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.
Nearly half of all adults younger than 40 have at least one tattoo.
Quick survey of staff here: no one appears to have a tattoo. Do you?
I’ve never gotten a tattoo. It’s not because I have anything against them; I think the artistry of them can be quite something. It’s just that I’ve never felt the urge to communicate something so strongly that I would have it imprinted on my body.
The idea of just randomly picking a design out of a book, that I’ve never understood. If the purpose of a tattoo is to express something unique about yourself, then just flipping through pages of someone else’s illustrations seems antithetical to the whole endeavor. I would think it necessary at the very least to create the idea yourself. And I’ve just never come up with such a compelling idea, something so foundational to who I am, as to walk into a parlor and have them paint it on me.
And where? My arm? My ass? The whole of my back?
Source: nprfunfacts
Is it logical?
In an interesting article on Slate, author Ben Yagoda advocates for the use of “logical punctuation” — an English writing style in which punctuation is placed outside of quotations and one generally used everywhere but America. American English writing is driven by aesthetics, he argues, while logical style is driven by technical correctness. Yagoda increasingly favors the technical, others hold onto aesthetics. I’m not sure it much matters.
Rules for written language are by definition arbitrary. There is nothing inherently more logical in “logical punctuation” than there is in the American form because they’re both based on approximations of spoken language. But within the general rules of style, I understand how the “outside” approach could be seen as more accurate and therefore more clear.
Personally, I favor aesthetics in prose. I care less for rules, whatever they may be. In general I believe strict adherence to rules of grammar and punctuation often has the effect of drawing attention to the writing itself rather than engaging the reader.
For example, I don’t think it’s useful or necessary to italicize the names of books, magazines, or movies. Capitalization does enough to set them apart within the context of a sentence. I needn’t write “in a recent Los Angeles Times article” when “in a recent Los Angeles Times article” has the same affect and, in my opinion, looks better. By any convention this approach is wrong, but I’m less concerned with correctness than I am with readability.
Similarly, to me a punctuation mark outside of a quote draws unnecessary attention to itself and distracts from the content of the sentence. It’s also more visually appealing to place punctuation inside quotation marks because it inspires more fluidity, eliminating excess white space and more seamlessly connecting to what follows.
But that is just my opinion. In the end, what I think is important is to understand the rules of grammar and punctuation so that you can make your own reasoned decisions as to how to apply them and when. Consistency is what’s vital.
I Must Not Make Lists
I gave up trying to earn a living as writer a long time ago. I’m not sure if it was because I lacked the discipline for it, the lack of money involved or that I didn’t have much to say. Probably a bit of all three and a few hundred other things.
Oddly enough, and all evidence to the contrary, even during my time of aspiration, I never fancied a career as a travel journalist. I don’t have much interest as a writer in journalism of any kind. I preferred fiction, which I suppose offered even fewer career prospects than the saturated world of non-fiction travel writing.
Part of my problem with the business of publishing and in journalism in particular is evident in this article, 10 Ways Not to be a Travel Writer by Lonely Planet’s Vivek Wagle. He argues that in travel writing you must “build your niche and establish your credibility in it,” rather than follow the more generalist path of a Bill Bryson. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not you can actually build a niche rather than find one, he’s absolutely right — if your goal is to get published in a travel magazine. It’s utterly practical advice that says nothing about writing engaging stories.
I’m not interested in finding my niche. I’ve never wanted my writing to be some sort of exhibition of expertise. I wasn’t interested in the ten things I should avoid if I want to be a published author. I just longed to express myself creatively through words, to make my readers laugh or cry, feel something. To connect with them through the characters I created and the life they gave them.
Maybe my lack of publishing acumen was my undoing as a writer, I don’t know. But I don’t really care. I wouldn’t have wanted to be that kind of writer anyway. If I’d succeeded I’d likely be writing lists of the 10 Best Places to Eat Tacos on the Beach to get the page views up and earn my keep at Such-and-Such-Travel-Dot-Com.
But who needs to be a “travel writer” now anyway? Or any kind of “writer” as defined by an antiquated publishing industry? I like to think now that technology has more or less made the traditional system obsolete, that aspiring writers will no longer have to worry about professional acceptance and be free to find their voice, to experiment with words and ideas without fear. To simply tell compelling stories the best way they know how.
With the barriers to publishing broken, there will be more worse writers out there assuredly; there already are. But how many more brilliant ones will there be to discover?
Point of Clarification
Does tomorrow mark the Rapture or the End of the World? The answer to this question will greatly impact my plans for this evening.
I like to think the Macho Man was just raptured before the rest of us.
It had to end somewhere, History’s Greatest Manhunt, and the fact that it climaxed in dull suburbistan next to a training base for the hunters’ allies proved less startling than the discovery that the hunt was still going on at all. Like the Monday morning shock of 9/11, the Sunday evening shock of Bin Laden’s death caught America flossing, concluding a tragedy that we’d stopped thinking about with a catharsis that we’d stopped hoping for. It was a moment of spooky historical symmetry, especially as it played out on TV. Down a long hallway that symbolized the past strode a grim-faced first-term president whose skin color, which we still noticed despite ourselves, made him look like figure from the future. Just as we had when Bush spoke way back when, we knew by the time Obama opened his mouth just about everything he had to say, which only increased our need to hear him say it.
Walter Kirn | Blackhawk Up
I was living in New York City at the time of the horrific September 11th attacks, and I’ve been trying for some time to gather my thoughts on the killing of Osama Bin Laden by my country’s brave Navy SEALS. I guess I was just waiting for the great Walter Kirn to gather them for me.
Albums are Dead
In his latest post entitled Albums, Bob Lefsetz argues that any artist focusing on making albums is stupid — that it represents old thinking and challenges your ability to stay relevant and grow your fan base. He writes of making albums:
It’s a waste of money. You lose momentum between projects. No one listens to most of the music. You’re in the music business, not the album business.
And the music business is about three or five or even ten minutes of glory. An experience that cannot be denied. Concentrate on constructing that. Then you’ll grow fans.
He’s right. Unfortunately. To me, there’s nothing like a well-constructed album. But the times have changed and the way people consume music is different than it was in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. And the distribution methods available to artists make the album obsolete, at least as a primary format. Technology has changed the game as it always does.
I’d argue that the album has been dying for a long time — essentially since the introduction of the compact disc. Records used to be 45 minutes tops. Even the greatest artists struggled to fill a piece of vinyl with truly great music. Albums like Dark Side of the Moon have always been rare. Double albums like Exile on Main Street even rarer. The CD added another 20 minutes to fill, making every album essentially a double. Most bands piled the extra space with garbage.
I think it wore on listeners on a subconscious level. Albums no longer meant well-crafted music projects, establishing a style, evoking a mood. They became a mishmash of great tunes, decent attempts and obvious filler that added up to nothing. Why do I have to buy the whole thing when there’s only a couple of decent tracks anyway?
Now listeners only have to buy or stream the stuff they care about. And seriously, I love Highway to Hell. It’s one of my favorite albums. But who needs Get It Hot?
If I were a band today, I’d be recording everything. In the studio. Live shows. Impromptu jam sessions. Whatever. I’d be capturing it on video. Why not webcast a rehearsal or experimentation in the studio? Maybe I’d only release the best stuff as singles or as mini-sets on iTunes, but I’d invite fans into the whole process of making music. I’d make my website, Facebook page, Twitter account, whatever, a destination — not just a useless discography or source of information about upcoming tour dates. You know, kind of like Ryan Adams does.
They give you a round bat and they throw you a round ball and they tell you to hit it square.
Willie Stargell
Baseball season has arrived and that brings to my mind springtime and youthful nostalgia. And the late great Willie Stargell, who I believe remains the only man to ever hit a a ball into the parking lot of Dodger Stadium.
Although growing up in L.A. and a Dodgers fan, I couldn’t help but love the great “We Are Family” Pirates team. How could you not like a team with Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Bill Madlock, Omar Moreno, Mike Easler, Lee Lacy, Dock Ellis, Kent Tekulve and Rennie Stennett? I mean, even their names were cool.
When I was about five, in 1980, I think, the season after they’d won the World Series, my family stayed at the same Chicago hotel as the Pirates, who were visiting for a series with the Cubs. As they boarded the team bus, I hounded them for autographs, even shook Dave Parker’s hand. There are two things I remember most about the encounter. 1) Nearly every guy on the team wore a leather jacket and carried a massive ghetto blaster, and 2) Dave Parker’s cobra belt buckle was bigger than my head.
I wonder what ever became of those autographs.
Source: thingsdeadpeoplesaid
