While having a guaranteed wider seat is nice, I've never found the width of coach seats to be all that terrible -- it's the lack of leg room, and the airlines continue to have sole discretion on how many rows of seats they'll jam in to these new planes.
Seat tilters. That's the biggest discomfort for me. The person in the seat ahead tilting back. If there was a seating section that didn't tilt, I'd take it. I'd even pay a little extra for it.
Or when, like happened to me, you get involuntarily relocated from the exit row seat you paid extra for? (Without compensation, since it was done by the flight crew during boarding and not in advance. Thanks, Singapore Airlines!)
Exit row if you don't want someone reclining in front of you, or bulkhead if you don't want someone in front you. There's always First when you don't want _anyone_ in front of you.
The summer I flew with RyanAir. The seats were smaller than the last time I flew but it was so much better. There was more headroom than on other planes and the seats didn't recline.
Some of the budget airlines have seats that don't tilt at all - I believe the default tilt is slightly more than normal, but they aren't adjustable, which is nice.
Buy yourself some 'knee savers'. My 6' frame is such that if Im behind you, you're already not going to be moving your chair back much, if at all, before my knees are in your way. For $20 now some jack hole is slamming his chair into some plastic clips instead of my knees.
The end result is the same either way for the person in front me, so I feel no guilt in using them. I also make a point to never recline my own chair.
I don't even bother with the knee savers. I just use my knees.
I'm tall enough that in coach my knees make full contact with the seat in front. I just keep them that way for the first half of the flight, and the person in front of me assumes the seat recline is broken.
And if they manage to recline anyway, I make sure to hold my food or drink or reading material directly above their head while I eat, since they're pretty much in my lap anyway.
While you may not care very much about it, the airlines know they can use "wider seats" to appeal to the growing number of larger individuals [1] around the world. That phrase alone might be enough to get those individuals' travel dollars (or rupees) over their competitors. You can bet Boeing and Airbus are stressing this in their presentations to the airlines.
I've given up complaining about legroom, all I hear back is the same tired "just pay quadruple for business class!" But realistically it would cost significantly less for the airline to increase seat pitch to comfortable levels. For example:
Airbus's A321: 141 Economy Seats in sets of 3x, or 23 rows on each side of the aircraft. 31" pitch.
If we take out one row of 3x seats, that's 1.34 inches of additional pitch, if we take out two, that basically turns it into Delta's Economy Comfort (34" pitch). So how much is six seats going to cost?
I grabbed a random Atlanta -> New Orleans on an A321, total one way ticket cost for 6x tickets is $561. If we split that between all the remaining 21 rows/63 seats on one side of the aircraft, that is $9/seat.
For $9/seat we could all be sitting in economy comfort. Based on $93.5 one way, that is less than 9% surcharge.
Heck, sell one side of the aircraft at 34" pitch and $9 more, and the other at 31" pitch and $9 cheaper. Everyone wins.
I'd pay $9 more. I cannot afford to pay $405 which is the cost of business class by the way.
PS - These are back of napkin figures, not an academic study. Take with a pinch of salt.
But the airline is also using less fuel. They're now transporting 6 less passengers and any luggage (even carry-on).
It also reduces stress on boarding, reduces some fees the airline pays, and while staffing cost per passenger increases, the airline's profit per passenger increases in kind.
Plus a lot of airlines don't even offer an Economy comfort class, and even fewer do on all of their aircraft.
The biggest likely impediment to this isn't the economics or business, it is that reseller sites only focus on price. They won't even tell you what the seat pitch/width is, they'll just tell you that seat A is $135 and seat B is $150.
This is why I miss American Airlines "more room throughout coach" that they had ~20 years ago (am I really writing that?). You'd know that you'd get an almost comfortable amount of legroom. If it was ~$20ish more for a long flight, totally worth it, especially if you want to take your laptop out.
Of course, the real thing is that customers are voting with their wallets, and they generally prefer as cheap as possible.
<mostly offtopic>
My 16 year old son is flying through 5feet 10inches in height. I'm 5-7, and my wife is 5-10. He obviously gets his 'tall' from his mom.
Anyway, he's been complaining a lot about sitting in the back seat of our car. The car in question, a Model S, is, as I understand it, known to have fairly good back seat legroom, and we don't ride with the front seats far back.
