The Wandering Chicken

Why Hasn’t Commercial Air Travel Gotten Any Faster?

Or, more accurately, why is commercial airline travel still so slow? It’s a question I’ve often wondered about and fortunately Slate’s resident Explainer (in this case, Brian Palmer) has the answer. Or answers. Or at least some plausible explanations. 

There are apparently a number of factors. First among them: fuel efficiency.

Commercial airlines have slowed down over the last three or four decades. Today, flying from New York to Denver takes 19 more minutes than in 1983, and a flight from Washington, D.C., to Miami takes 45 more minutes than in 1973. The primary reason for such sluggishness is the cost of fuel. By the laws of physics, the increase in drag equals the square of the increase in speed, so even a slightly faster flight requires a lot more fuel. Hiking a plane’s velocity by 10 percent takes 21 percent more energy. Speeding up by 40 percent approximately doubles fuel consumption.

You would think advances in technology would offset this. We certainly should have more aerodynamic planes now than we did in 1973, right? Well, no. Not really. Fact is most planes in service are really pretty old or at the very least based on some fairly old designs. And unfortunately the Explainer doesn’t see that changing.

Manufacturers are technically capable of producing faster planes, but there isn’t much demand for them outside of the military. In 1961, American manufacturer Convair released a commercial jet that could reach Mach 0.91, meaning 91 percent as fast as sound. That’s significantly faster than current design speeds, which range between Mach 0.78 and Mach 0.82. Even though fuel cost less than 50 cents per gallon back then, few airlines were willing to give up fuel efficiency for the sake of speed.

So it comes back to fuel efficiency, I guess. Wouldn’t you think we’d be able to make a plane that is both faster and more fuel efficient? C’mon, rocket scientists!

But it’s not all fuel efficiency. Apparently air traffic is another reason.

Today, most bigwigs fly jets, and their gain is our loss: Not only are more planes using U.S. runways, but passenger jets must reduce their airspeed when they get caught behind a corporate CEO.

Does this make anyone else feel uneasy about the friendly skies? For some reason I get a Fifth Element image of planes darting this way and that.

Anyway, there’s also this, which is not really about the speed of air travel but our perception of it:

There have also been changes in the way airlines report flight times, which makes them seem longer than they actually are. When airlines started disclosing their percentage of on-time flights in the mid-1980s, they added a few extra minutes to the scheduled times to increase their apparent punctuality, a practice known as block padding.

This mathematically jujitsu has been obvious for some time to anyone that travels frequently. Mr. Palmer’s being generous when he says “a few extra minutes” — it’s more like an additional 20% on top of the actual flight time. Which of course makes on-time statistics generally useless at least as far as gauging on-time departure goes. I find most flights I take don’t get off the ground until well after the scheduled time but still manage to land on time and often early.

Click here to read the whole thing on Slate.