The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. In a world where fossil fuel is needed to fly airplanes and where oil is causing a destruction of the world we inhabit, it's dangerous to suggest we should make the flying industry polluting more than they already are.
If anything we should look at the trade-off benefits of flying with the least amount of fuel consumption per passenger and miles flown. Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?
I’m a pilot and this is… a vast oversimplification. Jet aircraft are significantly more efficient at higher speeds and at higher altitudes precisely because there’s less drag up there and the engines can operate more efficiently. They are wildly inefficient when low and slow.
A lot of the assumptions people make about efficiency don’t hold water in aerospace. There are no laws of physics preventing supersonic aircraft from being efficient provided they can fly high enough and we figure out how to build better engines.
While true at cruise speeds/altitudes, any supersonic transport still has to climb up to those altitudes. On any american flight (not to alaska/hawaii) i doubt the greater efficiencies at 60+ thousand feet would be worth the fuel to get there with a supersonic wing. These would only be 2 or 3-hour flights at most anyway.
If we really want time savings, fix the entire airport experience. Thats where time can be most saved. When travelling domestic I ussually end up spending far more time waiting for flights/bags/security than actually flying.
I remember the times before September 11, 2001, when I could show up at the airport about 30 minutes before my flight, get through security (which was locally operated -- no TSA), get my boarding pass at the gate, and board. It was great!
People could also meet you at the gate when you arrived, instead of outside the security area. There would always be peoples' families and loved ones there waiting for them.
Geneva, CH, recommends that you arrive less than 2 hours before your flight departs.
If you are flying within Europe, without checking a bag, and have the QR code from your boarding pass, it always takes less than 30 minutes to get to the gate. Allowing an hour is more than safe.
It’s good to assume that it heavily depends on airport, and time. I’ve been many times in the past years when just security took me more than 30 minutes. There are airports where it’s always less than 10 minutes (especially if you know some tricks), and there are airports where it depends on time. One hour is a good rule of thumb in Europe nowadays if you don’t have checked baggage. It would have been a stretch a few times, but I would have never missed a flight if I had been there only 1 hour before departure.
Last summer was crazy for popular airports in Europe, with queues lasting for multiple hours just to get _to_ security.
It was said that it was due to staff shortages due to layoffs during the pandemic though.
The airport experience is why, even though I enjoy actually flying, I avoid doing it to the greatest degree I can. Everything that happens from the time I arrive at the airport to the time the airplane leaves the runway is awful.
TTP/Global Entry sort of fixes this. What really fixes it is flying private. Unfortunately, that's doesn't do much to help the carbon problem.
The real difference now is that flying is too affordable. It used to be, only the rich could fly.
What we need to do is make air travel much, much more expensive, out of the reach of most people except on special occasions, and we can go back to having (1) less unnecessary carbon emissions from people flying to Disneyland or whatever shitty resort they spend their vacations at, and (2) very short waits at the airport for people who need to get somewhere in a hurry and can afford it.
Wow that would be very heavy handed and really assumes that the rich traveling are some how more meaningful for whatever destinations they are going to - maybe flying to some shitty meeting in Sweden that could be done over video conference. By this logic inflation happening now will fix the problems in the world bringing all prices up and forcing most people to become vegans because meat becomes too expensive and will also be for the rich only. Then cars can be for the rich too and in the end we can let the poor sit with out technology at all leaving only the rich one percent having all the carbon emissions. Finally the environmental crises is solved.
> really assumes that the rich traveling are some how more meaningful
No, it assumes you care about reducing air travel more than equality of access to it
> forcing most people to become vegans because meat becomes too expensive
Sounds...effective? It isn't what is happening, but taxing the hell out of meat would be a great lever to pull if you want to drive consumption away from it.
Outside of cost the only possible lever is rationing. Good luck with that one.
wish that were true, but the variance of wait time, even with tsa precheck, etc defeats the purpose. needs to be reliably consistent (and short) for me to take advantage of a 30min show time.
Those problems solved but a lot of other problems created. This genie can't go back into the bottle that easily. People live in other countries or states now and want to see their families too.
I am old enough, but arriving 20min before a flight was never really a thing. You could in theory arrive that way, but you were running a risk. Any delay in security, a delay in the bus system, or just bad luck with an irrate customs person could always delay you a few minutes too long. And if you werent even checked in 20min before your flight you had a very good chance of being bumped off the flight for someone on standby. There was also zero chance of any checked bags making it onto your flight unless you were checking in at least an hour before travel.
The last time I flew through Dublin airport I got from my taxi to my gate in 16 minutes including checking in a bag. I had arrived 3 hours early nonetheless due to the "chaotic" queue times I had read about.
This is one reason why I prefer to take the train for work whenever possible, even it takes longer and isn't that much cheaper, the onboarding experience is awfully simple and relatively stress-free.
From the bay area, there is nowhere you might want to go that a train would make less stressful.
Want to go to LA? That's 1 hour in the air for around 100 bucks.
Or it's a 10 hour ordeal involving transfers between coach bus and train in more than one location. All for the low price of 60 dollars.
Want to go to New York? That's 6 hours by air or 80+ hours by rail. Where realistically you are going to book a roomette ($$$) and not just sit in coach for 3 days straight.
> On any american flight (not to alaska/hawaii) i doubt the greater efficiencies at 60+ thousand feet would be worth the fuel to get there with a supersonic wing. These would only be 2 or 3-hour flights at most anyway.
Hi! There are many of us who exist outside of the US and would be open to planes flying faster because the world is super big. Thanks for listening
Suggestions about how Canada could improve really ought to be directed to the Canadians. They might be amenable to different policies in sparsely populated regions like Hudson Bay. Continental USA has no analogous areas.
Non-Americans who wish to complain about USA have a broad range of topics from which to choose; there's really no need to complain that USA regulates the operation of airlines in USA airspace.
I only commented on what is the current dynamic. Your thoughts on why there ought to be a different dynamic is interesting, but it doesn't seem like something anyone could predict.
Only a recreational pilot but I agree, when we calculate fuel usage (because people want you to pay your share this is a serious topic) there’s so many more ‘real’ variables
Yes, from basic principles, energy is force times distance. This force on an airplane is drag. Since on an airplane, both the drag and lift are proportional to the square of velocity, if (thought experiment) you assume a fixed lift to drag ratio, speed cancels out. It doesn't affect energy usage.
Basically a faster airplane can have smaller wings which produce less lift and less drag. If we in spherical cow tradition ignore body drag, you can halve wing size, increase speed by 44% and have the same drag. You need more power but for a shorter duration, for the same energy usage per trip.
You're ignoring the efficiency of the jet engine itself. You have to basically pick an altitude, temperature, and speed at which the engine is most efficient. Modern airliners are most efficient at a certain speed and altitude because they're designed to stay under the supersonic regime.
It's been a long time since I've touched compressible fluid mechanics or turbomachinery design, but if I recall correctly the theoretical "sweet spot" for overall aircraft efficiency is something like Mach 1.3. I'd have to dig though my textbooks to remind myself why, but the number stuck with me.
Definitely! I remember seeing an old picture of a physical three dimensional plot about theoretical airliner efficiency. X axis was speed, Y axis was something else and Z axis was efficiency. I think it was made of wooden shapes. There were two local maxima there, one subsonic and one supersonic. Probably it was related to the US SST project.
Most commercial aircraft take off and land well below their cruise speed. My understanding is that this limitation applies to supersonic aircraft as well. Applied power is typically restricted due to noise control requirements near airports.
That wing lift/drag relationship may be less fungible than you're supposing in order to address lower-speed flight segments.
If anything, automobiles frequently utilise negative lift, as with a Formula 1 or Indy Car's inverted wing which generates increased downforces. On street cars you'll find spoilers and similar factors.
Aircraft can fly low and fast, though that's typically associated with combat aircraft evading radar or air-defence systems. Such missions are known as fuel-burners precisely because of the greatly increased drag.
I don’t think people will believe you even though you’re right. Pure math has a strange way of swaying one’s opinions; ML in particular suffers from this.
But thank you for trying to point out that engineering efficiencies matter a great deal. Hopefully the message will get through.
>Jet aircraft are significantly more efficient at higher speeds and at higher altitudes precisely because there’s less drag up there and the engines can operate more efficiently.
This is true, but isn't the flip side of this that the high altitude emissions are much more damaging?
It's an oversimplification but as far I understand it's not wrong at least with past/current projects.
Efficiency for a given aircraft is nice but it's not the point. I believe Concord was most efficient at cruising speed (~Mach 2) but it does not change the fact that it burned like 4x more per seat/km than a b737 (Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft). Of course Concorde was only first class but that's part of the point of the parent.
As for boom, some guesstimate are around at least 4x too (https://theicct.org/new-supersonic-transport-aircraft-fuel-b...). No idea how biased this is but I believe it's quite telling that there is only mention of SAF on https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability. At best in some 2017 article they compare themself to a lay-flat bed in subsonic business class, but since they only manage to secure an engine maker last year it was firmly in the guesstimate too.
I strongly agree with your point, but I think some extra context is warranted.
As it stands, the economics of air travel force carriers to optimise for reducing fuel consumption, since that's (by far) the biggest fraction of a commercial aircraft's operating cost.
If supersonic transport makes a comeback, it'll be because the economics will make sense, which (in my mind) will be either because of:
- Somehow reduced fuel consumption, potentially through engines that leverage the effects of the supersonic flight regime for increased fuel efficiency (e.g. ramjets, through that likely wouldn't be possible in low-supersonic flight)
-> As another commenter in this thread mentioned, drag decreases with lower atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes, so there are fuel efficiency gains to be made just by flying higher, within the engines' design constraints.
