The (Bleak) Future of Air Travel
It’s occurred to me now and again that pretty much every real or hypothetical technological development you hear about that could make things radically more fuel efficient relates to cars. But high oil prices would also imperil the viability of airplanes. And while it’s pretty clear in the case of automobiles that if 10-15 years from now oil is incredibly expensive we’ll be able to shift to plug-in vehicles of some kind nobody seems to think you can build an electric plane. Brad Plumer looked into this for The New Republic and, indeed, there seems to be absolutely nothing on the horizon, technologically speaking, that could shelter air travel from its heavy vulnerability to air travel.
For short flights, high-speed rail is a very good alternative option. It would require substantial investment in infrastructure, but it’s not as if we got our current air travel network without substantial investment in infrastructure. But even a train enthusiast such as myself needs to acknowledge some serious limits to this option. Most notably, as Brad says, “Trains, of course, can’t span oceans.” Which leads to some genuinely wacky scenarios:
Perhaps the most unlikely alternative to emerge in recent months is the rebirth of the dirigible or airship, as companies have already been unveiling new designs for niche tourist trips and transporting cargo. The good news is that modern helium airships are far safer than the Hindenburg and emit a great deal less carbon than jumbo jets. The bad news is that natural reserves of helium may be running low and, more to the point, airships can’t carry many people at a time, don’t handle heavy weather well, and are quite slow: A flight from New York to London would take around 40 hours. (Fast passenger ships would take twice as long, though modern ocean liners suffer in peak oil scenarios, too.)
Near the end, Brad quotes George Monbiot saying that a major decline in the availability of air travel “flies in the face of everything we have been encouraged to regard as progress.” It’s worth considering in that regard, however, that for decades now aerospace technology has really been disappointing the high hopes that once existed for it. We’ve already pulled back from manned travel to the moon and from supersonic passenger travel as basically impractical so it wouldn’t totally shock me to see further backsliding on this front even as advances continue in other domains.
102 Responses to “The (Bleak) Future of Air Travel”
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August 15th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I’m not too worried. Someone will figure it out.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
there seems to be absolutely nothing on the horizon, technologically speaking, that could shelter air travel from its heavy vulnerability to air travel.
How true that is!
August 15th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
emerging technologies will serve to reduce travel demand: increasing use of video conferencing, for instance, in lieu of actual meeting, not to mention that my parents and my 4-year-old can (and do) have a weekly ichat right now to bridge the 3,000 mile distance….
August 15th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
There’s certainly been increased interest in the Pilgrim-tested method. While ‘working your passage’ is increasingly rare, and a cabin on a freighter is more expensive than a flight, the idea of crossing the ocean in seven days rather than seven hours has a certain appeal in the era of TSA security theatre and nickel-and-diming on flights.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some entrepreneur looked at reviving the ocean liner with refitted cruise ships.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I’m kinda excited about the possibility of a zeppelin comeback. I love zeppelins, espicially in alternate fiction when people end up on some parallel earth, and this is signified by zeppelins being the dominant form of air travel.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
The alternatives are things like biofuels and coal-derived liquid fuels. They have drawbacks, but it certainly won’t mean the “end of air travel.”
Plus, if we really did substitute away from oil for running our cars, that would mean we’d have a lot more oil left over to use on airplanes where it’s really needed more.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Hydrogen airships would have a lot more carrying capacity than helium, and there’s no danger we’re going to run out of hydrogen. There’s the whole “burst into flames” thing to get around, but my understanding is that it’s overstated. But I think boats will do just fine.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
How the hell is my Russian bride gonna get here?!?
August 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Trains can’t span oceans? Someone may need a history lesson. I doubt people would be willing to spend days to get across the country, but if plane tickets got expensive enough that could change.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Correction: a history lesson.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Oh, Matt actually means span oceans, not span continents. Never mind.
Also, is air travel really that vulnerable to air travel? The risk of a midair collision seems to be very small.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
The transcontinental railroad is an example of trains spanning oceans? I think you’re all wet, in several ways . . .
August 15th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
This is a little silly, or at least simplistic.
If we switched all our cars to plug-ins and people moved to denser locations and we expanded train and bus services, guess what would happen to the price of oil: it would go down, or at least its future trajectory would be substantially flattened. And if we used far less oil in cars, there would be plenty left for airplanes, and possibly at not much greater cost than we see now. (Carbon taxes are another thing, though I suspect politicians wouldn’t be lining up to push for the demise of over the ocean air flights.)
I think you can put the dirigibles on hold for now.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
What is jet fuel, except a store of energy? Turbines can run on all kinds of fuels, and this may be where ethanol comes in as a fuel. It has 1/3 less energy density than jet fuel, so we’d have shorter range or larger tanks. It also has a freezing point of -114 degrees C, so it will not freeze and gum up the injectors at high altitude like some biofuels would.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
“there seems to be absolutely nothing on the horizon, technologically speaking, that could shelter air travel from its heavy vulnerability to air travel.”
for shame–a harvard grad, and yet still addicted to the idea that analytic statements are unfalsifiable!