The point is this: in so many ways, it's fucking glorious to be short.
I can sit on Caltrain or a jetliner and work fairly comfortably with my laptop. That's an epic, life-long advantage.
In trade? Well, I have to ask my wife or son to get things down from the top shelf.
> My 16 year old son is flying through 5feet 10inches in height. I'm 5-7, and my wife is 5-10. He obviously gets his 'tall' from his mom.
The contribution of tall mothers to height in sons is deceptively large, because women are quite short compared to men. Using your figures and some stylized assumptions:
American mean male height 70 inches.
American mean female height 66 inches.
Father 67 inches = 70-3
Mother 70 inches = 66+4
Heritability of height 0.8
Expected value of son's height is (70) + ((-3+4)/2)*0.8, or 70.4 inches, taller than either parent.
Reversing the heights of the parents gives the same result for the son (it's a substitution of (0+1) for (-3+4)), but people are much less surprised by a son who's slightly taller than his average father than they are by a son who's much taller than his father and even taller than his very tall mother.
Followup comment: this assumes that the standard deviation of height is equal for males and females. In reality, the male deviation is larger, which means that an inch of mother height contributes more than an inch of father height does.
The back seats of some cars are fine. The back seats of others are like being hauled around in a stagecoach, even with enough leg room. I'm not sure where rear seat comfort fell on Tesla's priority list. On one hand you expect a premium car to feel premium regardless of what seat you're in but on the other it's not marketed as a family hauler.
I've never encountered anything worse than the back seat of a 4th gen Altima. Something about it it just nauseating Given a choice between an old pickup with no AC and manual steering in the summer and rear seat of a 4th gen Altima I'd take the truck almost every time.
Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy. Like, in my lifetime the changes in the world have been incredible… Flying is the worst because people come back from flights and they tell you…a horror story…They’re like: “It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn’t board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway…” Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?! You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!
Flying has become a lot less comfortable. It has become a lot cheaper at the same time. It's not clear whether it had to become less comfortable to get that cost saving.
> Boom - It'll fly you from Tokyo to San Francisco in less than six hours.
Yes, but that's one of the only routes it will fly. With the Concorde, we discovered that flying supersonic jets around population centers is a big deal-breaker because of the supersonic boom.
Given how few of these routes you can actually fly, I expect Boom will come to the same realization that the airline industry did 20+ years ago; you can't make money on supersonic.
US west coast <-> East Asia, and US east coast <-> Western Europe (especially London/Paris) already covers a sizeable fraction of business travel, doesn't it?
Those are basically the four major global economic centers. And among those four, the only link that this service can't provide is Europe <-> East Asia.
US west coast <-> East Asia, and US east coast <-> Western Europe (especially London/Paris) already covers a sizeable fraction of business travel, doesn't it?
Not necessarily.
For example, Southwest Airlines got its start by moving businesspeople around Texas. It only started leaning on tourists later.
Well, a lot of the flights from US East Coast to Europe or from US West Coast to Asia fly over water or unpopulated areas for substantial periods of time.
Do you know a good way to check, for a particular flight route, how much of it would be eligible for supersonic flights?
East to west US coast doesn't fly over unpopulated for substantial periods. Despite popular belief, people still live in the middle of the US.
The only places in between with enough space to get up to supersonic and subsequently drop out in time for population are a few chunks of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Look at a night time satellite picture of the US to see how infeasible flying over most of the eastern US is.
if it's only the transition _to_ a supersonic regime that generates a shockwave, then it wouldn't be out of character for carriers to get a variance allowing for "acceleration zones" which could be within 20 minutes flight time of most hub airports. If your plane leaves JFK and goes out over the Atlantic to go supersonic before heading to Seattle it would still be quicker...
It's not. The shock wave is present as long as the plane is in super-sonic flight.
I grew up in fly-over land, and military training flights based out of the Dakotas used to go overhead; we would get the occasional boom.
(Also, once in a while doing my farm-kid chores driving a noisy piece of machinery across a hay field I would get buzzed by a jet sneaking up from behind me flying at a very low altitude. It was always startling because I never heard them coming over the noise of the tractor. I'm sure I made a pretty good surrogate for an enemy tank...)
Well, that isn't a straight-forward problem. Take Atlanta to Zurich, for example (a Delta flight I have been on). Conventionally, the plane flies up the East coast until it clears Nova Scotia, in part because that is approximately the great circle route, but also because pilot training 101 tells you that your flight plan must include nearest emergency landing point for every inch of your route.
So for super-sonic flight, that path might be modified to be off-shore enough to keep sonic boom over the ocean, but follow the East coast closely enough that an airport capable of accommodating the plane for an emergency landing is always within a reasonable distance. (Bonus points for being able to fuel up and take off again.) It isn't simply a problem in spherical geometry.
Concorde had several major issues that Boom might not face [1]:
- Boom. Boom supposedly targeted a 10x noise reduction for its sonic boom compared to Concorde, but whether or not it can convince the FAA remains to be seen.
- Lack of bodies that could reliably fill seats at the ticket prices. Boom is targeting current business class ticket prices, and the plane is half as big as the Concorde; 55 seats is around the size of a current premium class cabin.
- The wrong ocean. Flights across the Atlantic are not that long; six hours is a reasonable night's sleep from NY-London. On the other hand, the Pacific is massive; even Seattle-Tokyo is 12 hours. When Concorde was built, Asia wasn't rich and they could only convince Air France and BA to buy them; today JAL is investing in Boom, and there are probably people willing to pay a premium to halve 12+ hour flight times from the West Coast to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc.
Yeah, but when I think "supersonic jet", I think of the extremely vivid image of a the flaming Concorde crash[1] - it was the cover of every major paper. I think lots of people who remember that era still do, and it'll make me extremely unlikely to ever step into a Boom (the name doesn't help either), even though I do want them to succeed.
The Concorde crash was caused by bits of titanium engine cowling on the runway shredding a tyre and damaging a wing tank. The largest piece was an 18" long, 1" wide strip of metal that tore 10lb chunks out of the tyre.
Do you associate DC10's the same way? (The debris were from a DC10).
Apart from being a chain of events vanishingly unlikely to repeat, I doubt all other aircraft would come away from the same scenario fatality free.
The way you say it, it sounds like Concorde was unsafe, and by extension, all supersonic planes are.
Almost every plane out there has had at least one bad accident. And every single time measures are taken so that type of accident doesn't happen again.
There was also, I believe, a fairly effective lobbying campaign against Concorde by Boeing after it became clear that the 2707 wasn't happening. 2707 was cancelled round about the time Concorde prototypes had their first flights.
It looks like they are hoping to make money by having a more efficient, slightly faster and smaller aircraft than Concorde. It also has more range which they hope will open up transpacific routes which Concorde could not do. Their goal is to make it profitable for airlines to charge about the same as they do for a business class ticket.
They also suggest that their aircraft will make a much smaller sonic boom. Possibly quiet enough to be tolerable over land routes. That would obviously be a huge game changer.
Their still building their technology demonstrator, so I'd take all their claims with a big grain of salt. They want to fly their XB-1 in 2019, so hopefully we'll have a much better idea of how well this work next year.
I'm still taking everything I hear about Boom with a grain of salt. Maybe they'll make an airplane and actually get someone to offer routes with it, but there are a lot of hurdles that have to be overcome first. Concorde only happened because of national pride in the UK and France. It would be so easy for these guys to finish their first planes just as oil prices spike again, assuming they ever finish those first planes.
I thought the boom only occurred when the plane breaks the sound barrier but not during supersonic travel. Why couldn't the plane go over the ocean, accelerate to supersonic and then start flying to the other coast?
It isn't mentioned in the article, but I hope the new commuter jets don't sacrifice speed for economy on longer flights... spending an extra 30-40min in the air for the same route is a good reason to choose a 737 instead. You can filter for it on most of the flight aggregators.
Can you elaborate on this? Where can I filter for this? I absolutely hate flying, so even saving 30 minutes would be great, if the costs aren't out of control.
Both Google and Kayak... and I think most others will let you filter flight legs by length although they usually include layovers, which may or may not be match your weighting.
Boeing 787 is a magnificent machine. Pleasure to fly: from bigger windows, to higher humidity, to fuel efficiency, to innovative materials, to arching beautiful wings!
I don't know that the windows add much cost directly - they're just a bonus side-effect from the carbon fiber construction. The innovative materials are for cost savings - carbon fiber instead of metal means less worry about metal fatigue, which means you don't have to take the whole plane apart as frequently to look for cracks. (Lighter too, which reduces fuel consumption.)
Arching wings ( usually exaggerated in renderings ) are an interesting point of difference between Aitbus and Boeing.
The higher the wings flex, the less efficient they become since the lift vectors aren't perpendicular. So, a more rigid wing is more efficient but also heavier. And you need some flex to ride turbulence, though active control surfaces can help.
Boeing has moved back to very flexy wings like it started in the jet era with the B-47 but Airbus tends towards more rigid.
A few years ago I took a trip in a DC-10 and those wings were like planks of aluminium, they didn't flex at all.
Obviously not. Many people do even while they bitch about the results. For myself, I clearly want quality up to some level of cost tradeoff. I rarely go for cheapest with respect to travel.
You're not the only one. I'd gladly stand on a short flight, say between LA and SFO or between Philly and Washington, DC. Those flights are faster than some subway rides, and no one complains about being crammed in to subway cars.
The Acela takes about 1:45 hours between PHL and DC and costs as low as $39, while driving a car takes anywhere from 40min to 2 hours longer than that[0]. It's not EU 'high-speed', but it moves at roughly double highway speeds at times. Granted, on that section it averages like 96-112kmh (60-70MPH) I think, as it makes a couple stops (Wilmington, DE and Baltimore, MD at least).
For me that's going to depend greatly on how cheap it was. I just flew WowAir to Europe for a ridiculously low price and thought for the price I got the trip was straight up luxurious.
The very price sensitive customers like you are very numerous, but it’s the frequent price-insensitive business travelers that make up much more of the industry’s profits. So they care much more about the 5 million frequent business travelers, who do care about these things, than they do about the 500 million occasional travelers, half of whom have little to no profitability impact on the airline.
I highly doubt it. And do you have anything ti back that up? Because 5 million versus 500 that seems large difference.
Afaik airlines constantly lose money and the only time they make up for the whole year are xmas and national holidays such as thankgiving and independence day. In fact even when you buy xmas time ticket in 2030, it will be accordingly overpriced.
I was that way for a while, when I finally got the money to start traveling. It took about five or six round trip "knees cramped into the chair" style flights before I started realizing the extra leg room of an exit row or bigger seat was worth the 20-100$, or that landing at 5am wasn't worth the 35$ it saved me on a 200$ flight.
I don't know if I'm getting older or just my values are changing, but I stop thinking of the money spent and start simply enjoying more comfortable travel.
I'm 6'6". Any air travel long than like an hour and a half is a cramped, claustrophobic hell. If I can find seats with more leg room, I take them. I'd also love more shoulder room - spending the whole flight trying to slouch as much as possible to stay out of people's way is no fun.
These are not newer planes but iterations of existing models. Granted that airline industry is slower in churning out newer planes than say automobile for obvious reasons, but you don't say Nissan is launching a newer car called Altima TTZ.
However, for the sake of the argument if any iterations of these existing planes is worth citing as a "newer" plane then IMO it is A350-1000ULR which is going to operate the longest flights ever from Australia to New York/Johannesburg/London/Brazil https://www.ausbt.com.au/airbus-mulls-ultra-long-range-a350-...
The Bombardier C series / Airbus 220 is new. Bombardier only made smaller rear engine jets earlier. There's a really nice video of the advanced carbon fiber wing, made in Belfast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aNoA3krV6g
Nothing about Legroom. At 6'5", I'm learning why Dad wanted to drive everywhere. Leave when you want. Take whatever luggage you want. Eat food when you want. No TSA Patdown. No bait n switch airfare purchase meatgrinder.
Anything less than 6+ hours or so, it's just as efficient to drive, depending on how big of a circus your airport is. More than that, planes start to be much quicker in transit time. Doesn't really solve the legroom part though.
I highly doubt it. I don't see anything different here.
Same old song.
These airplanes run on jet fuel, and require a pair of human pilots to operate. This means that these planes have a high operational cost.
Meaning that the airline companies will eventually cram everyone into the smallest space they can. Everyone will be miserable in economy. But if you upgrade for just $100, then you can get another inch of legroom in economy-plus!
