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The End of the "Age of Speed"
DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
it's bandwidth that matters.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
I used to speed a lot as a teenager- guess what? Now, I like to take my time, enjoy the travel, and save money on gas.
With the pat-downs and all the hassle at both ends of a flight, why would we need a Mach 2+ vehicle in the middle?
This is similar to developments in computer systems - the emphasis switched from faster processors to multi-processor, multi-core, etc. Interesting parallel. rgds Dave
There's not much point in plugging faster airplanes into a hub-and-spoke air transit system with chronic Air Traffic Control delays (assuming they're not asleep), 45-minute airport security lines and 20-minute waits for your baggage.
a couple of unrelated decisions are a sign of ending "the age of speed"?
at the moment China is constructing 17000 km of high-speed railways; *surely* the beginning of an age of speed.
sigh, media...
Given the seriously cramped conditions imposed by the Concorde's airframe design(it was necessarily narrow-bodied to reduce drag), and the further crunching induced by trying to get enough paying passengers into the sardine tube to justify the expensive flight, the trade off isn't as straightforward as one might imagine.
From the perspective of comfort and productivity, if the same money can get you a cattle-class seat on a mach 2 bird or a cushy recliner, a power jack for your laptop, and an edible meal on a cost-optimized subsonic one, it isn't at all clear that you'd choose the former.
Given that running the big, cost-optimized subsonic allows the carrier to adjust the split(not quite per-flight; but reasonably quickly) between comfort seats and low cost seats as the market dictates, while the small, supersonic one only allows choosing between expensive discomfort and really expensive comfort, the economics behind running the subsonic craft seem pretty compelling.
While I expect that maximum achievable air speeds(and/or flight paths that incorporate very high speed excursions outside the atmosphere) will continue to advance for specialty applications, mostly military; such developments as "leg room", "laptops that aren't a pain to work on", and "sweet, sweet inflight internet" have likely sealed the commercial fate of very high speed air travel services.
Well perhaps for the upper class Americans for whom air travel was a given back in the seventies travel hasn't sped up. But for the 10s or 100s of millions who are being introduced to commercial air travel for the first time, let me tell you their average speed has really taken off. Air travel has become affordable for the first time to a significant fraction of the world's population. Rising living standards and cheaper flights due to de-regulation has done the trick. Living here in Vietnam I personally have taken many airplane "virgins" for a ride. ;)
(Due to an extremely fortunate set of circumstances, I must confess I was lucky enough to break the sound barrier in a Concorde flight way back when. It was interesting watching the digital airspeed gauge go higher and higher!)
How old are you? The older I'm getting the more I want to play with engines and build things with wood and metal.
it's bandwidth that matters.
A 200mph train link giving affordable travel between distant cities would be much more useful that a celebrity supersonic service.
As much as I think space travel is cool, and the SR-71 was one of the more aesthetically pleasing aircraft ever, and similar sentiments, I can't really muster much pity for the disappointed astronauts and test-pilot types.
There's a saying from the murky world of the intersection between market actors and regulatory agents: "Nobody screams louder than the guy whose subsidy is being cut."
Astronauts, and their ilk, while they did the jobs we offered, fair and square, were (in terms of human speed) some of the most subsidized travellers in history. For a mixture of reasons, some more or less universal(scientific curiosity), some bound up in particular historical moments(Cold war dickwaving and spy games), we made comparatively massive investments in the velocity of a small number of pilots carrying out specific missions. I have nothing against the pilots, who largely executed their missions with skill and nerve; but that doesn't change the fact that those were some of the most expensive tickets in human history, made possible only by certain historical conditions. Those guys were playing with once-in-a-lifetime white elephants, not prerelease prototypes of consumer goods.
(Now, unfortunately, our extraordinary subsidies projects seem to be focused on our parasitic layer of financial services con-men, an entirely crasser class of people, with far fewer virtues and far greater dangers...)
The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there?
