The big answer: fuel. As in, if you fly too fast, you’ll burn too much and it will cost too much monies. Commercial airlines would prefer flying at a specific speed that enables them to be as fuel efficient as possible. According to Slate:
By the laws of physics, the increase in drag equals the square of the increase in speed, so even a slightly faster flight requires a lot more fuel. Hiking a plane’s velocity by 10 percent takes 21 percent more energy. Speeding up by 40 percent approximately doubles fuel consumption.
It’s crazy. Flights are actually longer now than they were back in 1983 (NYC to Denver is 19 minutes longer) and even 1973 (DC to Miami is 45 minutes longer). It’s probably safe to assume that airlines have found the perfect speed to maximise fuel while not sacrificing too much speed.
The littler answers to why air travel hasn’t gotten any faster is because there are more jets in the air now. Jets, unlike propeller planes, fly at the same altitude as commercial airliners and when a commercial airliner is behind a jet, big boy has to slow down. Also, airlines have gamed the system on reporting flight times through block padding. They’ve add a few minutes to scheduled times in order to make it seem like their on time (when they’re not). It’s all screwy!
So yep, blame it on the airlines that it still takes so long to fly. Or on our reliance on fuel. [Slate]
Image: Shutterstock/Mikael Damkier
Nodeity
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 9:42 AMSo, the sooner they get scram jets off the ground the better, huh. Scram jets would use bugger all fuel compared the airliners of today, because they just need to get into space and reduce the drag, thus getting them to where they re-enter the atmosdphere much quicker with almost zero fuel used.. Fuel is used getting up there and obviously less fuel is used getting down… Oh well I can dream can’t I..?
Kevin
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 10:36 AMThe drag calculation is based on the existing “accepted” plan form of the airliners. There are other designs that will significantly minimise drag with better payload / fuel / range.
Tomas
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 2:03 PMIt did get quicker – the Concorde. Then one blew up, and instead of going back to the drawing board and fixing what was wrong, they scrapped the whole idea.
Ignorance to innovation.
EMH
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 2:18 PMYou need to compare airfares now with airfares in the past; they have become a lot cheaper! The cheapest aeroplane in which to fly is the A380, because its average density is the lowest of all airliners. The Concorde failed because its average density was like the aeroplanes designed much earlier; it was just too expensive to fly.
If flights are slower now than they were the reason is almost certainly air traffic. These days there is far more air traffic than there has ever been before and handling all those aeroplanes flying into the same airports means that some have to slow down and occasionally some have to speed up a bit. It air traffic control mate.
Steve
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 3:15 PMBlame air resistance and sonic booms.
Andreas
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 8:37 AMTo answer your headline: Because they killed off the concord!
Lillee
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 10:23 AMIt all boils down to this: fossil fuel has it’s limits and we are at that limit.
“Hiking a plane’s velocity by 10 percent takes 21 percent more energy. Speeding up by 40 percent approximately doubles fuel consumption”
This is only a problem because we have to burn fossil fuels to achieve this.
Aaron
Monday, June 27, 2011 at 1:32 PMAlso I haven’t encountered a form or theory of teleportation that didn’t involve you dieing and being remade at the other end every time you were transferred. Like the method used by the Eloi in Dan Simmons Illium novel. Same with cloning as being a key to immortality as its used all the time in science fiction from low brow stuff like The 6th Day to high brow stuff like Tad Williams Otherland series (rich people copying their minds into a VR world and letting their bodies die), or Cory Doctrows Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where people download their minds every few days in case they die. They all use the theory that you get destroyed, then rebuilt somewhere else but they all seem to skirt around the issue that the original you dies, your experience ends and the new you lives on in your place, its not a transference of consciousness, it’s copying and deleting the original. I suppose that’s okay if you’re world view is based on peoples external experience of you, to them you won’t be different, but it’s the dying an infinite number of times that bothers me. I wouldn’t much like being copied (take people who think piracy isn’t a big deal today!).
… what were we talking about again?