers left, Boeing and Air Bus (which is a government consortium) again reducing innovation.
No 4 leads to reduced capacity or desire for innovation. Most of the improvements have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Nows its possilble that a second line manufactuere in N America or Europe or someone in Asia , (mainly Russia and China, but maybe India, Pakistan, Indonesia etc) or Africa (S Africa) or S America (Brazil) will comeup with a new concept, but the fact is that currently it takes more than a decade and a half for an aircraft to go from paper to delievery (if you are lucky) so no one seems to want the risk.
There have been some real improvements, in avionics, range, quitness, efficieny and passenger comfort since 1993.
I’d really appreciate a “WAG” tag before some of you posted. It would not only inform me of which posts to ignore, but also which posts I should read before reporting.
Also consider that in 1990, oil had an average cost of around $23/barrel, and now it costs about $90/barrel (although the Brent price is about $110, and the WTI Cushing is artificially depressed due to lack of transport to go with the shale / tight recovery).
Anyway, the cost of the fuel has about quadrupled, but in 1990 the average cost to fly in the US was 13.4 cents per mile. Today, the cost to fly is about 12.7 cents per mile.
There’s your improvement in efficiency.
eta: Fuel costs represent about 1/3 of all airline operating expenses - at least in 2011 - obviously, other cost elements are subject to growth, the fuel is just dramatic and easy to define.
Specifically because the airlines don’t think the public are willing to pay the cost of faster flight. It has been done and failed with the concorde. Boeing had plans for a sonic cruiser but it was shelved in favour of the more economical B787.
There’s a little thing in the way called the sound barrier. Large jets already have air speeds close to 600mph. The speed of sound is around 770mph. The Concorde proved that supersonic travel is very hard, if not impossible, to make economical. Also it’s noisy.
I think the main problem has to do with the basic premiss here.
We have continued to make astounding progress in our ability to put more and more transistors on a wafer of silicon. Our ability to craft miniature circuits is mostly in the field of digital logic, but similar of not so marked advances has occurred in analog - especially RF - circuits. And this is close to about it. Better computers? More transistors on chips. Better phones - you mean phones with little computers in them, and miniature RF systems for radio communications. Laptops? Little computers.
Our ability to do this is really because we simply have not got good enough at it yet to find the physical limits. It isn’t so much that we are so clever, but that there is so much inherent scope to exploit. This is a critical point.
Cars are interesting. Strip out all the computer gear in a modern car and see what you get. Your in car entertainment system vanishes (no CD, digital radio, MP3 player) so you are back to FM radio. You lose the engine management system, so your fuel consumption escalates and the power and driveability drops. Welcome back to carburettors or (horrors) mechanical injection. You lose anti-lock brakes, stability control, a whole slew of luxury and safety bits and pieces. If we took away the computers from the designers you could welcome back shoddy fit of components and heavier cars that never drive well.
If you look around your home, you will actually be hard pressed to find much that has really advanced as much as an aircraft in the last 50 years. The house itself for a start. A builder from 50 years ago would probably be horrified at the shoddy crap we build nowadays. Many people are very happy in their old homes, and apart from a few useful advances involving synthetic materials their houses are just as durable as new ones. Go into the kitchen and check out the marvel that is your refrigerator and how it is almost identical to one made 60 years ago - except that it is probably more shoddily made. And the cooking range. Apart from induction ranges, you probably have a range that a technician from 60 years ago would be totally comfortable fixing. Observe at the faucet, and how modern technology still provides water on demand, just as it did in houses a hundred years ago. The house electrical system, and the power generation and distribution systems that feed it have changed almost not at all in 60 years.
When you get dressed you would be hard pressed to find anything that you wear that you not be familiar to someone living a hundred years ago. Apart from perhaps shoddy cheap plastic soled shoes.
Walk around during the day and look for things that have really advanced that do not depend upon microelectronics for the advance. It is very hard to find much at all.
Medicine is interesting too. For the average person, medicine made its most important advances over a couple of hundred years ago, with sanitation. The most recent sea change is of course antibiotics. Which is also about the same time as the first jet planes. Most people will go most of their lives never needing any more advanced medicine than antibiotics and painkillers. The advance in expected lifetime was huge, and since has barely changed. Now of course there have been relentless advances in medicine. Probably more money is spent here than in trying to advance any other human endeavour. All over the place you can meet people who owe their lives to astounding medicine. But the real advances that change the field for most people are things like - CT, ultrasound and MRI imaging. Laprascopic surgery. Better anaesthetics. But have we made inroads into the big killers? Not much. Survival rates for cancers has been improving at a glacial pace, heart disease is more about diet and lifestyle than triple bypasses. Stroke is little better handled than it was a hundred years ago. As it impacts the majority of people that big advances happened a very long time ago.
Aircraft got good very quickly. From the Wright Flyer to the first jet was 40 years. From the Flyer to the first modern jet liner was about half way to now. The progress was phenomenal. But by then we had worked out what an airliner was. It was a mature device. It isn’t clear what you can do to improve it much now. The big advances are - guess what? - based upon microelectronics. Those first 50 odd years were like where we are with microelectronics now. Every year microelectronics just gets better, simply because we haven’t yet figured out what the mature technology is. Curiously microelectronics is about the same age as aircraft technology was when maturity hit. We will hit a maturity wall at some point. There will be a point where suddenly the advances come at too great a cost, in either development, or they are just too difficult to realise affordably. Then your computers will stop getting faster each year. Your mobile phone will not be obsolete in two years time. Apple, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, will become ossified companies.
Because 600 mph squared is 36,000 mph. The New Horizons probe was able to get up over this speed, but it could only do it outer space and it cost 650 million dollars and took 15 years to build.
There are some exotic aircraft engine technologies in very early stages of development. The scramjetwill run at supersonic speeds, mach 5 and higher, and has had mixed success in a few NASA proof-of-concept tests. One private company is in the early stages of developing a combined jet/rocket engine which might conceivably power the space planes that everyone has been imagining since the 50’s.
In the more wildly optimistic corners of technology reporting, these new engines will let you fly from LA To London In Like Just A Few Hours. Maybe if the technologies work, and the economics support commercial passenger service at that speed, that might happen in 50 or 100 years. More likely, IMHO, is that these will only be used on cruise missiles, drones, and orbital launch vehicles. How many travelers are willing to pay 10x to shave a few hours off their flight? However, when you want to blow up something on the other side of the world on two hours’ notice, cost is no object…