Yet the number of air travelers increase year by year. Personal travel IS important. In the USA, domestic flights carry from 1 million to 2 million passengers each day. And speed IS important. What's the point in sitting in an airplane? We would like to reach our destination as soon as possible, otherwise we would take a cruise ship, not an airplane.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
I traveled a lot in the mid-90s when my co had AmEx Travel people on premise who could cut boarding passes (REAL ones, not the oxymoronically named "e-ticket" crap) & all you had to do was go through metal detector & walk on plane. I once got to Hartsfield (Atlanta) for a 6:30 am flight, realized I'd forgotten my wallet but knew I had cash in my planner for cab & was meeting my director later, called AmEx who took care of the hotel & proceeded to make a 2-day trip to Houston & back w/no ID whatsoever!
nowadays I avoid air travel like the plague! I'm going to have to go to San Diego in Sep but that will be my 1st flight in almost 2 yrs & I assure you it ain't b/c I can't afford it... when (/if) the security theatre stops (ha! I kill me!) & I don't have to worry about my 6 yr-old daughter getting molested and/or radiation exposure I MIGHT resume my previous air travel level but I don't see that happening any time soon & we're driving distance to Port Canaveral so I'll be giving my $ to the cruise lines for the foreseeable future...
got that Delta/TSA/Obama?
(quick edit: ironically my captcha word was "oppress")
Well, duh.
It's almost as if our average speed was linked to the availability of cheap energy and the days of cheap energy were coming to an end.
The human race as a whole != the handful of people who go top speed. Ever heard of averages ? I'm sure the millions of people in China and India and other countries who are getting their first taste of cars, air travel, underground... more thank make up for the disappearance of a few outliers.
Same as with money/health/culture/...: what counts in the end is not what the toppest top have/achieve, but what the masses do.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
petroleum is getting more expensive to dig up and process, as a function of more marginal types of deposits (oil shale, tar sands, etc), and just plain deeper to get to
at the same time, india, brazil, china: approaching western standards of lifestyle and energy consumption
this is a simple economic equation: decreasing supply, increasing demand, which means the age of cheap easy petroleum is over. and while we might be able to switch to electric cars relatively painlessly, i don't see electric powered aircraft in our future (battery weight/ energy density being the obvious issue)
which means air travel, a mainstay of middle class lifestyle, might move back into the realm of the upper middle class and the rich as it was in the 1940s. simply as a function of fuel prices
this doesn't have to do with speed, but it does have a lot to do with the related perception from the middle of the last century of air travel/ space travel becoming more and more ubiquitous and common place. think flying cars. but air travel is actually going to get less common, more rare
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Would you really call it Pax Americana, given the lack of "pax" around the globe over the past 200+ years (and especially the last 100)?
The Romans only had "peace" through slavery and oppression and there was continual fighting anyway. There has never been anything called a "pax" which deserved the name.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> The older I'm getting the more I want to play with engines and build
> things with wood and metal.
It's okay. We're all addicted to Minecraft too.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
It's good to see Boeings anti-Concorde propaganda is still hard at work.
In case you didn't know, the "Oh my God, the sonic booms will [shatter windows|disturb sleep|puncture eardrums|kill kittens]!" hysteria is just that: hysteria. Cooked up Boeing in the 70's to try to get Concorde banned from as many routes as possible, because it knew it simply couldn't compete. It was successful too: in the end only the national flag carriers of France and the UK ever bought Concorde, despite initial interest from around the world. Once countries started to ban super-sonic flight through their airspace, the potential contracts disappeared.
Boeing got to sell lots of 737s instead.
I do know what Concorde sounds like when it takes off, by they way. I live in Bristol, a few miles from Filton, where Concorde used to regularly come for maintenance. Concorde taking off with full after burners was a glorious sound, but not loud enough to scare any grandmothers to death...
I believe the root cause is more the loss of ambition of the general population. The climbing average age in the U.S. means that older and, generally, less ambitious people are at the voting booths. Their overall selfishness in old age and their cliches of "not in my backyard!" and "not with my tax dollars!" has lead to a completely different social environment for the youth of America than they had. During the cold war money was dumped into education, and the payoff was a very prosperous and advancing America. These days you'd be lucky to end up in a school district where your teacher isn't personally having to buy all the classroom supplies. You end up with teachers that are stretched too thin, broke, unhappy, non-engaging, and generally unmotivated anymore to what they enjoyed before. This results in kids brushing off that subject as unimportant, whereas an engaging teacher could possibly unlock a savant. We've likely already lost some brilliant and innovative American minds to our lack of funding for education, likely now working some crappy cubicle job being reminded by 4 different bosses about TPS Reports, rather than working in theoretical physics and propulsion. Our society needs to stop hacking at the roots to "save" the tree.
mod parent up.
