Flights feel like they’ve gotten much slower, in user space time.
I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.
> The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
It prevents a lack of funding for security pork. The TSA is a massive funding boondoggle for many many snake-oil security salespeople.
Full agreement with the point here: lock the cockpit doors, and let everyone go through the same level of security checks as TSA Pre.
"Just killing passengers" isn't meaningfully worse/different than your average mall shooting... It sucks, but it's not quite as severe as turning the giant flying tube of jet fuel into an improvised ballistic missile (the 9/11 problem).
A few things: we also put lots of effort into preventing mass casualty attacks in public places around the world (except the US govt in primary schools, for unfortunate three letter political reasons that begin with N and end with A). We generally don't want people to blow up planes because they're super expensive (even if we discount the lives of the passengers). Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things. When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground. And so on...
This is wrong on many levels. There isn’t much effort put into preventing those kind of attacks outside of really dense venues like stadiums.
Train and subway stations rarely have more than one or two armed officers if they have any at all.
Train tracks have shockingly little protection to prevent timed derailment sabotage. Buildings have little protection from being surrounded by accelerants and set on fire, etc.
There is a strange subset of things terrorists seem to want to do and society doesn’t do much to prevent the rest.
I'm not sure that's relevant or comparable when there's no baseline for what terrorist means.
There are lots of reasons people bomb cars. I would bet most of those organizations (1+ individuals) would prefer to blow up planes full of specific targets over specific targets.
>When planes crash, they often hit people on the ground
Do they? Other than 9/11, I'm personally unaware of this ever happening. 20 seconds searching says there was an airplane that crashed into a DC bridge in the 80's killing 4 motorists, and a couple of similar incidents, but it seems rare.
> Terrorists prefer blowing up aircraft to other things
Seems to me a lot of terrorist attacks are blowing up buildings or driving vehicles into crowds or bombs in crowds or stuff like that. Not a ton of blowing up planes in transit in the overall list of terrorist attacks.
But TSA does nothing to prevent that. Any rando can do that from outside of the plane. The things aren’t bullet proof and tailgating a vehicle into the general aviation gate of a major airport is trivial if you don’t care about eventually being caught.
yeah but the same is pretty much true of a train or a bus, which don't require all of this TSA stuff. If you wanted to kill people for much lower effort you can just get in a car and run over pedestrians or something.
The justification for the TSA is that terrorist attacks like 9/11 could deal a disproportionate amount of damage compared to the effort needed to pull them off. But it's sort of a flawed premise because the 9/11 attacks relied on the element of surprise: the victims thought the attackers were pirates. Otherwise there's no way a couple of terrorists could fight off an entire plane with just box-cutters.
If you blow a hole in the side of a bus then the bus can come to a halt and the passengers disembark safely. Same story with a train.
If you blow a hole in the side of a plane, then no one can disembark until the plane lands, and the plane itself may simply disintegrate mid-air, killing everyone on board.
Same story if you fill the bus or train with toxic gas, or try to start shooting, or literally any other form of attempted mass casualty attack. Planes are uniquely different to all other modes of transportation because you cannot disembark them quickly and the default failure mode is everybody dies.
> I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
If you were picking someone up, you could also park in short-term parking, go all the way in to their arrival gate and meet them as they got off the plane, help them with their bags or just accompany them to your car. No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
> No fooling around with trying to time your arrival in the driveway or hanging out there blocking other traffic waiting for your party to appear and figure out where your car is.
This hasn't really changed. If you're willing to pay to park you can still park and meet them at bag claim or another outside-security exit.
I think people are just more rushed and there are more flights so more contention for parking.
Waiting at baggage claim sucks ass. The seating there is usually terrible and the dining/drink options on that side of the airport are comparable to a prison cafeteria.
That helps but it’s still a mess, especially if the driver and passenger aren’t both familiar with the airport and can’t communicate well about where they’re meeting.
From that link, there were 137 hijacking attempts in the U.S. between 1968-1972, and 90 of them had Cuba as the destination. Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.
Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
> Seems like this could've been prevented more easily by not embargoing Cuba.
Cuba is a nearby non-extradition country. They did not decide to go to Cuba and hijack a plane to get there; they did other crimes and used the plane to attempt to evade law enforcement.
Many other countries are also non-extradition to the US, for various reasons including reciprocity and how the US treats its criminals. It’s definitely not unique to Cuba.
Presumably hijackers would just go to the next nearest country with no extradition policy. Honestly though I’ve never heard of “preventing hijackers” proposed as a reason for wanting to normalize relations with communist Cuba. You realize there are no hijackers anymore right? Additionally, there are many US citizens and corporations with valid and verifiable claims to property confiscated by the communist government in Cuba. Normalizing relations would obviously require a resolution to this situation.
>Also of note: these 137 hijacking attempts resulted in 1 fatality. By contrast, in each of those years 55,000+ people died in car crashes.
>People are terrible at judging risk.
And nuclear power is judged, fairly or unfairly, by Chernobyl. I probably don't need to explain what the cultural baseline for risk of hijacking is, and why it's not the late 1960s.
Reminds me of the study that showed that the increase in US car fatalities in the 2 years after 9/11 because everyone was scared of flying was comparable to the number of people who died in 9/11. Right 9/11 was arguably the safest time to fly.
That's pretty short-sighted. Plane hijackings are very dangerous situations and large death tolls, enormous investigations, threaten air travel, etc from a single event. I don't think the nerd calculus about the number of deaths from car crashes tells the whole story. 1968-1972 was also a different time from now and there is a lot more air travel and many more unstable people in this country. In the 1960s, the word "fascist" didn't mean "someone I didn't vote for" and words like genocide, oppression, etc mean far different things today and all this results in a lot more potential problems. Should TSA be a lot better, do they screw up a lot, is a lot of it a bit silly? Sure, but the idea that we just say "oh, well, there are a lot more car crashes so let's just no secure air travel" is just hard to take seriously. Sometimes doesn't simple nerd calculus doesn't tell the whole story. But, people always like to make claims like "people are so bad at determining" and it's a kind of unintended (usually) condescension but I think it's really a Dunning-Kruger thing. There are real reasons why simply comparing hijacking deaths to car crash deaths is not so simple that it leads to the conclusion that we shouldn't spend much money it. I've also seen ridiculous statements like that we only focus on airports because "lawmakers fly a lot more than normal people" it's crazy-talk.
things i have had confiscated: the blades for my twin-blade razor, pocketknives, leathermans, bottles of water, supplements, liquids that are slightly over 3.4oz.
this is retarded. there is no good reason to do this. if there is a good reason, i really don't care and would rather live in a freer society with slightly more risk.
"police state reduces crime" okay i do not care.
even their stupid IMS machines are just calibrated for lots and lots of type II error, and i don't believe they've actually ever caught anyone.
p.s. the sixties hijacking thing wasn't for purposes of terrorism. it's also why federal marshals started traveling around on planes.
Terrorist hijackings were a major reason for sky marshals being put on planes. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine famously hijacked some planes and then blew them up on camera. This led directly to Nixon putting sky marshals on planes.
The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists).
right, like most terrorism they were flashy but ultimately low-impact. the stat given about frequent hijackings is true but does not mean there were attempted or successful terrorist hijackings so regularly.
Things I’ve discovered in my carry-on (accidentally): a bottle of wine, box cutter, a weed pen, another weed pen, a large Anker battery, more wine, a chef’s knife.
I had the experience once of TSA finding numerous "things" in my luggage, looking at them and clearly knowing what they were, giving me a "you shouldn't have done that" look, putting them back, and letting me go.
Security does. But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater. The whole shoe removal thing, belts, etc. It's the most pathetically over the top form of security, and totally unnecessary. It does not in any way shape or form provide any extra level of security that can't be covered by something much simpler, less invasive, slow or antiquated.
> But a lot of what we go through these days is security theater.
I just had a big dose of that this morning, getting my tool bag flagged by TSA, which I honestly expected, and told my calipers were not allowed (because maybe I'm going to hijack a plane by threatening to measure it??) but having my very sharp broaching tools, which could actually maybe do some damage as a weapon, completely ignored. And then, the second time through, after checking the calipers, having my watch case opener taken because it sort of looks like a knife, even though it's completely dull with no sharp edge.
If you measure the position of the plane very accurately that will cause the momentum to become unknown due to quantum mechanics, which could make it hard to control the thing I guess.
Hmm. At least you weren’t threatening to measure the momentum very accurately. Since that would make the position unknown. Would that turn the plane into a slab?
You can always tell Americans at security in a European airport because they take their shoes off. European airports don't bother with shoe removal.
Are European airports statistically less secure than American airports? Is anyone even monitoring this? Surely by now we'd have some data to decide whether you need to remove your shoes or not.
One security agent at Frankfurt would not allow me to take my toothpaste through Schengen security. I had many hours until my flight so I took my luggage (and toothpaste) back to the non-Schengen area and waited until that security agent took a break and then went through security. From what I could tell she told other agents about me (she talked to them each in turn and pointed at me while talking). None of them fussed over my toothpaste when I went through. I and felt like I won the FU lottery.
I just don't carry a multi-tool any longer no matter how TSA safe it's supposed to be. It's not just the US though. I had one of those super cheap 2-part wine corkscrews (no foil cutter) confiscated in Spain.
You will never dodge the odd malicious gate agent.
We were late for a flight in the Philippines and the gate agent knew it. Told me all of my travel fishing gear was contraband - even the rod and reel. Straight up stole all my fishing gear figuring (correctly) it was worth less to me than making my flight.
Flying Dublin to US was incredibly backward. First you go through Dublin airport security, then you walk through a beautiful terminal, lots of food, drink, etc., so you grab a bunch of drinks, maybe a sandwich, unaware that you are about to have to throw it all away because you have to go through TSA and US Customs once you reach the "American" terminal.
So after throwing away perfectly good food and multiple bottles of water because our flight was coming up, we then had to sit in a terminal that only had 2 snack choices and no real food offerings.
I've decided to never fly out of Dublin to the US again. Even if that means I have to fly to London just to transfer to the US.
Most airports in Canada work similarly when flying to the US. It's actually an advantage because you go through US customs on departure and can fly into any US airport, even smaller non-international ones that don't have customs.
Perhaps it's more likely at an American airport, but I've been asked to remove shoes in both the UK and Portugal when flying to other European countries.
Same. Sometimes I've been asked by someone walking the queue to remove my boots. Never do, never a problem. I'm sure they just walk the queue so it feels like "something" is happening and you're not just waiting in yet another interminable queue.
if there are nails in the boots it triggers the metal detector. My boots aren’t glued (like timberlands and doc martins might be) and they trigger the detectors.
Almost all of my shoes nowadays have steel toes in them. I think my count for being told to not take them off because they expect them not to exceeds being asked to take them off. Never flown out of a non-EU country.
In my experience if you have tall soles/chunky boots they often ask you to take them off. Also if something bad happened there's sometimes theater where everyone has to take them off and they swab your hands.
If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.
So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, and the program is useful in that adding a fast lane speeds up the lines for everyone, as the fast lane inherently has more capacity per hour. And it also means fewer people to be screened by the primary lanes, which means more attention can be put toward a group statistically more likely to contain a bad actor (because they have had no background checks).
The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.
> So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program,
The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all).
The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.
Why shouldn't it be free for frequent travelers then? If it has all these benefits, including lower overall cost, surely it makes sense to not disincentive its use by charging for it.
I also had to pay a fee to the government for my driver’s license to have access to drive and passport to leave the country. Should those also be free?
You were 100% right until the random racism thing. I'm completely aware I'm paying a bribe for favorable government treatment.
Paying the bribe is better individually though. I'd even agree if you said Global Entry is only $30 more because your fingerprints are part of the payment.
> anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it.
Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design).
> The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval
Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.
The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive.
And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."
> Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.
Iowans have committed significantly more homicides per capita than people from most European countries (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter). I don't think it's problematic if European airports screen Iowans more heavily than Europeans and Saudis. Do you?
If they had a reputation for committing those homicides in Europe, that seems sensible. As stated though, it would be a big waste of their time. I mean, they are free to do their own risk assessments and run their security as they see fit either way, though.
If you really believe the public is kept safe most effectively by pretending to be fully blind to nationality when choosing who to screen at an airport (since you can't intensively screen everyone) I don't know what to tell you.
Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
> If they had a reputation for committing those homicides in Europe, that seems sensible.
Reputation?
Are we deciding security policies by reputation or statistics?
I think I'd win the bet of "Americans have killed more people (per capita) in other countries than Saudis have", so it does seem relevant to be more wary of them. Especially given how widespread the former has been, compared to a few incidents with the latter.
> If you really believe ... I don't know what to tell you.
That does seem evident, yes.
> Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.
Yeah, so this makes more sense. Even if I accept this statistic about Iowans, which I am fairly dubious of, your position still doesn't make sense. You would be saying that in situations of crimes of passion, gas station robberies, etc that it would be more likely for an Iowan to commit a murder than someone from Saudi Arabia (again, still dubious claim but I will grant it), this doesn't say anything about terrorist acts particularly related to air travel.
Yeah, at the expense of my civil liberties. You do realize that you have to do a background check and an interview to get that, right? Whereas when I was a child you didn't have to do any of that to enjoy the right to keep your belt and your shoes on at the airport.
Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre).
I rationalized it in a few ways:
* "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...)
* If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
> "The Government" already has all the information GE wants.
Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.
That's fair since it's technically not the federal government, but when I moved from Missouri to Colorado in 2019, I had to provide fingerprints in order to get my Colorado driver's license. And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.
> And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.
Let me put it this way: I wouldn't choose to leave my fingerprints at a crime scene assuming legal firewalls would prevent me from getting caught that way.
Technically, legally, right now, maybe the Colorado DMV's database isn't accessible to other parties. How strongly are you willing to bet that it's going to stay that way for the rest of your life?
I have never heard of a state drivers license requiring fingerprinting.
I've lived in 5 states in the last 20 years, but none of them were Colorado.
A quick web search suggests that CO requires prints for licensing as an auto or motorsports dealer, but I can't find a requirement for getting a standard DL. I didn't look too hard, and I'm not claiming any authority here, but I remain surprised by the requirement.
"The information here covers identification and lawful presence requirements for Coloradans seeking a driver license, ID card or instruction permit... Per C.R.S. 42-2-107 and 42-2-302, applications for credentials must contain a fingerprint."
CRS 42-2-107 concerns applications for driver's licenses and learner's permits, and CRS 42-2-302 concerns issuance of driver's licenses and non-driving identification cards.
My friends who were already in the state prior to 2017 never needed to get their prints taken to keep renewing their licenses. But since I moved here in 2019, I needed to provide mine, as do any teenagers getting their permits or licenses for the first time here.
That's shocking. And really too bad, because I could have imagined myself living in Colorado. From a distance, I appreciate what I know about their government.
But compulsory fingerprinting is too authoritarian for my tastes. I can still visit, right? :)
Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.
The U.S. used to take pride in freedom of movement. In fiction, demands for papers were a classic sign of a government gone over the line. Now you need ID even for a Greyhound or Amtrak. I guess you can still walk or ride a bicycle.
I've taken Amtrak quite a bit in the last few years (Emeryville & Truckee in California, and NYC, Philly, BWI, and DC in the east), and I've never been asked for ID to board a train. (In other words, trivially easy for someone to do something nefarious if they wanted to.)
No security checkpoints, no ticket checking before getting on the train, just someone checking tickets on the train itself 10-20 minutes after it gets moving.
You also don't actually need an ID to fly, though if you try that, give yourself plenty of time to get through "extra security".
Funnily enough, a while back (may be different now) I somehow lost my license between the car and the terminal door and didn't have any backup because it was a last minute trip. Guessing it's not the case today post-RealID but I was still able to get through TSA. The kicker though was that I had to go through all sorts of machinations to check into the Travelodge near the airport and pay in cash. Ever since, I use a generally useless global entry ID as identification at the airport and keep my driver's license well secured.
Yeah, similar experiences on both counts in early 2000s. The hotel's refusal to honor a reservation even with cash in advance was part of the new "not the country I grew up in" feeling, those years.
It has more to do with having a credit card on file in case of damages.
And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.
Yes, it was. One thing there seems to be more of is bundling of politics, like "Y is bad" as rejoinder to "X is good" with no necessary link between them.
I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.
My point isn’t political. But when people wax poetically about how great the US use to be, it definitely wasn’t great even in the 70s for a percentage of people living in the south
I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
That reads basically like "if you seem cooperative enough with our extra effort to check your identity, we'll probably let you through". That's just a very different country from "you need greenbacks to buy a ticket over the counter."
Similarly though admittedly more permissive, with Amtrak iirc it's like: you need a credit card and they probably won't check your ID. There were several more years after 9/11 before the "papers please" principle came for the trains and buses too.
If you walk onto the train with a ticket you printed, I don't think I've ever been asked for an ID. I might if I were picking up a ticket at the station.
You definitely need ID for hotels a lot of the time. Not sure the level where the regulations are put in place--probably varies--and Europe is probably more formal than the US in this regard. Was staying with a friend in Europe about a year ago and they had to take our passports to the police station to make us "official."
As I wrote elsewhere, I also had a challenge in the US a few years back but I expect that, had I been at my usual chain, there would have been a discussion with the manager followed by "I see nothing, I hear nothing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking cites two figures for the U.S. rate of hijacking attempts near its peak. The higher one is "Between 1968 and 1977, there were approximately 41 hijackings per year." meaning once per 9 days, an order of magnitude below yours. The other is once per 13.3 days over 1968-72. If both Wikipedia numbers are reliable then the peak must be somewhat higher than 1/9 in 73-77.
I already said ID is not security. How many 70s hijackers got away unidentified? How many would not have even tried if they also had to show ID? I can think of one case, "D. B. Cooper".
This conversation just doesn't seem promising. Your initial wildly-off claim got me worried I might misunderstand the world by that much (I remember the 70s, fuzzily). I wasted time checking it, wondering if the actual peak might be in a year not mentioned, trying to find the paper Wikipedia cited: it was a non-open-access paper with at least four links to check; one of them did show the first page, which at least gave the figure in question, if not the ultimate source.
Are we talking about the same US that didn’t allow my parents to attend certain schools, drink from the same water fountain, forced them to be in the back of a theater, and had separate colleges?
It is not only security, it is the lockable cockpit doors and entire set of changed assumptions. The airplane hijacking game was entirely ruined by Al-Qaeda on 9/11.
Prior to those events, the standard protocol was to assume a diversion, a hostage negotiation and a standoff, with likelihood resolution without bloodshed. Hijacking was either for extortion or for a ride somewhere else. They would get the plane on the ground and start negotiating.
Post-9/11, the assumption is now the entire planeload is already dead and the hijackers DGAF if they get out alive. As a potential hijacker, this removes your primary bargaining chip.
Plus, the locked cockpit doors mean you can't get to the pilots. Even if you can somehow convince the pilots to get a message out, you'll get nothing. They'll just get to an appropriate airport whether or not you start killing passengers every 5min. Then, you'll just be shot by the SWAT team on landing. Moreover, in many countries including the US, the protocol now includes shooting down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets [0].
So, since then, the likelihood of any potential reward from hijacking has gone to near-zero, and the risks have become essentially infinite.
And of course on top of that, despite the publicized failures, the security theater still substantially increases the risk of getting caught even trying to board a plane to hijack it.
To put it in gaming terms, the hijacking meta changed. Before, you had relatively minimal consequences as a hijacker. Now if you try anything funny, EVERYONE is going to be your enemy.
You aren't locked in the airplane with the hijacker. The hijacker is locked in the plane with hundreds of people with nothing to lose.
But very very few had any casualties - which is why we didn’t collectively freak it about it and establish the TSA. Also the vast majority were outside the US.
You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
Nobody has replicated 9/11, and to my knowledge, nobody has tried. If it's so easy to do so, then the perception of safety must be working great!
To be effective, safety measures don't have to block people who are smart and wouldn't commit the crime anyway. They only have to block the people dumb enough to do it.
Nobody has replicated 9/11 because as soon as the passengers figured out the new threat model, there was no chance of getting away with it. Flight 93 figured it out before 9/11 was even over. The locked cockpit doors are the suspenders to the “let’s roll” belt. There will be no new 9/11 until 9/11 falls out of living memory.
That idea is also a perception of safety. No team of hijackers has attempted to take over a plane post 9/11.
If TSA is just theater, couldn't an attacker simply bring weapons sufficient enough to hold off the crowd and break the door? The hijackers on 93 only had box cutters.
It is the combined perception of airport security and the perception that passengers will fight that deter bad actors from even trying.
It's the cockpit doors that prevent another 9/11, and those have nothing to do with TSA. Even if you could bring box cutters onto the plane you wouldn't be able to take it over. Plus, like you said, awareness among passengers. That also has nothing to do with TSA.
There are others in the this comment section saying it is easy to take a gun through TSA. If that is true, why would an attacker want to bring another box cutter? If the TSA is ineffective, couldn't someone bring a tool to break the cockpit door?
My point is that none of these things have to be impenetrable. There is a swiss-cheese model to safety. TSA doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective. Every layer of security adds up. There is no single component responsible for all airline security, not even the cockpit doors.
So there's three problems with the argument for TSA:
1. We did a lot of things in response to 9/11 (e.g. locking cockpit doors, TSA, increasing awareness). It's unclear whether TSA was a component that helped.
2. In the modern world, it's unclear whether hijacking is a severe risk to planes (compared to drones or missiles which are way more acquirable by terrorists and civilians than they were 25 years ago)
3. TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
> TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
Well, if we caught 20% of threats across the 19 hijackers on 9/11, there would have been a 99% chance one was caught. And a 67% chance that someone was caught in each group for each of the first 3 planes with 5 hijackers.
But even if they do miss 80% of the failures in penetration tests, what actually matters is whether or not real world threats are being caught. Threat actors in the real world act with different motivations than penetration testers, and with different skill sets.
What do you mean by that? And how acquainted are you actually with airport security?
I have a family member who works at a (European) airport in an administrative position, and apparently the security culture is quite deep and, I dunno, it sounds reasonable? As in, employees have clearances and passes to enter the more restricted areas (and they go through their own security points), the airport generally knows where the employees are and why they're there, the public areas have guards and many cameras and even the layouts of the stores and booths are subject to many security rules regarding materials and even stuff like camera sightlines.
I wouldn't assume that isn't going to happen. I've heard specifically that someone in the Trump camp wants to just have the airlines figure security out themselves.
One optomistic point is that a lot of stupid things persist because whoever gets rid of them would have to deal with a bad image. TSA is of that style; the other political party would almost be guaranteed to scream in cynical fashion that it is making people less safe.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
Exactly. I think some of the things in Trump/Musk’s crosshairs are legitimately a waste of money and focus, and if worth having, would be better controlled by the more accountable state level. Some, like CFPB, are obviously much better off not being deleted, but tbh the things anyone can make a convincing case for, can just be reestablished later, without the sprawling cruft they’ve accumulated in 25-90 years of existence.
I do wish it was someone smarter doing this, but only a President already hated by all the elites could do this degree of upheaval and get away with it.
> If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
The other thing that prevents another 9/11 is the first 9/11.
Before 9/11, airplane hijackers were like bank robbers: idiots trying to get some cash. If you just followed their orders, everyone would mostly get out alive.
Even mid-9/11, when it became clear that the hijackers were using the planes to attack civilians (at the necessary cost of the lives of the passengers), people stopped cooperating and stopped the final plane from reaching its target.
Even if someone walked into the cockpit with a gun they'd get nothing for their trouble but an immediate nosedive as the pilot sacrificed the plane to protect whatever the intended target was.
For the situation where the hijacker can actually control the plane, I'd imagine the US military now has a more proper response and will be able to scramble jet in time to shoot down the plane (they didn't have such plan for domestic situation in 2001).
also, before 9/11 many airplane hijackers were also political protests (PLO, Cuba, etc.) where the goal was _not_ to kill anyone, not terrorists intent on killing as many people as possible
The nosedive would also throw the hijacker up to the ceiling and/or backwards with a good chance of knocking him out or at least giving him a nasty concussion.
Cockpit doors and the fact that just letting hijackers do what they want is no longer acceptable to Americans. We solved the hijacking problem about 60 minutes after the first plane hit the twin towers. Flight 93 is proof of that.
It’s a good question. If you filled a flight with as many attackers as you could get tickets for, would the remaining seats have enough people willing and able to fight back? I’ll admit I’m glad they lock the cockpit doors.
This is exactly right. Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.
Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.
>Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.
Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”
… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.
[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.
With the newer scanners, you don’t have to take laptops out even without TSA pre check from what I have read. We have TSA Precheck so I can’t verify it.
I do know flying from Los Cabos Mexico where TSA doesn’t matter, I didn’t have to remove my laptop a couple of years ago
the shoes, the tooth paste, the water… are all necessary security theatre. the real work is happening behind the scenes. but the theatre is also necessary (albeit not as dramatic as we have it now :) )
Security theater guarantees a giant line of people right in the front where that crowd is most easily accessible instead of at the back if those people could go straight to their gates. I would rather see news media stop making every one of those people infamous so it ceases to be a way to get a bunch of attention.
The school shooters do that because it's shocking and gets in the news. We have so many crowded situations throughout the world where an equal splash could be made.
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
NYC is an island... doing shit on the NYC subway disrupts bunch of people living on a (largely populated) island. doing shit on airplanes causes country-wide (and beyond) issues.
> doing shit on airplanes causes country-wide (and beyond) issues.
Like what?
In the absolute worst case it grounds flights nation wide and 100 people die. In the grand scheme of things that's a minor hiccup and not a likely outcome. We saw a bigger impact from the polar vortex.
The security simply doesn't match the value.
I'll remind you that 70 people died from an airplane accident. Tragic, but we were hardly impacted by it. When you talk about 2.7 million flyers, the impact of a few hundred dying a year still makes it one of the safest forms of travel.
Airplanes aren't special and shouldn't have the annoying special security treatment they do today.
That's like imagining school shooters won't get an AR-15 and do a school shooting because you put an otherwise unarmed guy with a baton by the front gate.
Lots in the 70s but by the 90s it was very infrequent in the US. And most hijackings did not result in casualties (or very few casualties). People didn’t hijack with intent to kill the selves and everyone on board. Probably more people died from the shooting down of planes by militaries than by hijackings.
The summer of 9/11 I brought on a full suit of hoplite armor with shield and spear on board a regional plane. The stewardess told me I can't have it in the passenger compartment so I should just give it to the pilot before takeoff.
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
I have vivid memories from childhood hugging my grandma before flying right at the gate. Unfortunately people have a short memory. Kids these days will have no memory of how free of a country we lived in even 25 years ago.
I understand why all of this happened in the first place. 9/11 was truly shocking. Maybe more so because I was a kid, but watching those planes hit the buildings, the buildings collapsing, the Fallen Man, the recordings for United 93…it was a lot.
It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.
It seems like there are two problems:
1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong.
Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed.
2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns.
Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money.
Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed.
As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it.
It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.
> It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.
That's . . . a take, considering that OBL's main beef with America was infidel troops on the soil of Saudi, because the Saudi royals were the guardians of Mecca. And the Saudis asked us to intervene against Saddam.
9/11 wasn't some coherent beef with US foreign policy; it was bog-standard religious extremism of the Salafist Islamic flavor.
I'm just being honest but I think you are missing an gigantic point here. Why would a Muslim terrorist not bomb the holiest place in Islam? That is basically your question. They already viewed the U.S. as infidels, the "Great Satan", or kuffaar (unbelievers), I don't see why its not obvious that someone like that would choose to attack the U.S. instead of Saudi Arabia.
What I wrote is exactly how terrorism works, for evidence, I submit the real world. Again, they aren't going to bomb Muslims in their holy land, I don't see how this would be surprising.
There have been a huge number of terror attacks in SA. It's worthwhile to look this stuff up first because these theories are not always concordant with reality.
In fact, these theories comport quite well with reality. I'm aware of attacks in Saudi Arabia but there have been no attacks on Saudi Arabia of the scale of 9/11. Sure, there are attacks all over of the Middle East but not any of these large scale shocking attacks.
> I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
I took flights in the 2010's that didn't feel all that different from boarding a bus. You went to the desk to check in and to give them any checked baggage, walked to the waiting area to wait with a couple of dozen people, then went outside to board the plane. Any plane that would eventually connect to an international airport would have passengers go through security, but otherwise no.
What country were you in? I took two domestic flights within Japan last year, and it was crazy how similar it felt to boarding long-distance trains there. I showed my ticket, but did not need to present any form of personal ID, just the ticket. I checked two bags, then walked through a metal detector while passing my carry-on through a conveyor belt on the side.
When I take domestic flights within the US (between places like St. Louis, Denver, NYC, and LA), security takes far longer for several subtle reasons. Everyone has to show a government ID to a TSA employee (and get your photo checked against a database) before proceeding to the actual security lines. Then, most of the security lines use full-body scanners, not just metal detectors; some have moving parts and some don't, but they all require you to actually stand there for a second instead of just passing through. Every single person also has to take their shoes off before they go into those scanners, and you put your shoes through the same slower scanning system that the baggage goes through (which basically doubles the load and halves the bandwidth of the baggage conveyor belt).
In my experience, flying internationally out of/into the US (with both Japan and Canada as the other side) is no more security than flying domestically within the US. Which basically means we have full international-level security even for flying domestically here.
In a post-9/11 world, I took an airplane to university and back, and on a regular basis from [SMALL CITY] airport. I could, as a disorganized young adult, be at the airport within 10-15 before boarding time with luggage to check.
Pre-9/11, my family travelled internationally and it was always a 3+ hour, pack-a-lunch affair to be at [MAJOR CITY] airport.
I've never had airport security confiscate food, only beverages. Unless you're packing soup for lunch, I guess? Or flying somewhere with specific customs prohibitions that for whatever reason does it at the origin instead of the destination, like flights too/from Hawaii maybe?
But I've never had, like, a sandwich taken from me.
> The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
And the results of those tests are widely misunderstood. Security isn't about a 100% success rate - that's the goal but not the outcome. It is about disrupting the planning process.
That someone, somewhere might sometimes get a gun through TSA security is one thing...but is that person intending to carry out a terrorist attack in doing so, or did they just leave it in their bag?
Is it possible for anyone to organize a coherent plan which involves as a first step smuggling weapons onto a plane in a way which is not more likely then not to be detected?
And is the correct conclusion from "in a test (where we motivated someone to try a plan they couldn't be sure would succeed but which would have no personal consequences for failure) they succeeded" that the security is pointless, or is it that they need to modify their procedures to improve the detection rate?
Pre–TSA each airport authority was responsible for security. In theory there was a common standard, in practice it varied greatly airport by airport and contractor by contractor.
Am pulling this completely out of foggy memory but one of the justifications for TSA was that potentially local airport authorities would be considered liable for acts of terrorism like 9/11.
Pre-check is a wild concept to me. I've been flying for 20 years and y'all are going to pretend you don't have me in your system, like I'm some unknown entity? It's a grift. If you can do pre-check to verify someone isn't a terrorist you can also let people through on good behavior after two decades. Call it a 20 year post-check. Just stop the madness.
> TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
> eventually everyone will have [pre-check]
How do those two things follow? The government does a /bad/ job yet I have to submit to even /more/ monitoring to fix it? They're the greatest exploiters of the transport monopoly we have in the USA and so strong is their grip people don't even avail themselves of the obvious solution.
> The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
Think of it like this. Suppose 1% of handguns get through security, and you are a terrorist. Do you really want to take on an assignment that has a 99% chance of ignominous failure and jail for life?
Let's remember that airports make 2/3rds of revenues from shops (rent), 1/3rd from flight slots. Therefore, there's a perverse incentive for them to make sure you stay in the airport longer.
The entire point was to create more make-work jobs (TSA) at the expense of the general flying populace. Also another revenue stream (Clear/Pre-check/GlobalEntry).
I remember as a kid in the 60s I was invited into the cockpit of the 707 to watch them fly. Of course, my dad being in his AF officer uniform probably helped :-/
Came here to say the same. They feel much slower, not only because of the whole security ceremony but also because overall they got a good deal more inconvenient.
The problem is that security is feeding a whole industry with its union and lobbies now. We’re never going back. We’re going full body scan instead. Just fly from Seattle to see what the future looks like.
The most braindead "security" measure is the prohibition of liquids. Many airports don't even have any drinking water fountains at the gates! If you are thirsty you need to buy bottled water for 6€ - 10€ per liter. (Sometimes I take water from the toilet, but it's not safe to do on every airport.) It also causes lots of unnecessary plastic waste, both at the gates and on board. Personally, I would just like to bring a large bottle of water instead of drinking from these tiny plastic water cups.
I try to take the train whenever I can afford it (money and time-wise)
First, the hull shapes of container ships are tuned for a particular cruising speed. They accelerate up to that speed and cruise across the Pacific. In particular, the ship's bulbous bow is shaped to create an efficient counter bow wave at that speed.
Before 2007, that cruising speed was faster, maybe 27 knots. This is just like the 707 doing 525 knots in the article. It was faster but not efficient.
Enter Slow Steaming. They redesigned the hulls for a lower cruising speed, maybe 18 knots. They actually took ships into dry dock and re-nosed them. The result was better fuel economy. Fewer shippers (some still are) were willing to pay extra for the 27 knot speed. With Slow Steaming, the results are lower costs and significantly less pollution.
The economics of flying and shipping are largely the same in this case.
I've always wanted turboprop planes to become more common for long haul flights. Many people would gladly pay for premium economy with spacious seating in the entire cabin if the price was competitive even if the flight took an extra 2 hours. In fact a 10 hour flight can be more nice than a 7 hour flight in terms of consuming a whole cycle of the day.
I find the most onerous part of the flying experience to be the invasive searches at the airport followed by the corralling and grouping of people onto the plane penny pinching everything from a bottle of water to whether my bag goes in my lap or the overhead bin. The size of the seat area and length of the flight haven’t come to mind as travel complaints for a long time.
Yep. It's the feeling of being in constant high alert the whole way through the airport. I regularly take a 40 min flight and it leaves me exhausted because of this. My theory anyway!
> It's the feeling of being in constant high alert the whole way through the airport.
This is something you can change though by changing your mindset and outlook. Airports are what they are, they are highly predictable and unlikely to change drastically. On the other hand you can recognise when you are begining to feel on alert, acknowledge it and let go of the feeling. Let it wash over you like a wave.
You are presumably not a terrorist, nor a criminal. The worst thing which can happen is that there is some misunderstanding and you are delayed a bit. And even that is very unlikely. If you make peace with that maybe that will help with the feeling?
Not saying that you can go full meditating zen monk with “this one little weird trick”, but if you can make the experience more pleasant for yourself by just a little bit maybe that is worth the try?
Humans are notoriously suggestible by nature. If we are told to look for something, we are likely to convince ourselves that we have found it. Airport staff are actively looking for terrorists and criminals in a way that few other professionals do.
This means that even as a passenger with a completely clean record, every action you take is viewed through the lens of being potentially suspicious. The worst case scenario is not being delayed - it's being falsely accused.
Less importantly but hugely more likely is that you travel is disrupted. Your bags are misplaced or stolen. You can't take your water bottle so now you have to buy another for 10x the price. Your passport was accidentally torn so you now have to explain that to a skeptical border police officer. You don't speak the foreign language well enough to explain yourself. Your flight is cancelled and you must now rush to the only hotel to book a room before they sell out - or risk waiting in order to convince the airline to book it for you.
I don't disagree with you that some relaxation can go a long way to making such an experience more pleasant, but it's still true that there's more to go wrong in one international journey than in a whole month of most people's day-to-day lives.
You sound like you've never had an issue, and hey, congrats, but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of horror stories and legitimate reasons to worry. And suppressing legitimate worry is a bad habit, particularly for folks who don't have white, male, and several other "default" identity markers in their profile.
I got plenty. My luggage got lost more than I can count. Missed connecting flights due to delays. Had a flight take of with four hour of delay to then ingest a bird in the engine on climbout so we had to land back imediately with a smoke filled cabin. Got selected for extra screening plenty of times, had been asked to go to the security office to answer extra questions about my luggage. Had my share of flight cancelations too. The most serious issue was perhaps when I got waylaid for a few weeks because an airline didn’t like the stamps on my imigration paperwork. According to my imigration lawyer the airline was in the wrong and misunderstanding the law, but what can you do? We got it sorted with the embassy as soon as we could and I was on my way.
Thing is that worrying would not have helped with any of these. Simply not the right answer.
In flight from Dubai to JFK, I had two 500ml used empty plastic bottles (not reusable, just basic transparent). Security made me throw 1, saying one 1 empty bottle allowed.
They have changed drastically in our lifetimes because of 9/11. You used to be able to simply go to whatever gate you want and then show your ticket and get on the airplane. This is all still evidenced by the design of airports such as charles de gaul or the one in berlin that just closed which both have annoying security addons that disrupt the design and flow of the original architecture. All of this security theater has simply added to the cost of running an airport. I doubt it makes any of us safer.
For me, that sense of being on high alert is less to do with airport security and more to do with feeling that nearly everyone and everything you interact with is some sort of low level scam. Overpriced food and drink, duty free, poor value upsells, the sea of manipulative advertising, plain old pickpockets, someone trying to sell you tickets for a chance to win a car, someone approaching you in a queue to do a “survey”…
It’s like browsing a Fandom site but in real life.
Which airports are these? Honest question. I've been flying frequently for 20+ years but the only complaint I can relate to is "overpriced food and drink". Definitely never had anyone sell me tickets or approach me to do a survey. So I'd really like to know which airports are these where these things are common?
I’m always wondering why there are American Express people in gardmoen in Oslo. Like where in Europe can you spend Amex I guess someplace but definitely not Oslo. My Amex was mostly useless there which is why I eventually got rid of it when I lived there.
> The worst thing which can happen is that there is some misunderstanding and you are delayed a bit
Even so, the little things alone can ruin the experience, before adding the big ones.
Maybe it's a busy day at the airport and you're stuck in a surprise 2h security screening or passport check queue. Maybe you're pulled over for a routine check, or 2, or 3. Maybe you have 1kg over weight for your hand luggage and they expect you to check it in for extra cost while others are allowed with oversize luggage. Maybe they keep changing the gate 2-3 times and you have to constantly be alert and ready to move around the airport. Maybe your flight is late 1h or 7h. Maybe you have to sit in a crowd with dozens or hundreds or people in the (off)boarding area. And so on. There are just so many more ways to be irritated by air travel.
And that's just before you are on the plane. Seat comfort-wise air travel is probably the worst option. I'm above well above average height so I have to pay extra for a decent (not great) experience, or be ready to do the check-in the first moment it's available, or if there are no sits with extra leg room I'll suffer for hours, or be hit over the knees with the different carts by every inattentive flight attendant if I try to spread towards the aisle, or sit behind someone who reclines their seat the whole way.
There's only so much will you can have to have all these things slide. It's like saying that whenever you get punched in the face you can lean into it to make the experience better. It will still very much suck, just marginally less. And I flew hundreds of times, I tried all the tricks. For average travelers there's a ceiling for their air travel experience and it's in the "hopefully tolerable" range. And I tolerate it because I have no choice but it's objectively a bad experience almost without exception.
Mindfulness and CBT sorts of things have always seemed like saying, "but have you tried just not having anxiety?"
I don't get it. Address the feeling, let it wash over you. It won't wash over. It sticks and causes the chemicals in my body to fuck me up completely. I can already tell you that I'm anxious.
While you may be aware that you're anxious, part of the point of things like mindfulness is that not everyone is aware of what their autonomic nervous system is doing to them, because it functions largely unconsciously. So it's helpful for many people in some circumstances to notice what their body is doing, and then pick up practices that engage the parasypathetic nervous system and calm down a fight or flight response in cases where it is silly and unhelpful--say when one is in a airport, rather than confronting a large carnivore in nature.
And, perhaps, you can appreciate that the sooner one notices what is happening subconsciously, the easier it might be for some people to "put out the fire" of their autonomic response. Even if getting good at this might take practice.
Maybe this awareness and these tools are not things of interest or value to you, but they don't seem to be things that are that are that hard to understand abstractly, even if you don't practice them.
Probably this is _the_ solution for many? GP seems to talk from experience with this, or similar situations.
Probably it could work for you too, if you haven't tried it yet. (Also, if you haven't tried it enough times. One experiment/measurement is not enough.)
This feeling of letting it "wash over you" is a verbal construction that is very helpful and apt for some, but others may describe it's different. Some people may start to think of it as "experiencing these feelings with more remove" or something. It's something that takes practice often done with guidance from a therapist or psychologist.
For many (this is not universally true), what is experienced as "anxiety" is like a preset program or routine that auto-executes across cognitive, behavioral, and emotional channels. CBT isn't a cure, but helps you interrupt the program during its cycle or before it starts by inserting new and different programs that don't auto-run without effort. As you sense your anxiety spiking ("awareness training" may be needed to get this early insight), you engage in behaviors or techniques to prevent the normal cycle of anxiety spiraling and calm the nervous system.
It is effective, but it is not a magic trick and takes practice.
There are visualization techniques that help with the washing over, but there's also the advice, which CBT therapists do give but randos on the internet always forget, that sometimes you're having anxiety (or another "negative emotion") for a reason, and it's a bad idea to ignore it in those cases.
If you want to get better at the "washing over" thing, maybe try visualizations like:
- As you breathe, imagine you're pulling over to the side of the road and watching your anxious thoughts drive past.
- As you breathe, imagine taking each anxious thought and placing it on a leaf on a stream and watching it float away
But in general, security theatre is kind of a legit reason to feel anxious - these folks have real power over you and can screw up your life - so it's ok to just feel it in those situations.
Yes. This is why I don't mind taking like an 8-10 hour train when I go to vienna from amsterdam even though the flight takes way less time. Because tbh, just getting to the train is mindless, you simply show up and find your seat. There isn't anything more to it.
You must be of size medium to small then because legroom is definitly an issue for me, especially for longer flights and I'm just 180cm. (just below average hight)
Or alternativly you can afford better seats than me.
I am of the same height as you, and I managed a Ryan Air flight to Madrid a couple of weeks ago with enough legspace that I was able to put my bag under seat in front and pull it out without having to shift around noticeably.
On the other hand, I took an Iceland Express flight many years ago, and my knees were uncomfortably pressed against the seat in front.
For me, the size of the seat area is probably the biggest nuisance on a long flight. I'm not super tall, but above average and depending on my body position, either my knees or shins are always lightly pressed against some hard plastic or metal from the seat in front of me. Not painful, just a constant discomfort, especially if the person in front moves a lot.
The biggest quality-of-life improvement for flights, for me, was paying up each way for an emergency exit seat. A secondary benefit that I hadn’t initially considered but turned out to be huge is being able to get in and out of my seat at any time without making the entire row get up or having to get up for others.
Airport bullshit/overhead, and transit times, are why I massively prefer overland or over water transport for shorter journeys (up to say 1000 miles) even when it takes a few hours longer.
I’d rather be happier, less stressed, and get there more slowly, than go through all the nonsense. I can always read, work, play a game, or just watch the world go by so the time isn’t wasted (unlike so much of the dead time in a noisy and crowded airport).
It also has the increasingly important benefit of being more environmentally friendly.
Depending on how the airport is arranged you can find yourself doing a lot of walking or standing around in not quite stationary queues. If you can manage to find somewhere to sit down where it isn't too noisy, it's fine, but often that's harder than you'd think, and you find your concentration is just continually broken by something or other that's going on or that you need to pay attention to.
Budget airlines and priority boarding are a particular bugbear of mine here. Most people pay for priority boarding just for the extra bag it allows you to take into the cabin. You end up with two thirds of the flight made up of people who have priority boarding. That's great, but there's only so much space in the overhead lockers, so you have everyone queuing up way before boarding starts to avoid having their cabin back checked into the hold at the gate.
The whole process is just... endlessly tedious and wearisome. I'd genuinely rather board a much slower form of transport, like a train, coach, or ferry (or even drive under some circumstances) than deal with being treated like cattle at an airport. The whole experience of airports, and getting to and from them, sucks.
Hence why I like going by train tbh. A long-distance train (well, long-distance for German standards. Probably grocery-distances in terms of the US standards) reaches the main company office in 5 hours or so, while a flight (including all of the stuff around it) takes about 3 hours.
Except with the train, I can just drop myself into the seat 10 minutes from home and go to sleep / work / do other things for those 5 hours without a care in the world.
Well, then you're talking Boston to NYC or NYC to Washington DC in the US basically. In which case I agree train is better. But there aren't a lot of options to do that.
How would a change in engine tech from jet to turboprop give more space to the passengers? Even if they are more efficient, that just means the airline can save on fuel but cram just as many paying passengers into the fuselage.
I also don't think "Many people would gladly pay for..." has been proven in the marketplace. If anything, the success of Ryanair, Easyjet and co has resoundingly proven that people will gladly suffer less spacious seating if it means paying less.
> I also don't think "Many people would gladly pay for..." has been proven in the marketplace. If anything, the success of Ryanair, Easyjet and co has resoundingly proven that people will gladly suffer less spacious seating if it means paying less.
Given the number of 7 hour flights I could find, I really don't think that proves anything except maybe people will pay more.
> I've always wanted turboprop planes to become more common for long haul flights.
The math doesn't seem to make sense for it: there's a maximum speed that can be hit with turboprop (x), and if you can only carry so much fuel (y) as part of your useful payload (to maximize carrying revenue-generating cargo), then you can only go a certain distance. That distance turns out to be <1500 nmi.
The Breguet range equation is the first stop for roughly determining range. The three knobs are aerodynamic efficiency, structural efficiency, and fuel consumption.
Broadly speaking, fuel consumption has an outsized influence on range as the other two terms are usually fixed at a maximum value by state of the art.
I'm not sure turboprops would be efficient for a long-haul flight. They cruise at lower altitudes, which makes sense for short-haul (no point climbing to FL410 if you're going to immediately begin descent for arrival), but for a longer distance I think that would hurt efficiency.
I think the common thread in airline pricing for the past decade has been that consumers want to pay the absolute least they can for every flight, disregarding almost everything else about the flight/plane.
I don't think that's a fair assessment when pretty much all upgrades are overpriced for what you get over the base service. And the markup is even more obscene once you discount bundled upgrades that you don't need. There isn't really an option to e.g. pay 10% more for 10% more seat pitch - and really the price increase should be less than 1:1 that if you keep the baggage allowance and food / other services the same.
There are things like Economy Plus on United. But, yes, in general Economy is priced for the bulk of people who want the absolute lowest fare--and once you have a class of seating that isn't the absolute lowest fare, there are a lot fewer constraints to how high it can be set.
while the cabin may be able to be more spacious (like dirigibles and blimps) the flight my not be more comfortable because a turboprop's ceiling has you flying well within the troposphere where the majority of weather occurs. that may also put wear and tear on the airframe, incurring costs additional to the extended crew hours.
Did the crackdown on cheap sulphurous bunker oil have no effect on it? Or was there no real crackdown and it was just media hype? (This is a genuine question).
The crackdown was so successful that some scientists attribute the even-warmer-than-expected weather we have had in the last few years to additional warming due to the lack of light-reflecting sulphur in the atmosphere (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...). Oops...
Not sure if that's sarcasm, given the existence (or, not) of practical fusion technology.
We do of course know how to power large ships with nuclear fission. The US Navy has been doing so - for generations(!).
Only issue with that is the US military is a "money is no object" scenario. Price container shipping at the unit cost of hauling it on a naval nuclear reactor, and we'd be looking at degrowth anyway. It's proven, practical technology, but very very expensive.
(Other countries with nuclear deterrents run their sub fleets on fission, but even those with nuclear subs have found it too costly for their surface fleet).
Microsoft expects to get fusion power from Helion in 3 years, so (if we are very, maybe unrealistically, optimistic) the wait won't be that long.
Actually, seeing recent developments, I'm afraid the only remotely realistic chance left to limit global warming is for fusion to become widely available and dirt cheap pretty damn soon! Renewables, you say? Nah, those windmills are disgusting and made in China anyway, so we're better off burning good clean American coal and oil (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/trump-war-on...).
We can't even close the hole in the ozone layer. We were all patting each other on the back for a job well done (which it almost was), but then took our foot off the accelerator and now it's opening back up again.
Chlorofluorocarbons stay 50-150 years in the atmosphere, once they are there it takes a while for things to go back to normal.
Hydrochlorofluorocarbons are also now banned pretty much everywhere, replaced with hydrofluorocarbons and hydrofluoroolefins which both have an ozone depletion potential of 0 (zero).
Note that if you did want to directly compensate for the decrease in sulfur (exclding reductions in emissions), I think you could just, like, spray water in the air?
Bunker oil is an orthogonal issue. Generally, it's restricted to offshore use. For example, ships have to switch to low sulphur 60 miles outside of San Francisco Bay.
As for the IMO 2020 restrictions, I've read that they have significantly lowered pollution but that would be in addition to Slow Steaming.
Both industries optimized for efficiency once fuel costs and environmental concerns became bigger factors. The difference is that in shipping, slow steaming is more flexible
It's still kind of surprising that the optimal design / speed for fuel efficiency has plateaued though, given how much more powerful the modelling tools are now. The FAA certification overhead presumably has something to do with this.
I was very struck recently looking at the Wikipedia pages for the KC-135 Stratotanker (first flight 1956) and its ongoing replacement the KC-46 Pegasus (first flight 2015). Just from the pictures of the two planes, I'd have no idea that one was more modern than the other.
Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends.
If I'm taking a 6 hour flight, it's actually a 10 hour flight. If the airplane gets there twice as fast, it's a 7 hour chunk of my time. I save three hours but how much am I willing to pay for that? It's still effectively a calendar day gone.
For shorter flights, this is even worse. For super long flights like London to Sydney, maybe it would be useful to double the speed, so that you're not wasting two days instead of one, but doubling speed is also pretty far from possible.
There is a point in getting faster. The Concorde run profitably for the later 20 years of it's lifetime. At its best it did the New York to London route in under 3 hours. At more than double the speed of a subsonic flight. I have taken multiple 7 hour and 3 and a half hour flights and I would pay a significant premium to cut the 7 hours in half. It's not that I would have more of the day available. It's that I would spend less time in the plane. Being in a plane for a long haul is miserable. In the nineties if flew profitably for a 10% markup over regular business class.
I would wager a supersonic jet liner could make a lot of money crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific even today. Sure for short hauls it makes no sense.
Btw, Boom is working on supersonic private jets,they recently flew a scaled down experimental jet at supersonic speeds.
Concorde’s problem was once the lie flat business seat was invented in 2000, it was substantially more comfortable than what was, by all accounts, a plush but very narrow seat due to the narrow fuselage.
Throw in the third flight crew member and the economics fell apart.
I think with how unergonomic airplane seats have gotten, there's a real health benefit to minimizing the time people are crammed in those cramped seats.
If they made airline seats reasonably sized and ergonomic, sure, the flight time matters less, but right now the longer the flight portion is, the longer my back will complain afterwards. I'm not even unusually tall or heavy-set.
Airlines won't make the seats bigger since that would cut into margins, but if the planes are faster, they can run more flights and pay the pilots/flight-attendants for fewer hours, so that feels like it's a solution that's more likely to happen than the real solution, of making it so the seats aren't designed to destroy your back until you pony up for business/first class.
One of the reasons I don't travel as much is due to this.
I used to live in the peninsula in SFBA. I was about 20-30 minutes away from SFO. Unless it was an international flight or I had checked luggage, I would never get to the airport before the flight started boarding. I would walk through security at a lightning pace (SFO is one of those airports where sometimes TSA precheck is longer than regular!) and get to my flight just as my boarding group was getting called.
It was so insanely efficient. I never spent a moment not moving in the airport. I'd often spend more time waiting on the plane to deboard than I would in the airport when leaving too.
I miss SFO. I live in NYC for now and all the NYC airports suck for the fact they all take about an hour to get to (from Manhattan) and they all regularly have large and inefficient security lines with theater that is only rivaled by Belgian airports.
I worked for someone once (pre-9/11) who would do the go to airport 30 minutes before flight sort of thing. Absolutely hated it. Airport was close to downtown Boston but still not how I like to catch planes even if delays are rarely an issue.
When I lived in Kyiv and airports were still a thing, flying from Zhuliany was a bliss. Something like 30 minutes from the apartment door to sitting at the gate. The fact that it's small and in city limits was a deciding factor.
Boryspil' is twice the distance from the city center (whatever you pick for city center in Kyiv) and is quite nice and modern airport with all the problems of a big modern airport -- it's huge, lines are long and unpredictable and it doubles as a mall.
IMHO we would be better served reducing the amount of time it takes you to go into an airport and board a flight. Right now they recommend 2 hours prior to takeoff but if you're in the right airport and know what you're doing then that time could be as little as 30 minutes (or less).
Rather than trying to take time out of the "middle" of the journey (ie when you're on a plane), we would be better served as a society to take time out of the "ends" (before takeoff and after landing).
But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.
> But nevertheless I still think it's worthwhile for us as a species to look at ways we can cross the planet faster. I think eventually (maybe in our lifetimes), the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched. While I don't think the time savings going supersonic will be worth it, I think the savings when going into outer space will, assuming we figure out a economical way to get people up and down from outer space.
It's possible that it may make sense to establish a few business class only very fast point-to-point routes. But that also really depends on the vehicle taking people through space. There are a number of problems:
1. Currently, spacecraft are only licensed for experimental travel. Everyone signs an informed consent waiver and basically disclaims all liability. And the FAA is forbidden to regulate for passenger safety by congress (and has been for quite a long time) - they can only regulate for the safety of the general public.
This would have to be changed before any serious commercial spacecraft went into service
2. It's not clear that any spacecraft has the economics to pull this off. Maybe Starship can do it. But it's pretty far from clear that they can.
3. Spacecraft are orders of magnitude less safe than commercial aviation. Do you know the saying "regulations are written in blood"? If this starts happening, there'll be a lot of new regulations that happen over time.
And maybe that'll happen anyhow - I think that space tourism will certainly be a thing that becomes much more popular in the future, and that has the exact same problems (although it's much less readily comparable to commercial aviation).
Yeah I totally agree with your points. If space travel ever becomes commonplace it won't be anytime soon, my gut says it would be "in the next 100 years".
Seriously. Just have the whole passenger section setup like cargo pallets and wheel them in and out of the plane. Why bother walking up and down a narrow aisle? Just have a "passenger marshalling facility" away from the airport, have the interior section in parts there, have everyone comfortably load up, put that on a bus, wheel that straight to the plane, then load them in like large scale cargo through a huge side door.
Lock them down and send them wherever. Do the same in reverse at the destination.
Each one has to be a pressure vessel, so either we have a bunch more pressure doors on the plane, or each one has its own toilet, galley and staff. Sounds expensive.
But the limiting factor isn't whether you're in the airport, it's whether you can arrive at the airport with that much a time margin reliably. It does not take many traffic accidents or an unexpected rail disruption to mean you miss your flight, for example - the 2 hour window is essentially to force people to account for unexpected delays.
Having faster flights could also increase the frequency of such flights, which lowers the impact of a missed flight, which lets people be more loose with getting there early enough.
>the idea of taking a flight that takes you into outer space won't be too far fetched.
Reading this unlocked memories of the (after googling it) September 2005 National Geographic Kids magazine, which was centered around future life in 2035. One of the things in it was exactly this: travel time cut by launching into orbit and flying around the planet to cut travel time down to ~1h.
For most people, reducing the pre-checking time would require full refunds if they can't make it in time for some reason. This is especially true if the airport isn't even in the same city.
It's particularly cheap in around Melbourne because the government introduced a daily fare cap across the whole state. So it's $10 from Melbourne to the state border, then the other $25 is for the much shorter trip from the border to Canberra.
It's absurd that getting onto a 3-dimensional bus takes ~1.5hr more per end than a normal bus. The fundamentals of embarking and disembarking passengers and their luggage is unchanged beyond needing to have all the luggage in a pile before you toss it on for weight distribution reasons.
You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.
Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.
This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time.
Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”
I wouldn’t change the flight itself, but I’d certainly use it to decide when I set out for the airport. Not by a ton but it’s easily the difference between a leisurely farewell breakfast and scarfing down a muffin on the run.
can bring a quart zip lock bag stuffed to brim with nips (50ml bottles of booze) through TSA security. While you are technically not allowed to drink them on the plane absolutely nobody gives a shit as long as you are not an idiot about it.
bingo! for long-haul flights (>10hrs) i'd even bring two zip locks. Relax and fall asleep right during takeoff while everyone else has to wait for the stupid cart forever.
And you can also bring an empty water bottle that there are often stations setup for the purpose of filling next to water fountains.
Mind you, I'm annoyed at the liquids thing given I used to routinely bring bottles of wine or a local liqueur home in carry-on. And I can't any longer.
I recall when those guys in the UK (?) had their plan to explode a plane by mixing some volatile chemicals in the plane toilet. IIRC this kicked off the whole no liquids requirements. At the time I remember reading an article by a chemist on the chances of actually pulling off what they wee planning to do, and it was comical. To not just make a giant poof that mainly singed off some hair they needed to carefully mix the liquids in an ice bath for about 1h (without anyone noticing) and every little shake could potentially mess up the whole thing.
He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.
>He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.
So this is why we also can't bring own cocaine on board in addition to not having own booze. What a shame
I think the point of it was that our enemies had figured out that the way to destroy America wasn't to kill our leaders, but rather to convince us that our enemies were inside the country, and then watch us tear each other apart.
I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. Like 10 minutes average 20 minutes for the 95% percentile and a guarantee that it will never exceed 30 minutes. Seeing lines form around the block and passengers having to wait hours to clear security in some extreme cases is simply not acceptable.
It isn't, but changes that require additional staffing simply aren't going to be tolerated. If you add more staff, that directly translates to higher ticket prices because passengers directly pay for most of the TSA costs. If you expand facilities, that takes away from the valuable real estate the airport would rather use to sell you magazines and duty free. It also harms their Clear revenue stream, who pays airports to make security lines worse as a means to convince people to sign up.
Or we could streamline the process: remove steps that are taking too long for little benefit (typically asking people to remove their shoes) and automate more.
>> I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security.
What they should really have is a line for clueless people. You know, the people ahead of you who walk thru metal detectors with belts. Then aw-shucks and waste another 5minutes. Then they forgot to take their laptops out of their bag. Aw-shucks again. Then they want to unlace their shoes.
I'd love to have a line for clued-in travelers and one for people who arent.
If only it was only a belt. I've had multiple times where I was behind someone with a concealed firearm that tried to walk through security who somehow "forgot" they had it. One time it seemed the person was on probation as well and shouldn't have even had access to firearms!
> You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.
Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive).
Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)).
But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop.
Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
> Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should
There was a company about 15 years ago that developed a double ended jetway so you could load and unload from the front and back simultaneously. They said it shaved about 18 minutes from loading and unloading (combined). On the average flight this would be the equivalent of going about 100mph faster for seemingly a simple change.
They installed a few in Denver and I believe in Calgary. Unfortunately one in Denver had a problem and collapsed and hit the wing of a plane, and so they ripped them all out and no one ever tried again.
Ryanair loads its planes from both ends in most airports (except in airports where they're required to use a jetway). It _helps_ (I was recently on a Ryanair flight from Brussels, a mandatory-jetway airport, and it was noticeably slower than usual to load) but it's still a lot slower than you'd hope.
Ryanair actually orders specialised 737s with built-in airstairs and a few other modifications to facilitate this.
This only really works for 737-sized planes and down, though, where air-stairs are an easy option (AFAIK even A320s can be a bit of a stretch, as they're significantly taller than 737s).
Yeah I've done that on a few euro airlines. It's definitely faster to load, but usually you have to take a bus to the plane, which adds a lot of time and hassle that you don't have with a gate. I still really think that the double ended gate is probably the lowest hanging fruit in terms of speeding up air travel. The only reason I can think of that we don't have it is that you can pay more to be at the front of the plane, so a lot of the benefit goes to the lowest paying passengers. I would still think that this would improve the turn around time for the airplane so that the airline could get more utilization, but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.
> It's definitely faster to load, but usually you have to take a bus to the plane, which adds a lot of time and hassle that you don't have with a gate.
Ah, that depends on the airport. Haven’t been on one of those in a few years; I think Ryanair and friends managed to grab a lot more proper gate space during Covid when the higher-end airlines were practically giving it away.
(Years ago, I was on a Ryanair flight to Brussels airport which used a jet bridge, because it’s mandatory there… But the jet bridge was in the middle of nowhere, served by a bus. Half-convinced Ryanair does this sort of thing deliberately, to live up to their brand image of being quite annoying.)
> but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.
It _definitely_ is, at least for short-haul stuff.
> But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown
Washington Dulles aka IAD is a fine example. It has a vast security area below deck for regular folks and a smaller one up top where all the Clear and Pre flyers go. That should be inverted.
Then, after security, passengers must walk 300m and change levels to catch a small shuttle train. Or, to take the special mobile lounge bus things. If you take the train, it drops you off 500m from the gate area, so you have tonget off the train, climb the stairs, walk through a tunnel, climb the escalator, and then walk the remainder of the terminal to your gate. It is absolutely laughable how poor Dulles is, esp considering its importance to United.
> Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.
I don't know why there isn't just a bunch of seats in the terminal laid out the same way as the plane. Sit there and wait, and then when it's time to board, the people at the end get on first, tada, everyone is boarded and we're not stopping each other from getting in.
It's because the overhead space is limited. Airlines have spent decades trashing, losing, and delaying checked luggage, so everyone tries to cram everything into the overheads. Since there's never enough room for everyone to do that, higher classes have to board first so they can. It would be nice if first class could at least be at the back so the line didn't completely stall in reverse order, but they also want to get out (the front) first, and you will never convince the other passengers to wait for that.
Or you're traveling to an airport near the city from out of town. For me it's over an hour and the associated cost--rarely drive myself--is often as much as the flight.
Security doesn’t have to be that variable. Flights are all planned weeks in advance. TSA can pretty exactly predict the passenger volume in time to schedule enough workers, it’s just that sometimes they don’t. If they were going to be short staffed and needed people to come early, they could notify the airline and the airline could notify you that you needed to come early that day.
Denver's airport is apart from the actual city, and there are light rail lines connecting it with downtown. That system... does not work very well, owing to crappy light rail and the fact that most people still aren't where they need to be even if they took that to Union Station.
If you're suggesting this hypothetical giant tunnel would actually have the planes taxiing all the way to a whole airport underneath a city... I don't see that solving more problems than it would create.
You have airports that are pretty convenient to the city (assuming that's where you're going). Boston. SFO is at least on BART. The old Hong Kong airport. But newer airports tend to be pretty far out because they presumably need more land and that land isn't available near the city.
So as a reader one can assume that either a) I forgot about the wings (I guess I must be an idiot) or b) I am using a broader set of reference objects than simply "current passenger transportation modes". There are many man made objects much bigger than airplane wings. Fitting an aircraft carrier, or a container ship, or a skyscraper, moving under a city, would be much, much harder than fitting an airplane. Not to mention that if we strongly applied this engineering constraint, it's not beyond the realm of imagination that we could produce airliners with removable or foldable wings, or where the passenger compartment slides out, or tunnels with deep grooves for the wings, etc.
It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it.
Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled.
Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around."
Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.
IF (yes, still a reasonably big IF) they could just automate highway driving, a large segment of air trips become really a wash, especially if you consider that taking your car someplace gets you a car for your destination, while if you flew it is an additional hassle/expense/delay.
So the exercise to me is: how far does it have to be before you would rather fly? If I had reliable highway automated driving, you're already dealing with a 3-4 hour drive being reasonably equivalent to the time and hassle of a 1 hour flight.
Plus with a car you can leave on a whim with no prescheduling, pack more with less restrictions, will be cheaper generally (especially if carpooling/family driving), can stop and eat more conveniently, have better internet access typically, can stop and see friends or other places along the way, and again, you have your car for transport when you get there.
A self-driving sprinter van converted to an RV would be even better: sleep overnight, have a place to stay at a minimum when you get there.
Anyway, I suspect this might hollow out quite a lot of flight demand when it becomes a reality (any decade now). Airlines will be forced to reexamine their policies if an overnight self-driving trip gets you the vast majority of the way to a destination.
My wife and I really don't start regretting our 18 our drives to and from Florida until the last couple hours. The kids sleep for more than half of the trip and the air travel experience is just a whole other kind of exhaustion.
Plush buses are still buses - you will need to rent a car or take a ride at the end to get where you are going. A self-driving car that takes you from door to door? Yeah, that's completely different.
You live in Pittsburgh. You want to go to NYC for a show. You hop in the car, it takes you to the theater, you get out, it drives itself to a parking lot in NJ to wait. You call for it half an hour before you need it, it picks you up, and it drives you home. That's currently the province of the very rich or the very extravagant. A car that drives itself can do that every night.
Yeah, I take a bus trip regularly between cities for work. It's ~3.5 hrs from downtown to downtown and, even though the flight would only be just over an hour and about the same price, it ends up being not worth the effort.
Some high speed trains (in Spain, for one) require security checks to board as well. But they're way less intrusive or time consuming than flight checks.
> Due to the the time it takes at either end, there's a fixed minimum time cost to flying. Maybe three or four hours counting both ends.
To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff.
But yeah - having to budget time to get through security is a pretty poor user experience. Especially during busy times of the year, when it's more uncertain just how much time is required.
I don’t understand why people act like checking bags is a huge time sink. It’s maybe fifteen minutes at most on a bad day for the bag drop, and I can’t remember the last time I had to wait more than 20 minutes for them to show up on the carousel at my destination (and 20 minutes is super slow, it’s usually more like 10). The only times I’ve really had problems with checking bags is connecting flights when my flight is delayed or canceled and such, and even then while there was some stress over it my bags always got to my destination either when I did or sooner. On the last point the last time I flew international I had a baggage attendant at Heathrow actually call my phone personally to reassure me they had my bag and told me where to go to pick it up when I got to baggage claim.
I’m sure there’s horror stories out there of course, there always is, but 99.99% of the time checking a bag is only marginally less convenient than trying to fit everything in my carryon.
I’ve had a vastly different experience. Several trips in the last year with 30 minutes+ to drop a bag and a couple closer to an hour. That’s enough to move the needle on when I feel like I can show up to the airport.
Baggage claim is usually pretty quick but even 5-10 minutes sucks after flying.
I’ve also had 2 bags fail to make it with my plane meaning I had to wait 24 hours for a courier to deliver them. It also makes connecting or flight changes much more dicey.
I definitely think I’ve been unlucky recently but the fact that I could be unlucky is why I avoid it as much as possible
There are times when I know I have to check a, usually, pretty small bag. But especially because of the delayed baggage issue or because of last minute changes to flights because of weather or whatever, I probably carry-on (with a light load) 9 times out of 10. Especially with dress being more casual these days I usually don't really need more than carry-on unless I'm activities requiring some amount of gear.
The thing that kind of sucks is that picking up your bags is before customs, where another line can develop, so that 15-minute delay can lead to an hour+ in line if a bunch of airplanes unloaded all at once.
> To be fair to airports, the arrival side hasn't really changed post 9/11. If you check bags, that's on you - it's going to be slow to get your stuff.
Except it has changed in the last couple of decades (probably not due to 9/11, but still), because size and weight limits for hand luggage keep getting smaller and smaller. I have always travelled light and avoided checking in luggage except for very long stays abroad, but it's becoming increasingly difficult.
For example, both Qatar and Etihad (very common airlines to travel between Europe and Asia) now limit hand luggage to 7 kg (and in the case of Etihad, they don't even allow the typical "personal item"). 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2. Pack a laptop and you'll struggle to pack even summer clothes for a few days. Let alone winter clothes or -oh, the luxury!- buying some souvenirs at your destination.
Fortunately, in my experience, they mostly just don't look. But they could, if you're unlucky. And even if they don't, the dwindling limits also reduce practical slack, i.e. with a formal limit of 9 kg I would feel comfortable packing 10 or 11 because most airport staff probably wouldn't be strict about that, but with 7, packing 10 or 11 starts looking like a real gamble.
I'll admit that I don't travel outside of the US much, so those issues don't really apply to me.
> 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2
One thing that I have done is move from roller luggage to a travel backpack. I personally use the Osprey Farpoint, but there are many in the category to choose from. Not only is it much lighter than hard sided luggage, but it's typically much more forgiving of dimensional requirements, and can often fit in overhead bins, where hard sided luggage may not be able to (if you're the last person trying to put something in the bin).
And on top of all of that, it's been much more reliable for me - I've had and seen roller luggage fail pretty often - at both the wheels and the handle. Neither of those exists on the bag, which just keeps trucking.
I get that for many people a travel backpack isn't an option. But if it is something that might work for you, I highly recommend it.
Worth considering to be honest, as I'm in reasonable shape so carrying a backpack is not out of the question.
But do you think one can pack as much as in roller luggage, while conforming to the size limits? I've always been under the impression that roller luggage would be more efficient in this respect, but have no real experience traveling with a backpack.
IMO, backpacks are better at conforming to size limits.
They're typically advertised by volume, so 30L, 40L, etc., so you can get one the size you want. I think carry on size is typically advertised as 35-40L. They've got all the same stuff as roller luggage - straps, dividers, etc., depending on what you want. Although, IMO, the best setup is to just get a bag with the volume you want and use packing cubes.
The great advantage of backpacks is that they're soft. Every carrier has their own "box" that your item is supposed to fit into. As long as you don't have too much stuff, you can just squeeze your bag into the box. But with a hard sided roller, it either fits or it doesn't.
Fully agree. Even if it's not completely soft, a 40L-ish travel backpack is just about perfect for most trips unless you just physically can't carry.
I do have a larger travel pack and sometimes favor a slightly larger wheeled pack. But even though it's a bit heavy for any really long schlepping, it's lighter than the wheeled frame and is a lot easier to deal with on trains etc.
Roll-a-boards are the devil IMO but then I'm not usually dressing up when traveling. I tend to use a probably somewhat larger 40L Osprey than what you use but it's a lot more flexible than the standard carry-ons to put in overhead.
It’s kind of insane how no profiling is allowed whatsoever.
Has a plane ever been hijacked by a couple of European descent traveling with their own children? The lengths we go to to pretend everyone is the same is mind boggling.
> She claimed to be unaware of the contents, and that she had been given the bag by her fiancé, Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian.
Certain groups perform attacks of this kind.
It's not necessarily because they are backwards or evil or something. They just can't resist militarily, so they go for soft targets.
If the situation was reversed, and there was some kind of hegemonic global Islamic caliphate with an ostensibly unbeatable military, perhaps you would get some random Poles or Spaniards blowing up planes.
People who aren't in groups in those kinds of situations, don't do things like that. Why would they? Why do we pretend that they would?
The thing is that being, for example, Arabic looking or having an Arabic sounding name isn't a prerequisite for being Muslim. So if we started profiling for people that we thought were Muslim, then it would be pretty easy for terrorists to figure out our criteria and just use the most "white-seeming" of their cohort to commit attacks.
If, on the other hand, you randomly select people for additional checking, they can't predict that and can't learn how to circumvent it, they just have to take a stab at an attack and hope they don't get unlucky.
Basically, any deterministic aspect of security is predictable, which makes it vulnerable.
And even if not everyone does, operating entire flights at business class+ fares is probably not viable. Especially given that lie-flat seating (e.g. Polaris) with at least decent food is pretty comfortable for the people who are willing to pay a premium.
JSX operates an entire airline as business-only. They use CRJ-900s, so not long-range, but there's no TSA (they are technically charter flights, you board at an FBO).
You could feasibly run major transatlantic routes once or twice a day like that.
JSX operates based on a loophole in the part 135 rules, but that only allows 30 seats. A CRJ doesn't have the range for (nonstop) transatlantic, bigger planes would be impractical, and smaller ones with the range won't hold 30 people.
BA has, as I understand it, gone back and forth on London to New York business only flights. But that's not designing a whole new aircraft for the purpose.
A CRJ-900 is a very, very common regional jet. They just changed the seats.
I'm not making a comment about the original topic, just the comment that operating an entire airline as business wasn't viable. Not on every route, no, but for the right route? Yeah, there are enough people who fly certain routes and will pay for a better seat that you could fill a plane with them.
If you have demand for 10,000 passengers to be transported on a route daily, and a plane carries 200 people, you would need 50 trips. If the round trip is 4 hours, you could do 6 trips per plane and you'd need 9 planes to service the route.
If the round trip time is 8 hours, you could only do 3 trips per day and you'd need 17 planes.
Honestly, not much. 350km/h seems to be the peak practical operating speed (and that hasn't really changed since the 80s). Even the rather impractical Shanghai maglev no longer operates over that speed, though it did routinely run at over 400km/h for a while. Most high speed systems are in that general range today.
_Maybe_ maglevs will eventually be practical, but I'd hate to bet on it. This is the only serious such project at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen#Energy_consump... (China seems to have largely lost interest in favour of conventional high-speed).
400 km/h seems to be practical. China started building trains that can go that fast. They must already have lines that support that speed, cause upgrading lines is the huge expense.
There is less advantage to increasing speed. Is it worth the cost of maglev Shinkansen to save 30 minutes? How long would 400 km/h rail take instead? Maglevs have disadvantage that need dedicated route, while high speed rail can take existing rail into cities.
A car from the '60's could do 0-60mph in ... an age. I'm 54 y/o and not off of the '60's but old enough to remember lead in petrol (gas). My modern EV can do 0-30 rather rapidly and 0-60 quite rapidly. It tops out at 120 or so.
The US freeways are able to sustain high speeds but their older off ramps are proper old school and way too tight. Older bits of the German autobahns have the same issue - far too tight bends on "Ausfahrt". In France and Italy, Spain and well the rest of the EU I recall mostly decent on and off ramps.
I think the UK has the best efforts - we generally have massively long and large slip lanes but I will grant that we have some horrible exits from A roads, which are dual carriageway and so look like motorway. For example A303 whilst running through Somerset.
Quite a lot of German autobahns still don't have a speed limit. I lived there when it was West Germany.
I remember 90mph in lane one being normal and that was in the 1980s. 120+ in lane two was normal. Petrol was cheap back then - even in the EU. In the US gas was nigh on free! (or so it seemed to us).
I was given a scale model of an Audi Quattro rally car by a German chap when I turned 17 (1987). I still have it. That car destroyed all comers back in the day because it brought 4WD to the game.
Nowadays I drive an EV - a Saic MG4. I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which is where the Morris Garage (MG) started off in around 1910. I can safely say that an MG4 is not a British thing at all.
Legally, road travel speeds have come along way from the 1974 federal speed limit of 55mph. States set their own limits now, and all fifty of them have a higher maximum limit. Safety-wise, cars are much safer in crashes than they were in the 60s, both at high and low speeds. Setting aside safety and the legal limits, raw top speeds of similar car models are much higher today than they were in the 60s and 70s. Acceleration and braking have vastly improved, too.
The biggest time delay is getting through security and boarding, then waiting for baggage claim.
1) TSA stuff doesn't keep anyone any safer
2) protectionism: foreign carriers are banned from flying many domestic routes. We'd have more capacity and throughput, as well as lower prices.
3) boarding algorithms are silly and could easily be improved by letting passengers self-select into fast vs slow boarders and letting fast get on/off first.
4) incentives for crew flight time / overtime / limits create scenarios where passengers are made to wait on the tarmac for no good reason.
What would interest me more is innovation at the airport end of things. Much faster travel links, much faster security. Or are airport perversely incentivised to not do this to sell overpriced food and trinkets?
Many airports (in the US, at least) make much more money from parking fees than everything else. On top of that, at least some operate their retail in a royalties model too (ie 20% of all sales goes to the airport, before any costs).
Thus, there is very little incentive to keep you in the airport less, and multiple incentives to keep you there longer.
That's what makes the 2-hour early 'rule' so egregious. Manipulating passengers to sit around in a Disneyland-priced mall because of the 1 in 5 chance the TSA screwed up their staffing that day.
I think Singapore has a pretty good experience worked out now, the immigration is automated just with an iris scan.
Additionally moving security to the gate rather than having a single security point for all flights also makes the wait here shorter and more importantly predictable.
If I'm just taking a cabin bag I always arrive 35-40 minutes before a flight and have had no trouble with time, normally enough time to grab a coffee too before boarding.
Going faster and improving are two different things. Planes have improved immensely since the 1960s, but they don't go faster. Commercial aircraft have much lower fuel use. Military aircraft have things like better radar and stealth.
Back when (90s) I did fly the Atlantic frequently for work, I would have preferred to sit in comfort in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class (although 747s are pretty fast) and take some time about it rather than be squashed into a Concorde with nothing much to look out of. By the time you have factored in the hassle of getting to and from the airport, comfort (for me at least) takes priority if someone else is paying for it.
I never got the choice and I must admit I would have liked to have flown Concorde once, just so I could say I had done - a beautiful aircraft, but then so is the 747.
My dad got upgraded to Concorde once for some reason. His reaction was pretty much that it was cool to have done it once but he probably actually preferred his first class PanAm and getting a good dinner rather than arriving in London at rush hour.
EWR is better than it used to be although I don't know about the terminal Virgin uses/used. (I'm always on United.) Transport into the city is still terrible though.
If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are borderline incompetent at delivering this (or just not interested).
And the other potential big saving is in airport transit time - but airports nowadays are optimised for "extract as much money as possible from each user", not "minimize user transit time from the station/car park to their assigned seat on the aircraft".
All the European airlines do that - I think it's a response to compensation laws about delays. The schedule can eat a 30 minute delay without anyone even noticing.
Faster? It’s gotten slower! Significantly slower. Haven’t you noticed that modern jetliners don’t really even have swept back wings any more? The sweet spot for fuel efficiency is around 530mph for modern, very high bypass turbofan engines. In the 60’s, turbojet 707’s and DC8’s regularly flew at >600 mph. Gas was 25c a gallon.
What modern jetliners are you referring to? the 787 has a sweep back of 32 degrees and a 707 had a sweep back of 35 degrees so not really that much difference. The 737 has a sweep back of 25 degrees and it first flew in the 1960s.
They have. But drag is drag and the price of fuel is the price of fuel. Drag increasing at higher speed means your fuel usage grows geometrically with speed. Slower is more efficient (to an extent, slower means higher angle-of-attack to maintain lift so your drag will start going up again if you get slow enough). No matter how efficient the engines get drag remains the same and going faster will still cost more. Engine efficiency just goes into reducing operating costs instead of travel times now.
Does it need to be faster? It needs to be more comfortable imo. also the process of boarding and deboarding a plane is more annoying and slower than the 60s.
Hardly. Even for those limited few who can afford the extra cost, a business class seat only slightly insulates you from the worst part of any flight... other annoying passengers.
Don't have kids. That way you can avoid the holiday season for your vacation.
No lines at security and your fellow passengers are business travelers and old people.
A lot of domestic flights, business is more like economy plus. Trans-Atlantic I don't really have complaints although red-eyes are still disruptive. (I pretty much always do London as a day flight even though it means an ungodly early start.) I agree it's not a hotel room although I often don't sleep well the first night in a hotel room after an international flight either. AFAIK, there isn't anything even on the drawing board that could do trans-Pacific non-stop.
- Most people want cheap flights over everything else, speed is expensive
- The flight time only has a limited relative impact on the overall travel time. Time to get in and out of the airport, security, border controls, boarding, taxiing, etc... often take longer than the flight itself.
- For passengers who are ready to pay more, you can always offer more comfort. The advantage with comfort is that you can divide the plane into classes, it is highly modular. Faster requires an entirely new plane design just for those who can afford it.
- Arguably, comfort is more valuable than the kind of speed improvement we can get. For example, if you sleep better on the plane, that's less sleep you will need at your destination, saving you time overall. If you can work on the plane, that's also time you don't have to spend working at some other time.
In pragmatic terms, I can be in a tiny town in Virginia at 4am, and then be in another tiny town in Washington state in about 12 hours...how much faster does it have to be?
I remember, in the mid 90s getting up at 6:00 am, taking a taxi to LGA and catching a 7:00 am Shuttle to Washingto DC so I could be at a 9:00 am meeting.
In part, that was partly because you could just walk on the next shuttle at 7:30 or whenever if you got delayed for some reason. Personally I'd probably take the train although a 9AM meeting might be tight.
6am is about the time you'd need to get up if you lived in Front Royal and wanted to make a 9am meeting and that's assuming a pretty efficient workflow for leaving the house.
One might equally ask why cars have barely gotten faster in the same time period. I think these systems settle into a (maybe local) optimum of safety, cost, pollution, infrastructure requirements etc, and are then very hard to adapt.
Seems like a bigger delay is the #$%^&* hub and spoke model.
Not too long ago I could catch a direct light to many, many cities in Europe.
Now, I need to fly into a hub first - often passing right over my final destination (then having unboard, reboard, and fly back, easily another 1-2h).
And don't even talk about the security theater. Sometimes twice (although that gotten better in that there isn't a 2nd check.)
And, yes, I noticed that pure flight times got longer, about an hour on transcontinental flight. All this time I thought I made that up, but at speeds mentioned in the article this is about right.
As soon as I saw the title I knew the answer ... economics. The vast majority of people buy the cheapest flights they can, and with modern jet engine technology it's cheaper to fly slightly slower.
The same is true with ocean going cargo ships. They deliberately cruise[0] slower if they are under some nation's flags because the wages are lower for those nationals[1], and the balance between cost of wages versus cost of fuel shifts towards spending more time (higher wages) at a lower speed (less fuel).
Roughly, steaming faster increases your fuel bill but lowers your wages bill, and vice versa. The exact balance point depends on the base rate for the wages of the crew. And the number of crew.
The arithmetic is brutal, but unassailable.
[0] The technical term is, believe it or not "steam"
So speed alone isn’t enough. And now we have noise restrictions, emissions rules and lack of infrastructure for supersonic flights. And I think commercial air travel will likely keep optimizing for efficiency rather than speed.
So apparently the issue is fuel economy -- going faster uses more fuel, so there's an optimum speed.
But haven't jet engines become more fuel efficient in the past 50 years? You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.
> You would think that by now they'd achieve at least 2x the speed with the same fuel load.
No.
The problem is not engine efficiency. To my knowledge, Concorde still holds the title of having the best engine fuel-efficiency at cruise. Close to 60%.
And although engine efficiencies at subsonic speeds have improved drastically since the 60s, the problem airplanes face when cruising closer to Mach 1 is that they start getting transonic effects around their wing and fuselage. And that greatly increase your drag. It is therefore more economical to stay below the speed threshold at which these effects start occurring.
A high Mach 0.8+ could probably achieve that. Aircraft builders have settled for about Mach 0.82 for airliners. Private jet builders, in some cases, care less about fuel efficiency, and still build airplanes flying above Mach 0.9, as for example, the Cessna Citation X.
Also what annoys me is how much friction airlines have added to the whole process. They want you there early, but too early and you wont have anywhere to sit. Show up a little later and it's a cluster trying to check a bag. Then boarding times are always wrong. Everyone rushes and blocks the lines. Process takes longer too when everyone brings all their luggage as carry on and argues about gate checking.
>> Also what annoys me is how much friction airlines have added to the whole process.
My biggest pet peeve is how they call groups successively, but dont actually let the lines exhaust before calling the next group. Successive groups realize that the lines are all mixed up, and people stop honoring groups and just all jump into line. Chaos ensues.
Also, everyone has a carry-on since checked bags now universally cost extra, but there's never enough space for all the carry-ons, so everyone's quietly jockeying to not be the last twenty people in line.
I also do this, especially if you have assigned seats and are flying light, there is no reason to be the first person on the plane unless you like sitting and doing nothing for 45 minutes.
I'm skeptical how much charges for check-in have to do with it. People traveling on business almost universally don't want the time overhead (and risk of delayed luggage) associated with checking bags even though they could expense it or often get free checked bags through status anyway.
I've been having fun with people putting their bags in the compartments marked "emergency exit seats" and then being surprised their bag is put in the hold when mine is put in instead of theirs. (Since you cannot have luggage under your seat there some airline have a reserved bin for the ee seats)
Yeah but you already packed lighter and more constrained and hauled your carryon all the way to the plane, so it feels obnoxious to then have to surrender the one advantage of carryon other than price (not having to wait for your luggage at the carousel) after you've already accepted all the disadvantages.
Not anymore. As of last year, if you try to board earlier than your zone is called, the scanner won’t accept it and the FA will tell you to go to the back of the line. This is at least on Delta. I read other airlines are also being more strict
The best strategy is to go to the bathroom when they call boarding and mosey on over whenever you like. Its easier to board as one of the last few vs the first. No one in the aisle and you can identify your potential seat from across the plane.
I would much rather be situated in my window seat early. I don’t have to worry about people mistakenly or purposefully taking my seat and waiting for them to move or wait for people to stand up for me to get my seat.
If I get a free upgrade to first class, I can already be sipping on my free prs board alcoholic beverage.
Board first, board last, all good choices for people. However, a mass of people chaotically at a boarding gate is so shameful -- Computer Science has solved these problems already with priority queues, and the airline industry should catch up. Perhaps airlines should just mandate leetcode.
I do remember being on business in East Asia and how orderly these things operated.
There are priority queues at least with Delta to a point.
- people needing extra time
- military
And then they are call by Zones
- 1st class boards first sho are at the front of the plane (Zone 1)
I think zone 2 is Diamond medallion. More than likely unless they bought a last minute ticket on a full plane, they would at least be C+
- Comfort+ boards next who are behind first class (Zone 3)
- Gold Medallion boards next and they are in the main cabin (Zone 4)
Those four zones above have a dedicated lane and should have plenty of overhead space close to their seat.
Below those four is where the upheaval starts especially if you fly out of Orlando like I do now with a lot of infrequent fliers. At that point, everyone is Main cabin jockeying for position and overhead space.
Even then Zone 5 isn’t bad. You get that by either having a cobranded credit card or being the lowest medallion level - Silver
Here in Ireland nobody cares what the gate agents say on the announcement. People start lining up way before the flight and just get on the plane. It sucks because if you need overhead room you are stuck standing for at least an hour. I’ve seen American boarding agents boarding Irish return flights getting frustrated that people aren’t listening, and they are faced with either creating a big incident or just acquiescing.
It works so much better when there is a system and everyone follows it.
>Process takes longer too when everyone brings all their luggage as carry on and argues about gate checking.
I would be more willing to check bags if they return your baggage right after the flight, instead of losing the bags on a connecting flight and shipping it back to me a week later.
This.
In some places you used to be able to check your bags in advance. In Switzerland you could even check your bags at your local train station the day before so that you could just go to your flight and breeze through the airport.
That doesn't really solve the problem of your bag not arriving at destination. So far my ratio is 3 out of 14 that had bagage problems when I didn't bring them in with me as carry on.
If you fly multiple hops, there is no way to guarantee this, service quality varies wildly ie across Europe.
Some airports are known to be 'black holes' for luggage, from dealings with Swissport who handles lost&found everywhere, they mentioned that Fiumicino airport near Rome didn't have stellar reputation to say politely, and Barcelona wasn't that great neither. Had luggage lost on both in rather annoying way - both of them didn't have a clue where it was for more than a week, started saying goodbye to all rather costly equipment like paraglider set in it.
But I've seen stuff get lost in places like Vienna multiple times, so one can't draw any simple conclusions. I see it as a massive room for improvement and automation via 'AI', but that should have been done a decade ago, ie automated barcode scanning isn't novel tech.
It does seem to have improved in general. (From a small sample size as I don't check luggage unless I have to.) United's baggage tracking in their app seems pretty reliable and I toss in an AirTag as a backup which also works well.
That has definitely improved. My bags used to get lost (well, more delayed than lost) nearly every time I connected through Paris CDG. Now it's been a long time since that has happened.
It's by design. Airlines, like most industries these days have decided that it's no longer "Profitable" to serve regular folks, so they are pursuing the "Whale" strategy of re-orienting their entire service offering to exclusively cater to the 20% of their customers that drive 80% of their profits.
The experience of flying first class is better than it's ever been, and all that extra comfort, convenience and luxury has come 100% at the expense of the experience of the unwashed masses flying "Economy" class. First class gets lie flat beds, priority boarding, lobster thermidor and hot towels, while economy seats keep shrinking, boarding times get longer, checked baggage that used to be free costs $100, and a child-sized bag of peanuts costs $5.
The reason airline travel sucks so much these days is because it's supposed to. If you're flying economy class, the airlines literally see you as a burden, rather than a valued customer, and are doing everything in their power to make your experience as awful as possible, while squeezing every last penny out of you in the process.
My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - well over a dozen times a year since Covid lifted.
For the frequent traveler who is loyal to an airline, a lot of those problems go away.
We are Delta loyalists and both Platinum Medallion.
1. When we buy a main cabin seat, we get upgraded immediately to Comfort+ for free.
2. When we go to the airport, if we don’t use curbside check in (and tip), we get to use the Sky Priority Checkin line and have two free checked bags
3. We have TSA Pre-Check and Clear to skip the line
4. After check-in, we head straight to the Delta, Amex Centurion or Priority Pass lounge where we have plenty of seating free food and drinks (alcoholic and non alcoholic)
5. When boarding, we get to board early because of our C+ upgrade (Zone 3) or worse case Zone 4 and have plenty of overhead space if we need it and get to be situated early.
Related: Am I the only one that lives in a (mid size and prosperous US city) and does not have a preferred airline company because my choice of operator depends on destination and availability rather than choosing one among many airlines for a given destination and date? The city I live in rhymes with “Charleston”.
Poorly worded question - I’m glad you guys know how to travel well together and often. The only thing I miss about my college girlfriend was when we got an overnight delay in Denver and the crazed associate told us “I don’t fucking know” when we asked about the details of our hotel she said: “I mean this sucks but it’ll be okay hahaha”
I try to perpetuate that mindset nowadays lol. End monologue
If you don’t fly often, airline loyalty doesn’t matter. I just don’t hate myself enough to fly Southwest and deal with non assigned seats even though they do have the most non stop flights from our current airport
>does not have a preferred airline company because my choice of operator depends on destination and availability
That's certainly the line that can't be compromised, ultimately you fly because you wanna get somewhere. But finding and choosing favorite airline(s) has many perks that aren't easily quantifiable, enough that many frequent flyers choose to focus their patronage for those benefits.
I'm personally a Delta fanboi because Northwest was my childhood airline on family vacations. My Delta SkyMiles account goes all the way back to 1998 when my dad opened it for me as a kid, back then it was Northwest WorldPerks.
Small tangent story: Delta SkyMiles was instrumental in my getting an AMEX credit card as my second ever card with merely 6 months credit history as a literal newcomer nobody to the credit world. It's been my favorite card to carry ever since.
Boston isn't a United hub but I can get to most places with a fairly reasonable flight option from there. The main exceptions are Raleigh (which is short enough that I don't care much) and London for which I change planes rather than take a BA non-stop.
Yes, having lots of money makes life easier. I don't have the networking skills to be management, so I'll continue to travel once every three years and be lucky for that.
Clear just helps you get to the front of the TSA Precheck line and its airport dependent and time of day whether it’s any faster than regular TSA Precheck + DigitalID.
But we are talking about $85 for five years for PreCheck.
But as far as security, the only difference pre check makes is that you don’t have to take your belt and shoes off.
I mentioned earlier that newer scanners don’t require you to take electronics out of your bag whether or not you have PreCheck
PreCheck probably makes less of a difference than it used to. But, as you say, if you fly any amount, getting PreCheck (or Global Entry which comes with PreCheck) is a drop in the bucket in terms of money.
I think PreCheck probably goes faster too because people with PreCheck mostly know the drill.
I did have to take my laptop out of my bag flying out of JFK the year before last and they said you could only have one electronic in your bag even with TSA Precheck.
That hasn’t happen before or since. At that time I had a client laptop, my company’s laptop (working in consulting), my iPad, and an external USB powered portable monitor in my carryon.
Before TSA existed we could get through security without paying the extra $85. Why doesn't the TSA just pre-check everyone? It just feels like a scam to me.
It's just more examples of enshittification over the decades. Nevermind the checkin, the premiums for first class are absurd (and nowadays there's at least 4 different tiers of flight, not just 2), you don't get free snacks anymore, seating is smaller, etc. Those times of treating customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).
>customers with respected ended quite a while ago (except during COVID of course. But that's mostly over).
I definitely didn't feel respected during covid. There was a mask rule, standard for the time, fine. But then they give out drinks, okay. They were extremely strict, you must sip your drink and have your mask on again within less than a second. Long sips, unacceptable. Pause in your sip, unacceptable, there needs to then be two sips with an intermediate remasking. The air staff were quite 1930s Germany as far as the rigor of their enforcement of this rule. This has all the charm and beside manner of a driver laying on their horn 200ms after the red light turns green. Quite bizarre, the mask fetish, when most passengers were vaccinated and there's this huge vector of spreading the disease called touching things with pathogens on their surface aka fomites.
Where was this? When I travelled here in Europe we could just take our mask off while eating/drinking. No second rule. That would indeed be super annoying.
What I find annoying these days are those people who theatrically mask up and then look at you like you're supposed to do the same. Luckily it's very uncommon in aviation now. A bit more in the metro but they can just walk elsewhere if they want.
Absolutely. Why have any charge at all? Why is the government expecting me to pay for it? Fuck the poor I guess, they wait in line.
Why should I have to pay at all? Why not make everyone going through security pay $5 every time to recoup the costs for the TSA through user fees?
And it's not like it's only $70-85 every five years, it's per person so I'll have to buy for my whole family. Quite a bit more than just $70! And in the end it's all bullshit anyways. Just a way to sort people willing to give up the money versus those who don't know, don't want to, or can't pay.
Why should I pay for your TSA Precheck? Let’s be real though, we are only talking about taking your shoes off and belt. It won’t kill you to do that. If you have a disability that doesn’t enable you to do either, I’m sure they will make an exception.
And kids up to 17 don’t need Precheck if flying with a parent
Are you really complaining about spending $70 once every five years to give me TSA Precheck? You won't even notice paying for my Precheck.
Why should I pay for your usage of the TSA? Why not have all $7.55B entirely funded by direct user fees, handing the TSA agents cash or tap a credit card while you go through the scanner? Why should I pay for your airports (often constructed with massive tax subsidies and grants)? Why should I pay for the highways you drive on to go to your airport?
> we are only talking about taking your shoes off and belt.
No, we're also talking about stereoscopic facial scans, high resolution millimeter wave scans of my body, yet another centralized government database tracking my movements, having to showcase all my valuables to all the other passersby by dumping all the electronics out of my bag, wasting my time, wasting our tax dollars, for pretty much no benefit. Ooh but I can skip the line if I surrender more biometrics and pay extra! How nice!
> If that’s your concern, why would you want TSA Precheck where you have to give the government your fingerprints and go through a background check?
I'd rather just have practically none of it because it's largely a waste of money and time and a major inconvenience while providing practically little real security.
> Not getting blown out the sky is a pretty big benefit.
Tons of other countries have far more basic security at airports. They're not constantly having planes blown out of the sky. Airlines operated for decades before the formation of the TSA and millimeter wave scanners and taking off our shoes and stereoscopic face scans and yet they were not getting blown out of the sky.
- Amex Delta Platinum
Card - $350 Annual Fee and you get a companion pass - buy one get one free round trip ticket anywhere in the US, Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean and a $150 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Business - the same benefits except a $200 hotel credit.
- Amex Delta Reserve - an up to first class companion ticket and a $200 Hotel credit + lounge access.
It takes $15000 MQDs to reach Platinum Medallion. But if I flew less, I would only care about Silver Medallion where you get sky priority Checkin and preferred exit row seats (extra legroom) for free.
Just by having those two Platinum cards would give you the $5K MQDs to get Silver. Either of those cards give you free checked bags. Medallion status gives you an extra checked bag.
You get 1 MQD for every dollar you spend on flights and $1 MQD for every $10 you spend on the Reserve or $20 you spend on the Platinum. You get $2500 MQDs for each of those cards.
I got the other $7500 MQDs last year between flights and credit card spend.
Me and my partner/friends travel with some privileges due to my work in air transport industry, so business class seats on trans-oceanic flights for 150$ or so
Still hate the experience in comparison to modern rail.
But security theatre is apparently necessary, see "golden age of hijacking" 1968-72: over 300 events in five years, that's a hijack a week!
As soon as they build a tunnel under the Atlantic or make widely available solar-electric "steamers" that can cross it in less than a week with four-figure ticket prices, I'll be thrilled to take that option.
Ditto for a high-speed rail network throughout the continental US.
Until then, it's simply unhelpful to try to shame people for not opting out of employer-mandated travel or limiting their vacation days to a 300-mile radius (or insisting that they spend multiple of those days driving).
> [...] limiting their vacation days to a 300-mile radius (or insisting that they spend multiple of those days driving).
Why? Why does everybody think that they've got the God-given right to fly thousands of miles away to just lie at a beach for 3 days and come back? Why don't they realize that they are probably already very fortunate in life and with that fotune comes some responsibility?
Maybe it's not helpful shaming them, but the more we de-normalize this behavior, the fewer people are going to do it.
How large of a percentage of your income do you give to help the less fortunate? Did you choose a career for the money or did you decide to choose a less lucrative career in a non profit?
What sacrifices are you making to the lifestyle you want to have “to save the earth”?
And no one can answer the question of how my flying in a plane that was already going to fly reduces emissions.
I could also clutch my pearls and say people who drive into work instead of choosing a job that allows them to work remotely and refusing to be in an office would help climate change.
Of course that would be silly and self serving. I bet everyone criticizing me would love to be in a position to have unlimited PTO, work remotely and be able to travel more.
Not that we are rich - we are 50, empty nesters, downsized our home and moved to a state tax free state along with other fixed cost saving moves
And no one can answer the question of how my flying in a plane that was already going to fly reduces emissions.
you can worry about your carbon footprint or not - your choice - but this is about as silly of a statement as they come. this is like being nazi in Auschwitz and going “well someone else would commit these heinous crimes so what’s the difference if I do it.” you do your part - that is what you are in control in and what you can decide on based on your beliefs. but to say “well shit, this plane gonna take off anyways so imma just jump onboard and take a couple
of seats that are available” is not an acceptable argument
It really doesn’t matter what I did as you were the one commenting on but I’ll amswer
Did you choose a job where you didn’t have to go to work and cause carbon emissions?
yes, I am a contractor and have been working from home-office since 2007
You purposefully chose a job where you decided to drive into work. Did you buy a house close enough to work to walk or ride a bike?
yes, I also chose a private school for my kid which is nearby and we bike to school weather-permitting roughly 75% of the time
Whet sacrifices have you personally made to reduce your carbon footprint?
I drive EV. My wife and I donate 10% of all our pre-tax earning significant portion of which goes to Oceana. I installed solar panels on my house long before it was even remotely economically feasible… We try to do our part, even in cases where it is a bit of theatre more so than actual benefit (recycling for instance)
What we don’t have is an expensive car - we bought a cheap new car that is less than half the median cost of a car in the US. We don’t have expensive housing - we downsized to a 1200 foot condo after our youngest graduated. We don’t have state taxes - we moved to state tax free Florida. We also don’t have any debt besides the condo that we put 30% down on. Our mortgage is much lower than the average mortgage.
In the grand scheme of things, our travel budget is less than 10% of our gross comp and I don’t work at BigTech (been there done that). Even half of that is offset by not having to pay state taxes which we did before we moved in 2022.
There is some 'startup' trying to bring modern versions of concorde planes, not really grokking the reasons it went out of business it seems.
As if rich people are not universally hated enough, lets show off to everybody by flying marginally faster and polluting way more in super cramped very loud tubes. Some technical challenges can be maybe addressed these days but not all of them. Unless folks fly half around the world time spent on airports takes away massive chunk of overall flight time anyway.
>> Also most airlines board people roughly front to back, when it should be the opposite
the problem with back to front is that people in the back would put their bags into overhead bins in the front, which they can easily pick up on the way out. However, you cant walk backwards for pickup, so the read overhead bins would be empty and inaccessible by the people boarding last.
I was a traveling consulting when people did such things. I got to see this silliness 2-3x/wk
I don’t think they mean passengers in row 50 put their bags in row 30.
I think it’s just that your eyes’s reach trends towards the front of the plane. If it’s busy when you try to stow away your bag, chances are you will prefer putting it in a meter towards the front of the plane (where you’re standing anyways, waiting for the person before you to stow away their bag) over cramming it in above your head, where the other bags already are.
Oh, people in row 40 routinely put their bag in row 8 if they can, because it means they might not have to check their bag if the plane runs out of space.
Honestly they need to crack down on overhead usage in general, and not just for this reason. The thing about air travel that always makes me angriest is how F'ing slow everything becomes because everyone is trying to jam 93 different huge bags in the overhead bin.
Incentivize people back towards checking their bags, the process would be more efficient all around.
I've sometimes wondered why there's not a ballistic trajectory plane. Something that boosts upward into the upper atmosphere, soars above dense air for a majority of the trip, then uses engines for a controlled landing.
I kind of figured SpaceX or similar would cater to the billionaire class more by now.
SpaceX wants to do that with Starship (they call it Earth-to-Earth) but I'm pretty sure even they acknowledge that it's something of a reach.
Spaceflight is still where air travel was in the early 20th century - starting to become available "commercially", but still too dangerous and expensive for mass market adoption.
If we see anything like Earth-to-Earth in the next decade or two, It'll almost certainly be military.
Incremental improvement on flight time wouldn't even really benefit many passengers all that much, if I fly London to East coast US/Canada I spend more time getting to/from airports, and waiting in airport or on the field, than I do in the air.
Sure if it was twice as fast with the same comfort that might be a meaningful dent in the whole experience, but if the first step was 8h becomes 7.5h or then 7h, etc., meh?
I'm not sure how much appetite/passenger money there really is for working on this problem. Maybe more frequent smaller flights, or with higher cargo ratio, would appeal to airlines though.
That's sort of happened. Witness the relatively little appetite the airlines have for the largest planes, e.g. A380.
But, yeah, I'm an hour to the airport even early morning, arriving at least 1.5 hours before flight time. For London, I usually have a change in Newark. TSA actually doesn't take me long and London's usually pretty fast at immigration these days with biometric US passports. But then it's usually about an hour to my hotel in London. So supersonic trans-Atlantic wouldn't do a lot for me in the scheme of things.
The problem with the A380 was that only the biggest airports could accommodate them. Personally I always try to fly direct I absolutely HATE changing flights and apparently I'm not the only one.
Airlines are subject to enshittification just as all other things are:
• Diminished airline status returns
• Increasingly large/overpriced shops/restaurants
• More discrete seat/class upgrade costs, worse experience for base fare overall.
• Higher security friction
• Explosion of travel cards that overload lounges
• Increased nationwide traffic so even the drive to the airport is worse
• Costs of food purchases on plane (in the 90's any transcontinental flight usually had a free meal).
The only things that have gotten better are wifi and entertainment to act as recompense for less leg room.
Commercial air travel has gotten worse in every way since TSA. Airports are filthy, passengers are treated like animals and act accordingly, packed in like sardines. Many are barely dressed; it feels like a forced sleepover. Even if you fly first class, you still have to share the airport facilities with the proles. Just awful.
If somebody actually develops supersonic private aircraft, we really need to start taxing aviation fuels. You could blow through your annual carbon budget in like an hour. Those costs need to be internalized.
I don't really care what the airport wants. But stuff happens--e.g. there's construction in the tunnel leading to the airport or there's a holdup of some sort--so I essentially always arrive much earlier than I need to. I hate stressing myself for maybe a bit more sleep in the morning.
> Still, major airports all want you to arrive quite a long time before your flight's scheduled departure.
I think they still encourage this so that you'll spend $$ at the airport (the longer you're there, the more likely you are to spend), which is a major source of revenue these days.
Except that sometimes the Precheck line is longer than the regular line. Has happened to me a number of times. I still stay in the precheck line because I don't want to take off my shoes, but as precheck becomes more popular, the speed advantages decrease.
Fuel efficiency dives as you approach the speed of sound, airliners were already going as close as you’d want to in the 70’s. Since then planes have slowed down slightly and overall fuel efficiency has gone up considerably.
Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either, and the few and far betweem (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues.
Regarding the speed, we even had the Concord and lost it (and never improved upon it either).
>Don’t make things up based on your gut feelings
Analysts, Boeing insiders, and industry executives have spoken about the skills issue.
> Fuel efficiency doesn't prevent new designs working well for the same or lower speed. But we didn't manage to have those either [..]
We did, actually. Which is why the 777 is still being built, and the 747 is not.
> (and slow as molasses to be designed and created compared to the 1960s) new plane designs are plagued with tons of issues.
Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s. We can look at [1].
Average airline accidents over the 60-70 period: 65.5 accidents a year, for an average of 1400 deaths a year.
Average airline accidents over the 2011-2021 period: 20.1 accidents a year, for an average of 326.5 deaths a year.
So just on pure numbers, the improvements are undeniable. What is hidden in those statistics is that the world air passenger traffic increase more than 60 fold since the 60s.
>We did, actually. Which is why the 777 is still being built, and the 747 is not
The 777 design itself is over 3 decades old by this point - not exactly an argument for how better we fare now. That would be for the 787 - if such an argument could be made. As for 777X, it'ss still facing issues before even launching.
As for the 747 design, far from a failure, it served for like 60 years or so, and 747 models were still being produced until recently (and for 373, there are also more in service than any later model).
>*Actually, the rate of airline accidents and deaths has decrease drastically since the 60s.
The improvements still occurred with the majority of the planes in 2011-2021 still being the same old 40 and 50+ year old runs (they are not merely explained away by new designs replacing the old). So what part of it was improvements in radars, monitoring, ATC, and so on rather than new plane designs?
And how many of the airliners in the olden years were smaller propeller aircraft and not the jet designs under discussion? (most routes in my parts sure were still up to 1990 at least).
Going faster just simply requires more fuel, and fuel is a precious and limited resource. There are some optimizations we could make to aircraft design to improve fuel economy, but we've already done most of the optimizations given our constraints of safety standards and the general goal of comfortably transporting humans.
The rest of your post is pretty accurate, except for the goal of comfortably transporting humans. That "comfortably" is suffering the death of a thousand cuts.
I would prefer Boeing to figure out how to prevent cabin doors from blowing off mid-flight, or DCA air traffic control to figure out how to prevent planes from colliding with Black Hawk helicopters before they figure out how to make planes go faster.
That isn't ever going to happen, and modern airline safety is nothing short of a miracle. There are on the order of 10-20 million flights a year in the US, carrying 900 million passengers. You could take 5 million flights before you could statistically expect to die. This is one of those rare things in the world where a system has been developed that works, and it involves making slow changes with extreme planning and caution.
This is a typical refrain that I can translate as "we'd solve horrific safety issues and the fear and paranoia about flying if we'd all stop following the news."
But there aren't "horrific" safety issues, as the numbers demonstrate. Stepping onto a US commercial airliner is literally about the safest thing you can do. Watch the news all you want, just understand what you're watching and that if it were normal it wouldn't be news. Nobody is saying there isn't room for improvement, continual improvement in safety is part of the process, and the numbers bear that out.
Indeed, I thought awhile about a way to rephrase that, and it's really just media shaping the perceptions about such. Being in an aircrash seems like a top national nightmare, so 9/11 was super effective in catching our attention.
I'm not in a position to tell them anything. If I were, I would try and convey
that I understand nothing can replace what they've lost, but the cause of the accident will be investigated and determined. Recommendations from that investigation will result in procedures being added to cannon of safety measures to help prevent future similar tragedies. What would you tell them?
Sure, the sensors collecting the altitude data might have been faulty, but the helicopter pilot was reportedly 50% higher than was allowed. You would think that an experienced helicopter pilot would be able to gauge that they were a full 50% above the allowed limit. From the reported information, I'm not sure there is reason to believe that it was much more complicated than altitude misjudgement on the part of the helicopter pilot, unless they were somehow unaware of the allowed limits in that airspace.
If something was caused by pilot error, there's nothing you can really do except shrug and hope it doesn't happen again. It's an intuitively appealing explanation, and usually wrong. The aviation community has spent decades rejecting that instinct and looking for contributing factors that can be addressed. Those other factors are almost always present, and improvements can then be made. The net result of this process is that aviation has become incredibly safe, which would not have happened if people were content to say "eh, it was probably pilot error."
Air travel can be revolutionized with a pod-based boarding system to reduce travel times and enhance safety. Passengers would have individual pods with built-in luggage compartments under their seats, allowing for fast, automated boarding and unloading. This system would eliminate the need for overhead storage and flight attendants, streamlining operations. In emergencies, each pod would feature a deployable parachute, offering increased survivability. By minimizing human touchpoints and maximizing automation, airlines could drastically cut boarding times, improve passenger privacy, and enhance overall efficiency in air travel.
Air travel can be revolutionized with a vacuum-sealed passenger transport system, reducing total airport time to just 10 minutes while maximizing efficiency and safety. Upon arrival, passengers would undergo a rapid preparation process, where an oxygen-rich biofluid is introduced through both mouth and anus, ensuring full oxygenation without the need for active breathing. They would then be gently encased in a flexible, vacuum-sealed transport sheet, immobilizing them completely to eliminate security concerns and expedite boarding.
These passenger sheets would be automatically sorted and loaded onto aircraft via a conveyor system, optimizing cabin space with a precision-stacked configuration. Without the need for traditional seating, aisles, or security screening, aircraft capacity could increase significantly, lowering ticket prices while enhancing operational efficiency. Upon landing, passengers would be swiftly unloaded, revived from stasis, and ready to continue their journey within minutes.
This system would not only eliminate delays caused by baggage handling and TSA procedures but also enhance fuel efficiency by optimizing passenger distribution within the aircraft.
If I have a 2-year old child and I need to feed him or change his diaper but he's enclosed in his own sealed pod do I just have to wait 8 hours before I can interact with him at the other end or something? And what if I am traveling with my wife and she wants to put her head on my shoulder?
I remember as a kid in the 90s you could do a little metal detector, and sometimes not even that, and get on a plane.
The changes to cockpit doors solves the 9/11 problem. Other than that guy who lit his underwear on fire one Christmas, I don’t know what exactly all of this is pretending to prevent.
The TSA’s own internal tests have people getting handguns through.
I have pre-check. Maybe eventually everyone will have it and the vast majority of passengers won’t have to take off shoes or take out laptops. Then we’ll get back to where we were decades ago.