You obviously haven’t met my niece.
(20 yrs ago she was 8, and made an pie. Almost.
Today, her pies are exponentially better)
(and you win the gold medal for the best post/username combo! )
If you’re wondering why it’s not faster, well, the answer has already been given: it’s not economical. We tried faster 36 years ago (the Concorde), and people didn’t want to pay for it. Even at the elevated prices they were charging, it was’t making money for the airlines that used them.
Is it better? I have no doubt that new commercial aircraft designs and technology are more reliable than those of, say, 1970. The materials are lighter, stronger, and more consistent, the knowledge of material properties is more complete, the engineering (via the aid of computers) is better, enabling optimal use of those materials. The engines emit less chemical pollution and less noise pollution, and require less maintenance. Better avionics means a cockpit complement of two instead of three. The latest cabin technology includes individual LCD touch screens for each passenger, and you can choose your own entertainment from a huge library of movies, TV shows, and documentaries, or an endless variety of games. WiFi is typically available.
Is it cheaper? Absolutely. I can fly from O’Hare to Heathrow this spring for $1000 round trip. ISTR that I have ticket stubs in my childhood photo album from that same flight, showing a price quite a bit higher than that. If there were in fact no change, then a $1000 flight now would have cost just $169 back then. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case, but I will check my old ticket stubs tonight and report back.
I guess I missed this post, but twenty years ago you couldn’t get frozen cheesecake from the store.
Are you deliberately trying to be obscure now? I didn’t understand what you were trying to say when you said “Er. Sorry?” so I asked for clarification. Which you then didn’t offer. This whole exchange, combined with the fact that you had to clarify your OP at least once, might suggest that you have not been very successful at expressing yourself in this thread.
Were all WAG posts reported, who would 'scape whipping?
Er. Sorry again? :smack:
dubious::(:p:D:cool::rolleyes::mad::p;):):eek::rolleyes::(smack:
But they are willing to spend a few hundred bucks for seat upgrades to make the flying time more pleasant, which is why airlines have focused on that in the last few decades – differentiating different classes and charging for each level is, comparatively, a real money maker.
Before or after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978?
Do you have data points for the last 20 years to justify an exponential fit? I’m willing to bet that the actual tastiness curve is more sigmoid.
I going to assume you didn’t really mean ‘exponentially’. Cars are not ‘exponentially’ faster than they were 20 years ago, are they?
The answer “physics and economics”, while it sounds flippant, is essentially correct, although I’d add ‘safety’ as well. Consider one of the fastest atmospheric aircraft ever built, the SR-71. Yes, it could fly at three times the speed of sound, but to do so required that it be built from exotic, scarce materials, that it use such elaborate measures to mitigate aerodynamic heating as using its own fuel as a heat sink, required (IIRC) hundreds of hours of maintenance for every hour of flight time, and resulted in an aircraft about the size of a regional passenger jet that could carry two people.
Now, consider the Space Shuttle, another vehicle intended for very high speeds in atmosphere (as a glider, yet). Consider the number of fatal in-flight incidents versus total number of flights made. Would that percentage of failed flights be acceptable for a commercial passenger-carrying service? I would have to think not.
Lastly, we are already at the point where the amount of rigamarole to get to the airport, on the plane, up to an altitude where the highest speeds can be obtained, followed by more rigamarole at the arrival end, makes ground transportation at far lower maximum speeds almost equally efficient for trips of up to several hundred miles. So the highest speeds are really only useful for long-haul flights, but such aircraft tend to have small capacities, raising the cost required per passenger.
Bottom line: Getting a passenger aircraft to fly reliably at speeds that are multiples of the speed of sound is much more difficult than flying at high subsonic speeds, and even though it is technically feasible, the costs and risks involved continue to place this capability outside the scope of a mass transportation service.
That’s hardly the same kind of runaway advance as has been seen in a few other fields though, is it?
They certainly are faster than the Model T’s of the 1920’s, but what I’m thinking is why isn’t a 6 hour flight 20 years ago 3 or 4 hours today?
Seriously? Drop it, he apologized and clarified. You want a kiss, too?
because it’s (currently) far less efficient for aircraft to travel at or above the speed of sound. Most airliners have traveled at or near 0.8- 0.9 Mach for a long time. High-bypass turbofans don’t work well above those speeds, so pushing planes faster means going to afterburning low-bypass fans or turbojets. Which burns tons of fuel. The “market” has decided it’s far more desirable to put more butts in seats and wring efficiency out of turbofans and aero tricks than it is to try to push planes faster.
This has been answered several times in the thread. El_Kabong makes a good point about safety also being a limiting factor. Various supersonic bombers were designed with 1950s technology, but their safety record was appalling.
As a general point about technological development, exponential progress certainly isn’t the norm. But neither is any other pattern really. An advance in one area can suddenly make advances possible or economic.
