Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster?
By Brian Palmer
Two different manufacturers unveiled supersonic jets at this year's Paris Air Show, eight years after the Concorde stopped flying. The introduction of the new planes got the Explainer thinking—why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster over the last few decades? Fuel efficiency, among other things. Commercial airlines have slowed down over the last three or four decades. Today, flying from New York to Denver takes 19 more minutes than in 1983, and a flight from Washington, D.C., to Miami takes 45 more minutes than in 1973. The primary reason for such sluggishness is the cost of fuel. By the laws of physics, the increase in drag equals the square of the increase in speed, so even a slightly faster flight requires a lot more fuel. Hiking a plane's velocity by 10 percent takes 21 percent more energy. Speeding up by 40 percent approximately doubles fuel consumption. Shorter flights can save airlines money on labor, but not enough to offset the loss in efficiency. (Fuel represents about 35 percent of the cost of a flight, whereas personnel expenses constitute 30 percent.)...[continued]