- It'll fill the niche of richer-than-god people who use jets to skip highway traffic.
There's likely more cases than just these, but these are just the greatest hits as far as I can tell; and I say all of that as someone who's not involved in the aviation industry.
For the record, I don't support this second niche existing, but it does, and it can be an economic driver.
> As it stands, the economics of air travel force carriers to optimise for reducing fuel consumption, since that's (by far) the biggest fraction of a commercial aircraft's operating cost.
Not only this, but in general jet speeds have decreased due to airspace congestion. There is a lot of schedule padding due to delays at hubs like JFK, LAX, LHR, etc.
Flights to and from Beijing between the USA have (or had before the pandemic) at least a one hour pad due to PLA airspace restrictions popping up randomly combined with airport congestion. It often meant arriving in Seattle early before customs and immigration opened.
The second niche as a rule of thumb pollutes-more-than-God already(0)
I am skeptical that lifting barriers to them polluting more would land any type of net benefit given that ultra-luxury products such as said jets don't tend to land outsized downstream advancements than let's say, funding basic sciences such as what Boeing or Airbus are already doing
If it could be proved that things like faster private jets or faster planes could benefit in a sizeable and proportionate way to the general public, then yeah I would be in favor of this too, but as it stands I don't find the available info compelling, I'd rather them to pay more taxes
You're preaching to the choir; human progress isn't proportional to the number of billionaires with fleets of Gulfstreams (or rather, if it is, there's almost certainly no causation there).
I’m constantly in pain about how much human ingenuity takes the back seat just to keep the wheels turning in lives. If we actually tried to meet most of the requirements for people, creative thinking would flourish.
I’m not a billionaire apologist, but billionaires get a lot of flak for using private aircraft where it makes a lot of sense.
Zoom is not a valid substitute when you’re trying to make high stakes decisions that involve millions - billions of dollars and complex relationships in multiple time zones. Saying that human progress depends on it is a bit dramatic but these folks allocate large amounts of capital and have an outsized impact on the economy.
Sure, but the private jet usage is not exclusively to said high level meetings.... If it were, then the Oxfam piece above would be singing a quite different tune
Let's say that you can now make twice as many flights in a day. You can now do twice as many flights with the same crew and aircraft (same maintenance costs). Your fuel costs increase, but your other costs remain fixed, so despite the increase in fuel costs, you still end up making more profit. You might be able to charge more for the faster flights as well, and there may be beneficial second-order effects.
I hate to break it to you but the planet is very resilient. It was here long before humanity and it will be here and habitable for life long after we've disappeared or evolved into something else.
When we say “destroy the planet”, it usually means making it inhabitable for human (as we are) life, Mother Nature would recover in the long term, but in the long term we would be dead.
Global population is set to decrease dramatically as industrialization's demographic wave passes. Pollution will decrease with it. It's a plot change many haven't noticed yet.
Climate change skeptics think humans have little to do with climate change and so we are all doomed anyways (conservation won’t help, so YOLO). Definitely Mother Nature will correct it one way or another, and humans could be totally obsolete in a few centuries anyways. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable using this as justification to drive a canyonero.
We are already almost at +1.5° C, we are looking at +4° C at the end of this century with the current trends. The Global population will still be around 11 billion (3 billion more than today) in 2100 (if we are not all dead at that point from wars and famines which is inevitable after 4° warming).
As trajectories go, currently habitable places will become uninhabitable within the lifetime of people you know. And that process isn't nice. Becoming uninhabitable means a series of natural disasters (and clean water pressures) that force people to migrate. Mass migration means global turmoil as people scramble to get safe. And many will die along the way. That's already started.
The planet will physically be here but its habitability matters too. I don't really care about what comes after humans, as long as it doesn't come now and kill me and mine.
If your only argument is "life, uhh, finds a way", that's great. Thank you for your contribution. Now find us a way to relocate a billion people in the next three decades.
You might be ok with breathing air that tastes like dirty anus and gives you cancer in exchange for some added conveniences, but me and I'd hazard to guess most other people would rather make some concessions so our planet is as healthy as possible.
Actually, a nuclear holocaust would most likely not lead to all humans losing their lives. Many, if not most, would survive. Even some in the cities and their immediately surrounding areas would survive. Unless you tell everyone to go outside in the middle of their nearest city right before the bomb drops, you're going to be stuck with humans even after the dust settles.
And my point was that neither climate change nor nuclear holocaust would be sufficient to cause a mass extinction on the scale of, say, that which eliminated the dinosaurs. In either case there will be plenty of humans remaining.
Seems like a pretty unfounded assumption. Why do you think all of our knowledge and sources of societal stabilization are embedded in the communities most vulnerable to natural disaster?
Stop it. We must seize the wealth of all billionaires before the water rises to the second rung of the ladder on Barack Obama's dock in Martha's Vineyard.
You can offset environmental impact by excise-style taxes on the polluting activity that are used to subsidize environmentally-friendly processes elsewhere that would've otherwise used fossil fuels due to cost.
It's not perfect (as fossil fuels are still being burned) but it's better than nothing and a much more realistic solution than some extremist ideas such as stopping using fossil fuels overnight and effectively shutting down the economy as a result.
You can tax enough to remove 150% of the pollution. I'd call that much better than the status quo. And that's before we talk about the usefulness of funneling rich people money into technology research.
Yeah and those are necessary to avoid airlines filling all the way up at the cheapest location and thus wasting more energy carrying unneeded fuel around
I agree with you in principle, but it's probably easier to enforce speed limits than sound and emissions (because both are hard to measure while in air, in contrast to speed).
Sound would be measured at the ground, I presume, as no one is really bothered by loud things up in the sky, but by the ground.
For emission, require airlines/airplanes to have a emission-sensor installed that automatically measure the emission. As a part of take off, make it mandatory to check it's working and as a part of landing, make sure it sent there data to where it has to go.
Be careful witn that reductive reasoning. Fines are an entirely reasonable mechanism to regulate an industry that is highly competitive with tight margins.
You are contradicting the commenter but I don't think you understand fully what they mean. I took their comment to mean that rich people won't care about a fine and will happily continue polluting. Your statement about "tight margins" is exactly what they are referring to. Only people who care about "tight margins" i.e. poor people, i.e the majority of us, will be effected while rich people who do a disproportionate amount of damage will be able to shrug off the law.
I'd keep in mind that when people talk about the rich doing a disproportionate amount of the damage, if you're American, you're almost certainly who they're talking about. It's the normal American lifestyle that's doing the bulk of the damage, not specifically the richest of the US. The car-centered suburban lifestyle of much of the middle class is an environmental disaster. But sure, bigger houses made with more material and more flights by richer Americans aren't helping.
The middle class in America have a small impact on climate change just like they have a small impact on most things. If you want to understand what’s going on look into who was running disinformation campaigns and actively sabotaging efforts to add carbon taxes etc.
People love to blame SUV’s because they are in peoples faces, but replace every American SUV with an EV and the impact on the climate is negligible. Things would get just as bad a few weeks later, and that’s about it. People blame the rich and powerful because when you blame the people running things when things are fucked up.
Consider, the option for electrified roads instead of burning hydrocarbons existed 20 years ago. We could have reduced gasoline use by around 90% by now without any great breakthroughs but such choices aren’t up to individual consumers.
If you’re a middle-class American, you have a huge house by global standards, which you heat and cool more than just about anywhere else on Earth. Each family has two bigger than average cars which they drive more than most other countries. Middle class Americans also eat far more beef than most of the world.
It is true that middle class Americans fly less than the rich, let alone the super-rich in private jets.
Yes, the super-rich do pollute a great deal per capita. But the idea that American or indeed global emissions is in large part the result of private consumption of the super-rich is just wrong.
You completely missed my point, the problem isn’t that the rich and the super rich are flying private jets. The problem is they are actively controlling the narrative and obstructing progress.
Climate change is beyond individual choices. The infrastructure of suburban homes and roads doesn’t go away when someone moves into a city.
The actual solution is to discourage and then eliminate mining coal and other fossil fuels. Rather than simply rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
In terms of carbon released to support a given middle class family, it's not a small impact, it's the equivalent of the consumption of many hectares of active-growth forest. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that people have been steered toward the suburban design plan because that's what's been made available by decisions made by people that weren't them; I've personally had a hard time finding great walkable areas to live that push cars to the periphery. Zoning is a large part of the problem, and largely out of normal people's control. Municode-derived zoning is a blight on our nation, in my opinion.
But then I see what happens at city council meetings and on local forums when people suggest loosening up on zoning rules to allow for denser development. It's mostly normal people that are pushing back on this stuff, and then blaming the "greedy developers" for trying to "ruin their neighborhood". That "traffic is bad enough" and that "our infrastructure can't handle it". We can't have separated bike lanes because "we don't have enough parking as it is", or "that road is already too full, we can't take away lanes". It's totally ingrained in our culture.
Who's been running the disinfo campaigns on carbon taxes?
This seems like a pretty bad reason to want speed limits, because the thing you actually want to limit is fuel inefficiency. I think rules should normally try to achieve their goals through first-order effects rather than second order effects.
I don’t think wanting fuel efficiency is incompatible with getting rid of the speed limit rule.
Sometimes behaviour is legislated through second order behaviours because legislating first order behaviour is politically sensitive, or sometimes because even though the primary behaviour is already legislated the second order behaviour is as well. Not saying it's right, but it's exceedingly common.
