> Concorde, ... ultimately failed economically due to ... regulatory restrictions on overland supersonic flights.
Hardly fait to blame regulation here, the problem was that it was incredibly loud and unpleasant. You can try to make it sound like government overreach, but it takes some serious mental aerobatics.
Spooky23 · 5h ago
It was state of the art 1960/70 tech. Cruising across the ocean on afterburner is a feat, but doesn’t make sense - even the air force delivered super cruise on the F22.
pfdietz · 6h ago
The problem was it was very expensive.
There should be a name for the principle that one needn't look for more complicated explanations when economic ones suffice.
wongarsu · 6h ago
And it was very expensive because it was a Cold War prestige project. A three-way race between the US, Europe and the Soviet Union. Just like the Apollo program it was forced into existence through force of will, on a tight deadline with limited economic considerations.
If anything it's a miracle how practical the Concorde was and how long it remained in operation
pfdietz · 4h ago
That was why it was done at all, but not why it was expensive.
xdfgh1112 · 6h ago
That's Occam's razor more or less.
namuol · 6h ago
Just give us high speed rail. Who does supersonic travel actually serve?
areoform · 5h ago
Some of us would like to visit other continents. A world that grows ever smaller is one where war becomes ever unthinkable.
whoisyc · 5h ago
Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.
If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.
areoform · 5h ago
Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.
See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.
In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
bojan · 5h ago
You'd think so, but Europe grew ever smaller, with open borders, low-cost flights, single market, until at some point it didn't any more, and that process is since 2016 reversing.
perching_aix · 5h ago
A 6000 km long undersea tunnel with a 600 km/h avg speed train traversing it would be pretty futuristic alright :)
tom_ · 5h ago
You can visit other continents already? If they aren't connected by land, we have aeroplanes - and if you don't like flying, you can go by boat.
supportengineer · 5h ago
That sounds like a false choice. In order to avoid war, people need to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels so they can personally visit the country?
bjourne · 5h ago
If shorter distances were correlated with more peace there wouldn't be a genocide in Gaza, since the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv is only about 70 km. More travel may have other advantages, but peace doesn't seem to be one of them.
0cf8612b2e1e · 6h ago
That would be great if it could actually get built in the USA. Too many entrenched interests who want it to fail and/or want to skim off the project.
(I love high-speed rail; I enjoy it in Europe. I think Brightline's implementation may need some work before it's scaled up.)
MoltenMan · 5h ago
From what I've seen the majority of the deaths are either a. intentional or b. really not the trains fault. That's not to say it isn't horrible that it happens, but IMO the solution is train safety awareness (don't stop on a railway crossing!!!), and if anything building more high speed rail in the US will improve public awareness of how to be safe around trains.
namuol · 3h ago
This is ultimately scaremongering. First off, safety was supposed to be addressed by government funds which it sounds like only recently were approved; there’s nothing fundamentally unsafe about rail when you actually build it properly. But even if this were the baseline figure, do we really need to compare the death rate of our highway system?
justinclift · 5h ago
> averaging one death every 13 days of service.
Holy Shit. That's beyond just terrible.
laurencerowe · 5h ago
Brightline is mostly 110mph with a few 125mph sections. Standard intercity speeds in Europe, the tier below TGV style high speed rail.
Freedom2 · 4h ago
Depends on your definition of "high speed", considering how slow it is.
daft_pink · 6h ago
Most people using these flights would be traveling over oceans that are not serviceable by rail.
namuol · 6h ago
My point stands. Who needs to cross oceans so regularly and so fast?
AlotOfReading · 5h ago
Even with the decline of business travel, there's plenty of people traveling constantly who would pay absurd amounts of money to arrive faster. Celebrities, sports teams, entertainers, the ultra-wealthy, etc. Less flight time allows them to get more rest and spend extra time preparing for the events they're traveling to.
psadri · 5h ago
Another approach would be more comfortable travel at today’s speeds (or even slower). Imagine boarding a plane with a luxury hotel like experience. A buffet breakfast, some work/reading in a nice library, followed by some treadmill / stationary bike time, then a shower, lunch, a massage in the spa. Dinner later before a classical concert and finally heading to sleep in a comfy bed. Then wake up and disembark at your destination.
AlotOfReading · 5h ago
Many of the people I mentioned already travel in luxurious conditions, and the economics for luxury aviation are well-explored. It misses the fundamental issue here though. Time spent traveling is time that isn't spent setting up for an event or meeting with fans/media/business interests. You can't solve that with classical music.
dexterdog · 5h ago
Very rich people and C-level execs. Ok, maybe not 'need' but they want to.
supportengineer · 5h ago
We had the perfect machine for this. The SS United States.
scopendo · 5h ago
I would hazard to say very many people, me included.
juujian · 5h ago
Fabulous, even more means for the ultra rich to consume and generate greenhouse gases while the quality of life for the 99% stagnates.
Jtsummers · 5h ago
If they use Starship, though, it would reduce the number of ultra rich out there as their wealth gets divided through rapid unscheduled inheritance.
appreciatorBus · 6h ago
A whole section on economics, efficiency and speed without any mention of externalities.
robotresearcher · 6h ago
“More fuel per seat‑km means higher CO₂ if sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is scarce. Supersonic NOₓ and water vapour are emitted directly into the lower stratosphere, affecting ozone and radiative forcing . Methalox rockets also inject large quantities of H₂O and NOₓ at >30 km.”
appreciatorBus · 6h ago
Fair enough, I was literally searching for the word.
I assumed the history of noise externalities from supersonic aircraft might merit a broader discussion of externalities.
It’s great that they are talking about air pollution, but I’d still argue that there are many other externalities to supersonic air travel, (and sub sonic air travel, and ground transport, etc)
I just think we’d get saner transport policy and better innovation if we talked about them, and how to balance the benefits for people inside the vehicle for the costs to those outside the vehicle.
areoform · 5h ago
For the self-described "skeptics," 2 hour travel to anywhere on Earth means that everyone gets to have a donor organ shipped to them within the viability window.
If we could go from SF to Tokyo in 2 hours, it would permanently change geopolitics. Imagine commuting between Shenzhen and SF. One foot in each of the two most innovative cities on Earth.
The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
ThinkBeat · 5h ago
yeah, but in reality it would mean the rich and powerful can get a donar organ from anywhere in the world. Probably from somewhere whre organs can be cheaply obtained, one way or another and then rushed to the private hospital where Bill Gates is waiting.
justinclift · 5h ago
> The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
Is there strong evidence that's true?
bryanrasmussen · 5h ago
>The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
and the quicker disease can spread.
jMyles · 5h ago
It's unlikely that the general speed of spread of a pathogen will cause an increase in adverse outcomes from that pathogen. It's equally possible (though woefully underexamined) that the hastened immunity stemming from more rapid spread will cause a decrease in adverse outcomes.
What causes an increase in adverse outcomes, at least for fast-moving pandemics such as respiratory pandemics, is spread between risk tiers. For example, in the case of a pathogen with a significant age-dependent morbidity/mortality rate, one of the most dire threats is spread within multigenerational households.
Providing resources, opportunities, and guidance to facilitate spread within the low-risk tier while briefly isolating that cohort from the high-risk tier is likely to produce better outcomes.
Stated more tersely: the human proclivity to travel and share immune information with peers is a strength, not a weakness.
areoform · 5h ago
> and the quicker disease can spread.
People who haven't been on HN for a while tend to think HN keeps getting worse etc. and that's rarely the case, but I do think something has changed in the site's core audience.
HN has attracted its share of luddites. People who aren't interested in building a better future. But are very interested in tearing it down.
When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
tom_ · 5h ago
You can make the case for whatever case you are trying to make, without pushing back on this quite specific extremely correct point. When people meet. disease spreads. If it doesn't spread when they breathe on one another, it will spread when they touch. If it doesn't spread when they touch, it will spread when they fuck. If it doesn't spread when they fuck - phew, crikey, this disease is useless indeed, and natural selection will see it off quickly. Meanwhile our protagonists now have flu, norovirus and crabs.
supportengineer · 5h ago
March 2020, approximately
Avicebron · 5h ago
> When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
As there as been a general broadening of discussion as to exactly what "a better future" means and I suppose more specifically to whom.
daft_pink · 6h ago
It’s kind of interesting the way the entrenched players really aren’t interested in this technology so much.
zeristor · 7h ago
Charm of Concorde sort of noise dived when it exploded.
Jtsummers · 6h ago
What's "noise dived"? I presume you mean "nose dived".
But it did not explode, it crashed. The cause of the accident was FOD (Foreign Object Damage). Debris on the runway, a 17"x1" strip of titanium, caused damage to the tire which caused additional damage and ultimately the crash.
Perhaps less dramatically, but that's not a unique-to-Concorde kind of accident. FOD is taken seriously in the aviation industry.
jMyles · 5h ago
While the engineering and innovation surrounding fast travel is interesting and compelling, I think that ultra-comfortable but slow-and-sustainable travel is more likely to win the day.
pfdietz · 6h ago
Makes the mistake of to some extent conflating propellant and fuel. Liquid oxygen is very cheap, much cheaper than hydrocarbon fuels per unit mass, a fact not in evidence in the article.
Hardly fait to blame regulation here, the problem was that it was incredibly loud and unpleasant. You can try to make it sound like government overreach, but it takes some serious mental aerobatics.
There should be a name for the principle that one needn't look for more complicated explanations when economic ones suffice.
If anything it's a miracle how practical the Concorde was and how long it remained in operation
If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.
See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.
In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
(I love high-speed rail; I enjoy it in Europe. I think Brightline's implementation may need some work before it's scaled up.)
Holy Shit. That's beyond just terrible.
I assumed the history of noise externalities from supersonic aircraft might merit a broader discussion of externalities.
It’s great that they are talking about air pollution, but I’d still argue that there are many other externalities to supersonic air travel, (and sub sonic air travel, and ground transport, etc)
I just think we’d get saner transport policy and better innovation if we talked about them, and how to balance the benefits for people inside the vehicle for the costs to those outside the vehicle.
If we could go from SF to Tokyo in 2 hours, it would permanently change geopolitics. Imagine commuting between Shenzhen and SF. One foot in each of the two most innovative cities on Earth.
The smaller our world becomes, the more peaceful it becomes.
Is there strong evidence that's true?
and the quicker disease can spread.
What causes an increase in adverse outcomes, at least for fast-moving pandemics such as respiratory pandemics, is spread between risk tiers. For example, in the case of a pathogen with a significant age-dependent morbidity/mortality rate, one of the most dire threats is spread within multigenerational households.
Providing resources, opportunities, and guidance to facilitate spread within the low-risk tier while briefly isolating that cohort from the high-risk tier is likely to produce better outcomes.
Stated more tersely: the human proclivity to travel and share immune information with peers is a strength, not a weakness.
HN has attracted its share of luddites. People who aren't interested in building a better future. But are very interested in tearing it down.
When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
As there as been a general broadening of discussion as to exactly what "a better future" means and I suppose more specifically to whom.
But it did not explode, it crashed. The cause of the accident was FOD (Foreign Object Damage). Debris on the runway, a 17"x1" strip of titanium, caused damage to the tire which caused additional damage and ultimately the crash.
Perhaps less dramatically, but that's not a unique-to-Concorde kind of accident. FOD is taken seriously in the aviation industry.