While our time saw the death of the only supersonic passenger plane (the french/british Concorde), years ago already, it also saw the dawn of superfast trains, from the japanese shinkansen to the french TGV to the german ICE.
The french experience is, when you set up a fast train on a 500-km-like destination, you just shift 90% of the air traffic down to land.
Fast trains are still slower than aircrafts, but if you factor in starting, and arriving, straight in city centers -and generally a much lower travel cost, this is definitely a move ongoing in many parts of the world.
Herve S.
Business class, which is almost as comfortable but typically doesn't have the fully horizontal sleeping position, can be as little as £200 more than economy for a transatlantic flight. For a company, their employee being able to work on that 7 hour flight is easily worth £200. For a holiday traveller, it probably isn't.
Of course, business class tickets are generally closer to 2.5-3 times the price of economy. I just checked, and I can get a return from London to New York for £370 economy, but the cheapest business class ticket is £1007. I'm not sure I could ever justify the price difference.
I think you're probably being a little unfair on Concorde, it wasn't that uncomfy, having flown on it myself.
Whilst you didn't have the space of a 1st class seat, or even an economy class seat near an emergency exit (yes, you usually get MUCH more leg room there) on classic subsonic airliner, it was certainly far comfier than your usual economy class flight, in part because the seats were just much more nicely designed than the cheap economy class crap you get to this day.
It wasn't really just the cost that was prohibitive and led to it's downfall as such, although that was certainly a contributing factor, but largely politics. From the American's bitchiness about it not being an American invention making it difficult to even fly the thing onto American soil, to the British government subsidising British Airways purchase and taking a large portion of the profits causing BA to charge more than it would otherwise need to, to BA not being willing to hand over such an icon to Virgin who wanted to keep it going through to Airbus refusing to support it preferring to try and sell more of it's more profitable newer aircraft instead. Politics gave that plane a hard life, and was really what destroyed not just Concorde's continued hopes itself, but any willingness for any other airline, government, or manufacturer to invest in a similar programme.
This said there's some truth in the points made above in response to this article that being efficient is important- in the last 10 years we've seen a massive growth in support for improved efficiency, and certainly in the last 5 years those calls have grown ever stronger. It's unlikely Concorde would've survived calls for increased efficiency anyway. This said, had Concorde not been so crippled by politics all it's life, had more money been invested into supersonic passenger jets, it's quite possible the competition would've meant we'd have had cheaper, more efficient supersonic passenger jets by now too, but this is speculation, it could've gone either way.
One thing I do know is regardless of the politics, it was a beautiful aircraft, and I'll always have fond memories of it having flown in it, and grown up around Filton where much of it's early production and later maintenance was carried out. It would be wrong to keep it flying simply for nostalgia, but I do think a valuable field of competitive engineering was quite possibly lost, largely for little more than political bickering.
Military is also "stuck" (which is even more telling); the max speeds were set half a century ago, the average speed of human pilots maybe went somehow up - say, due to jets capable of supercruise... but that' the key thing here, "of human pilots" - because speed doesn't seem that important for the present wave of unmanned ones. And when the faster drones will show up...
Ultimately, that's just the nature of human progress in the real world (vs. wishful fantasies) - extrapolating its rate into the future never really works, virtually every technology in the history of human civilization reaches a plateau after few generations.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Which is why pure speed is pointless: JFK to LHR (or CDG) is great. Except that with the airport security and procedures, and the city-to-airport travel which is damnably slow, it is pretty pointless.
When in the future, mass transit will have become massively efficient, and we all have chips implanted which will remove the need for humans to do border checks, then having a faster plane will again cause travel times to be significantly smaller.
when concorde was introduced, going to the airport would have taken 20 minutes, and the check-in procedures be completed in a couple more minutes. Then, of course, going at Mach 2 made sense.
Now, hours to reach the airports (three hours before departure) So your trip will last the day. Even if your plane is supersonic. So who cares?
If we had any significant passenger rail use, the security would be just as tight.
You'd think so, but evidence says otherwise. Look in Europe, which has a lot more terrorism that the US. Airports have high security, while trains, high-speed or otherwise, have very little. Its the same everywhere else too.
It's still made from dead dinosaurs, right ?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff