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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."
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?
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 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.