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.
Traveling with the iPhone | Hipmunk
There are a ton of flight search apps available for the iPhone (including the Kayak app I featured before) but the new Hipmunk is notable for its simplicity and attractive interface. There’s no extraneous stuff here — just impressively quick flight search and comparisons.
Select your point of departure, destination, and preferred travel dates and Hipmunk spits out your available options to a slick timeline-oriented UI - a visual matrix organized by departure time, price and carrier* (with additional filters like Length and, amusingly, the default Agony).
If you want to buy a fare, the app will link directly to a service like Orbitz via Mobile Safari or email you the link if you prefer to handle later on your home computer.
Hipmunk is so clean and simple, it makes painfully evident how cluttered and overwrought — and perhaps irrelevant — web-based travel search sites have become.
Download the Hipmunk iPhone app on iTunes (Free)
For more apps in my Traveling with the iPhone series, click here.
* If there’s any downside to Hipmunk it’s that a few carriers like American Airlines and Southwest are not searchable. This, however, isn’t unique to Hipmunk. AA and Southwest don’t make their flights available to any third-party search.
Pan Am is Looking to Fly the Skies Again, Even If It's Just Cargo | Jaunted
The other day when I mentioned Pan Am, little did I know there are plans in place to resurrect the defunct airline. According to Jaunted:
The plans include up to 70 flights each month to plenty of places across Latin America. The first flights, however, will just be filled with cargo and other goodies, but eventually they want to bring passengers back to the skies within official Pan Am-branded airplanes. They’re already talking about flying fans to Rio de Janeiro in advance of the Olympics in 2016.
I know when it comes to Pan Am, the first thing that comes to mind for most is the Lockerbie bombing. It’s hard not to. But for whatever reason, when I think of Pan Am I recall a more glamorous time when air travel was a luxury and passengers and flight attendants played the part. And smoking. I think of smoking on airplanes.
via: momagus
Source: flickr.com
A special thanks to condenasttraveler for the reblog. (Does this mean I’m a published travel writer? Look out, Andrew McCarthy!) And extra special thanks for pointing out Virgin America airline’s special “Thanks for Voting Us #1” fare sale. Branson and Company really know what they’re doing.
via condenasttraveler:
Source: thewanderingchicken
Virgin America Named USA's Top Airline | USA Today
It must be awards season. First Andrew McCarthy comes out of obscurity to claim his Oscar Lowell Thomas, and now Virgin America earned airline top honors in Conde Nast Traveler’s annual Reader’s Choice Awards. I wholeheartedly support these intelligent readers. I’ve flown Virgin America a couple of times over the last few months, and they were each without question the best air travel experiences I’ve had in recent memory. From check-in to landing, they were smooth, comfortable and, most notably, not a total nightmare. The planes themselves are modern and put to shame any other domestic carrier (even if the whole mood-lighting thing is a touch hokey). JetBlue followed up at number 2, but to my mind there’s hardly any comparison between the two except the very superficial one - that thy both have in-seat media. Congrats, Virgin America.
Traveling with the iPhone | American Airlines
I’m pretty baffled that every airline and hotel doesn’t have its own mobile application at this point. And frustrated more so that the ones that do - with a few notable exceptions - haven’t put much thought into them. American Airlines is one of those exceptions. Their brand new iPhone application is an absolute must-have for any frequent American flyer and AAdvantage member.
Basically anything you can do on the airline’s website you can do on your phone - search and book flights, check flight status, manage your frequent flyer account, whatever. That’s handy enough.
But the killer feature is your Mobile Boarding Pass. The app stores your boarding pass on the phone with a barcode. Just flash that at security and off you go. Or so they say anyway. I haven’t tried it yet (the app just became available a day or two ago), but it’s hard to see how it is any different than a print-out.
Oh, and you can play Sudoku if that’s your thing. The app is free.
Download on the American Airlines app on iTunes
For more apps in my Traveling with the iPhone series, click here.
United and Continental Airlines have merged to create the largest (and likely suckiest) airline in the world. Here are the two companies’ chief executives photo-opping. Notice anything? How about that new logo, combining the United name with Continental visual identity?
In a previous life I was a brand strategist, and putting that hat on, what exactly is there to say? Well, it’s dreadful. Mega-mergers are rarely successful operationally, even less so when the two companies try to come together equally, as if nothing’s changed. The “new” logo is a perfect visual example of this fool’s errand in action. In reality, United acquired Continental, and the new larger company either should have retained the United identity or created an entirely new one. Instead, we get this Frankenstein’s monster.
