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Why We're Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners
glowend writes: Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has an article about sub-orbital flight, and why we'll never see it as a common mode of transportation. Quoting: "Yes, we can save some fuel by travelling above the atmosphere and cutting air resistance, but it's not a free lunch: you expend energy getting up to altitude and speed, and the fuel burn for going faster rises nonlinearly with speed. Concorde, flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 2.0, burned about the same amount of fuel as a Boeing 747 of similar vintage flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 0.85 ... while carrying less than a quarter as many passengers. Rockets aren't a magic technology. Neither are hybrid hypersonic air-breathing gadgets like Reaction Engines' Sabre engine. It's going to be a wee bit expensive."
Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."
Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."
Concorde service was never very profitable, in the end it was run for prestige. Concorde service was notoriously unprofitable through the 1970s and only made it to the 1980s with heavy government subsidy of the tickets -- it was in the early 80s that BA took control of the program and you started seeing the $10,000 tickets. It made a little money in the end but it just didn't produce the kind of money that justified the other expenses and hassles. After September 11th they just couldn't justify the service on those merits, notwithstanding
Since then, jets' biggest competitors for wealthy business travel aren't each other, their biggest competitor is telecommuting and telepresence.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's pointed to in the summary and was not missed - there were not enough people in a hurry to sustain Concorde flights.
An ironic thing is the 747 was opposed within Boeing in the late 1960s because it was thought that only supersonic airliners would have a place on long hauls in the 1970s - so very few were built in the first batch. As mentioned in the summary the 747 went on to render Concorde mostly irrelevant.
The article (well worth reading this time) argues that such a target market has left the building and is already on "bizjets" to avoid the time consuming fuss of getting onto an airliner and having to stick to a schedule. It also points out that suborbital spaceports are not going to be in the middle of cities so the time to get to and from them also has to be considered. Those factors seem to reduce the small market you suggest to zero. Expensive, fixed timetables and little or no time saved compared with "bizjets" in the same or lower price range that leave when you want and land closer to where you want to be.
Sucks, but all that extra effort to go supersonic/hypersonic prices it out of most civilian situations.
You've got some missing historical knowledge there. It was so loud it would actually damage tomatoes on the vine. (true story)
And it wasn't "banned" in the US, it was just required to operate at regular speeds.
Also.. Boeing has a large number of supersonic aircraft. Google it. ;) They're actually quite good at it, not some bumblers who couldn't get a prototype. It turns out, the market for them isn't really with airliners, because... well, because tomatoes.
Me driving my car with nobody else in it is just as efficient as the average of domestic airliners. Yeah, I get over 40 mpg. A lot of people do.
Ships are TERRIBLY, spectacularly inefficient for passenger transportation. Queen Mary 2 has a mass of 75,000 tonnes with a capacity of 2620 passengers. That's 155 tonnes pulling each individual passenger. She burns 12 tonnes of fuel every hour to move about 25 nautical miles. That works out to roughly 9 mpg per passenger.
Dry and liquid freight is a completely different story. Tankers and container ships are not making as much speed, and they are using less than one tonne to support each tonne of payload. Often MUCH less.
If you gutted out the accommodations and packed people into Queen Mary 2 in airliner coach seating, it would be a lot more efficient (if you could get 99% of them to sit nowhere near a window for long periods, and they didn't all die from DVT), but you would still cube out.
The crash was caused by French arrogance. The British knew of the danger to the fuel tanks and designed a fix. They offered it to the French who said "Non!"
A British Concorde would have survived.
They've built planes like the Gulfstream G650, 14 passengers and 7500nm range which means that from New York you can reach Tokyo to the west and Dubai to the east non-stop. It won't take you to Australia or South Africa but it's fairly global. A full range trip works out to $200-$250k so it's not for the average person but if you're a multimillionaire flying with an entourage between two local airports - a 14 passenger plane can probably land just about anywhere - then it wasn't as absurdly expensive as I thought. A little out of my budget tho.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The Queen Mary 2 is not a good representation of a traditional ocean liner. No steerage class, at that, going from memory, it is basically one class that is awfully close to first class.
Last time I crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner, it took a week which gives an average speed closer to 15 knots and where our cabin was, we did not have windows and were probably below the water line. Very small cabin that 5 of us were crammed in. At the time it was much cheaper then flying even considering that we had to pay for a weeks food etc. Of course flying wasn't so subsidized back then and cost much more then now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The story apparently seeks to establish that these methods do not teach the desired lessons, but instead, teaches people that the leaders are evil, and that compliance doesn't protect or save them, and that their Hope is to resist evil, even at a high cost.
Well, duh.
The problem with Hunger Games was not that it was hard to understand, but that it was politically retarded, and nowhere near as funny as Battle Royale.
In fact, they lost money on every flight.
Only the French ones. The BA ones were actually profitable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No, it really couldn't have - the Virgin Atlantic offering, like many of Bransons stunts, was nothing more than a PR exercise. He even used some of the typical bullshit myths surrounding the Concorde in order to put BA in a bad light - "you were given them for £1 each, so heres £7 give us seven Concordes and we will call it evens..." etc (BA didn't get them for a quid each, they paid real money for the core fleet which they ordered, and took on several unsold airframes at a slightly reduced price but still real money). Virgin also wanted all of the support infrastructure at Heathrow and elsewhere for a song as well - all of that was worth more than the Concorde airframes.
Virgin Atlantic and Branson were also ignoring the fact that the responsible manufacturer (Airbus) had withdrawn the type certificate and support for the aircraft, so there was absolutely no way VA were going to fly them except under an experimental certificate, which forbids passengers.
The reason they no longer fly is that they didn't make enough money to stimulate a new product generation
Indirectly, yes. What prevented them making more money was being banned at many airports over largely unfounded concerns over noise. What promoted the largely unfounded concerns about noise was that US airports wanted to support Boeing's SST effort by blocking the competition that got there first.
There are quite a few orders of Concorde lined up, it was only when some US airports decided to ban it that they dried up. Had they not done that there would have been regular flights to the Middle East and Far East, as well as over the Atlantic. Boeing's own SST might have been finished too, instead of being abandoned.
By now we would have much more efficient SSTs running at much lower cost.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC