Why is this a surprise? Flying slower saves fuel. And modern high-bypass turbofans are simply designed to fly slower than the original turbojets because fuel efficiency is job #1.
Flying slower (to a point) is true, but in the end the airframe and engines are designed to have an optimal speed and altitude to fly at a particular weight which is why climb and cruise are planned and managed by the FMC to fly an optimal profile of climb, cruise, and descent to save fuel. Generally flying higher saves gas over flying lower, and flying significantly over or under the design mach number is going to reduce efficiency. Flying slower means higher alpha and corresponding energy bleed that takes more thrust to overcome, while flying faster raises drag, and flying low raises drag vs flying higher in the thinner air. The sweet spot is the best place to fly which is around M 0.76 to 0.83 for most airliners even though most can achieve higher speeds and still be pretty efficient but most will start to encounter shockwaves at over M 0.89 as parts of the aircraft will start having supersonic airflow at those speeds and really start to increase drag and possible risk of hitting Vne where the aerodynamics can degrade causing loss of control or actually exceeding structural limits and breaking up.
Fuel efficiency is a concern due also to the fact that each passenger seat gets more and more electronic features. And as you know, those features use fuel, too. Yes unlike 40 years ago, every passenger has a screen in the back, the upper classes have power reclining seats, food for first class passengers require appliances to cook that higher quality taste, not just reheating like in the economy class, the upper class has an IPad to remotely run their 40’ TV screens, and so on.
@@unknownunknowns This sort of stuff uses an infinitesimal amount of fuel compared with what runs the engines. Aircraft engines generate many megawatts of power whereas passenger electronics use just a few watts per seat.
Because it doesn't matter very much. 30 years ago you could turn up with baggage half an hour before departure, get your flight, and expect to be out of the airport with your baggage 15 minutes after landing. Airport parking was reasonably priced so it was short time from car to check-in. Now your have to get there 2 hours before departure or you might not make it through security. Your luggage won't appear for half an hour at best after you land, then you have to get a bus to the off airport parking that adds another half hour or more. For many journeys, the actual time flying is a relatively short part of the journey, from entering the airport system to leaving it at the other end.
@@HarryOld972 I've never flown. But I believe you 100%. Why does it all have to be so God damned complicated. There are times that I feel mentally prehistoric, seriously. Keep swearing at them, under your breath. That's all we can do. Until it gets, better? Go Lions!😎😎😎
Living in the GTA it's one reason I don't fly much. Pearson International (YYZ) has a strangle hold on passenger flights in the area, made worse by the results of airline monopolies. Everyone was to fly out of the same airport because there's a whole bunch of contracts that made a few people rich. Except that airport can't handle that traffic. As you said, 2h or more just to reliably get through security on time, then it takes forever to load through those goddamn jetways. Go to a smaller airport, like Hamilton, and you're checked in and through security in less than 30m and with stairway loading you can use 2 doors to load the plane, so it takes half the time. Smaller airports also have less travel time between the plane, the baggage pickup, and the exit, so you get your baggage sooner and out the door sooner. Flying from one small airport to another makes experience of flying amazing!
Comparing the DC-8 to the Concorde and TU-144 is absurd. On one occasion, during a test flight from over 50,000’ a DC-8 just barely exceeded Mach 1 for a few seconds while in a powered decent. The DC-8 was actually slightly slower than the 707 and Convair 880 and 990 in normal cruise. The Concorde and TU-144 on the other hand cruised at Mach 2+
You couldn't be more correct! It is ridiculous to compare a DC8 to any super sonic aircraft. Comparing cars and trains is also stupid, for a variety of reasons.
The more meaningful statement would be that the Convair jets were explicitly designed to be faster than the Boeing and Douglas and British jets. Convair paid a hefty price for this in that their planes ate fuel and thus couldn’t quite go coast to coast in the US. At the time, these routes were the very heart of the jet market, while medium and short flights were still dominated by turbo prop aircraft.
It's worth mentioning that the Convair 990 was the fastest airliner ever produced by the US aircraft manufacturers. And it paid for that speed by being thirsty.
_Makes no sense. Ground speed has increased, but in most countries ground speed for cars and trucks is restricted by law. And in the traffic jammed cities, the speed is even more restricted for obvious reasons._
Fast, powerful cars sell because they are popular regardless of the speed limit. Individual owners purchasing a high performance car are rarely interested in efficiency or fuel costs. Airlines are businesses and must concern themselves with efficiency to meet investors demands. A more accurate comparison would be private aircraft versus private automobiles where both have increased significantly in performance over the past 50 years.
The main problem is the drag rise above the speed of sound. An airliner cruising at mach 1.1 uses several times more fuel than one cruising at mach .8. Building faster planes is easy; building economically viable fast planes is not so easy.
@@rinzler9775 Yes, 747 fuel consumption to carry around 100 passengers. Proof that it takes a lot of energy to travel, if you have to compress the air around you in the process.
I fly around 52 times per year. We routinely break 625 to even 700 mph heading east. Heading west we still see 575 - 600 mph depending on the head wind.
Concord drank fuel like there was no tomorrow.... High bypass jet engines are more like turbo props than the low bypass ones that used to be fitted to aircraft... IIRC the Vickers VC10 still has the record for a subsonic Atlantic crossing of about 5 hours
a) way denser traffic in air and on ground, b) way more efficient utilization of planes, especially with low costs, which on other hand propagates any delay throught all day, c) going sonic is expensive & complicated
I remember the 55 mph way back in the day. In fact, I started driving just before 55 ended. Economy,economy, economy. The government made us all aware of the fact that optimal mph, on the highway. Is 55-60 mph. If you gofaster you burn fuel at a faster rate. Seems like this could apply for planes.😎😎😎
The speed of the airliner became much less significant in 2001, when passengers were introduced to Homeland Security and the requirement to arrive at the airport at least two hours before scheduled departure. Today a passenger might travel six hundred miles on a fast train before the airliner ever takes off, and the train will be faster or at least competitive on trips up to one thousand miles.
Twas always thus for most of the world. Was it not like that beforehand in the USA? It always seemed to be when I was flying there, but I was generally going transatlantic. I didn't see any changes apart from having to take your shoes off after that shoe bomber bloke.
A car's top speed has little to do with actual, real-world travel time. Speed limits on the Interstate were 70 mph 50 years ago. It takes pretty much as long to get from point to point on the Interstate as it did then. Also, contrary to popular belief, if a car's speedometer reads up to say, 200, that doesn't mean the car will do 200. MPH, KPH or FPF. (furlongs per fortnight). Just a small irrelevant point, in a good informative video. Well done. Keep it up. Thank you!
6:08 You missed three important reasons that marginal reduction of flight duration is not as valuable to passengers: with all the security and lines, the airport time has soared and thus the flight time is a smaller percentage of the overall travel time; electronics now allow passengers to fill the flight time with movies, work, texting, and such. Formerly it was reading, talking, or drinking. But the big one is that flying is no longer a luxury for the wealthy. Ordinary people fly and they are price-conscious.
Older narrow-bodies are slower than newer ones, but ultra long range wide-bodies are faster than before even though it’s not by much. The best example I can think of is the 747-8I which was specifically designed to be more streamlined than its predecessors.
Many delays are due to congestion on the taxiways and at the gates. I've spent a lot of time sitting on the taxiways just waiting for a gate to become available. I've also been lined up waiting for a turn at the runway and we were thirteenth in that line. It doesn't matter how fast a plane is if you spend much of time not moving. Its sort of like the difference between a Hyundai and a Ferrari on a gridlocked freeway, neither one is getting anywhere fast.
