What about climate change [1], and using less fossil fuels? We need the opposite - less first class, less business class seats, less private jets, to maximise the people who can travel per the same quantity of fuel. A typical passengers aircraft burns ~ 48 tons (!) of fuel to cross the Atlantic [2]. Part of the refugees issue happens exactly because of the warming and drought [3]
48 tons of jet fuel to take 300 people on that route works out to around 70 passenger-miles per gallon, and that's not even assigning any fuel consumption to the cargo being carried. Airliners are pretty efficient. That's actually a pretty bad one, many airliners can do well over 100 passenger-miles per gallon.
Air travel makes up about 2% of human CO2 emissions. Certainly you can make an argument that a lot of it is pretty wasteful since a lot of people on airliners don't need to travel, but there are far better areas to worry about if you want to curb emissions.
As a normal consumer, air travel would just definitely be a significant portion of your emissions. One round trip trans Atlantic fight would be comparable to one years worth of commute by car.
The units that really matter are tons of co2 equivalent.
Your personal share of that trip (ignoring cargo and such) would be about half a ton of CO2. Per capita emissions in the US are about 17 tons. The portion isn't negligible, but it's not all that great. For comparison, the average American drives about 12,000 miles per year and gets around 25MPG, resulting in CO2 emissions of around 5 tons.
If you want to cut CO2, your efforts are best spent on electricity generation, heating, and road transportation.
I'd half expect that argument to be countered with the proposal that since supersonic planes will have a higher cruise altitude you could just offset the climate effect of the carbon dioxide by adding enough sulfur to the fuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols... says Airliners could use lower-quality sulfur-rich fuels on higher altitudes. That approach would utilize regular flights and enable airlines to use cheaper fuels on long-distance flights. It would require using separate fuel tanks for takeoff and landing in populated areas, due to toxicity and olfactory sensations of sulfur oxides. This can be achieved in many airliners without difficulty, since they already have separate and selectable wing and fuselage fuel tanks.), and I am not even sure if I would be fascinated or appalled by the argument...
Is it the difference big enough that its worth putting political capital on stopping faster and more comfortable air travel?
I would much prefer if focus where on high-speed rails that (if my memory is correct) has the lowest climate effect of all forms of travel except biking.
It would be awfully nice if all the advanced engineering effort being put into multiple competing supersonic programs went towards working on lower emissions for the next generation of regular subsonic aircraft. If we can make a new subsonic jet for normal people that's at least 30-40% less carbon intensive, then that's something to get excited about.
Agreed on HSR though - here in Australia HSR has been a pipe dream for decades...
The desire for cost savings by way of using less fuel already means that huge effort is devoted to improving jet engines (and planes, the 787 is quite different than previous jumbos). Even after all that, slower planes are more efficient than jets.
Although there is obviously still effort being put into the supersonic programs, aerospace giants like Boeing and Airbus are working pretty hard to get a reduction in NOx, emissions and fuel consumption. We have gone a long way in designing a good aircraft, and have been making it more efficient over the last few years. One of the primary goals of these manufacturers right now is to become more efficient. [1] NASA has some mid-term goals for 2035 in terms of emissions, NOx and fuel consumption, in terms of TRLs.
A lot of effort is in fact being placed in these areas. NASA has had the N+1, N+2, etc., programs. There is a lot of interest in distributed electric propulsion (see the ESAero work), and Europe is working on their Clean Sky programs which are actively trying to push what is now called "Open Rotor" propulsion technologies. What is missing is major civil airframer (i.e., Boeing, Airbus) commitment to take some risks with new concepts that go beyond traditional tube-and-wing. Unfortunately, the outsourcing disasters that happened with 787 have convinced Boeing management that they "took too much risk" with the 787, conflating programmatic and technical risk, and it's hard to be sanguine about Boeing prospects for going beyond traditional configurations.
The issue is that other forms of supersonic propulsion, outside of jet engines, are all still in very early experimental stages, and not proven.
Engine manufacturers have spent a TON of R&D on fanjet engines and making them several orders of magnitude more efficient than the engines of 20 years ago even, but supersonic flight needs more than a fanjet - they need to look at turbojets, with afterburners etc. There is not much scope to play with with those unfortunately. What works at subsonic speeds at 30,000 feet won't at Mach 2+ at 80,000 feet.
But there are other aspects to conserving energy. When Concorde lands, then energy expended by the braking systems on the rollout is the same as that used to power an average family house for a day.
If they could improve kinetic energy recovery systems (as they do on Formula 1 cars and some electric cars), then that energy could be fed back in some way, to power on board avionics etc.
"making them several orders of magnitude more efficient than the engines of 20 years ago even"
Surely that's an exaggeration? (If not - I'd love links to explain what's changed... 100 to 1000 times improvement since the mid '90s seems unlikely to me though...)
A modern 747-400 gets about 0.9MJ per passenger-km.
Meanwhile trains vary enormously but US trains appear to get about 2.7MJ per passenger-km, while Portugese ones are about 0.07MJ; but I don't know if that's comparing like with like (the data is unclear). Cars seem to get about 1.2MJ per passenger-km. A big cruise ship seems to get about 5.9MJ per passenger-km, plus you need to spend lots more energy on, essentially, life support because they're so slow.
So that's half an order of magnitude in 70 years - which feels much more "Yeah, I can believe that". (Not that trusting gut-feel is a great way to do science or find truth, but checking facts when your gut feel says "Nope" is always a good idea...)
Also, that's a little bit of an apple to oranges comparison - I wonder what the numbers look like comparing a Concorde-vintage 1976 (or 1969?) 747 with a modern 747? Or even an A380 (Which I guess is the nearest modern counterpart of a mid '70s 747?)
> US trains appear to get about 2.7MJ per passenger-km, while Portugese ones are about 0.07MJ
I'm with you, there has to be some flaw with differing methodologies going on here. It's way too discordant.
I'm surprised at the 2.7 figure; are trains really more than twice as worse as individual passenger vehicles? I can't imagine so. Especially not the trains I use most often, electric-powered urban subways.
The higher the speed, the more important avoiding air resistance is to get high efficiency.
Planes are efficient, ones they are high up in the sky because there is less air there.
Unfortunately, they need lots of energy to get up in the low pressure regions, and we do not have ways to recover that energy in landing.
Moving slower also increases the per mile efficiency, as air resistance grows faster than linear in speed.
Net effect (highly simplified) is that trains beat high speed trains irrespective of distance, high speed trains beat planes on shorter distances (up to a few hundred miles), but planes beat high speed trains if the distance covered in one hop is large enough.
Hyperloop aims to change that by being a train riding at low atmospheric pressure (planes don't only burn fuel to go from A to B, they also burn fuel to stay up; hyperloop wouldn't need to do the latter) (edit: ideally, it also would recover energy on braking)
I'm on my phone right now so I can't post nice details, but the Wikipedia number for "Portugal" is mislabeled. Per the reference, that is just for the Lisbon rail system. The US DOE report the US number was sourced from averages all passenger rail systems in the US, and specifically notes significant system-to-system variance. The biggest variance is that the Lisbon numbers are based on an average of about 400 passengers per train kilometer, while the US averages only about 40 across all systems.
Yeah, that seemed really odd to me, but I thought maybe it was due to diesel vs electric-with-regenerative-braking, which can be disturbingly efficient. Trains should be vastly more efficient than any individual transport.
The only US commuter train I've seen was the SFO Caltrain, which was very not electric. Are there many electric trains there?
Yes. For example, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor is electric as is light rail for the most part (entirely?). There's also an electrification project underway for Caltrain. I'm not sure about how much commuter rail in the US is electric in general.
> Engine manufacturers have spent a TON of R&D on fanjet engines and making them several orders of magnitude more efficient than the engines of 20 years ago even, but supersonic flight needs more than a fanjet - they need to look at turbojets, with afterburners etc. There is not much scope to play with with those unfortunately. What works at subsonic speeds at 30,000 feet won't at Mach 2+ at 80,000 feet.
Whether you fly subsonically or supersonically, thermodynamic efficiency will be driven by engine pressure ratio and turbine inlet temperature. The advanced turbofans flying today have very impressive gas generator cores (high-pressure compressor, low-emissions combustors, high-pressure turbines) that would be equally applicable to supersonic airframes. The low pressure part of the cycles will definitely optimize to a different point for subsonic vs. supersonic applications, with supersonic cruise preferring higher fan pressure ratios and lower bypass ratio. Like Concorde, you are going to want to size the engines such that you do not cruise in afterburner (assuming you are staying roughly below Mach 3; above 3 - 3.5, the ramjet cycle starts becoming more favorable). However, this is all within scope for what the aeropropulsion vendors know how to do. The big issue is that the specific engine configuration you are going to want for a supersonic cruiser is unique to that application. Originally, Aerion was going to use JT8Ds, which they later shifted away from.
My point here is it's not principally an R&D issue, it's that if you want to minimize supersonic fuel consumption, you are going to want a specific configuration for which there will not be a huge engine market. Contrast with the market for something like a CFM56 or V2500. Being able to leverage the ADVENT three-stream/variable cycle work (and GE YF120 before that) will also help, but the point still stands.
Better to develop some sort of awesome virtual reality so that people don't need to travel as much to meet each other. (Yes yes people will still travel sometimes, but there's a lot of low-hanging fruit like going to conferences and business meetings where travel is not really necessary)
People don't go to conferences and business meetings primarily to do the things that VR and recorded presentations can replace. If they did, conferences would have gone away years ago.
Did I say they did? That's why watching youtube videos from FOSDEM doesn't replace going to FOSDEM.
But it's also clear that current VR or even "telepresence" robots (ie. ipads on sticks) are awful and there's a huge opportunity to make virtual interaction at virtual conferences great.
From pure capacity management point of view this would work.
From financial perspective the cost of a first-class ticket is much higher proportionally than the space occupied by that seat. Full-fare first-class passengers subsidize coach passengers on a promotional or discounted ticket, enabling air travel for many.
Remove the subsidy, and average cost per coach ticket might increase, which is why Southwest (which does not have first-class in its fleet) is just sometimes, but not always, the cheapest option.
What is the vacancy factor in first class vs economy class? My observation from flying often would estimate coach being 70~80% full on typical routes and first/economy class only being ~50% full. I would also guess that the average paid price is only half of the full first class price.
Would there be a public source for any of this data? Or anyone with in insight in these numbers that want to share anything?
I'd venture the vacancy rates are inversely proportional to distance (first-class on a long-haul Los Angeles to Tokyo is a somewhat better deal than first-class on a quick Seattle to Portland) and proximity to business centers (where company pays vs me paying out of pocket).
It seems against any airline's self-interest to have those numbers in the open, this analysis uses the availability of free upgrades (unsold first-class seats that are given away to airline customers with preferred status) as a reasonable proxy https://skift.com/2016/08/27/the-state-of-airline-upgrades-f...
Another part of the refugee issue happens because people don't travel very much, and are susceptible to believing in propaganda that dehumanizes the populations of places that are so far away they don't even seem real.
I'd imagine it's harder to get behind the carpet-bombing of a place that you've been and people you've met. Let's have more air travel, not less.
Joining the military (or a terrorist organization) should not be anyone's best chance of seeing the world. Yet sometimes it is.
This is exactly right. A far better form of innovation is to make better use of aircraft cabin volume. Every time I fly, it seems like a good 30 - 50% of the cabin volume is either (a) empty space of (b) overhead bags. Something like this [1] seems to lower carbon intensity and improve comfort.
I looked around and these seats apparently give "higher density than first-class seats," i.e. they're much less
dense than coach. I don't think this will lower most people's carbon footprint.
Yes, I guess these particular seats are not more dense, but the idea of trading some cabin volume for legroom seems a good one, but requires some innovation.
For that to work you have to ensure there are no loopholes to avoid the taxation, that any offsetting actually works, and that no one tries to "disrupt" the industry by ignoring the rules. Not to mention the environmental impacts you can't offset such as the noise pollution suffered by everyone on the plane's flight path. It's far more effective to ban supersonic passenger flight.
There are some "nice things" that money shouldn't be able to buy because they have too much downside for everyone else. Regardless of how much money you have, you still have to share Earth with everyone else.
> Not to mention the environmental impacts you can't offset such as the noise pollution suffered by everyone on the plane's flight path. It's far more effective to ban supersonic passenger flight.
When you first read a paragraph like this without experiencing what airplane noise pollution actually means you say to yourself: "How bad that can actually be? The airplanes fly at an altitude of 10,000m, I'm sure it can't be that bad. Right?"
Wrong. Since the Ukrainian Civil War started lots of large airplanes have been diverted to fly above my parents' country house, somewhere in Eastern Europe. The closest airport is located at about 140 km, but it doesn't matter, because at least once every hour you can hear those damn big "birds" flying 10km above you. It's even more unsettling when you notice them at 5 in the morning, as you had quickly woken up ready to fall asleep again but you now can't because there's that nasty airplane noise making its way through the house's concrete walls.
Supersonic flying over populated areas would increase that shitty noise exponentially.
I'm going to have to disagree. I grew up on a farm, and yes, outdoors on a calm day, you can hear jets flying over at 30000'. But, it is very quiet: easily drowned out by wind rustling in the trees and such. I would be very surprised if you heard it indoors. Perhaps, with a window open, but even then it will be drowned out by things like the refrigerator running. Frankly, it may have woken you up because it was an unfamiliar sound, but certainly not because it was loud. Either that, or the airplane you are complaining about is at significantly lower altitude than you imagine.
It happened more than once, and by looking at that airplane radar app I saw that there are lots of A380s flying above my parents' house each day. It is an airplane-spotter's dream location, though, on a clear and sunny day I was able to count 6 (six) airplanes flying above my head at the same time.
There are 'coastal' airports where noise isn't a huge problem, although even then it's debatable - the Concord project almost failed when New York cited noise pollution as a reason to ban the plane from landing there. The problem here though is that a private jet wouldn't be limited to a few Atlantic routes. The owner would presumably only buy one if it could be flown pretty much everywhere. That means the noise impact would be felt everywhere too.
Because rich people control politics, and only things that effect them matter (see Gilens and Page). For example, airport security is terrible because rich people bypass it completely. Transit is shitty because rich people have limos and helicopters. And where the prosperous do use transit, like in Switzerland, it's fantastic. If you want nice things you have to take the rich down to the level where regular problems are their problems too.
I am hardly rich, but I qualify for TSA Pre. I can buy a toll tag to use on toll roads. It is all moving downmarket.
It is not the same as being rich enough for general aviation transportation, but if I wanted to get a pilot's license, I could do that too.
As has now been demonstrated fully in the US, rich people hardly control politics. They do support one "team" or the other, but I would not mistake that for control.
1) Taxes-as-transfer-payments rarely work like we intend. These are not lossless transforms, the rule-sets are complex and somebody has to run it. Actual efficiency estimates are very hard to come by. This being said, actual transfer programs in the US seem quite efficient.
2) Americans at least have been described as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." The odd entertainment value of gawking at rich people as celebrities is really a thing.
3) There is an eternal struggle between the Coase Theorem and Pigou taxation.
4) The people who self-select for wealth may not consume as much as people who do not self-select for wealth. I heard the quote on the show "Vikings", but I imagine it is not original with them - "power is only given to those who will lower themselves to pick it up."
I'd like to see a moratorium on space tourism too. That's unlikely to be a popular view on Hacker News though, and it's got zero chance of happening anyway.
I propose all human beings be allocated a 10x10 meter concrete apartment (15x15 if living with a partner, and 20x20 if you are permitted to have children).
Furthermore, everyone will be given a standard monthly food ration consisting of rice, dry beans and powdered milk.
Each resident can own up to 3 "luxury" items selected from a standard catalog.
Each resident is permitted to travel no more than 150 miles from their residence each month, and personal cars are banned.
Imagine how quickly we could heal the environment if everyone could agree to these common sense restrictions!
With so many (all?) of the prediction models being completely off the mark, and the lack of significant temperature increase over the last decade plus, the perpetual mention of pending climate catastrophe just isn't as relevant as it used to be.
The global temperature anomaly in 2006 was 0.63C, in 2016 it was 0.99C. Tell me more about this supposed lack of significant temperature increase over the last decade.
Off the mark like under predicting? [1] Even simple models from 35 years ago indicate, at the global scale, warming. And, you know, that model while not very sophisticated, seems to be holding up well.
This is an area where the startups and disrupting efforts completely fail. We read and learn from so many blog posts about "startup X is shutting down" - but what about species? Would be nice to see wildlife and animals as priority (e.g. for Ycombinator). Also, movie makers like Disney who make fortunes from animating animals, should contribute. Otherwise, the only animals we will see is a Pixar movie.
The reason there's no interest is because the primary concern for investors like YC is generating a high return on investment. No matter what feel-good stuff Sam Altman might say about YC's goals in basic income research or other non-profit initiatives, at the end of the day, they have to deliver returns to their LPs.
But Governments can. They are already spending billions of dollars and a major chunk of that goes wasted due to inefficiency, corruption, red-tape etc. The kind of stuff that big organisations like IBM or HP had that startups came and disrupted by being more efficient and nimble. Imagine if Governments can setup and run a transparent organisation like YC whose sole purpose is to promote startups in those important areas like environment conservation and clean energy without worrying about profit.
I can imagine that many startups and founders are willing to let go of their unicorn dream and jump aboard (including me).
This is a correct description of the current situation. But maybe we never explored it? Many fields which were not considered good investment opportunities, are now bringing nice returns.
(1) This is a clever implementation. Maybe with a mobile camera it can be even more convenient to use?
(2) True knowledge work requires breaks, and can not be measured with simple metrics like "boss watch what on screen" or "lines of code"
(3) Even true knowledge workers can get into a non productive youtube loop, and sometimes external influence helps to prevent procrastination
(4) If your relationship with the boss is based on these types of system, you better look for another place where you are respected 360 for your contribution
(5) We should respect people that can not easily find interesting work or bosses that respect you
(6) Communication, context and respect are always better than authority, hierarchy, and politics. Alas, humans can be very good at both
This is great of course, but then again - it feels like human is the only species on this planet. We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with technology.
This article reminds an always missing in the startup "change the world" culture: animals and wild life. There is almost no investment, innovations, startups etc in this direction. The poor animals can't blog.
Also: auto-install a matching development & deployment local website on OSX or Ubuntu Desktop ,and the polls tutorial with git & deployment to a real website.
Hi Sam!
Would you consider to add preserving wild life and animals to YC https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/? After all, animals also live here with us, humans. And we need them too. Maybe startups and innovation can help?
THIS. I remember Reddit being seen as the red-headed-stepchild to Digg, back when you could get 3-letter usernames. Digg was estimated to be worth $200MM.
And then Digg v4 got released in 2010, with a huge community uproar. People flocked to Reddit, and within 18 months Digg gets sold for $500k.
[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-gam... [2]https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-do-airplanes-flying-acro... [3]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/is-a-lack-of-water-...