I'd make an example but these are exactly the sort of things that launch off topic 10 page discussions with very low information content.
Sure, there are exceptions. When I wrote ‘normally’ to cover them, I was more thinking of things where it is hard to set good metrics for the thing one wants controlled, or cases where avoiding the spirit of the rule would be too likely.
Nevertheless, I think those are exceptions. I think first order effects tend to matter more than second order effects (that’s why they’re called first order) and not doing good first-order things because of potentially bad second-order things is often wrong.
Cars are regulated pretty differently from air travel though? And airlines are already quite incentivised to use less fuel as it’s a huge cost. I think it’s just a case of different things being different.
Doesn’t nearly-supersonic flight require more fuel than supersonic flight, at least in some cases? That seems to contradict fuel efficiency being a decreasing function of speed.
This is a terrible argument because it presumes there are no uses of faster travel that are beneficial. The proper argument is for a carbon tax that captures the externalities caused by emitting carbon and then to let individuals decide if they want to pay that or not for whatever activity they are partaking in.
Whether it benefits the masses or the elite is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the use is worth more than the correctly priced cost of carbon
Because the problem with carbon is that the cost of emitting it is not reflected in the market price of the things emitting it. This is called an externality in economics. You fix the externality by taxing the carbon emission at a level that covers the externality. After that you let the much more efficient market sort out what emits and what doesn't because it does a far better job than than any grouping of hacker news commenters expressing what ever combination of the seven deadly sins you think makes them hate the most productive people in society. Markets work and envious, wrathful authoritarians don't. You just end up with another episode of great moments in unintended consequences going down that road.
>Markets work and envious, wrathful authoritarians don't.
So EPA, FDA, etc regulations should be replaced with fees for poisoning everyone rather than outright bans, because to desire freedom from such concerns is to be a jealous tyrant?
The short answer is: some should be replaced, some should be cancelled outright for being stupid, and some are great ideas that should continue. Those two institutions are massive and encompass such a large variety of things that they have things in all categories (should be taxed instead, should be cancelled, and should stay banned).
The technically correct answer but practically silly answer is: yes because the correct charge for the externality of poisoning everyone would be asymptotic and unaffordable by anyone so it would amount to a ban.
Also the concern is not about being a jealous tyrant, the fact of the matter is markets almost always work better than dictating what to do, especially in the long term due to reacting to new information more effectively and changing course more effectively than an authoritarian regime.
When something is banned any action including planning to do it at all are criminal conspiracies and its hard to change this. When something is taxed its an easier ask to reduce the cost, to play games with finances and parent child company relationships, or just go bankrupt and not pay. The penalties, costs, resolutions for not paying your bills are completely different by design compared to the tools to respond to active plans to commit crimes thus using fees to control things nobody should ever do is ill conceived at best.
Insofar as market based solutions I don't know why you imagine they should work. People are in general hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless. The only way to make them behave with any modicum of sanity and decency is for someone educated in the topic of interest without a dog in the fight to stipulate based on objective standards the kind of things one must and must not due in order not to fuck their fellow man.
The fact that this at present remains less than ideal doesn't mean we ought to trust the same immoral pieces of garbage with less controls on the notion that they will do a better job that way rather than trivially corrupt the over-complicated process. By and large we know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do we don't need a market based solution to figure it out we need a less bought and paid for government to actually implement what we already know.
You are arguing against the technically correct but practically silly answer when I am not making that argument (except for the very specific case of carbon emissions and what you are allowed to output carbon emissions for. CO2 emissions are not a life and death situation any time soon, they cause potential range of harm in the far future on some spectrum of probability with another spectrum of probability for completely mitigating the problem before it causes serious harm through technology and that makes up the bulk of the externality that needs to be priced).
Do we really have to rehash how and why markets work better in 2023? I mean, we spent the last century watching places that adopted freer markets succeed and places that went in the opposite direction failing, we saw communism fail a couple times, we watched communists that embraced markets turn themselves around (although they now look a lot more like facists, which is very concerning), etc. They likely work precisely because so much of humanity is hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless and free markets allow those that aren't to supply the needs of the rest while building up capital, increasing influence and spreading capability throughout the system. On the other hand authoritarianism might have flashes of excellence but more often than not excellence has dumbass kids or friends that replace him or other factors change and the formerly excellent authoritarian doesn't pivot like the multitude of independent actors in a market can and then that flash is gone and we are back to stagnation for the society organized along authoritarian lines.
Your third paragraph's main flaw is that WE don't know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do. YOU think you know that and YOU may be too hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy and/or useless to know when YOU are wrong. With a market solution you can be all of those things and it's usually self regulating because you lose your ability to influence anything by blowing your resources on stupid, while people that get it right end up with more resources to bet on their predictions in the future.
>Do we really have to rehash how and why markets work better in 2023? I mean, we spent the last century watching places that adopted freer markets succeed and places that went in the opposite direction failing
No, we spent the last century watching the utter depravity of free market capitalism be reigned in by regulations. Free markets don't maximize public welfare, they maximize profit for successful marketers.
Your comment is the equivalent of looking at the cherry on top and drawing conclusions about the palatability of the ice cream sundae while ignoring that the rest of it is being eaten by maggots.
Also maximizing profit for successful individuals in the market is equal to maximizing public welfare IF regulation is successfully mitigating market power and externalities, which is exactly what I have been arguing for here. Everybody knows the outcome of a totally free market is monopoly and there is a role for government in breaking up/regulating those potential monopolies to mitigate their market power as well as in spots where there are natural externalities that need to be priced in. That I seem to have to recap all of this before making an argument that a specific regulation is incorrect is a bit concerning, as the above is basically settled in economics and the current argument is what should be regulated and how (which is the discussion we are having here regarding a national speed limit on flying and how it is incorrect to argue who changing the law will benefit regarding carbon output when we can just tax the carbon at the amount that most likely covers the externality and not have to make those judgement calls (and risk getting them wrong as we often do).)
Free markets are excellent in picking which shoe store ought to succeed and how many are needed in town. Setting by regulation a list of thou shalt and thou shalt not for various industries isn't communism nor authoritarianism its a normal function of government. The fact that you can't tell the difference virtually disqualifies you from further discussion. Nothing incidentally is self regulating.
We ended up with food safety laws because people did things like knowingly sell unsafe adulterated milk, causing thousands of infants to die (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal). If you do that these days, you will simply go to jail.
Or get executed, as happened with China's 2008 milk adulteration scandal.
You're asking how taxes and fees are different from criminal penalties? I guess the simplest way to put it would be that you go to prison for not paying enough of the one, whereas you'd go to prison for paying too much of the other.
Taxes work in some cases, but we do bans as well sometimes when it makes sense. That isn't authoritarianism; it's just regular governance. Or you could call it civilization.
In terms of climate change, there isn't really any budget of "safe" CO2 emissions left -- we've used it all up by largely ignoring the problem up until now.
The world can't realistically just stop using fossil fuels right now, because so much of our infrastructure depends on it. But we can stop wasting fuel on things we don't need. One of those things we don't need is the vast majority of air traffic that isn't transporting high-value time-critical cargo or getting people where they need to go to complete a specific job (and if it could have been done with a Skype call then no, it isn't a need).
If you want to tax something, you have to define it, measure it, and report it. You need a system for collecting the taxes, a system for enforcing the collection, and a system for validating that the reported numbers are correct. You will need more regulations and more bureaucracy than if you had simply banned it.
Banning something is a solution that prevents some people from doing what they want. Taxing something is a solution that subjects a (potentially much) larger group of people to a reporting and tax burden and random inspections. If it's authoritarianism you are concerned about, you have to contrast the sizes of these groups and the potential harms from the banning and tax collection to determine which solution is worse.
Which is a tax on jet fuel, not on carbon emissions. If you raise the tax to cover the negative externalities, you create an incentive to use other fuels that may be less efficient and more harmful but cheaper. If you extend the tax to cover the use of all fuels in aviation, you need a mechanism to prevent people from using fuels bought for other purposes.
Regulation is difficult, especially when you are trying to outwit the market.
There is also sufficient regulation in place to make sure jets don't put random garbage in their fuel tanks. Not that you need it, because it would damage the engines.
I have no idea what you think a passenger jet would switch to?
Not random garbage but fuels the engines are specifically designed to use. After the regulations are in place, in order to circumvent them.
If writing regulations that have the intended effect without significant downsides was as easy as you suggest, tax planning would not be a big business.
How do you define an airline? Especially if the company is active in multiple fields of business. Would a business that operates both planes and trucks have an advantage or a disadvantage under your tax scheme?
How do you deal with refueling at international destinations and possible carbon taxes in the destination country?
Do you actually want to tax carbon emissions or climate impact? A synthetic fuel could plausibly be carbon neutral, but burning it at the cruising altitude would still have an impact on climate change.
I don't need to define an airline. The tax applies to anyone fueling a plane, and I was just saying that airlines are huge and they're not going to hide.
A business with other things has no advantage or disadvantage.
> How do you deal with refueling at international destinations and possible carbon taxes in the destination country?
Pick an option. It won't make much difference.
> Do you actually want to tax carbon emissions or climate impact? A synthetic fuel could plausibly be carbon neutral, but burning it at the cruising altitude would still have an impact on climate change.
We can have that as a possibility. Probably it's worth wording the law so that the tax scales with the remediation cost.
First, you are thinking about the airlines that exist today, rather than the businesses that would exist under the new regulations. If it's more tax efficient to operate the hypothetical supersonic business jets under a multi-industry conglomerate, that may well be what's going to happen.
Second, international refueling has historically been the main reason why jet fuel cannot be taxed properly. In many European countries, gas has long been much more expensive than jet fuel. If you try taxing jet fuel without coordinating the tax scheme with nearby countries, the end result is increased emissions. Planes will refuel under a more favorable tax regime, fly with a heavier fuel load, and maybe even trade some payload for fuel. Airlines may also route their flights suboptimally to take better advantage of cheaper fuel.
Third, if you want to tax climate impact, it's not enough to tax fuel. You have to collect data on where the fuel is actually used and build new systems for ensuring that the reported data is correct. And then you need a model for calculating taxes from the data, which is going to be a politically contested issue. Especially when the model is changed according to the latest scientific understanding.
> I don't see how business structure affects my suggestion at all. The main tax would be on fuel purchases.
Including fuel used by trucks when the same fuel could also be used in planes? If you tax it, businesses that operate both trucks and planes are at disadvantage. If you don't, you create opportunities for tax evasion.
> So make it an EU thing. And the US can do pretty well by itself despite that.
The EU has to deal with major hubs outside its regulations in London and Istanbul. As for the US, Toronto is conveniently located for many domestic routes.
> And you can charge planes at landing based on any fuel they recently used that wasn't taxed enough.
Assuming that you are allowed to do that, according to various tax treaties and free trade agreements you would like to keep.
> Nah you don't have to do that. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and don't try to make taxes too complicated.
Unfortunately it's 2023 and not 2003. The window of opportunity for a good outcome has already closed, and even an ok outcome requires understanding the difference between carbon neutral and climate neutral.
And as I mentioned, there is an alternative to making taxes too complicated: banning activities that are obviously wasteful.
Assessing a tax doesn't actually clean the air. All it does is ensure that only the rich have the right to fuck everyone else over. If the government committed to funding carbon capture at a rate of at least as much as they would've in the counterfactual where there was instead a ban plus the additional amount funded by the carbon tax revenue, taxing the externality would probably be adequate redress, but that isn't ever going to happen.
You have to both put the entirety of the tax towards it and ensure that the fact that you're funding it through the tax doesn't decrease the amount of additional funding you put towards it or else that decrease effectively decreases the tax rate (at least as far as carbon capture is concerned). The second part is harder than the first.
This is what happened when lotteries started spreading across the US. The proceeds were earmarked for schools, so naturally, the property tax rates (which pays for most school funding) was held in check, resulting in no actual increase in school spending.
Carbon taxes (as they exist now) are a con. You just buy some carbon credits from some company that is supposedly carbon-negative, because it plants forests somewhere so obscure that nobody checks.
And anyway, forests are not carbon-negative; all that lives must die. They're carbon-neutral.
We do not have carbon taxes, we have carbon credits. Carbon credits are at best green political theater. At worst they're an effective means for the carbon economy (coal, oil, gas) to deflect efforts to get a carbon tax on the table, as evidenced by comments like this one.
Carbon taxes, on the other hand, are an effective solution to global warming.
Carbon tax != carbon credits. Carbon credits are part of emission trading approach. Carbon tax doesn't need credits cause uses money. Not being cheatable is one of the advantages of carbon tax.
Offsets are basically mostly lies and nonsense. If your goal is to reduce emissions in absolute terms controlling it with taxes makes less sense than just limiting which unlike offsets actually does something.
Looking it up, the Concorde flew at 60,000 ft, compared to normal planes at 30,000 ft.
And atmospheric pressure at 60k ft is less than a quarter of what it is at 30k.
Is it possible to fly twice the speed of a regular aircraft but without using that much more fuel, by flying higher? Or does the plane have to burn even more fuel to get up to that altitude and maintain lift in a thinner atmosphere?
Yes. It's one of the reasons liquid hydrogen is potentially a better fuel than kerosene. You need a larger volume of fuel, but you carry less mass which makes cruise more efficient, and hydrogen burns so lean that you can fly around twice as high. You would cruise around 70k ft, instead of the usual 35k.
You do need more energy to go that high and fast, but it take a bit of analysis to figure out if it's problematic. Most likely it would be driven by the mission profile as to whether or not the trade-off is worth making.
One of the bits of trivia about the Concorde: It nominally flew at 60k feet, but a "cosmic radiation" sensor was added, and if went above some limit, they would descend to 47k feet or lower.
Not sure the quotes are necessary. That's exactly what it was.
"In the days when the supersonic transport was in active service, and cruising at between 60 and 68,000 feet, the estimated radiation received by the crew was 50-130 mSv/yr. thus, obviously, as newer generations of aircraft cruise ever higher, by the time we reach altitudes above 60,000 feet, it is entirely possible that, especially with crews flying trans-Atlantic or transpolar routes, the acceptable maximum safe dose of radiation per year will be exceeded. In addition, these numbers do not take into account the possibility of pregnancy in female crewmembers. "
I just imagined this as Nethack, where a pilot readout suddenly says, "Oh wow! Everything looks so cosmic!" and then everyone/everything in the cabin begins hallucinating.
I haven’t ever thought of cosmic radiation in that way before. It would be interesting to know more data on the rate of bit flips when flying at altitude.
If I edit my photos on the flight home, am I more likely to corrupt my files with bit flips?
Yes, even at normal flight altitudes rays energetic enough to flip bits are hundreds of times more common than at sea level. It would be a fairly poor idea to put your new datacenter in La Paz (or Utah for that matter ... attention: NSA).
Not twice as much I think, but it's definitly more efficent to fly higher if it's in the efficent envelope of these engines , just alone cause winds up there are way way faster which can be very favorable, because of the Coriolis
Effect
Take it just a little further: why not ballistic flight? Sure, they call it the "vomit comet" for a reason but with the right marketing and some investment in gravol, I feel like the zero g portion of the flight should be a selling point.
There's also no reason to keep everyone in the same capsule once you're in space: you could have multiple independent reentry vehicles. Fire off a rocket somewhere West of Chicago, send a dozen people to Stockholm, a dozen to London, a bit of cargo to Prague.
As long as nothing ever seems to be mysteriously off course and heading for Moscow it sounds like a great idea. Is it easy to distinguish a ballistic missile full of passengers from the more bad kind?
Fit them with transponders and broadcast schedules well in advance of flights. The destination can veto a flight at any time before launch, and have inspectors at the point of launch. In this way, Moscow (etc) could keep arrivals down to a limit that their antiballistic defenses can handle, and ensure that only people-carriers are being put into their airspace. An attacker would be limited to a single kinetic suicide attack before their target goes on high alert.
But I was more curious about the fuel efficiency...
Which is offset by the need to climb through 30,000 ft on the way to 60,000 ft.
It turns out that higher cruising altitude isn’t nearly as useful as atmospheric pressure might suggest. Aircraft end up optimized for their cruising altitude, but there’s a lot of tradeoffs when targeting a higher altitude.
Doesn't that also imply that it would be possible to fly a modified plane at the regular speed of a regular aircraft at that much higher altitude, and use way less fuel? Airlines' main cost driver is fuel, so it seems like they'd take advantage of that as much as possible.
If you go higher, the speed of sound decreases so you have to go slower to avoid going above the critical Mach number for your aircraft. Normal airliners have to stay quite a bit below Mach 1 to avoid any part of the airflow going supersonic, since that would create big issues like shock waves making the aircraft uncontrollable.
But due to the air being really thin, you also have to go faster. Otherwise your wings will not generate enough lift to keep flying.
IIRC, that's what made jet planes possible in the first place. Jet turbines in general, and particularly the first ones, were horribly inefficient compared to props. However, they let you fly so much higher that it kind of canceled out.
The turbofan engines of today mitigate this inefficiency by, in essence, strapping a big prop in front of the turbine, except we call it a fan.
I think it's called a fan and not a prop, because it's a fan and not a prop.
Props employ lift like a wing. Fans are screws.
It's really a spectrum where most props & fans actually posess at least a little of both properties, and there are some in the middle that had to simply be called propfans.
Funnily enough the SR71 at Mach 3.5 had a better mpg than a Boeing 747 below Mach 1. It’s kind of hard to compare apples to apples here - but at supersonic speed, different engine technology can be used with better fuel efficiency…
U miss the point entirely that supersonic planes work differently from “traditional” subsonic planes. Just assuming that “faster equals less fuel efficient” is not really correct. Turbofan engines are kind of draggy and not so fuel efficient close to Mach 1. Ramjets change your equation… :-)
The point is poorly made. Would be like talking about how fuel efficient the space station is for it's speed. Can only work if you ignore the trip to that steady state.
So, for the blackbird, how does it do on take off? You know, when it is literally leaking fuel? :)
You also have to compare getting to that speed. And, of course, the comparison is dead when done per passenger. Might as well compare a missile in there, or a drone.
And I guess the brains behind a Ferrari enjoy their work more than engineers designing said bus. And Ferraris will attract more attention than a bus.
Maybe some things are just unnecessary. Conquering the useless and doing unnecessary things is what keeps me sane and happy. But our mileage on that topic might vary.
Maybe start with taxing the rich higher taxes, have minimum wage, maximum allowable working hours and all that stuff. The country I live in does that. You unemployed with three kids? Government pays your housing, free education for school and college (which is the same for rich and poor) and free healthcare.
Why does designing a Ferrari have anything to do with your broken society? It’s not about the Ferrari - it’s about middle class upwards being cheap. Pay higher taxes and your problems on “improve live of workers” will go away.
I pay approx. 60-65% on my gross income. Do the same and we can start talking again.
… and don’t be cheap about “oh no, I cant because I can’t change the tax system”. Start tipping everyone rendering you a service until 65% of your gross income is gone every month. That UPS driver picking up your package - here’s 50$. That school teacher staying late at a parent conference. Take my money. The lady in the supermarket - take the $100 because I don’t need it. At least you can feel good about it because you do it voluntarily. You can fix it with (your own) money.
Drag goes back from the transonic peak but not below what was at subsonic speed.
The gain comes from being able to fly in thinner air if the plan be is designed to survive the the transonic regime and supercuise, because mach speed becomes lower higher you fly and the air thinner, so lift available to subsonic planes is limited
If we had a robust carbon pollution tax, then this wouldn’t be a problem. The emissions would be priced into the ticket, and we could all (theoretically) fly easy.
The root of all this is really just that the pollution from fossil fuels needs to be paid for.
> The faster the plane goes, the more fuel it consumes due to the drag increase by the square of the speed. In a world where fossil fuel is needed to fly airplanes and where oil is causing a destruction of the world we inhabit, it's dangerous to suggest we should make the flying industry polluting more than they already are.
Just tax fuel to price in the externality and let people decide how much they want to spend?
> Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?
> How much should it be taxed to factor in the external cost?
I don't know. But that can be treated as a technical problem to figure out. (Problems being technical is good! Much more tractable than political or social problems.)
> Air fuel is taxed very little due to the Chicago convention.
I'm not quite sure how much the Chicago convention would hinder a clever law drafter. Judging by what I can see at Wikipedia on it, I would imagine you could technically tax not kerosene itself, but the burning of kerosene inside your airspace.
You are again trying to control the wrong thing - speed vs noise or carbon emissions. Price carbon and let details sort themselves out. Also by the same token, small elite will not generate a lot of carbon in the big picture.
“ n order to slow the rate of the damage, the Federation Council shared the findings with all known warp-capable species and imposed a speed restriction of warp factor 5 on all Federation vessels in all but extreme emergencies. The areas of space most damaged by that point were restricted to essential travel only.”
Everybody sure can find something to handwring over when it comes to climate change. We fucked the environment pretty good and we’ve barely begun to feel the effects.
Let’s just fly around really fast and enjoy it for the next century or os.
Seems like a good job for a carbon tax to change the economic calculations involved. Perhaps for some, the speed would be worth it, but they'd be paying for it.
if we’re talking passenger miles per gallon then commercial planes are often more efficient than vehicular transport, especially when considering vehicles with only 1 or 2 passengers
I'm going to assume you are not trolling and hope this will change your mind, but I am not sure what proof you expect will convince you. It's worth asking yourself before reading these what is the level of proof you require to be convinced, and then see if these are fulfilling your expectations.
I have not read this one in depth but maybe it will help change your mind on some misconceptions: https://skepticalscience.com/
I'm happy to link similar studies from across the world if you speak other languages.
I know for every link I send you, you will find an equal number of links from climate change deniers. Put please put in perspective the number of people on one side of this issue and the other: the overwhelming majority of scientists agree.
And even if they are wrong, is it really that bad to try to burn less oil and make the air less polluted and our planet more hospitable?
> issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history.
Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth. Seriously, f this guy. I suppose he's in favor of letting us chuck all of our garbage out of open windows while we drive, too.
I've heard sonic booms before at air shows, and it's not some quiet little "beep". They're loud and disturbing. As someone who values silence, hearing these frequently at any hour of the day would drive me insane.
I don't doubt there is technology that can make booms quieter, but until it's 0, STFU. Sick of people arguing that creating technology for the benefit of a tiny few (as others have mentioned, supersonic travel will always be inherently more inefficient) is OK, the externalities on the rest of the populace be damned.
“I've heard sonic booms before at air shows, and it's not some quiet little "beep". They're loud and disturbing.”
I highly doubt you’ve heard a sonic boom at an airshow, it’s illegal to perform them and has been for a long time. A true sonic boom performed at low altitude at an airshow would blow out the eardrums of every attendant at the show and all the windows in every car in the parking lot. Only the military is allowed to cause them and only for very good reason. There was a recent case in the UK where fighter jets caused a sonic boom as they were scrambled to respond to a malfunctioning plane; the video is here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGR96Zz0dXk and it had people from over 20km away calling the police to report that a bomb had gone off somewhere nearby.
What you’ve heard at airshows is close to a sonic boom, it’s called “tickling the cone” and it’s highly compressed but not collapsed sound waves. It resembles the regular roar of an airplane, but packed into a few seconds. Very different to a sonic boom, which sounds exactly like an explosion.
(The practical upshot is this strengthens your argument.)
Poor guy is so dragged into the pipe of the magical supersonic flight he sees absolutely nothing outside, even the economic downtrun is attributed partially to the sonic boom ban on the end, and the key to greatness are booms in the sky, ridiculous. :D
As one spent my childhood in the Eastern Bloc with fighter planes practicing overhead passing supersonic limit frequently I say the sonic boom is no joke. Most likely those happened lower than the cruising altitude of an airlener and consequently the shaking windows and frighetened animals (and children) may be avoided if happen higher up yet the more silent ones were still enough waking up anyone. Happening multiple times throughout the night - airliners fill the night sky - would be detrimental to health in an already noisy society where good sleep is seldom.
I am living now in Easter Anglia and one or two years ago two Eurofighters went on to intercept an airliner not responding to calls and the resulting booms not only broke the work for everyone - wife was on a call and both end startled about the loud 'explosions' nearby - but the booms were in the news that day triggering discussions and analysis.
Booms are pretty distracting. Even milder noises are like low rumble coming from a factory or works, especially during the night. Better to be avoided, the regulators were wise. Uncaring fisherman - observed by the author - lost in an activity then interrupted by a mild boom only for seconds is no reliable reference here I think. : ) Someone lost in an activity - mind is engaged in to the level of being disconnected of surroundings - should not be noticing it at all to be accepteble.
He's proposing allowing sonic booms below certain decibel limits that are apparently below what any aircraft can achieve today. So your experience with airshow sonic booms is not directly relevant.
They are proposing 85db at ground level. That’s as loud as a gas lawnmower, except it would sound like an explosion.
Even current aircrafts’ air braking is loud enough to be annoying as hell (to the point where people routinely complain and force airports to move approach routes).
The air brakes sound something like “dew-yoooouuuuu”. Not sure what the actual name of the hated thing that makes the noise is.
That's the sound of changing configuration from descent to landing. Involves increasing power to the engines which is the main source of the sound involved.
Properly executed landing in airliner doesn't use airbrakes until touchdown (where they are used among other things to ensure airplane doesn't accidently lift from runway and are triggered by pressure sensors on main gear).
To quote a certain pilot's response to ATC: "Air brakes are for when I fuckup, not for your fuckups"
so it would be about as loud as something most suburban homeowners do on a weekly basis during the summer, but for a much shorter duration? not really making your point here... that sounds like a fair tradeoff to decrease flight times.
Once that’s a law, it’s super easy to get politicians to alter that number a bit more your way every year. That won’t make news or cause pushback that a binary decision makes.
No, the better thing is to demonstrate the lower number as achievable first, then change the rules to go into production.
Well, the level of carcinogenic jet exhaust allowed in aircraft cabins during taxi-ing has been steadily creeping up now that its been a few decade since all those flight attendants died of rare cancers…
And we're not talking about one (rich) bastard disturbing one other person. A sonic boom will disturb almost everyone under/near the flightpath. How many people would be under a supersonic flight down the US east coast from (say) Boston to Tampa - 50 million?
This is an absurd attitude. Most human activities have externalities, from farming to driving to playing music to hiking to having the lights on.
Things with externalities should ideally have the beneficiaries be made to pay for those externalities, or if that's not practical, have them measured as best we can and a sin tax imposed.
That's such a simplistic attitude. Piguvian taxes aren't magic. And a sin tax doesn't help the people who live close to the airport.
Yeah great you have terrible living situation but at least the government has money for new F-35s.
And the reason this isn't done is because very often you couldn't pay those things in the first place. So companies that depend on not paying them will just lobby it away or die.
Sometimes its better to just make it illegal so no company actually starts depending on these things.
OK, sure, maybe make some things illegal if your government is incapable of spending money well, but you definitely need to weigh the pros and cons in that case, not impose a blanket ban on anything with a negative externality!
Ok, and from the other side of things, I’ve never heard a sonic boom in my life. No idea how loud it is, or what the tradeoffs are. Shouldn’t we get a say?
More generally, bans on a technology “forever” just seem silly. It should at least be revisited every decade or so. A decade brings lots of advancement; maybe there’s some clever way of minimizing the boom from a sonic boom now.
Or maybe there isn’t. But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “if it’s >0, ban it. No noise whatsoever!” Like… you’ve heard loud motorcycles. Why not argue for those to be banned too?
A sonic boom is quite loud and will shake all the windows of every home across a state (though only a smaller section of the state if it is large like California).
I have not heard them since the Space Shuttle was retired.
I agree with the forever part in theory. However in politics (and law) if you leave a door slightly open, then people are incentivized to open it wide open and “get around” various rules.
Permanent “for forever” laws and never that. They are forever until someone changes them. That’s more binary and easier to reason about than “this sonic boom is better than that sonic boom so it’s ok, and it the 1980s already so let’s have at it!”. You set some threshold number, then the politics is about the number not the booms themselves really.
If technology has truly advanced enough, people will change the laws. Done.
Now as an engineer, I prefer the threshold. But it’s so much easier to change that. You start a company in 1980 and have so much better tech after 10 years in 1990, but it doesn’t materially change things enough, so you shut down or try and change the threshold. What do you do?
Implying we have any control over the laws. :) It’s lobbyists all the way down. Outsourcing our freedom to lobbyists seems like a bad idea in almost every case.
“Just change the law” is usually not an easy proposal. One could argue that it shouldn’t be. But technology advances much faster than the law, and having a lag time of decades doesn’t seem optimal in most cases.
You only hear them if you live near an airport, and only if you’re right under the landing approach or takeoff route. But not when they’re cruising at 30,000ft, or even if you live within visual range of the airport but not under the takeoff/landing path.
The French used to fly Mirage jets over the sea near where my family used to go on seaside holidays - no airport anywhere near. I don't know what altitude they were flying at, but you could see them clearly - as long as you looked at the opposite side of the bay from where the sound came from.
To be clear, they boomed, and it was loud and annoying.
You're still wrong, or nearly deaf. During the night I can hear airliners between 9 and 13KM up. With closed windows. Through triple paned glass. Sometimes even while hearing music with over the ear headphones, at between 20 to 30% volume. It varies in intensity with the weather, but it's regular.
Edit: They don't need to be directly above me, 10KM to any side suffices. Of course it depends on the type, too. From experience, curiously clicking on flighttrackers to see who was that, it doesn't really matter though, because it goes all the way from small bizjets over airliners and freighters to heavy transports. And then there is the military. Always louder, no matter which. Even subsonic.
The author doesn't make a particularly good case for it though, because it's relatively straightforward to define whether an aircraft is or isn't exceeding Mach 1 (and even more straightforward to stay well below it), whereas decibel levels from a sonic boom depend on the position of the observer amongst other things, and what's "acceptable" is as the article discusses still a research problem. Non-US markets and airframers exist, a first generation Mach 1 airliner existed and failed to gain traction, people worked on "low boom" supersonic airliner projects anyway, and if a working implementation didn't remain purely hypothetical, Congress is perfectly capable of amending a law.
He also misses the much bigger impediment to supersonic jets than a local rule in the US being fuel cost, most amusingly when he points out that 1973 was the beginning of a so-called Great Stagnation but somehow misses the oil embargo and the resulting fears over fuel prices affecting everything that decade, including killing the demand for Concorde in the rest of the world and changing airframers' focus to fuel economy. I think when he's suggesting that only a "vocal minority" (which exceeded the number of people ever to have experienced the rich person's pleasure of supersonic flight) held us back from linear progress in commercial aviation speed so we'd all be flying around at Mach 4 by now, he's also being governed by emotions.
I did read it. Most of it was arguing "Hey, it's not that bad, we did some tests and only a few folks were really bothered about it, and some people are bothered by anything, so screw them!"
If I decide to go live in the middle of nowhere for some solitude, I shouldn't have to defend my choices to enjoy that solitude as "you're just too sensitive!".
I think a lot of people here are missing the author's point. It's not about letting people go faster per se. It's about the fact that the ban doesn't actually target the right thing.
The purpose of the Mach 1+ ban is to reduce noise. But if the goal is to reduce noise, why not just set noise limits? We have the ability to measure noise, so if the goal is to reduce noise, set a limit on noise.
Then let the airplane operators innovate however makes sense for their business. If you're worried about pollution (which is a good thing to worry about!) then there should be a separate fuel per mile limit or a carbon tax. Then they can innovate within both constraints.
But the whole point is that the metric being used is wrong -- it should be noise output, not speed.
This is a good summary of the author's point. In a historical context, it may be the case that the only useful way to enforce "quiet skies" was to put a speed limit, but that doesn't account for changes in technology that may enable quiet booms.
Most commenters in this thread seem to take issue with the author's assumption that there is no other justification for a speed limit other than noise reduction.
Honestly, I find the author's premise to be vaguely reasonable, but the whole thing is undermined by the god-awful chart which extrapolates historical aircraft speeds to imply that without the "speed limit" rule, we would have commercial aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean at 2500 mph. (Per wikipedia[0], the fastest manned aircraft in history, a SR-71 blackbird flight, capped out below 2200 mph.)
Yeah this is a good point. The military was never capped by speed limits nor fuel costs or pollution limits. And even they didn't go faster than 2200mph as far as we know.
Which either means there was no reason to figure out how to go faster, or they just couldn't do it. If the former, maybe with commercial pressures there would be a reason to go faster, but that's unlikely. And with the latter, well I'm not sure a commercial entity would out-innovate the military-industrial complex.
> The military was never capped by speed limits nor fuel costs or pollution limits. And even they didn't go faster than 2200mph as far as we know.
But the military had other constraints, and needs.
One thing the military doesn't need as much as the civilian world is comfort. You might prefer to go from New York to Hawaii in 2 hours instead of 11. The military might prefer that too, but maybe not as much.
A lot of the things for which the military needs speed have alternatives: if you want to bomb a place, you can send missiles, if you want to surveil it, you may use satellites. If you want to evade some incoming surface-to-air missile, you are out of luck anyway. That's the reason the top speed of F-35 is lower than the top speed of earlier jet fighters like F-14, F-15 and F-16.
On the other hand, the military needs to optimize for other things. Maneuverability. Ability to open up a bomb bay and drop bombs (imagine Concorde opening up some hatch in the middle of its supersonic flight). Capability to take off from shorter runways. High G forces. And of course for more recent military jets low observability.
Compared to that, civilian aircraft is very boring: it needs to fly at a constant altitude and constant speed. That's the reason Concorde flew more supersonic miles than all the military jet fighters in the world combined.
"as far as we know" -- they're famous though for trotting out the Blackbird and setting a new public speed record just exceeding whatever the Soviets had previously advertised.
Author never stated what the current noise level is, but in my experience when I'm in the middle of nowhere and a jet passes over at cruising altitude, I pretty much can't hear it
If this changes it so that this is no longer true, then no, screw this idea.
Plus the reality is it would just be used by rich people to jet about, probably emitting much more c02 per mile.
I think "noise limits" should extend beyond simple decibel. Even if sonic booms can be made much quieter, just a random faint explosion, if I can still hear them I will go nuts. The unpredictability and suddenness of it would be the problem, not the volume.
Currently working up the energy to go on a walk so I don't have to hear my neighbors drying machine turn on and off at random intervals.
Absolutely right, it is somewhat disappointing that the top two comments are just negative gut reactions by commenters that don't seem to have actually read the article.
Well I am old enough to remember the Sonic Booms. We would get a warning in the local newspaper (sometimes) and as kids we will watch outside waiting for the boom and try and find the plane. We lived fairly close to a base that would test these planes.
But, some people's windows would crack and some would break due to the boom, which they had to pay for. So, if this limit is changed, will the aircraft owners pay people for their broken windows.
Back then seeing a plane at any speed was not common event. Now you look up at just about any time of day and the chances are very good (like 90%+) you can find a plane.
I don't really care much one way or the other, but the article does address this.
The actual externality is the noise/pressure wave, not the speed. It makes sense to regulate as close to externalities as possible, rather than banning sort of related upstream things.
In other words, if they can do supersonic without booms that cause problems, go for it. If they're unable to, well, then they keep flying so as to not produce them.
I can only assume you’re being downvoted because folks are thinking that you can’t go supersonic without making a boom. While this may be true, it doesn’t change the fact that you make a good point - regulation should be made as close to externalities as possible. If it makes the upstream thing impossible, then fine, but let’s actually regulate what we want to regulate.
I saw that, I find that hard to believe unless they are flying extremely high. I think height was also mentioned.
But doesn't flying that high damage the ozone or something ? I thought that was one of the many reasons the concord was stopped (Yes, I know the real reason was financial). If so, many planes flying that high could cause other issues.
My wife used to live on Edward's Air Force Base which has been a reserved sonic boom corridor all along. Just some learnings for that lifestyle. Don't keep fragile things on narrow shelves and you have to glue the bottom of every picture to the wall. Don't have dogs or get them a xanax prescription. Cat's don't care. It's not (always) an earthquake when the glass rattles. And you get used to all of it.
Yes. Experienced numerous Space Shuttle sonic booms. For me they weren’t problematic like broken windows. But would wake you up.
I also remember waiting for the sonic boom from Columbia, which never came..
Am in north Texas. That morning, I was watching NASA TV’s coverage of what should’ve been the mission’s safe ending, and heard multiple sonic booms, closely spaced. This was soon after Houston had lost comms with Columbia following the warnings about weird sensor readings, and I said to myself, “That’s weird. That sounds like what a shuttle does when it’s—” . . . and then I stopped, as I slowly began to realize there might be a terrible reason why Houston had lost contact.
Oof. I really hope we aren't moving towards a world where people start to copy/paste verbose AI-generated paragraphs without checking the results. Especially not to answer simple questions like, "about how old is someone who was a child 50+ years ago?"
The AI's guess is off by about a decade. If GP remembers multiple booms, they were probably at least 10 by the 1973 ban. Most people can't recall memories back to the moment of their birth, but LLMs often ignore nuanced contextual facts like that. Or maybe this is another case of the model living a few years in the past, since there's a lag in being trained on new data.
Who knows, but I am troubled that its incorrect answer was so readily accepted. This is not an important question, but it would have been easy to double-check. This comment may be a grim portent of things to come, if people continue to trust these models so implicitly.
Isn't the real killer of supersonic commercial flights the inefficiency? You're using ~5x more fuel to have a flight that's ~2x faster. I suppose you can recoup the fuel cost with expensive tickets, but should we encourage even less efficient flights?
The myth of Concorde's inefficiency is pervasive, but Concorde was reasonably fuel efficient and generally brought a lot of income at least to British Airways. It's engines were efficient enough that it supercruised at Ma 2.0, something only matched by few models of Tu-144 (there were multiple with different engines, not all of them supercruising), combined with high altitude it could use many efficiencies not available to other airliners.
Ultimately it was maintenance issues (which in turn were caused by corporate political fights) and 9/11 (which required expensive modifications) that killed Concorde, not fuel costs - all combined with BA finding out that they could well enough replace the super-profitable Concorde routes with other aircraft and still make a bank even if individual tickets had to be made cheaper.
Yes you can sell Concorde tickets at profit, probably, but you can make more profit selling premium cabin seats on an A350, even if you fix the maintenance costs.
Although I will say if you reengineered Concorde with 2020s tech, maybe it would close the gap.
Maybe instead of "inefficiency" the better argument is opportunity cost. Hardly anyone flies pax 747s anymore, and I wonder how long Emirates will keep its A380s going.
While I don't worry about the impact of sonic booms on humans, and were concerned about the impact on the rest of the natural world.
Like low-level sonic booms, light pollution was never considered to be a big issue but eventually crossed the threshold where it now has significant negative impact on animals insects and plants. My concern is that once little sonic booms become commonplace and we start noticing the impact on the natural world, there will be too much money in play to stop the damage.
[edit] just remembered another low-level fact that people did not think was important. Jet contrails significantly increase high-level cloud cover which alters weather patterns and holds more heat in the atmosphere. A simple change in flightpath by modifying altitude by couple thousand feet can eliminate 80% or more of cultural formation but the airlines won't do it because of the small amount of additional money it would cost.
I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force.
This seems like a hasty conclusion to make. There are plenty of things that correlate with the stagnation of economic growth. I'm aware the author goes on to say almost the same thing after making this statement, but it is clear the author is trying to offer the ban on supersonic flight over soil to be the cause of economic stagnation in America.
To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority.
I fail to see how there has been a complete halt on the development of supersonic technology. A ban on supersonic flight over US soil is not a ban on the development of the technology.
We need to get back to doing great things.
Who says we aren't?
If we want growth—if we want greatness—it’s time to make America boom again.
I can't agree with the author's conclusion. Besides, they don't really make an effort in their article to tie the development of supersonic flight over land to economic growth. This is more of a "build it and they will come" conclusion. I don't buy it.
Who's going to spend millions (or billions) of dollars developing better supersonic technology when one of the most important markets is off-limits?
Militaries, for one. But that doesn't mean supersonic flight is completely off limits to passenger flight. There used to be regular flights across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds operated by Air France and British Airways. The last one was in 2003. Did the Concorde program fail because they couldn't fly over the CONUS?
What an amazing scientific experiment: "we flew a fighter jet over a Texas city to purposely annoy people, and asked how annoyed they were." Followed by: "only 17 people rated 'very annoyed' so that's a win." No mention of the number of people who put down any other annoyance level...
And annoyed people won't be able to like, move away from Galveston and get away from it. It's going to be over the whole country. Several times a day. I could see suicides rising.
>"Let's create a nuisance for everyone so that billionaires can save 20% time in the air"
This is how I read it too. I've lived near an air show (jets) location and I've lived near shuttle booms, both are annoying AF. The shuttle booms would make you jump out of your skin every time like we were being shelled and that occurred at 60,000 feet and there were two of them because of how large the shuttle was. Everyone would be annoyed by the air show because they'd practice for a week before the show. If I was on a call, I'd have to say, "gimme 20 seconds, a plane is going overhead." You'd have to pause the TV or radio or conversation because you couldn't hear anything. No thanks.
In all fairness to the billionaires (God knows how persecuted they are /s), it would be a lot faster than 20%. Probably 2-3x or more, depending on how fast they were allowed to go. You only pass the sonic boom threshold once.
I think the author is right in wanting laws to try to directly control the thing they care about rather than indirectly affecting it.
I’m confused about the other point though. Did this rule affect transatlantic flights? Somehow Concorde was allowed and I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now).
I think the extrapolation of the max speed graph doesn’t really make sense. It may have made sense to do that in the ’60s or ’70s, as I think that people in the aviation industry reasonably thought that was the direction planes were going. The 747 was designed to become a cargo plane once supersonic planes replaced it. But apart from Concorde, supersonic civilian jets didn’t happen so is the claim here that the rule prevented them from being developed because of the extra economies of scale from selling a few more planes to fly between the east and west coast? That is: I think this argument would have been more convincing if transatlantic supersonic flight was also banned and Concorde hadn’t existed. Given that that’s not what happened, I think it must make a stronger case for that rule hindering the development of supersonic civil aviation rather than other things like consumers preferring comfort to speed or the increased speed only affecting time in the air and not travel to the airport, waiting there, baggage claim, and travel from the airport.
Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.
And mainstream consumers preferring the lowest price to both.
But, yeah, if you're going to be any significant premium over lie-flat seating that's a tough sell for anyone for whom a small number of hours != losing money. (i.e. almost everyone.). Saving a few hours coast to coast for NY to London is not worth thousands of dollars to most people.
I thought Concorde was priced similarly to business class tickets on regular planes so I thought the trade off was speed vs lie-flat seating rather than speed vs dollars.[1]
There used to be a flight (BA1?) that showed a market desire for faster transatlantic flights: it took off from London City airport (lower travel time, potentially much lower; also less time in the airport as it’s smaller), all business class, flew to Ireland to refuel (runway is too short for it to take off fully loaded), passengers would do US passport control and customs in Ireland while the plane refuelled, then land in JFK and get transport to the city. I don’t think it has been reinstated since covid though. In the reverse direction, one could take a helicopter from downtown Manhattan to JFK, which improves speed except you need to arrive in advance of the flight and get a flight at a certain time, but you would go through security (and check-in?) in the heliport and so be on the post-security side when you got to JFK. I think they only have a midtown heliport now. You can book it through Uber, I think, and it is sometimes cheaper than an Uber to the airport.
So, I think there is some interest amongst frequent travellers for faster flights. I personally don’t sleep very well on flights so if I had a choice between a 7 hour lie-flat redeye from New York to London and a 3.5 hour[2] non-lie-flat flight at the same price, I would prefer the latter. But this would matter more if the travel/waiting time before/after the flight were reduced.
[1] I looked it up and I was wrong here. The cost was 10-15% more than first class which would have been more expensive than business class.
[2] I’m not sure what the right number to write down here is.
Concorde predated business class seating (and lie-flat) and, yeah, there was a premium over first class. (I had heard 30% but whatever.) My dad got "upgraded" once but he actually preferred regular (Pan Am I think) first class because of meal on board and timing.
Usually I'll take a day flight from NYC to London anyway so lie-flat doesn't really matter. I am taking a red-eye in a couple weeks, which I really try to avoid, but that's because United now has a direct from Boston to London so doing the zero dark thirty thing via Newark doesn't really make sense. If I'm awake the whole time, business is nicer but not a couple grand nicer for 7 hours or so. I can have some really nice meals and other things for that in London if I want to.
Yeah, there's no heliport at the former Pan Am building now but there is a heliport in midtown.
BA1 was the business class only LCY-JFK flight. It stopped and hasn't restarted AFAIK. Business-class only has been a tough sell economically.
> I would have thought that transatlantic routes would be sufficient to economically justify supersonic flights if they make sense. (Maybe they do make sense now).
Sure if you ignore the cost of developing the airplane. There is no way in hell that its worth it otherwise.
And that's why new things aren't developed. If its not the government spending billions of $ for a luxury product that has a tiny market, then nobody else will.
At best this rule prevented a few more Concorde routes.
But the idea that any US company would have build its own supersonics is crazy.
> Another thing I believe is that noise pollution is generally underrated and that society and governments should care more about how much there is and reducing it.
Yes. As 'Not Just Bikes' says, cities aren't loud, cars are loud.
Noise is an underrated factor in health, specially in densely populated places.
Boeing 'tried' in the sense that they said "We will try if the government pays for it". And also by 'tried' it means 'we propose an absolutely outrages design, to make sure it appeals to politicians and we can get money for it for the next 15 years.'.
As soon as the government money was gone, Boeing threw the plans in the trash. Everybody else who was competing for government money instantly threw their plans in the trash as soon it was clear no government money was coming.
The glaring issue I see with this proposal is the author supposes that people who say that they could “live indefinitely with sonic booms” have all the facts needed to make that assessment and are correct, or that they want to live indefinitely with sonic booms.
People could “live indefinitely” with ionizing radiation (and non-ionizing, I might add), but that does not mean it does not impact their health or wellbeing. There are detriments outside of the immediately obvious “loud noise bothers someone”, such as property damage, ecological destruction, environmental concerns, health impacts, passenger safety, etc.
In any spot in the country, you can look up and see aircraft, or contrails, every day, all day. Unless near an airport, you generally do not hear them at all. Even with boom reduction technology, booms would be heard by everyone, everyday. This is _not cool_. The author makes a valid point that the restriction should be on the noise generated, not the speed, but even the mitigated booms would not pass a reasonable test.
> Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit.
Is enforcing a perceived noise, or even a measured decibel limit on the ground even realistic? It would be difficult to investigate reported infractions unless they're consistently coming from a scheduled route, because the noise level on the ground depends on more than just the plane. "Supersonic jets that don't have a lot of headroom on the noise limits in a dry, flat desert shouldn't fly supersonic through this area because the the land underneath is shaped like a parabola and it's very humid." is much more difficult for a pilot to manage and a regulation body to enforce than "Don't fly faster than this airspeed." especially when the effect was the same back when the bill was introduced.
"..there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority."
Isn't the whole problem with boom shaping that it requires a thinner fuselage meaning you transport even fewer people? I just don't see this being viable.
Musk has talked for a long time about a supersonic jet that would fly higher and thus not be heard on the ground. However batteries would need to get quite a bit better still and it would be a massive expansive project.
Until such time as the FAA creates standards that allow supersonic aircraft to operate over the United States, civil supersonic flight shall be allowed as long as mean cruise sonic boom directly beneath the flight track is less than 90 PLdB for daytime operations or 80 PLdB for nighttime operations.
Wouldn’t this just encourage designs that create a sonic boom null zone directly below the aircraft and make it louder 10 or 20 degrees to the sides?
If the proposed new standard is already impossible to meet, why not continue with the current permitting system and when quieter craft are on the horizon, make meaningful standards?
I live on my sailboat near Cape Canaveral, FL. I hear sonic booms when SpaceX lands their Falcon9 back on the pad. 1) it’s never at night, usually on weekends or evenings (thank you SpaceX!). 2) It’s an awesome feeling but can leave the less healthy feeling a bit distraught. 3) Because they are able to land a stage 1 back at the pad, and that is a huge feat of engineering excellence, I’ll allow it. So awesome!
edit my point is there are people that aren’t as bothered by it as others and would like to see us do great things as a species
This article comes off as _very_ optimistic, to the point of making some really bad assumptions and misrepresenting data.
The bit about sitting in a sonic boom simulator chamber is just silly — the author's subjective opinion about the loudness of a sonic boom has no bearing on reality, and fails to factor in that sonic booms during e.g. Bongo II (1964) shattered windows not because of the sheer volume of the sonic booms, but because this pressure wave would strike the large surface area of a window nearly all at once, putting a fair amount of energy into it in doing so.
Almost as silly is the line extrapolating speed trends in commercial aviation over time; it reads like xkcd#605. It completely ignores the different regimes of high-speed flight and the limitations posed by it. 2,500mph is roughly Mach 3.2 at sea level, or nearly 3.8 at 60,000ft. At Mach 2, you need to start seriously considering thermal issues caused by friction related to parasitic drag and the paint/coating of the aircraft; at Mach 3, these become primary design constraints, and active cooling systems have to be deeply integrated into the airframe. This is to say nothing of the exotic engine design decisions that have to be made in these regimes.
Much north of Mach 4, transporting any useful load becomes borderline impractical in-atmosphere with current technology.
Ignoring fuel economy issues since I brought this up in a separate comment: since the introduction of the Concorde, the major focuses of aviation development have been on safety, reliability, and automation (all of which are strongly linked). "We live in the safest era of aviation in history" is an evergreen statement thanks to those advancements, and aviation incidents — while tragic and unfortunately not completely eliminated yet — claim fewer lives with each passing year (as a proportion of passenger-miles travelled).
I was a kid before 1973 and grew up within 100 miles of a couple of air force bases. I heard sonic booms almost every day. We'd be out playing in the yard and hear a kaboom sound, look up and see the contrail of a fighter jet. (It was always too high to hear the engine.)
It was just a normal part of life. Everybody was used to it and I never heard anybody complain about it. I've been in thunderstorms that were much louder.
Granted these jets were very high. If they had been going Mach 1 close to the ground, people would have complained about broken windows.
And I'm not suggesting my experience was the norm. Just that in some cases sonic booms were a part of life that nobody really paid much attention to.
"Yet, the ban is not unrelated to economic stagnation. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat, there is something decadent about putting a complete halt to the development of a key technology simply because a few otherwise harmless sonic booms might annoy a vocal minority. With boom-shaping technology we know is possible, a tiny vocal minority. The cultural forces that led to and sustain the ban have certainly halted other progress."
Straight from the Silicon Valley comedy show. Next: "Why sonic booms are actually a good thing."
Noise leads to health problems and should be outlawed.
Stratospheric supersonic aircraft will have other significant and very poorly understood environmental effects, with complicated tradeoffs between damaging the ozone layer and contributing to climate change:
Supersonic passenger transport is hardly an urgent global need, so can we at least do some more science to understand the risks and appropriately regulate first?
No justification is given for ending the ban. Supersonic places are expensive enough that supersonic flight will be the exclusive domain of the wealthy for years.
I'm okay with not having to deal with the booms if it means the wealthy are stuck flying the same speed as the rest of us.
The obvious retort is that many modern conveniences began as expensive goods that we eventually figured out how to scale, or make more cheaply. It’s not as obvious that this counter-argument is robust, given the known history that we have with the Concord3. But if the economic is won’t work out, they won’t work out.
But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things. And I say that as someone who thinks we should be taxing the wealthy at much higher rates than we do.
> But I’m increasingly leery of arguments that imply the best way to achieve fairness is for everyone to have fewer nice things
Isn't this exactly a case of everyone having fewer nice things (such as peace and quiet) for the sake of a convenience for the very few? The author seems to actually propose a noise level of 90 PLdB with a straight face.
Makes sense to focus on the actual issue (noise) and not speed.
It’d be awesome to have supersonic commercial aircraft that were also quiet. I’m excited about YC’s Boom and their overature plane, but it’d be so cool to able to fly coast to coast at supersonic speeds.
What it would do is signal to the aviation industry that America is open for business. It’s time to build new low-boom aircraft
This is completely idiotic. There is not a single goddamn reason to operate supersonic civilian aircraft except to cater to the whims of the wealthy. This jackass read a study and sat in a simulator and thinks he has even the slightest idea of what it's like to grow up getting boomed every day. I did. It's not fun having your house rattle all the time at random. I cannot even imagine what it would be like around a commercial airport that had dozens of supersonics every day instead of a handful of small military jets.
The low boom aircraft designs are something I haven't seen and are quite interesting. I have been under a few "non low boom" supersonics, and they rattle entire buildings and set off car alarms.
The author’s thesis is interesting but unfortunately he makes terrible arguments for it. Here’s a completely different and much better argument:
For the past half-century, this one law has ensured that the entire field of supersonic flight has been explored by just one actor, the military, which has a completely different set of incentives and interests to all other actors in the field of flight.
Fuel efficiency, noise pollution, passengers per flight, economic benefits of faster commercial travel - the military doesn’t care about these at all. But commercial aerospace engineers care a great deal about these things, they have made huge strides in improving them*, and this law effectively completely bars all of them from investigating supersonic flight because no matter what they might discover, they will not be permitted to implement any of it. There is no way even in principle to get around this law because it does not care about anything except the speedometer reading.
( *: ”Revenue passenger kilometers per kilogram of CO2” is a statistic that tries to capture the combined effects of a wide range of efficiency improvements. Wikipedia says it has gone from 0.4 in the 1950s to 8.4 in the 2010s, a 20x improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft The FAA says that in 1975, one person on the ground experienced significant noise exposure for every 30 people taking a flight. Today, one person experiences significant noise exposure for every 2,100 people taking a flight, a 70x improvement. The threshold for ‘significant noise exposure’ has not changed in this time. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/noi...)
For all we know there might be some particular combination of aircraft shape, speed, route, and cruising height that lets an aircraft skip along the upper surface of some obscure transition boundary in the atmosphere and you could fly a thousand passengers from London to New York in three hours using one-tenth of the fuel, and all the sound energy bounces off that boundary and is reflected into the upper atmosphere, never reaching the ground. We will never know because no company will pay any engineer to look for it because even if they found it they wouldn’t be allowed to test it, much less fly it commercially. They can’t even properly investigate it intellectually since there’s almost no research material because, again, it’s illegal in principle.
It’s hard to come up with an analogous law for other fields. It would be like banning any computation faster than one megaflop per second, because at the time of the law being passed we only had vacuum tubes and getting that speed out of a vacuum tube computer required a building the size of a football stadium and the tubes tended to explode and kill technicians. It would be like making it illegal for any person to travel at any speed greater than 20mph, because trying to go faster tended to harm the horses we were riding at the time.
We should repeal this law against supersonic flight (and replace it with an equivalent law that cares about the consequences of supersonic flight), to signal to aerospace companies that we will, in principle, let them do it - if they can do it well.
Even disregarding the sonic boom, why would we even want mediocre civil pilots to have access to aircraft thag are necessarily more dangerous and more destructive in the event of a crash?
Planes usually crash at takeoff and landing, hence supersonic or not doesn't matter for that case.
Crashing at any other time, sure, there is potentially more energy in a supersonic plane. I doubt that people on the ground will know the difference between a plane crashing on them at 600mph vs 1200mph.
"Fifty years ago today, on March 23, 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history.
... The rule imposed a speed limit on US airspace. Not a noise standard, which would make sense. A speed limit."
Imagine how quiet hypersonic planes would be now if the rule had been a based on loudness instead of speed. I imagine getting from LA to NY in an an hour in near-silence... That would be awesome!
if that restriction is lifted then the sonic boom is going to be the next status symbol of the top .1%ers.
also - can someone give a tl;dr why that guy is so passionate about that to begin with?
> I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force.
seems like is onto something ...
> The speed limit cannot be responsible for the entirety of the Great Stagnation, of course.
If anything we should look at the trade-off benefits of flying with the least amount of fuel consumption per passenger and miles flown. Flying faster than mach-1 to save time will be reserved to a small elite. How does it benefit the masses?