There was a short period after COVID when we had a few budget airlines running at reasonable prices, and they used smaller airports. It was an absolute dream. None of the complications. You get there, you check in, you go through security in less than 30m and loading takes half the time using the front and back doors of the plane. And because it's smaller, there's less to no waiting for takeoffs. Then the big airlines bought them all up and rolled them in to their regular fleets and suddenly everyone had to go back to the giant, complicated airports again.
Just got back from Thailand a few weeks ago. Coming back between, the flights route from Russia through Alaska at 33,000 ft (according to the tracker) we were traveling between 690 and 708 mph. Boeing 777/300 er
A little known fact about Concorde is at cruise altitude and speed it was actually more efficient than any other airliner of the period because that is what the airframe and engine was optimized for. The problem was at low speeds its engines were horribly inefficient. While a 747 would burn around one ton of fuel taxing from the ramp to the runway a concorde may burn over 2 tons. Of its 33 tons of fuel it would burn half of it to reach cruising altitude and speed. While at cruise it was still burning fuel twice as fast as a 707 would the concord is also moving 2.5x faster so the fuel per mile covered was still less. If they had ever developed a hybrid turbojet/ramjet engine for concorde it could have been much more efficient in every flight regime than the olympus engines could ever deliver. Since such engines are being actively designed for military aircraft like darkstar its possible some civilian derivatives could find their way into a new SST but only if they can make it equally efficient to transonic flight and increase the margin of safety over concorde
@@epiculo2 It is very hard to predict where the future of high speed transportation will go. An SST will always have sonic boom to contend with, so even if its economy was identical to a subsonic aircraft it will have less utility due to restriction on where it can fly. Also it could be entirely bypassed by a sub orbital hypersonic that could go from London to Tokyo in 45 minutes rather than 4.5 hours or more in an SST. The answers will always boil down to the economics, regulations, safety, and consumer demand. A factor many ignore is safety, but when talking about supersonic or hypersonic speeds and such extreme altitudes you assume more risk than normal airline flight. I for one truly question how a Concorde would have done if one ever had an engine fail or loss of cabin pressure at cruise. Would the asymmetrical thrust have been controllable? Is O2 even effective at 55k feet? Could it descend to under 15k before the passenger O2 generators ran dry? So many questions I would love to ask one of the actual engineers, and risk are higher still when talking about sub orbital altitudes and hypersonic speeds. in those regimes your aircraft starts getting very intolerant of even small failures.
@@larrybremer4930 Concorde has been operating safely for decades, and we are talking about a 1960s technology plane. I know there is some research conducted nowadays on how eliminate sonic boom, and they seem to have found a solution. I cannot say anything about sub-orbital flights, but i think there are obvious economic concerns still to overcome.
@@epiculo2 How much of that safety record was good maintenance and good luck vs actual risk mitigation? Keep in mind even breathing pure O2 at 40k feet most people will not survive indefinitely. Depending on your cardio health your useful consciousness drops at altitudes over 40k. So exactly how long would it take a Concorde with a blown out door to descend from 55k to under 40k where useful consciousness is no longer a concern? The other concern would be induced yaw on a dead engine, how much time would the pilot have to react? At those speeds any extreme change of attitude compared to the flight vector would be catastrophic to the airframe. Concorde was not stressed for high G forces even when compared to large airliners like 747. These are facts, not speculations. Since I have not seen any real data on these things online, nor have I found a QRH online for Concorde these questions remain with me in the absence of actual flight data and emergency procedures to weigh actual risk. The space shuttle is a good analogy, while it has a number of take off abort modes most were dubious at best. In any case I still support my belief that with higher speed and altitude comes higher risk. Edit - non official information found, but it is believable - initial descent rate would be around 7700 fpm so about 6 minutes to get below 20k but crucially we are talking 2-3 minutes to get below 40k. So even with the pilot getting CPAP pure O2 how long would a healthy person remain conscious during that descent? Any Flight Surgeons out there to answer that? Keep in mind this would require a full cabin blowout (more than even one full window). It also revealed yet another factor I did not consider, that the CL migrates greatly so on top of the need to descend and slow down, they also have to move fuel from back to front to change the CG to follow the CL migration during the slowdown. The memory items for the emergency descent were stated as: EMERGENCY DESCENT CHECKLIST (memory items) THROTTLES.................................................................................IDLE (Capt) With the engines at flight idle it is possible to experience a small pop surge at speeds above M.60 -- this can be ignored. AUTOPILOT...........................................................................DISCONNECT (Capt) FUEL FWD TRANS switch...................................................................O/RIDE (Capt) At the same time as the power reduction, the FUEL FWD TRANS switch is set to the O/RIDE position until the Flight Engineer can take over control of the fuel transfer. It is important to begin forward transfer as soon as possible to keep the aircraft in the CG corridor and avoid the Rear CG limit. TANK 9 selectors (2) and TANK 10 PUMP selectors (2).................................VERIFY OFF (F/E) PRESSURIZATION.............................................................MAX RATE OF DESCENT (F/E) On the System 1 and System 2 altitude selectors, set both rotary selectors fully clockwise to allow the maximum rate of descent in cabin pressure. CABIN ALTITUDE selector...................................................................ZERO (F/E) Set both rotary selectors to zero. ATC TRANSPONDER.........................................................................A 7700 (Capt) Rotate the ATC Transponder code selector knobs to set 7700 (General Emergency code) on the digital display. SAFETY HEIGHT............................................................................CHECK (F/O)
It was also carrying a LOT fewer passengers, so the fuel cost PER PASSENGER was quite a bit higher which made it LESS EFFICIENT BY FAR by the metrics the airlines actually need to use.
I used to fly from Stansted to Glasgow as it was cheap and fast, that is no longer the case. Now due to the price of parking, additional luggage cost and having to arrive at the airport at least two hours before the potential take off I prefer to go by car.
A sign of the times. The word for it was used in the video. "Deceleration". The age of technological acceleration is ending for many reasons. It has just manifested in aviation first. The paradigm of "better faster" is no more. Life expectancy is another. Get use to it. There will be more of it and people will get angry at losing what they see as their birthday without understanding the deeper reasons. Basically every civilisation reaches its zenith and then declines. We are lucky to be witnessing such a transition.
This is a disappointing part of the future. As a child of the 60s I would have laughed if someone told me all forms of transportation would be slower - auto (due to traffic on big cities) and air (due to economics). There would be no more supersonic aircraft, or flights to the moon for close to 60 years. Sure air travel is more common, but it's much more uncomfortable, and takes a lot longer.
If you understand plumbing. You get it. Plumbing goes from a 2 inch line into a building until the last two connections of 1/2 inch. Volume pressure. The sizes of aircraft engines may be more powerful but yet are bigger. Losing volume pressure.
I'm calling BS on the sonic boom thing. I lived in Minnesota until I was eight years old. I remember hearing sonic booms fairly regularly. No broken windows. No panicked pets. They really weren't that loud. The challenge was to spot the aircraft that made it. The aircraft creating those sonic booms were typically about seven miles up. Aircraft don't instantly go supersonic the moment they lift off the tarmac. It takes time to reach speed and altitude. The Concord would typically be well away from the airport and the city it serviced before reaching the speed of sound. It would drop below the speed of sound well before reaching its destination.