For the Boeing 787 to be bragging about better fuel efficiency.. Well.. so what? That is really irrelevant to me, because I am paying the same amount for the ticket, or more. And they still cram everyone into the maximum amount of misery possible in economy class.
And for the planes that are bragging about being able to fly 20 hours.. Can you imagine the horror of flying internationally in economy? And trying to get some sleep during the flight?
I can. Welcome to our new future of flying. Nothing but misery ahead. Unless of course, you want to splurge a little more on First Class tickets.
The largest piece of the puzzle is air travel has progressively gotten worse over the last few decades since the deregulation of the airline industry, it really doesn't matter than new planes have more space or are more fuel efficient. Airline companies will still pack more people in like sardines and charge for more and more for baggage since their stockholders want it.
But that's how you end up getting new bargain airlines to drive the prices back down. And the demand for tickets has only increased, so it's not surprising that established brands raise prices
Yeah. Passengers pick tickets based on sticker price, often/usually through price search engines. Connections and travel time are also factors.
Baggage isn't. Leg-room isn't. Food isn't. Even "the most convenient airport" is often not important to passengers' purchasing decisions.
It's hard to blame the airlines when they're just responding to incentives the passengers are giving them. And tickets are cheap, right? Can't complain too much about price competition, and I don't think you should really complain at all about a la carte pricing. It's the fairest way to do things (and it's what we all ask of our cable companies -- "I don't want to pay for sports/luggage, just give me HBO/beer!")
How often is info on legroom or food actually available when shopping for tickets, though? Price is often literally the only concrete information available when buying a seat on a flight.
Which, interestingly enough, is at least in part an API problem.
Was at a talk by some people from IATA and ThoughtWorks a while back, and apparently the standard ticketing APIs that at least all the third party booking agencies use simply don't have room for innovative features.
So for example, I think it was Air New Zealand that had a product where you could buy the middle seat to keep it empty. But that wasn't something that could be represented in the APIs, so you could only book it on their own website.
> Which, interestingly enough, is at least in part an API problem.
> Was at a talk by some people from IATA and ThoughtWorks a while back, and apparently the standard ticketing APIs that at least all the third party booking agencies use simply don't have room for innovative features.
If that's the case, then Southwest should be able to innovate very easily in this area, because they don't use third-party ticketing. They could have separate zones with more or less legroom.
I think you're referring to the Sky Couch, which isn't just an empty middle seat, but converting three economy class seats into a bed (just) big enough for two to snuggle up.
I'm a frequent business traveler, I generally pick based on arrival/departure times, and carrier service level. Price is maybe the third or fourth item down on my list.
> The largest piece of the puzzle is air travel has progressively gotten worse over the last few decades since the deregulation
I challenge this (I have been flying since 1967 and have multiple millions of frequent flyer miles).
I will agree that the typical flight quality of an economy passenger today is worse than it was in the 1970s. But consider:
1 - many more people are able to fly today than could so in the days of regulation.
2 - The market, not the shareholders, has chosen the feature/price point they want: ultra-ultra-low-cost airlines (Ryan/Spirit) don't dominate the market; a plurality of flyers are willing to pay a bit more to get more than that, while attempts at launching higher levels of default service have suffered. So it isn't that people always choose the cheapest (or all we'd have is Spirit). At the same time you can pay more for the full-service experience if you want (business, called first in the US).
3 - The whole experience is safer and more comfortable than it used to be. An original 747 was spacious, but prone to accidents, more stops because there was no long range flights (Sydney-London is 24 hours with one stop now; in the late 70s it was 36 hours with four refueling stops). And the business and international first are a lot more comfortable; business today costs about what coach did in the 70s.
My first flight was on a VC-20 (I have a BOAC junior log book -- signed by the captain of each flight! -- of every flight I took between 1967 and 1975) and I flew 747 in 72 and frankly I'd not want to fly that way again. Oh yeah, planes had smoking sections into the late 1990s (and later in Russia, Korea, parts of Africa, and probably other places I didn't fly).
What has gotten worse is the histrionic rubbish before you board. What a waste of human life the TSA is.
I disagree with your contention that the 747 was unreliable, in its first decade of operation it only had 7 hull loss accidents. A comparable number to the DC-10 or A300 - interestingly enough, much more than the L-1011.
I do agree with you completely about the security theater aspects of the TSA
Yes, that was a careless mis editing on my part. Thank you for highlighting it.
What I meant to say was that yes, you had more room in a 747, but overall passenger flight safety these days is amazingly high in an absolute sense and a massive improvement over flight safety of the 60s and 70s.
I liked how enthusiastic this article was that the airlines would outfit their planes with 2x3 seating and wider seats instead of figuring out some way to cram 3x3 seating in there.
The aircraft the A220 is replace is about the Size of an MD-90/95 - which I suspect is what its meant to replace, which was also 2x3. 17 inch wide seats are the norm in the industry.
Yes, but I never trust airlines not to try to squeeze in even smaller seats when given even a whiff of a chance. And then of course the overhead bins will be insufficient because they were only sized for 5 per row instead of 6...
Pretty much every commuter flight already has an announcement beforehand that overhead bin space will be extra tight and gate checking is available if you don't mind waiting 15 minutes for your bag when you get to your destination.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadI have been hearing that for a long time with every new airplane that gets introduced. The truth is that coach will always asymptotically suck.
Or when, like happened to me, you get involuntarily relocated from the exit row seat you paid extra for? (Without compensation, since it was done by the flight crew during boarding and not in advance. Thanks, Singapore Airlines!)
It's fantastic, all airlines should introduce it.
The end result is the same either way for the person in front me, so I feel no guilt in using them. I also make a point to never recline my own chair.
I'm tall enough that in coach my knees make full contact with the seat in front. I just keep them that way for the first half of the flight, and the person in front of me assumes the seat recline is broken.
And if they manage to recline anyway, I make sure to hold my food or drink or reading material directly above their head while I eat, since they're pretty much in my lap anyway.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/health/obesity-study-10-p...
Airbus's A321: 141 Economy Seats in sets of 3x, or 23 rows on each side of the aircraft. 31" pitch.
If we take out one row of 3x seats, that's 1.34 inches of additional pitch, if we take out two, that basically turns it into Delta's Economy Comfort (34" pitch). So how much is six seats going to cost?
I grabbed a random Atlanta -> New Orleans on an A321, total one way ticket cost for 6x tickets is $561. If we split that between all the remaining 21 rows/63 seats on one side of the aircraft, that is $9/seat.
For $9/seat we could all be sitting in economy comfort. Based on $93.5 one way, that is less than 9% surcharge.
Heck, sell one side of the aircraft at 34" pitch and $9 more, and the other at 31" pitch and $9 cheaper. Everyone wins.
I'd pay $9 more. I cannot afford to pay $405 which is the cost of business class by the way.
PS - These are back of napkin figures, not an academic study. Take with a pinch of salt.
It also reduces stress on boarding, reduces some fees the airline pays, and while staffing cost per passenger increases, the airline's profit per passenger increases in kind.
Plus a lot of airlines don't even offer an Economy comfort class, and even fewer do on all of their aircraft.
The biggest likely impediment to this isn't the economics or business, it is that reseller sites only focus on price. They won't even tell you what the seat pitch/width is, they'll just tell you that seat A is $135 and seat B is $150.
Of course, the real thing is that customers are voting with their wallets, and they generally prefer as cheap as possible.
Anyway, he's been complaining a lot about sitting in the back seat of our car. The car in question, a Model S, is, as I understand it, known to have fairly good back seat legroom, and we don't ride with the front seats far back.
The point is this: in so many ways, it's fucking glorious to be short.
I can sit on Caltrain or a jetliner and work fairly comfortably with my laptop. That's an epic, life-long advantage.
In trade? Well, I have to ask my wife or son to get things down from the top shelf.
Totally worth it.
The contribution of tall mothers to height in sons is deceptively large, because women are quite short compared to men. Using your figures and some stylized assumptions:
American mean male height 70 inches.
American mean female height 66 inches.
Father 67 inches = 70-3
Mother 70 inches = 66+4
Heritability of height 0.8
Expected value of son's height is (70) + ((-3+4)/2)*0.8, or 70.4 inches, taller than either parent.
Reversing the heights of the parents gives the same result for the son (it's a substitution of (0+1) for (-3+4)), but people are much less surprised by a son who's slightly taller than his average father than they are by a son who's much taller than his father and even taller than his very tall mother.
I've never encountered anything worse than the back seat of a 4th gen Altima. Something about it it just nauseating Given a choice between an old pickup with no AC and manual steering in the summer and rear seat of a 4th gen Altima I'd take the truck almost every time.
-- Louis CK
I, too, think about the Louis C K quote every time I fly.
You can appreciate the miracle of tap water while still wishing your shower stayed hot longer!
Yes, but that's one of the only routes it will fly. With the Concorde, we discovered that flying supersonic jets around population centers is a big deal-breaker because of the supersonic boom.
Given how few of these routes you can actually fly, I expect Boom will come to the same realization that the airline industry did 20+ years ago; you can't make money on supersonic.
Those are basically the four major global economic centers. And among those four, the only link that this service can't provide is Europe <-> East Asia.
Really? Most of those routes are either trans-arctic or trans-Siberian.
Not necessarily.
For example, Southwest Airlines got its start by moving businesspeople around Texas. It only started leaning on tourists later.
Do you know a good way to check, for a particular flight route, how much of it would be eligible for supersonic flights?
The only places in between with enough space to get up to supersonic and subsequently drop out in time for population are a few chunks of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Look at a night time satellite picture of the US to see how infeasible flying over most of the eastern US is.
I grew up in fly-over land, and military training flights based out of the Dakotas used to go overhead; we would get the occasional boom.
(Also, once in a while doing my farm-kid chores driving a noisy piece of machinery across a hay field I would get buzzed by a jet sneaking up from behind me flying at a very low altitude. It was always startling because I never heard them coming over the noise of the tractor. I'm sure I made a pretty good surrogate for an enemy tank...)
So for super-sonic flight, that path might be modified to be off-shore enough to keep sonic boom over the ocean, but follow the East coast closely enough that an airport capable of accommodating the plane for an emergency landing is always within a reasonable distance. (Bonus points for being able to fuel up and take off again.) It isn't simply a problem in spherical geometry.
- Boom. Boom supposedly targeted a 10x noise reduction for its sonic boom compared to Concorde, but whether or not it can convince the FAA remains to be seen. - Lack of bodies that could reliably fill seats at the ticket prices. Boom is targeting current business class ticket prices, and the plane is half as big as the Concorde; 55 seats is around the size of a current premium class cabin. - The wrong ocean. Flights across the Atlantic are not that long; six hours is a reasonable night's sleep from NY-London. On the other hand, the Pacific is massive; even Seattle-Tokyo is 12 hours. When Concorde was built, Asia wasn't rich and they could only convince Air France and BA to buy them; today JAL is investing in Boom, and there are probably people willing to pay a premium to halve 12+ hour flight times from the West Coast to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590#/media/...
Do you associate DC10's the same way? (The debris were from a DC10).
Apart from being a chain of events vanishingly unlikely to repeat, I doubt all other aircraft would come away from the same scenario fatality free.
Almost every plane out there has had at least one bad accident. And every single time measures are taken so that type of accident doesn't happen again.
It looks like they are hoping to make money by having a more efficient, slightly faster and smaller aircraft than Concorde. It also has more range which they hope will open up transpacific routes which Concorde could not do. Their goal is to make it profitable for airlines to charge about the same as they do for a business class ticket.
They also suggest that their aircraft will make a much smaller sonic boom. Possibly quiet enough to be tolerable over land routes. That would obviously be a huge game changer.
Their still building their technology demonstrator, so I'd take all their claims with a big grain of salt. They want to fly their XB-1 in 2019, so hopefully we'll have a much better idea of how well this work next year.
The higher the wings flex, the less efficient they become since the lift vectors aren't perpendicular. So, a more rigid wing is more efficient but also heavier. And you need some flex to ride turbulence, though active control surfaces can help.
Boeing has moved back to very flexy wings like it started in the jet era with the B-47 but Airbus tends towards more rigid.
A few years ago I took a trip in a DC-10 and those wings were like planks of aluminium, they didn't flex at all.
[0]https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Philadelphia,+Pennsylvania/W...
Afaik airlines constantly lose money and the only time they make up for the whole year are xmas and national holidays such as thankgiving and independence day. In fact even when you buy xmas time ticket in 2030, it will be accordingly overpriced.
I don't know if I'm getting older or just my values are changing, but I stop thinking of the money spent and start simply enjoying more comfortable travel.
However, for the sake of the argument if any iterations of these existing planes is worth citing as a "newer" plane then IMO it is A350-1000ULR which is going to operate the longest flights ever from Australia to New York/Johannesburg/London/Brazil https://www.ausbt.com.au/airbus-mulls-ultra-long-range-a350-...
Same old song.
These airplanes run on jet fuel, and require a pair of human pilots to operate. This means that these planes have a high operational cost.
Meaning that the airline companies will eventually cram everyone into the smallest space they can. Everyone will be miserable in economy. But if you upgrade for just $100, then you can get another inch of legroom in economy-plus!
For the Boeing 787 to be bragging about better fuel efficiency.. Well.. so what? That is really irrelevant to me, because I am paying the same amount for the ticket, or more. And they still cram everyone into the maximum amount of misery possible in economy class.
And for the planes that are bragging about being able to fly 20 hours.. Can you imagine the horror of flying internationally in economy? And trying to get some sleep during the flight?
I can. Welcome to our new future of flying. Nothing but misery ahead. Unless of course, you want to splurge a little more on First Class tickets.
Baggage isn't. Leg-room isn't. Food isn't. Even "the most convenient airport" is often not important to passengers' purchasing decisions.
It's hard to blame the airlines when they're just responding to incentives the passengers are giving them. And tickets are cheap, right? Can't complain too much about price competition, and I don't think you should really complain at all about a la carte pricing. It's the fairest way to do things (and it's what we all ask of our cable companies -- "I don't want to pay for sports/luggage, just give me HBO/beer!")
Which, interestingly enough, is at least in part an API problem.
Was at a talk by some people from IATA and ThoughtWorks a while back, and apparently the standard ticketing APIs that at least all the third party booking agencies use simply don't have room for innovative features.
So for example, I think it was Air New Zealand that had a product where you could buy the middle seat to keep it empty. But that wasn't something that could be represented in the APIs, so you could only book it on their own website.
If that's the case, then Southwest should be able to innovate very easily in this area, because they don't use third-party ticketing. They could have separate zones with more or less legroom.
https://www.airnewzealand.com.au/economy-skycouch
But you're right, the average GDS can't cope with this.
Flying used to be really expensive, its just not now.
I challenge this (I have been flying since 1967 and have multiple millions of frequent flyer miles).
I will agree that the typical flight quality of an economy passenger today is worse than it was in the 1970s. But consider:
1 - many more people are able to fly today than could so in the days of regulation.
2 - The market, not the shareholders, has chosen the feature/price point they want: ultra-ultra-low-cost airlines (Ryan/Spirit) don't dominate the market; a plurality of flyers are willing to pay a bit more to get more than that, while attempts at launching higher levels of default service have suffered. So it isn't that people always choose the cheapest (or all we'd have is Spirit). At the same time you can pay more for the full-service experience if you want (business, called first in the US).
3 - The whole experience is safer and more comfortable than it used to be. An original 747 was spacious, but prone to accidents, more stops because there was no long range flights (Sydney-London is 24 hours with one stop now; in the late 70s it was 36 hours with four refueling stops). And the business and international first are a lot more comfortable; business today costs about what coach did in the 70s.
My first flight was on a VC-20 (I have a BOAC junior log book -- signed by the captain of each flight! -- of every flight I took between 1967 and 1975) and I flew 747 in 72 and frankly I'd not want to fly that way again. Oh yeah, planes had smoking sections into the late 1990s (and later in Russia, Korea, parts of Africa, and probably other places I didn't fly).
What has gotten worse is the histrionic rubbish before you board. What a waste of human life the TSA is.
I do agree with you completely about the security theater aspects of the TSA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses
What I meant to say was that yes, you had more room in a 747, but overall passenger flight safety these days is amazingly high in an absolute sense and a massive improvement over flight safety of the 60s and 70s.
Pretty much every commuter flight already has an announcement beforehand that overhead bin space will be extra tight and gate checking is available if you don't mind waiting 15 minutes for your bag when you get to your destination.