August 15th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I believe NicK Fury’s solar powered Helicarrier would be fine for Trans Oceanic travel if retrofitted for civilian use.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Matt,
So you want people to live in dense cities, ride bicyles, build railroads and dirigibles. Maybe even more ocean liners like the Titanic. How about we also replace the internet with, say, telegraph?
August 15th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
The turbine engines used on “jet” airplanes can run on all kinds of oily fuel, including most notably the soy (or eventually algae) derived fuel that is usually called biodiesel. Extensive testing and quality control would be required before it could be used generally for commercial service but the technology is there. As with surface transit the question is whether we will do anything in time, but both Airbus and Boeing have some experiments underway.
The USAF is also testing coal-derived jet fuel which is equivalent to what we have today, but that is neither net-carbon-neutral nor renewable.
sPh
August 15th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
> So you want people to live in dense cities, ride bicyles,
> build railroads and dirigibles. Maybe even more ocean
> liners like the Titanic. How about we also replace the
> internet with, say, telegraph?
(1) False assumption that what is done differently today than 50 or 100 years ago is automatically “progress”, automatically irreversable, and never itself subject to change
(2) False assumption that changing one technology, such as surface transit, automatically terminates all other technologies developed in the same time period (of course the people who developed penicillin mostly likely rode a trolley to work and kept their car for the weekends)
(3) False assumption that a successful efficient technology such as the Internet can only support more of what was in place when it was created (e.g. more car-based exurbs) and can’t support other changes/ways of life (hey – no need for 7 cars/family when we can work over the Internet and take the maglev train to Grandma’s where we will rent electric cars for tooling around)
sPh
August 15th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
What about nuclear powered submarines?
August 15th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
there seems to be absolutely nothing on the horizon, technologically speaking, that could shelter air travel from its heavy vulnerability to air travel.
That’s positively Quayle-esque! Have Dan Q. and Matt ever been seen in the same place at the same time?
“Uou take the United Negro college fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
August 15th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
I guess I don’t really know what the quantity of fuel used for air traffic each year is, but I’m pretty sure that air travel could be covered under the long tail distribution of oil extraction for quite some time. It might get more expensive, but I don’t think it can get a whole lot more expensive before we start using all electric cars.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
It’s just funny to me that most of Matt’s suggestions are reminiscent of of life was like 100 years go. It is as if he wants to uninvent the airplane and internal combustion engine.
Also wrt to
(1) False assumption that what is done differently today than 50 or 100 years ago is automatically “progress”, automatically irreversable, and never itself subject to change
I think the fact that cars did replace trains as the dominant means of transportation at a time when cars basically sucked compared to modern ones, there was little if any infrustructure to support cars, and when railroad was at it’s golden age does say something about cars being progress.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
MS, cars started replacing trains for long-distance travel in the 1950’s, when the government started pumping millions of dollars into the interstate highway system.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Boats could be nuclear powered, as are many of the airplane carriers. That would be independent on oil.
Also, what makes oil price go up is demand; on the optimistic side, if one reduces demand enough on the car front, there might not be an issue on the plane front.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
> Turbines can run on all kinds of fuels, and
> this may be where ethanol comes in as a fuel.
Turbines _can_ burn ethanol but prefer denser fuels such as oils. And ethanol in general has a severe problem for aviation in that it absorbs large amounts of water vapor at surface temperatures that freezes when the airplane reaches altitude. There has been a lot of work in general aviation certifying piston engines for auto gas in view of the evental phase-out of aviation gasoline, but this effort is now threatened by the amount of ethanol that is entering the auto gas process and the inability/unwillingenss of refiners to guarantee that any gasoline is ethanol-free.
sPh
August 15th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Matt is actually a steampunk.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Modern container ships could even be wind powered.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Who says trains can’t cross oceans?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Tunnel
Estimated cost is only $12 trillion. I can’t wait until my great-great-great-grandkids can ride this train!
August 15th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
The only oil shortage right now is political. We have scads of oil offshore, scads in Alaska, scads in oil shale. None of it is accessible for political reasons. I think it goes without saying that the oil currently locked up behind political walls will become available, after some period of whining by people like Matt who can’t imagine that other people want to live a lifestyle different than his.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I dunno, I’m pretty confident that some kind of next-gen algae-based biofuel will be available for planes.
Also note that you could make airplanes that ran on much less volatile fuel if you just made with very huge, lightweight wings, so they’d be essentially slow gliders.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
The only oil shortage right now is political. We have scads of oil offshore, scads in Alaska, scads in oil shale.
Estimated volume of recoverable crude oil in ANWR: 10.4 billion barrels.
Total worldwide petroleum usag: 83.6 million barrels/day
I can’t wait until we get our hands on that that Alaskan oil! What an awesome four months that will be! I’m gonna buy like six SUVs!
August 15th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Note that scythia said “ANWR”, and I listed Alaska (as a whole), along with offshore and oil shale deposits. There’s also lots and lots of coal around, and 1940’s era technology managed to make fuel from it.
