The End of the "Age of Speed" 531
DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
Re:Speed is NOT overrated (Score:5, Interesting)
From the perspective of comfort and productivity, if the same money can get you a cattle-class seat on a mach 2 bird or a cushy recliner, a power jack for your laptop, and an edible meal on a cost-optimized subsonic one, it isn't at all clear that you'd choose the former.
Given that running the big, cost-optimized subsonic allows the carrier to adjust the split(not quite per-flight; but reasonably quickly) between comfort seats and low cost seats as the market dictates, while the small, supersonic one only allows choosing between expensive discomfort and really expensive comfort, the economics behind running the subsonic craft seem pretty compelling.
While I expect that maximum achievable air speeds(and/or flight paths that incorporate very high speed excursions outside the atmosphere) will continue to advance for specialty applications, mostly military; such developments as "leg room", "laptops that aren't a pain to work on", and "sweet, sweet inflight internet" have likely sealed the commercial fate of very high speed air travel services.
Actually, MANKIND'S average speed has soared (Score:5, Interesting)
Well perhaps for the upper class Americans for whom air travel was a given back in the seventies travel hasn't sped up. But for the 10s or 100s of millions who are being introduced to commercial air travel for the first time, let me tell you their average speed has really taken off. Air travel has become affordable for the first time to a significant fraction of the world's population. Rising living standards and cheaper flights due to de-regulation has done the trick. Living here in Vietnam I personally have taken many airplane "virgins" for a ride. ;)
(Due to an extremely fortunate set of circumstances, I must confess I was lucky enough to break the sound barrier in a Concorde flight way back when. It was interesting watching the digital airspeed gauge go higher and higher!)
Re:Technology of Ancients. (Score:5, Interesting)
my kingdom for a modpoint... (Score:3, Interesting)
I traveled a lot in the mid-90s when my co had AmEx Travel people on premise who could cut boarding passes (REAL ones, not the oxymoronically named "e-ticket" crap) & all you had to do was go through metal detector & walk on plane. I once got to Hartsfield (Atlanta) for a 6:30 am flight, realized I'd forgotten my wallet but knew I had cash in my planner for cab & was meeting my director later, called AmEx who took care of the hotel & proceeded to make a 2-day trip to Houston & back w/no ID whatsoever!
nowadays I avoid air travel like the plague! I'm going to have to go to San Diego in Sep but that will be my 1st flight in almost 2 yrs & I assure you it ain't b/c I can't afford it... when (/if) the security theatre stops (ha! I kill me!) & I don't have to worry about my 6 yr-old daughter getting molested and/or radiation exposure I MIGHT resume my previous air travel level but I don't see that happening any time soon & we're driving distance to Port Canaveral so I'll be giving my $ to the cruise lines for the foreseeable future...
got that Delta/TSA/Obama?
(quick edit: ironically my captcha word was "oppress")
Re:Actually very true (Score:4, Interesting)
BS. We can afford it; our politians have convinced the population that we are broke, broke, and broke, and that we must give ever greater tax breaks to the ever more wealthy.
If we chose to, we could afford high speed rail. Heck, we pay hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars to build new stadiums for private sports franchises but we can't afford to build a railroad?
We're not broke, we're stupid and gullible.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets look at "average speed". Today air and high-speed train travel is more accessible to more people than in any point in history. We even have tourists in space (or at least on sub-orbital flights). So I would say the collective speed of the human race has only gone up.
With more efficiency, we can get even more people up in the air and moving fast.
Re:Actually very true (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct but that is pretty out of date. The Economist had a great article about the difference between rail in Europe and the US and concluded that our focus on freight was a far more productive allocation of resources. It is just that it is less visible to the public. You save more energy moving 100s of tons of freight on those tracks than a tiny amount of people at high speed.