flying has made no progress since the 60's. planes still crawl along and it takes me 6 hours to get to the East Coast. I'll be wow'd when they make some progress beyond allowing me to listen to my music during take off.
We have different outlooks on life. I'm thankful and amazed that I have hot water right in my home, grocery stores filled with selection, heaters to keep me warm. We are so lucky to have such things and it's amazing what it took to get us where we are now. Try to build a screw, a single screw that holds one of these planes together.
That's pretty easy if you have a tap and die set, it doesn't require advanced machine tools.
I agree fantastic progress has been made due to our cooperative societies and the division of labour though, even just in the last few decades, the advances are astounding. The Internet alone is an advance at the level of Gutenberg.
I'm not going to defend the Concorde business model, but the ban on cross country flights due to noise made it impossible. I mentioned this in irony to a colleague recently as a maintenance guy blasted leaves outside with a leaf blower.
I still think Concorde could have been made to work in the end if it had been improved over time.
Concorde was sustainable. Almost everyone of them left the ground full. But these were planes built in the 70s. The rest of AF and BA fleet are fairly new withe oldest being from the mid 90s.
The planes were getting more expensive to maintain and there was nothing coming to replace them.
> Lie-flat beds in business class? On-demand entertainment? Power outlets and wifi?
Well those are certainly improvements, but they're basically hacks around the fact that flying is now slower than it was in the past.
The biggest impediment to speed today is the dreaded 'Cost Index' which nearly all airlines now implement. I think Boeing have a different term, but it's the same idea; the crew are given a target CI which they punch into the flight management computer and which then determines the Mach number according to the cost-saving target.
Flying from Belfast to London is now timetabled at 20 minutes longer than in 1973, regardless of the extra standing-in-line at either end.
flying has made no progress since the 60's. planes still crawl along and it takes me 6 hours to get to the East Coast. I'll be wow'd when they make some progress beyond allowing me to listen to my music during take off.
The price of a cross-country fare, adjusted for inflation, is a small fraction of what it used to be.
The planes themselves are massively more fuel-efficient, reliable and safe.
You have on-board live television and internet on many flights.
These are all significant gains. Meanwhile, passengers voted with their wallets on supersonic airliners; the time saved (4-4.5 hours on a transatlantic Concorde flight) were not seen as worth the significantly higher fares.
In reality, I suspect very few people actually notice what is going on in the ad. Ironically, they /will/ get a lot of 'wow' but mostly from the virality of the video and maybe award submissions. Which means they need not have produced the actual signage but just the video and probably would have achieved the same result. But that would have been too easy to earn them any publicity. How meta.
Our company (based in LA) has party today at Vegas. A friend of mine decided to take the plane from LA -> Vegas, I took the bus, other people drove their cars.... And somehow I got 30-60 minutes earlier than him, if not more. Granted, due to the rain it was much harder for the planes to take off, but adding checkin time, checkout, taxi to the hotel, etc...
On top of that we had nice 30 minute break with the bus, at not so bad place (In-N-Out). And plenty of room to play monopoly on the iPad, read books, drink wine, stroll around, etc.
I have found that the plane time travel door-to-door is almost slower than land base transport, especially train. If I travel from Cologne to Paris, car about 6.5 hrs, train is 3.5 hrs, plane is about 4.5 hrs.
This definitely depends a lot on the airport and distance you are traveling. San Francisco to New York, Los Angeles to Chicago... America is too big for land to be faster. Stuff is a closer in Western Europe.
You are right. The example I gave is probably a bit skewed to faster travel times. If I had chosen say Barcelona to Moscow, times would have been a lot different.
The other difference is that the trains in western Europe are much faster than their US counterparts as well.
This is really a big issue. I notice more and more metro areas are pushing their airports way back to the hinterlands. Especially for inter-European travel it seems kinda pointless to use airports when it takes already an hour just to get from an inner city area to the airport.
Clever use of ADS-B signals, which most large commercial aircraft ( and nearly all British Airways a/c ) now implement. I think the only exceptions in their fleet are four previous-gen 737s that are near to phase-out.
Accuracy of the co-ordinates broadcast on ADS-B is dependent upon a/c equipment but for BAW should be around 5 metres.
So receive signals, screen for BAW.* call sign, cross-reference online for route. I wonder if they include affiliates such as CityFlyer, which fly in BA livery? Their callsigns are CFE.*.
I was going to say, it would make more sense if they got the data digitally by knowing pre-registered flight plans and plotting that in 3D. Alternatively, they could point a camera at the sky and look for "plane-like" objects. Either would be cheaper than ADS-B hardware. Then I learned you could actually scan radio signals with software... http://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/ Mind blown. :)
25 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] threadThis reminds me of the Louis C.K. bit about how amazing flying is & how "everything is amazing & nobody is happy."[1]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfmmNif5WCw
That's pretty easy if you have a tap and die set, it doesn't require advanced machine tools.
I agree fantastic progress has been made due to our cooperative societies and the division of labour though, even just in the last few decades, the advances are astounding. The Internet alone is an advance at the level of Gutenberg.
I still think Concorde could have been made to work in the end if it had been improved over time.
The planes were getting more expensive to maintain and there was nothing coming to replace them.
Safety enhancements?
Not to mention flying is much cheaper than it used to be, adjusted for inflation.
Well those are certainly improvements, but they're basically hacks around the fact that flying is now slower than it was in the past.
The biggest impediment to speed today is the dreaded 'Cost Index' which nearly all airlines now implement. I think Boeing have a different term, but it's the same idea; the crew are given a target CI which they punch into the flight management computer and which then determines the Mach number according to the cost-saving target.
Flying from Belfast to London is now timetabled at 20 minutes longer than in 1973, regardless of the extra standing-in-line at either end.
The price of a cross-country fare, adjusted for inflation, is a small fraction of what it used to be.
The planes themselves are massively more fuel-efficient, reliable and safe.
You have on-board live television and internet on many flights.
These are all significant gains. Meanwhile, passengers voted with their wallets on supersonic airliners; the time saved (4-4.5 hours on a transatlantic Concorde flight) were not seen as worth the significantly higher fares.
https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2
Video without the other guys watching the video...
On top of that we had nice 30 minute break with the bus, at not so bad place (In-N-Out). And plenty of room to play monopoly on the iPad, read books, drink wine, stroll around, etc.
Accuracy of the co-ordinates broadcast on ADS-B is dependent upon a/c equipment but for BAW should be around 5 metres.
So receive signals, screen for BAW.* call sign, cross-reference online for route. I wonder if they include affiliates such as CityFlyer, which fly in BA livery? Their callsigns are CFE.*.