And a sonic boom would be sweeping every place between those points. The boom isn't just crossing the barrier and slowing down. Aside from that, what is the solution that supersonic flight solves? Who benefits? What problems does supersonic flight cause? Who suffers? Is the balance worth it?
The heavier a plane is, the faster it has to fly. Maybe lighter-weight materials have factored into slower general speeds while increasing fuel efficiency.
No you need more thrust - Just at as a sidenote one of the pilots at Air Rescue Qld said the helicopter they used required 6 tonnes of thrust to lift it of the ground
Nice dive into the question, thanks. I notice Vancouver - Hawaii is way longer than my first trip. On upside of fossil fuel powered aircraft, not ironically, we are Greening the planet, one flight at a time.
It's interesting that modern planes are basically indistinguishable visually from a 1960s plane.... The only obvious and yet subtle difference is the wing tips
Look at the engine diameter. As bypass ratios have gone up, planes have shifted from the cigarette shaped engines of the 1960s to the barrel shape of the modern turbofan. There has also been a lot of innovation in materials, but all of that is covered with paint
Depends vastly on how fast a person wants to get there pretty sure you ask every person who took a 8 hour air flight would he very happy to have that reduced.
@@Zlatomir_Ivanov maybe we should be asking ourselves, why cant we have both? Light aircraft (aka not packed in like sardines) as well as faster. I don't know about you but I feel pretty comfortable in my small 2 door sports car sometimes versus sitting around in a big SUV with a bunch of people I am tried of talking to. haha
@@panzer948 light aircrafts have up to mtow(maximum takeoff) 5700kg and some models have 2 turboprop engines and VNO(never exceed speed) 0,9max (1100km/h) from 1 to 20 passengers so we have many choices. But for me, I'm not a millionaire and small Cessna is the best 😄
Its about balancing speed (and therefore the number of flights per day) and cost of flight (fuel costs compared to ticket fares). Slower flights save fuel and if they can keep the passenger count the same for the day, more profit is made.
Hi Curious reason, good try!, sadly you do not seem to understand that the time it takes to travel from on location to any destination includes all the time spent in transit, this then means the total time elapsed between start and finish includes all the time spent getting to and from airports and all the time waiting for clearance and flights. This means that the speed of the actual aircraft at cruising altitude is almost irrelevant. The claim that concerns about environmental impact had any bearing on operational issues is also rather naive!, most of the 'improvements' in fuel consumption and noise were for purely commercial reasons, to save money not the environment. One has to read quite carefully between the lines and cover a great deal more information than is usually presented, that normally is distorted by their authors and publishers, by ignoring data that does not fit the required narrative and ignore actual experience again for mostly commercial reasons. Cheers, Richard.
High speed doesn't work anywhere in the world to connect cities that lack good local transit, and there are no cities in the world with good local transit that have the low density of US cities. I've lived 30 years in Europe and Asia and can inform you that anyone who thinks high speed rail would work in the US hasn't given the matter any serious thought. You should really research this stuff before you form an opinion and start spouting it on the internet.
@@blackoak4978 Trips up to a few hundred miles, not across the ocean. Reducing air travel for short trips reduces congestion at airports and in the air, leaving those facilities for the longer distances, including across the oceans.
@@lqr824 Having grown up in a major US city and having visited many others with multiple subway lines, buses, commuter rail routes, taxis and ferries, I wonder what you are talking about. We have a partial high speed rail system that connects Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC., all of which have good local transit options. Besides, high speed rail usually connects downtown to downtown, and that is where most local transit connects. The AMTRAK service on this route stops in New York City at Penn Station where there are direct connections to several subway lines, commuter railroads to New Jersey and Long Island, and a subway link to Grand Central Terminal where commuter trains run to suburban areas North of New York City, including parts of Connecticut. It is a short walk to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and taxis and city buses are available everywhere. Bike and scooter rentals are available as well. Is this not good enough?
The urgent need to reach net zero carbon emissions means potentially even slower propfans flying at lower Mach. But the most efficient high speed design is the oblique flying wing by RT Jones, able to adjust sweep angle for optimal efficiency at a wide range of transonic and supersonic Mach numbers, limited only by propulsion. A hydrogen electric oblique flying wing could be the most environmental option, but in the mean time autonomous cargo and military transport BWB startups are going to disrupt the obsolete tube and wing design.
Your consumption grows exponentially if you pass supersonic speed with any type of transportation, so commercial aviation will most likely never surpass 1000 km speed
The car industry is a long way behind the aviation industry. Think, the boom time of Pan Am, behind. Where bigger was better and excess took the prize. I really can't take the car industry seriously currently. Switching the source of energy whilst making the vehicle bigger, heavier, faster, more energy and materially hungry just makes no sense. The shift to electric being this all consuming focus means that they have totally lost sight of the real point of the need to change. Efficiency. Be better for the environment by having less of an effect on it. It's not just the transport industry, it's everything. If we want to extend our existence on this planet we need to learn how to use less energy. As greater efficiency normally means greater profits, you'd think that we wouldn't struggle so much with this concept. And yet, here we are.
@@rogerphelps9939 Digging the material out of the ground to make the batteries, shipping the parts across the world twice or more, and deposing of the cars in nine years instead of fifteen. Increased infrastructure to carry this electric across the country ripping up trees and digging up land, arable land use for solar farms that affect the water table, extra wind farms that affect bird migration, the last five or so years of the usable life of ICE vehicles shipped to another country to pollute the world there instead, the list goes on. Are you really seeing the complete picture?
EV are good for lowering CO2 but battery technology is nowhere near good enough to fully replace combustion cars yet. So im surprised why hybrids are more common would make sense to use battery power in city traffic then switch to fuel on highways or long journeys.
@@DogWick Really? I recently completed a 350 mile journey in my Skoda Enyaq. Much of that journey was at motorway speeds. I charged to 100% before starting , stopped for a bite to eat and a pee recharging for 20 minutes from 30% to 80% and arrived at my destination with 36% battery capacity remaining. It also cost me a lot less tthan petrol or diesel would. So exactly what is it about that that is nowhere near good enough to replace a combustion car?
@@smada36 and you truly believe that drilling for oil is that much cleaner than mining for lithium? Not sure what you are smoking over there but just remember you don't get something for nothing. But, you be you and continue to make the terrorist nations of the world rich so we can fight another war. Geez.
It the airline passengers that ultimately decide will they accept longer and longer flights. Air travels all about time it literally the number 1 concern besides fuel cost.
Well.. In start of 2000s, Still as a kid myself have flown one route many times. Direct normal flight without delays then, took 2h20minutes, oh and there was meal service included in ticket price. ~20 years later the same route now it takes 3h10minutes with no meal included in ticket price! If you want you can buy basic sandwich for 8€, small pringles pack for 5€ and can of coke for 4€... 🤣''20€ meal''
Title is grammatically incorrect: the “why” doesn’t belong. “Reason why” and “reason is because” are incorrect. Should be “reason that” or “reason is that”.
@ Agreed. It is not important but I like to rant. And it is frustrating that my super-power (English grammar) is utterly uninteresting to today’s people.
Having flown in the 70s and 80s, I don't really believe this unless it is fairly recent. I remember a DC-8 flight to Europe taking a long 8 hours whereas all my flights to Europe in the 90s were 6 and a half to 7 hours. I haven't flow internationally since 2000, but do so regularly domestically and flights to this day domestically remain consistently quicker flight times my flights in the 80s. What has gotten longer, particularly in the last 5 years is the scheduled times, but that is the airlines building buffer time into the schedule so they can maintain better on-time statistics. So there may be more on-ground time, but it doesn't seem to be increasing in the air time. The other difference these days compared to the late 70s and 80s is the air traffic control systems appear better resulting in better routings and comparatively few holds getting into airports. It still happens when there is weather or technical problems but I remember being in holding patters crazy long back on those flights when I was younger as almost routine at certain times of day.
To sum up, the selling point changed, ok. I think the companies have become greedier also, when they were more focused on real progress and luxury in the past, not just greed.
The airport at 6:31 is not in Beijing at all. That is Hong Kong International Airport. I am wondering how these kind of obvious mistakes would happen - may be this video is AI generated
It is a surprise because had you told someone in 1960 that aircraft in 2025 would STILL be tubes with wings, and we would be flying SLOWER - they would have thought you were thick in the head.
TGV? Modern? it's 50 + years old. Even the KTX is close to 40 now (although the Koreans did modify it, I was on one that did 350 KM/h for a brief moment near Seoul)
Why would you say the Concorde would consume 6.7 times its fuel per passenger? The Concorde max passenger load was much less than a 747. There was a huge difference in passenger capacity between the two. Let's compare apples to apples.
Why do so many airline related items like this one keep showing four engine liners such as the A-380 when none are being produced and only the 380 is still in regular service on limited routes. It's a twin jet world everyone.
There is no tangible reason why the speeds of commercial airliners have slowed (though marginally). In fact we are more resourceful Technologically, that we can push up the speed from the present 540 miles now (about 470 n.m. or 870 km), per hour. This can easily be pushed up to 900 km/hr and that is needed too, as getting into the airport & out takes much more time now. Any marginal reduction in that time will be welcomed. The Mach 1(speed of sound) is around 1200 km/hour. May be the airlines companies are playing a bit safe on engine maintenance.
Airline cost index is an airline navigation parameter that dictates Mach number as a function of balancing fuel cost versus crew and other costs to maximize profits, with no consideration of the external environmental costs. An appropriate international carbon fee would address this environmental failure, but big oil money corruption will never allow that.
Before: Faster flights, better experiences, wide open airports. Now: More passengers, more planes, lower operating costs, less drag, more congestion at airports, more delays in trips and slower flights.
You probably know that cars speed is regulated, so their top speed is completely irrelevant! After that, you discussed the main reason for slower flights, efficiency. So stop comparing planes, to cars and trains, it's quite misleading.
You can get a rough idea of how much power something is using by how hot it gets. Those screens don't get hot. Think of how hot an old-fashioned 100 watt bulb got. For those too young to know about them, you could burn your hand on them. For comparison jet engines use tens of millions of watts. So the power used by screens is insignificant by comparison.
Better jetstream forecasting/detection I guess, they can get into it and stay there. But I don't see this, Orlando to London always took around 8 hours for me.
Whatever the cost of fuel is, the airports congestion is the main culprit of longer flights as a flight time is based on "gate to gate" data. Just try to imagine an aircraft leaving from the largest airports in the US, such as JFK, SFO, LAX, ORD, DTW among others and the EU such as LHR, ZRH, CDG, LGW, BRU, STU, MUN among others is spending more time from the gate to its actual departure from the runway along with the time spent at their destination where the time spent from the landing strip to the gate is using longer and longer to get too. A DC 9 leaving LAX and arriving in ORD has seen its "gate to gate" time extended by one hour while a flight from MSP to ORD has seen its "gate to gate" time extended by 30 minutes as SEA is not a huge airport HUB and has a "gate to gate" time lower than a flight leaving LAX of only 30 minutes. The average airspeed of all aircraft in the 70's was 580 miles per hour while it has been reduced to 540 miles per hour because, like a car engine, will lower its gas intake while the air frame of all aircraft of today's market are slimmer, partly made with composite material which have rendered aircraft weight up to 20% lower than the aircraft of the 70's up to 2000's.
Not that much slower, but fuel cost is most likely why. The Concorde would be nice if people could afford 10,000 a ticket, I can wait a few more hours lol.
Why is this a surprise? Flying slower saves fuel. And modern high-bypass turbofans are simply designed to fly slower than the original turbojets because fuel efficiency is job #1.
Flying slower (to a point) is true, but in the end the airframe and engines are designed to have an optimal speed and altitude to fly at a particular weight which is why climb and cruise are planned and managed by the FMC to fly an optimal profile of climb, cruise, and descent to save fuel. Generally flying higher saves gas over flying lower, and flying significantly over or under the design mach number is going to reduce efficiency. Flying slower means higher alpha and corresponding energy bleed that takes more thrust to overcome, while flying faster raises drag, and flying low raises drag vs flying higher in the thinner air. The sweet spot is the best place to fly which is around M 0.76 to 0.83 for most airliners even though most can achieve higher speeds and still be pretty efficient but most will start to encounter shockwaves at over M 0.89 as parts of the aircraft will start having supersonic airflow at those speeds and really start to increase drag and possible risk of hitting Vne where the aerodynamics can degrade causing loss of control or actually exceeding structural limits and breaking up.
Fuel efficiency is a concern due also to the fact that each passenger seat gets more and more electronic features. And as you know, those features use fuel, too. Yes unlike 40 years ago, every passenger has a screen in the back, the upper classes have power reclining seats, food for first class passengers require appliances to cook that higher quality taste, not just reheating like in the economy class, the upper class has an IPad to remotely run their 40’ TV screens, and so on.
@@unknownunknowns This sort of stuff uses an infinitesimal amount of fuel compared with what runs the engines. Aircraft engines generate many megawatts of power whereas passenger electronics use just a few watts per seat.
@@rogerphelps9939engines generate about 100 kW per passenger in economy class.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt So a large aircraft generates around 40MW while cruising and quite a bit more while taking off and climbing.
Because it doesn't matter very much. 30 years ago you could turn up with baggage half an hour before departure, get your flight, and expect to be out of the airport with your baggage 15 minutes after landing. Airport parking was reasonably priced so it was short time from car to check-in.
Now your have to get there 2 hours before departure or you might not make it through security. Your luggage won't appear for half an hour at best after you land, then you have to get a bus to the off airport parking that adds another half hour or more.
For many journeys, the actual time flying is a relatively short part of the journey, from entering the airport system to leaving it at the other end.
Agreed. I have taken short haul flights were I was in the airport longer than in the plane.
@@HarryOld972 I've never flown. But I believe you 100%. Why does it all have to be so God damned complicated. There are times that I feel mentally prehistoric, seriously. Keep swearing at them, under your breath. That's all we can do. Until it gets, better? Go Lions!😎😎😎
Living in the GTA it's one reason I don't fly much. Pearson International (YYZ) has a strangle hold on passenger flights in the area, made worse by the results of airline monopolies. Everyone was to fly out of the same airport because there's a whole bunch of contracts that made a few people rich. Except that airport can't handle that traffic. As you said, 2h or more just to reliably get through security on time, then it takes forever to load through those goddamn jetways.
Go to a smaller airport, like Hamilton, and you're checked in and through security in less than 30m and with stairway loading you can use 2 doors to load the plane, so it takes half the time. Smaller airports also have less travel time between the plane, the baggage pickup, and the exit, so you get your baggage sooner and out the door sooner. Flying from one small airport to another makes experience of flying amazing!
Good points
Comparing the DC-8 to the Concorde and TU-144 is absurd. On one occasion, during a test flight from over 50,000’ a DC-8 just barely exceeded Mach 1 for a few seconds while in a powered decent. The DC-8 was actually slightly slower than the 707 and Convair 880 and 990 in normal cruise. The Concorde and TU-144 on the other hand cruised at Mach 2+
Did the DC-8 break the sound barrier?
You couldn't be more correct! It is ridiculous to compare a DC8 to any super sonic aircraft. Comparing cars and trains is also stupid, for a variety of reasons.
The more meaningful statement would be that the Convair jets were explicitly designed to be faster than the Boeing and Douglas and British jets. Convair paid a hefty price for this in that their planes ate fuel and thus couldn’t quite go coast to coast in the US. At the time, these routes were the very heart of the jet market, while medium and short flights were still dominated by turbo prop aircraft.
@@AudieHolland Mach 1 IS the sound barrier.
It's worth mentioning that the Convair 990 was the fastest airliner ever produced by the US aircraft manufacturers. And it paid for that speed by being thirsty.
_Makes no sense. Ground speed has increased, but in most countries ground speed for cars and trucks is restricted by law. And in the traffic jammed cities, the speed is even more restricted for obvious reasons._
They seem to confuse speed with acceleration.
@@michael.forkert There's a reason for that: speed cameras and moronic limits are a good income source for city councils.
Fast, powerful cars sell because they are popular regardless of the speed limit. Individual owners purchasing a high performance car are rarely interested in efficiency or fuel costs. Airlines are businesses and must concern themselves with efficiency to meet investors demands. A more accurate comparison would be private aircraft versus private automobiles where both have increased significantly in performance over the past 50 years.
For woke reasons, not obvious reasons
@@seanfromlimerick I find it hard to believe a 30% increase in speed in 50 years, even maximum speed. Certainly not in average speed.
This explains why I have been on deluded takeoffs but arrive on time on long transatlantic flights.
The main problem is the drag rise above the speed of sound. An airliner cruising at mach 1.1 uses several times more fuel than one cruising at mach .8. Building faster planes is easy; building economically viable fast planes is not so easy.
The concord proved this. A feat of engineering, but impractical running costs, both on fuel and maintenance.
@@rinzler9775 Yes, 747 fuel consumption to carry around 100 passengers. Proof that it takes a lot of energy to travel, if you have to compress the air around you in the process.
I fly around 52 times per year. We routinely break 625 to even 700 mph heading east. Heading west we still see 575 - 600 mph depending on the head wind.
It’s just Concorde not ‘the’ Concorde. I travelled at 1,420 mph on that bad boy. It was awesome. Cheers.
Yes I was the pilot
There was more than one Concorde? Was that a statement.
@@Jmg831 Yes, what?
@@shaggybreeks yes
Concord drank fuel like there was no tomorrow.... High bypass jet engines are more like turbo props than the low bypass ones that used to be fitted to aircraft... IIRC the Vickers VC10 still has the record for a subsonic Atlantic crossing of about 5 hours
a) way denser traffic in air and on ground, b) way more efficient utilization of planes, especially with low costs, which on other hand propagates any delay throught all day, c) going sonic is expensive & complicated
I remember the 55 mph way back in the day. In fact, I started driving just before 55 ended. Economy,economy, economy. The government made us all aware of the fact that optimal mph, on the highway. Is 55-60 mph. If you gofaster you burn fuel at a faster rate. Seems like this could apply for planes.😎😎😎
The speed of the airliner became much less significant in 2001, when passengers were introduced to Homeland Security and the requirement to arrive at the airport at least two hours before scheduled departure. Today a passenger might travel six hundred miles on a fast train before the airliner ever takes off, and the train will be faster or at least competitive on trips up to one thousand miles.
Twas always thus for most of the world. Was it not like that beforehand in the USA? It always seemed to be when I was flying there, but I was generally going transatlantic. I didn't see any changes apart from having to take your shoes off after that shoe bomber bloke.
A car's top speed has little to do with actual, real-world travel time. Speed limits on the Interstate were 70 mph 50 years ago. It takes pretty much as long to get from point to point on the Interstate as it did then. Also, contrary to popular belief, if a car's speedometer reads up to say, 200, that doesn't mean the car will do 200. MPH, KPH or FPF. (furlongs per fortnight). Just a small irrelevant point, in a good informative video. Well done. Keep it up. Thank you!
6:08 You missed three important reasons that marginal reduction of flight duration is not as valuable to passengers: with all the security and lines, the airport time has soared and thus the flight time is a smaller percentage of the overall travel time; electronics now allow passengers to fill the flight time with movies, work, texting, and such. Formerly it was reading, talking, or drinking. But the big one is that flying is no longer a luxury for the wealthy. Ordinary people fly and they are price-conscious.
Older narrow-bodies are slower than newer ones, but ultra long range wide-bodies are faster than before even though it’s not by much. The best example I can think of is the 747-8I which was specifically designed to be more streamlined than its predecessors.
Many delays are due to congestion on the taxiways and at the gates. I've spent a lot of time sitting on the taxiways just waiting for a gate to become available. I've also been lined up waiting for a turn at the runway and we were thirteenth in that line. It doesn't matter how fast a plane is if you spend much of time not moving. Its sort of like the difference between a Hyundai and a Ferrari on a gridlocked freeway, neither one is getting anywhere fast.
There was a short period after COVID when we had a few budget airlines running at reasonable prices, and they used smaller airports. It was an absolute dream. None of the complications. You get there, you check in, you go through security in less than 30m and loading takes half the time using the front and back doors of the plane. And because it's smaller, there's less to no waiting for takeoffs.
Then the big airlines bought them all up and rolled them in to their regular fleets and suddenly everyone had to go back to the giant, complicated airports again.
Just got back from Thailand a few weeks ago. Coming back between, the flights route from Russia through Alaska at 33,000 ft (according to the tracker) we were traveling between 690 and 708 mph. Boeing 777/300 er
Tail wind ?
@@chrissmith2114 Jet Stream at that altitude and direction is normal and common.
You must have had tailwind causing high ground speed, air speeds are much lower
The prospect of getting a surface to air missile up your tail will surely encourage faster speeds...
@@cathybrind2381 SAM travel at speeds in excess of mach 2 up to mach 5+, no chance of airliners dodging them.
A little known fact about Concorde is at cruise altitude and speed it was actually more efficient than any other airliner of the period because that is what the airframe and engine was optimized for. The problem was at low speeds its engines were horribly inefficient. While a 747 would burn around one ton of fuel taxing from the ramp to the runway a concorde may burn over 2 tons. Of its 33 tons of fuel it would burn half of it to reach cruising altitude and speed. While at cruise it was still burning fuel twice as fast as a 707 would the concord is also moving 2.5x faster so the fuel per mile covered was still less. If they had ever developed a hybrid turbojet/ramjet engine for concorde it could have been much more efficient in every flight regime than the olympus engines could ever deliver. Since such engines are being actively designed for military aircraft like darkstar its possible some civilian derivatives could find their way into a new SST but only if they can make it equally efficient to transonic flight and increase the margin of safety over concorde
@@larrybremer4930 We must ask ourselves if commercial aviation has a future in their plans.
@@epiculo2 It is very hard to predict where the future of high speed transportation will go. An SST will always have sonic boom to contend with, so even if its economy was identical to a subsonic aircraft it will have less utility due to restriction on where it can fly. Also it could be entirely bypassed by a sub orbital hypersonic that could go from London to Tokyo in 45 minutes rather than 4.5 hours or more in an SST. The answers will always boil down to the economics, regulations, safety, and consumer demand. A factor many ignore is safety, but when talking about supersonic or hypersonic speeds and such extreme altitudes you assume more risk than normal airline flight. I for one truly question how a Concorde would have done if one ever had an engine fail or loss of cabin pressure at cruise. Would the asymmetrical thrust have been controllable? Is O2 even effective at 55k feet? Could it descend to under 15k before the passenger O2 generators ran dry? So many questions I would love to ask one of the actual engineers, and risk are higher still when talking about sub orbital altitudes and hypersonic speeds. in those regimes your aircraft starts getting very intolerant of even small failures.
@@larrybremer4930 Concorde has been operating safely for decades, and we are talking about a 1960s technology plane. I know there is some research conducted nowadays on how eliminate sonic boom, and they seem to have found a solution. I cannot say anything about sub-orbital flights, but i think there are obvious economic concerns still to overcome.
@@epiculo2 How much of that safety record was good maintenance and good luck vs actual risk mitigation? Keep in mind even breathing pure O2 at 40k feet most people will not survive indefinitely. Depending on your cardio health your useful consciousness drops at altitudes over 40k. So exactly how long would it take a Concorde with a blown out door to descend from 55k to under 40k where useful consciousness is no longer a concern? The other concern would be induced yaw on a dead engine, how much time would the pilot have to react? At those speeds any extreme change of attitude compared to the flight vector would be catastrophic to the airframe. Concorde was not stressed for high G forces even when compared to large airliners like 747. These are facts, not speculations. Since I have not seen any real data on these things online, nor have I found a QRH online for Concorde these questions remain with me in the absence of actual flight data and emergency procedures to weigh actual risk. The space shuttle is a good analogy, while it has a number of take off abort modes most were dubious at best. In any case I still support my belief that with higher speed and altitude comes higher risk.
Edit - non official information found, but it is believable - initial descent rate would be around 7700 fpm so about 6 minutes to get below 20k but crucially we are talking 2-3 minutes to get below 40k. So even with the pilot getting CPAP pure O2 how long would a healthy person remain conscious during that descent? Any Flight Surgeons out there to answer that? Keep in mind this would require a full cabin blowout (more than even one full window). It also revealed yet another factor I did not consider, that the CL migrates greatly so on top of the need to descend and slow down, they also have to move fuel from back to front to change the CG to follow the CL migration during the slowdown. The memory items for the emergency descent were stated as:
EMERGENCY DESCENT CHECKLIST (memory items)
THROTTLES.................................................................................IDLE (Capt)
With the engines at flight idle it is possible to experience a small pop surge at speeds above M.60 -- this can be ignored.
AUTOPILOT...........................................................................DISCONNECT (Capt)
FUEL FWD TRANS switch...................................................................O/RIDE (Capt)
At the same time as the power reduction, the FUEL FWD TRANS switch is set to the O/RIDE position until the Flight Engineer can take over control of the fuel transfer. It is important to begin forward transfer as soon as possible to keep the aircraft in the CG corridor and avoid the Rear CG limit.
TANK 9 selectors (2) and TANK 10 PUMP selectors (2).................................VERIFY OFF (F/E)
PRESSURIZATION.............................................................MAX RATE OF DESCENT (F/E)
On the System 1 and System 2 altitude selectors, set both rotary selectors fully clockwise to allow the maximum rate of descent in cabin pressure.
CABIN ALTITUDE selector...................................................................ZERO (F/E)
Set both rotary selectors to zero.
ATC TRANSPONDER.........................................................................A 7700 (Capt)
Rotate the ATC Transponder code selector knobs to set 7700 (General Emergency code) on the digital display.
SAFETY HEIGHT............................................................................CHECK (F/O)
It was also carrying a LOT fewer passengers, so the fuel cost PER PASSENGER was quite a bit higher which made it LESS EFFICIENT BY FAR by the metrics the airlines actually need to use.
People weigh more!
I used to fly from Stansted to Glasgow as it was cheap and fast, that is no longer the case. Now due to the price of parking, additional luggage cost and having to arrive at the airport at least two hours before the potential take off I prefer to go by car.
I sometimes drive slower to save fuel since I was not in a hurry. Being there 1 hour ahead of schedule is not neccessary.
A sign of the times. The word for it was used in the video. "Deceleration". The age of technological acceleration is ending for many reasons. It has just manifested in aviation first. The paradigm of "better faster" is no more. Life expectancy is another. Get use to it. There will be more of it and people will get angry at losing what they see as their birthday without understanding the deeper reasons. Basically every civilisation reaches its zenith and then declines. We are lucky to be witnessing such a transition.
Lucky? To be addressed by a guru like um, coweatsman..........
This is a disappointing part of the future. As a child of the 60s I would have laughed if someone told me all forms of transportation would be slower - auto (due to traffic on big cities) and air (due to economics). There would be no more supersonic aircraft, or flights to the moon for close to 60 years. Sure air travel is more common, but it's much more uncomfortable, and takes a lot longer.
Trains have gotten significantly faster.
If you understand plumbing. You get it. Plumbing goes from a 2 inch line into a building until the last two connections of 1/2 inch. Volume pressure. The sizes of aircraft engines may be more powerful but yet are bigger. Losing volume pressure.
I'm calling BS on the sonic boom thing. I lived in Minnesota until I was eight years old. I remember hearing sonic booms fairly regularly. No broken windows. No panicked pets. They really weren't that loud. The challenge was to spot the aircraft that made it. The aircraft creating those sonic booms were typically about seven miles up.
Aircraft don't instantly go supersonic the moment they lift off the tarmac. It takes time to reach speed and altitude. The Concord would typically be well away from the airport and the city it serviced before reaching the speed of sound. It would drop below the speed of sound well before reaching its destination.
And a sonic boom would be sweeping every place between those points. The boom isn't just crossing the barrier and slowing down.
Aside from that, what is the solution that supersonic flight solves? Who benefits?
What problems does supersonic flight cause? Who suffers? Is the balance worth it?
Pffwah! Only rich individuals and celebrities travelled on the Concorde regularly.
The flight time is shorter from New York to the UK due to the tail wind effect of the Gulf Stream averaging one hour saving at times 6hrs 50.
Bro has finally returned
Will posting more often, I have been cooking some interesting topics
The heavier a plane is, the faster it has to fly. Maybe lighter-weight materials have factored into slower general speeds while increasing fuel efficiency.
No you need more thrust - Just at as a sidenote one of the pilots at Air Rescue Qld said the helicopter they used required 6 tonnes of thrust to lift it of the ground
Nice dive into the question, thanks. I notice Vancouver - Hawaii is way longer than my first trip. On upside of fossil fuel powered aircraft, not ironically, we are Greening the planet, one flight at a time.
It's interesting that modern planes are basically indistinguishable visually from a 1960s plane.... The only obvious and yet subtle difference is the wing tips
If you know what to look for, there are lots of differences. But yeah, a quick glance and the general layout look s pretty much the same.
Look at the engine diameter. As bypass ratios have gone up, planes have shifted from the cigarette shaped engines of the 1960s to the barrel shape of the modern turbofan. There has also been a lot of innovation in materials, but all of that is covered with paint
@@paulgush You're right but diameter increase because of the ducted fan(propeller), engine size same as earlier
To be fair, faster doesn't always mean better.
Depends vastly on how fast a person wants to get there pretty sure you ask every person who took a 8 hour air flight would he very happy to have that reduced.
@@icerwby Yes it's depends!
I'll more happy in a light aircraft with speed of 200km/h for 8 hours then in 8 hours at budget airliner...
@@Zlatomir_Ivanov maybe we should be asking ourselves, why cant we have both? Light aircraft (aka not packed in like sardines) as well as faster. I don't know about you but I feel pretty comfortable in my small 2 door sports car sometimes versus sitting around in a big SUV with a bunch of people I am tried of talking to. haha
@@panzer948 light aircrafts have up to mtow(maximum takeoff) 5700kg and some models have 2 turboprop engines and VNO(never exceed speed) 0,9max (1100km/h) from 1 to 20 passengers so we have many choices.
But for me, I'm not a millionaire and small Cessna is the best 😄
Fuel consumption and profit margins is your answer
We have gone backwards in flying faster for sure but one would think technology would have advanced to have faster more efficient flight.
In 1970, nobody cared how much fuel they burned.
When have modern planes improved the power without more fuel? Where are the fuel consumption reduction? When will shape change to improve efficiency?
Its about balancing speed (and therefore the number of flights per day) and cost of flight (fuel costs compared to ticket fares). Slower flights save fuel and if they can keep the passenger count the same for the day, more profit is made.
'WELL DONE AND INSIGHTFUL VIDEO !
Hi Curious reason, good try!, sadly you do not seem to understand that the time it takes to travel from on location to any destination includes all the time spent in transit, this then means the total time elapsed between start and finish includes all the time spent getting to and from airports and all the time waiting for clearance and flights. This means that the speed of the actual aircraft at cruising altitude is almost irrelevant.
The claim that concerns about environmental impact had any bearing on operational issues is also rather naive!, most of the 'improvements' in fuel consumption and noise were for purely commercial reasons, to save money not the environment.
One has to read quite carefully between the lines and cover a great deal more information than is usually presented, that normally is distorted by their authors and publishers, by ignoring data that does not fit the required narrative and ignore actual experience again for mostly commercial reasons.
Cheers, Richard.
"If you have time to spare, go by air"
But how long by tramp steamer from Seattle to Bangkok?
To reduce the congestion and increase the overall speed of air travel, we need to divert passengers from short trips by air to high speed rail.
Can't wait for those floating rails!
High speed doesn't work anywhere in the world to connect cities that lack good local transit, and there are no cities in the world with good local transit that have the low density of US cities. I've lived 30 years in Europe and Asia and can inform you that anyone who thinks high speed rail would work in the US hasn't given the matter any serious thought. You should really research this stuff before you form an opinion and start spouting it on the internet.
@@blackoak4978 Trips up to a few hundred miles, not across the ocean. Reducing air travel for short trips reduces congestion at airports and in the air, leaving those facilities for the longer distances, including across the oceans.
@@lqr824 Having grown up in a major US city and having visited many others with multiple subway lines, buses, commuter rail routes, taxis and ferries, I wonder what you are talking about. We have a partial high speed rail system that connects Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC., all of which have good local transit options. Besides, high speed rail usually connects downtown to downtown, and that is where most local transit connects. The AMTRAK service on this route stops in New York City at Penn Station where there are direct connections to several subway lines, commuter railroads to New Jersey and Long Island, and a subway link to Grand Central Terminal where commuter trains run to suburban areas North of New York City, including parts of Connecticut. It is a short walk to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and taxis and city buses are available everywhere. Bike and scooter rentals are available as well. Is this not good enough?
Great video!
Glad you enjoyed it
SR - 71 ? Why even bother to bring that up ? Rediculous ! 😅
I thought I was the only one who noticed this
flight time is the smallest time block spent in travel, getting through airports is the bottle neck.
You know how you can tell when a moth farts? When it flies in a straight line!😊
The urgent need to reach net zero carbon emissions means potentially even slower propfans flying at lower Mach. But the most efficient high speed design is the oblique flying wing by RT Jones, able to adjust sweep angle for optimal efficiency at a wide range of transonic and supersonic Mach numbers, limited only by propulsion. A hydrogen electric oblique flying wing could be the most environmental option, but in the mean time autonomous cargo and military transport BWB startups are going to disrupt the obsolete tube and wing design.
1:58 1st class was a different beast back then 😆
And you got real food even in economy.
Your consumption grows exponentially if you pass supersonic speed with any type of transportation, so commercial aviation will most likely never surpass 1000 km speed
The car industry is a long way behind the aviation industry. Think, the boom time of Pan Am, behind. Where bigger was better and excess took the prize.
I really can't take the car industry seriously currently. Switching the source of energy whilst making the vehicle bigger, heavier, faster, more energy and materially hungry just makes no sense.
The shift to electric being this all consuming focus means that they have totally lost sight of the real point of the need to change. Efficiency. Be better for the environment by having less of an effect on it.
It's not just the transport industry, it's everything. If we want to extend our existence on this planet we need to learn how to use less energy. As greater efficiency normally means greater profits, you'd think that we wouldn't struggle so much with this concept. And yet, here we are.
Switching to electricity at close to 100% efficiency from fossil fuels with 25% maximum efficiency is not losing sight of the real point.
@@rogerphelps9939 Digging the material out of the ground to make the batteries, shipping the parts across the world twice or more, and deposing of the cars in nine years instead of fifteen. Increased infrastructure to carry this electric across the country ripping up trees and digging up land, arable land use for solar farms that affect the water table, extra wind farms that affect bird migration, the last five or so years of the usable life of ICE vehicles shipped to another country to pollute the world there instead, the list goes on.
Are you really seeing the complete picture?
EV are good for lowering CO2 but battery technology is nowhere near good enough to fully replace combustion cars yet.
So im surprised why hybrids are more common would make sense to use battery power in city traffic then switch to fuel on highways or long journeys.
@@DogWick Really? I recently completed a 350 mile journey in my Skoda Enyaq. Much of that journey was at motorway speeds. I charged to 100% before starting , stopped for a bite to eat and a pee recharging for 20 minutes from 30% to 80% and arrived at my destination with 36% battery capacity remaining. It also cost me a lot less tthan petrol or diesel would. So exactly what is it about that that is nowhere near good enough to replace a combustion car?
@@smada36 and you truly believe that drilling for oil is that much cleaner than mining for lithium? Not sure what you are smoking over there but just remember you don't get something for nothing. But, you be you and continue to make the terrorist nations of the world rich so we can fight another war. Geez.
In the 80s when ever we traveled overseas airlines gifted complementary air bags (Travel Bags)…not anymore
It the airline passengers that ultimately decide will they accept longer and longer flights. Air travels all about time it literally the number 1 concern besides fuel cost.
Well.. In start of 2000s, Still as a kid myself have flown one route many times. Direct normal flight without delays then, took 2h20minutes, oh and there was meal service included in ticket price.
~20 years later the same route now it takes 3h10minutes with no meal included in ticket price! If you want you can buy basic sandwich for 8€, small pringles pack for 5€ and can of coke for 4€... 🤣''20€ meal''
Basically a con job, in order to meet stats, flight times have been artificially raised in order to avoid fines by being late.
Title is grammatically incorrect: the “why” doesn’t belong. “Reason why” and “reason is because” are incorrect. Should be “reason that” or “reason is that”.
Big freakin deal
@ Agreed. It is not important but I like to rant. And it is frustrating that my super-power (English grammar) is utterly uninteresting to today’s people.