The “[relatively mature technology]-meets-microelectronics” scenarios are by no means an end of the line. Surely, I believe, “[relatively mature technology met with microelectronics] meets biology” will occur, with similar quickening of practical change.
Whether mind-controlled automobiles and planes or DNA check-in and ID, for example, will alter the flight times or bullshit times is a different story.
Same reasons a 6 hour drive 20 years ago is still a 6 hour drive now.
- Safety
- Fuel/cost Efficiency
As you all have already noted, people flying on airlines have to put up with the hassle of TSA, claiming checked baggage, getting a rental car, etc…: things that take long enough to eat up any time savings that an SST would provide. Besides, most people’s time isn’t worth the added cost of flying on a SST.
But one market that might make sense is private general aviation. CEOs may feel (and some can even probably demonstrate it economically) that their time is worth the extra 100s to 1000s of dollars per hour it would take to fly supersonically. Charter a jet, and you get to skip all of the TSA garbage. Plus, most FBO’s can have your rental ready, or shuttle you to where you need to go. So, twice as fast might actually mean a journey that’s half as long.
Here’s an article from Forbes on one company’s efforts in developing a business jet SST. Per this article, Gulfstream (i.e., a company that’s actually built a large number of airplanes already.) is looking into developing a bizjet SST. So’s Lockheed. Plus, if the current restrictions on overland supersonic flight within the CONUS get removed, a bizjet SST can go faster than 0.99 Mach, which will result in even shorter flight times. That will probably depend on if the actual developed plane makes a significant sonic boom, flying at FL450-500. I don’t know what breakthroughs have been made in that area.
So I’m trying to be witty, and then somebody one-ups me…
damn, I love this place! 
(runs off to open old math books are re-learn sigmoid curves)
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the damping effect of regulation. Aviation is perhaps one of the most heavily regulated industries in existence. (not sure if pharmaceuticals are worse or not, apples to oranges to compare). Anything new requires a metric buttload of testing to gain FAA approval. Porsche tried to market a new general-aviation engine a couple decades back, and finally just gave up…so most GA aircraft are flying on 1930’s engine designs that are grandfathered in. They develop about 1/2 HP per cubic inch and the high compression ones are about 8:1 CR, and they need 100 octane fuel to avoid knocking. The very common Marvel carburetor many of them use was adapted from a farm tractor design, and it shows. It is really a sad state of affairs.
Now if you have an airplane that sells for millions of dollars a copy, you can amortize the cost of certification testing, and get some whiz bang stuff, but they are still putting seatbelts in them that would have fit right into a 1960’s sedan, style-wise. Nobody wants to invest the certification money in what would be purely cosmetic changes.
Several reasonably big advances have happened with big aircraft:
High bypass ratio engines. Old jets burned most of the air, and had very high velocity, hot exhaust. Newer ones have big fans, and most of the air is not burned. They have much more, lower velocity, cooler exhaust. This is far more efficient. Some ultrahigh bypass engines have been developed that have scimitar shaped propellers. There are some practical problems with these, but there is also a consumer resistance…“jet set” is perhaps an obsolete term, but the air travelling public really prefers not to see propellers on the airplane they are boarding.
Glass cockpits: This replaces a whole boatload of various avionics panels and mechanical gauges with flat panel displays. This greatly reduces weight, training time, and in many cases has reduced the cockpit crew by 2/3. The human navigator/flight engineer has been replaced by computers and GPS.
A few decades back, airlines were still relying on VOR navigation, essentially hopscotching from one ground station to the next. Inertial navigation systems were needed for travel over long stretches of ocean, and the arctic, and when they malfunctioned you got the KAL007 debacle (Russians shot down an airliner that strayed into Russian airspace) Prior to this, transocianic flights relied on dead-reconing from magnetic compasses, spotting islands as landmarks, and even using sextants to sight stars. GPS has made direct point-point navigation simple and painless. The receivers have become so cheap, compact, and light that there is no reason not to have several, and in a pinch you could borrow a passenger’s smart phone.
Aircraft radio communication is still fairly archaic. AM-VHF and SSB-HF While some of this is to allow legacy equipment to still be used, there are some real reliability issues associated with the old technology. For example if two pilots transmit at the same time, a controller will hear both, which is almost never the case with FM. The controller may not be able to understand either, but it will be clear that two aircraft are transmitting, and it can be dealt with.
Airframes: The speed of sound is a technical and economic barrier for sure. There is just no free lunch there. Winglets let shorter wings work like longer wings, and new materials allow lighter and more efficient air frames, but 1100 FPS is a speed you don’t exceed without exponential cost increases.
Finally, Air travel is already the fastest way to cross long distances. Airlines compete only with each other, not with any other form of transport. There may be some tiny amount of potential customers that don’t fly now, but would fly if airplanes were faster, but it is very, very tiny. The only way to get more passengers is to take them from other airlines, and the way to do that is with lower fares, not faster speed.