He keeps showing a 737 max when talking about the 787.
I’m not triggered or anything 😅
That TU-144 didn't have any canards either.
No need for excessive speed. The A320 is slower than the 727. 😊
Concorde customers now fly in private jets. Everyone else is in a double decker cattle truck.
As long as I can still get $20 Frontier 1000 mile flights you can get me there 20 later!
Having flown in the 70s and 80s, I don't really believe this unless it is fairly recent. I remember a DC-8 flight to Europe taking a long 8 hours whereas all my flights to Europe in the 90s were 6 and a half to 7 hours. I haven't flow internationally since 2000, but do so regularly domestically and flights to this day domestically remain consistently quicker flight times my flights in the 80s. What has gotten longer, particularly in the last 5 years is the scheduled times, but that is the airlines building buffer time into the schedule so they can maintain better on-time statistics. So there may be more on-ground time, but it doesn't seem to be increasing in the air time. The other difference these days compared to the late 70s and 80s is the air traffic control systems appear better resulting in better routings and comparatively few holds getting into airports. It still happens when there is weather or technical problems but I remember being in holding patters crazy long back on those flights when I was younger as almost routine at certain times of day.
But commercial aircraft by design are flying slower nowadays compared to the sixties and seventies
Con what you say in the article airlines do not look at making their airplanes more comfortable they only look at making them less comfortable
Sorry, but drag does not increase exponentially with speed. And the folks at MIT know that. (3:40)
To sum up, the selling point changed, ok. I think the companies have become greedier also, when they were more focused on real progress and luxury in the past, not just greed.
I think your missing the obvious explanation... they're stuffing twice as many people in the planes now. :D
The airport at 6:31 is not in Beijing at all. That is Hong Kong International Airport. I am wondering how these kind of obvious mistakes would happen - may be this video is AI generated
Planes are slow because the increase in price isn't worth the decrease in time for most people.
After so long, can't wait for more videos
Thank you so much! Appreciate it it very much. I will posting more often now :)
Turbo-fans are slower than pure jet engines... But jet engines use more fuel.
2:38
ummmmm not mention of the Convair 990??
Maybe we should mention emissions and pollution here somewhere?
Well, we've mentioned it now, so that's settled!
Efficiency is key and we need to quit burning petroleum our kids are gonna roast as it is.
Drag to speed relation is quadratic, not exponential.
In most cases, the car speed that is actually traveled is significantly slower.
It is a surprise because had you told someone in 1960 that aircraft in 2025 would STILL be tubes with wings, and we would be flying SLOWER - they would have thought you were thick in the head.
Southwest - we beat the competition, not you…… following the beat down of a customer by United.
TGV? Modern? it's 50 + years old. Even the KTX is close to 40 now (although the Koreans did modify it, I was on one that did 350 KM/h for a brief moment near Seoul)
And the almighty USA still hasn't got one.
More and more mid-haul flights using A320 or 737, they are slower than 777 or A350
Many mid range flights climbing higher isn’t efficient. Long range flights climb as they burn off fuel.
I find it hard to believe that cars travel an average of 30% faster in the last 50 years.
Why would you say the Concorde would consume 6.7 times its fuel per passenger? The Concorde max passenger load was much less than a 747. There was a huge difference in passenger capacity between the two. Let's compare apples to apples.
Why do so many airline related items like this one keep showing four engine liners such as the A-380 when none are being produced and only the 380 is still in regular service on limited routes. It's a twin jet world everyone.
I've just watched a Lufthansa A340 on FR24...
Flying slower allows more time to sober up before deplaning.
3:19 Bro showed us an A330, Not a Boeing 787
Aviation Fuel costs. The faster a plane goes, the more fuel it has to burn. Also why fly so quickly if you can enjoy your flight.
I'm still waiting for the surprise.
Interesting…. Everything is speed and trip times until EVs need to be inserted. Suddenly acceleration is a factor.
13:45 I always choose to fly on Snowbirds
Could planes slowerness b mainly due to weather change? And they do it in the hopes of better safety for works and passengers?
There is no tangible reason why the speeds of commercial airliners have slowed (though marginally). In fact we are more resourceful Technologically, that we can push up the speed from the present 540 miles now (about 470 n.m. or 870 km), per hour. This can easily be pushed up to 900 km/hr and that is needed too, as getting into the airport & out takes much more time now. Any marginal reduction in that time will be welcomed. The Mach 1(speed of sound) is around 1200 km/hour. May be the airlines companies are playing a bit safe on engine maintenance.
Fuel cost. Efficiency. Concord would eat through 2x to 3x the amount of fuel of a regular jet.
Airline cost index is an airline navigation parameter that dictates Mach number as a function of balancing fuel cost versus crew and other costs to maximize profits, with no consideration of the external environmental costs. An appropriate international carbon fee would address this environmental failure, but big oil money corruption will never allow that.
Yes, the same for cars. We don't need racing cars for the wast majority of the population.
Before: Faster flights, better experiences, wide open airports.
Now: More passengers, more planes, lower operating costs, less drag, more congestion at airports, more delays in trips and slower flights.
... but much lower fares (compared to the "Golden Age").
Not to mention the ubiquitous and often humiliating security checks, especially post 9/11. Flying is now close to hell on earth.
You probably know that cars speed is regulated, so their top speed is completely irrelevant! After that, you discussed the main reason for slower flights, efficiency. So stop comparing planes, to cars and trains, it's quite misleading.
Blame our desire to want more and more electronic features, such as having a screen for every passenger seat. Running those features use fuel as well.
You can get a rough idea of how much power something is using by how hot it gets. Those screens don't get hot. Think of how hot an old-fashioned 100 watt bulb got. For those too young to know about them, you could burn your hand on them. For comparison jet engines use tens of millions of watts. So the power used by screens is insignificant by comparison.
You could have written the reason in the title and saved us all 14 min
So baseline... humanty is getting slower and therefore more restricted.
I disagree traveling from Miami to the UK used to always be at least 9 hours now it's always close to 7 hours!
Better jetstream forecasting/detection I guess, they can get into it and stay there. But I don't see this, Orlando to London always took around 8 hours for me.
Snoopy used to fly a Sopwith Camel so there!
Whatever the cost of fuel is, the airports congestion is the main culprit of longer flights as a flight time is based on "gate to gate" data. Just try to imagine an aircraft leaving from the largest airports in the US, such as JFK, SFO, LAX, ORD, DTW among others and the EU such as LHR, ZRH, CDG, LGW, BRU, STU, MUN among others is spending more time from the gate to its actual departure from the runway along with the time spent at their destination where the time spent from the landing strip to the gate is using longer and longer to get too.
A DC 9 leaving LAX and arriving in ORD has seen its "gate to gate" time extended by one hour while a flight from MSP to ORD has seen its "gate to gate" time extended by 30 minutes as SEA is not a huge airport HUB and has a "gate to gate" time lower than a flight leaving LAX of only 30 minutes.
The average airspeed of all aircraft in the 70's was 580 miles per hour while it has been reduced to 540 miles per hour because, like a car engine, will lower its gas intake while the air frame of all aircraft of today's market are slimmer, partly made with composite material which have rendered aircraft weight up to 20% lower than the aircraft of the 70's up to 2000's.
Not that much slower, but fuel cost is most likely why. The Concorde would be nice if people could afford 10,000 a ticket, I can wait a few more hours lol.
lol. The “shin-KAAN-sin” sent me 😂
11:07 is an A330 not an A350