This is mostly a new way to try and manage the way people live. Nothing else has worked to drive people out of the suburbs, so maybe scaring them about climate change fantasies will do the trick.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Note that scythia said “ANWR”, and I listed Alaska (as a whole), along with offshore and oil shale deposits.
Did I say four months? I meant ten. Twenty SUVs to you, sir, for pointing out the flaw in my reasoning.
Gasoline, of course, will be on your tab.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
“Hydrogen airships would have a lot more carrying capacity than helium”
Wrong.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Estimated cost is only $12 trillion. I can’t wait until my great-great-great-grandkids can ride this train!
All graphite and glitter–ninety minutes from New York to Paris.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
scythia,
You sound a lot like Paul Erlich in the 70’s, as does Matt. You might recall how famously wrong he was. We don’t really know how much oil there is offshore, because various opponents to progress won’t let anyone look. There’s enough coal in the US alone for hundreds of years, and we know how to turn that into fuel. The only crisis is from people like you and Matt, who don’t want to let anyone look for oil – probably out of raw fear that we might actually find some.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
This is mostly a new way to try and manage the way people live. Nothing else has worked to drive people out of the suburbs, so maybe scaring them about climate change fantasies will do the trick.
Do seriously believe this? Why do you think I want to live closer to you? I need to know this, are you just posturing or do you believe the entire scientific community is pulling off a massive hoax because they are crypto-anarcho-primitavists?
August 15th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
How about we also replace the internet with, say, telegraph?
As a compromise, can we replace text messaging with Morse Code?
August 15th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
While it’s hard to imagine now, in a generation or two we’ll probably all be downloadable.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Shorter James Robertson:
Teh evel lieberals is out to gets mah big yard and big car! You can’t has it evel lieberals! I don’t care what yore fancee science says!
August 15th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I learned morse code in the military and send txt msgs using Q and Z codes to my friends. “WTF QTH IMI” means “Where the fuck are you?” and so on…
August 15th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
I would point out yet again that the SwiftFuel people are primarily working to replace aircraft fuel. Their product can work identically in aircraft. Cars are a secondary matter for them, since they don’t want to “rock the boat” – yet.
It’s the Platform, Stupid: Baby steps are the way to energy independence.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080606_005036.html
August 15th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I learned morse code in the military and send txt msgs using Q and Z codes to my friends. “WTF QTH IMI” means “Where the fuck are you?”
Wow. That’s so much better than disemvowelling…
The only crisis is from people like you and Matt, who don’t want to let anyone look for oil – probably out of raw fear that we might actually find some.
Yeah, bro, that’s me to a T. I hate oil. My car runs on nitrogen and used margarine. When I need to fly cross-country, I just hop on my hangglider and set sail on a breeze. Wrapped in my nuclear-powered blanket on cold nights, I sit at the top of my remote mountaintop and laugh at you petro-Luddites. Your welfare concerns me not a whit!
These are challenging times we live in, but it’s important to remember that people with different ideologies have absolutely nothing in common with you, and are likely seeking to nefariously undermine your way of life underneath their pretty-sounding “policy proposals.”
August 15th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
As a compromise, can we replace text messaging with Morse Code?
Nah I think the compromise would be those retro phones that you have to hold the receiver and the transmitter separately. Way cooler than the iPhone. Rotary phones were also nice.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I thought it was a very good article. We really need to get off of hydrocarbons as fast as possible – imagine if we had followed through with Carter’s policies instead of Reagan, or even gotten tougher on fuel standards under Clinton. It’s never too late, but it’s going to be costly now, and will only become more so in the future.
Long term, we need to switch to a solar/nuclear-powered society, with emphasis on solar. After all, hydrocarbons like coal and petroleum are the remnants of prehistoric plants and sealife that got squished into compact energy sources. Their origins, ultimately, were solar-based. Let’s skip the several stages along the thermodynamic path (and millions of years to boot) and get the energy from the sun directly. We then use nuclear as a backup for sitautions requiring constant power.
In the distant future, I hope we can use solar power to create liquid hydrogen fuel for aerospace applications, to support all the benefits of air travel mentioned in the article. Now, burning oil for vehicles or electricity is just the height of insanity, when we’ll increasingly need more of it for applications like fertilizer and petrochemicals.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
@gcochran:
“Hydrogen airships would have a lot more carrying capacity than helium”
Wrong.
Huh? Why is this wrong? My understanding has always been that hydrogen provides greater lift.
Regardless, I agree that fears of hydrogen are overstated. Also, they are likely to abate as people get used to hydrogen as an energy source in cars. Jets are filled with highly flammable jet fuel and have been know to burn and explode on occasion and also to crash because they are heavier than air. We don’t have enough data on hydrogen filled airships to know how they would compare safety-wise to jets or even ocean freighters, if we installed modern safety features.
Also, don’t forget about hydrogen as an energy source for jet travel. The space shuttle is powered into outer space largely from hydrogen combustion. It’s theoretically possible to have passenger jets that burn hydrogen derived from clean sources, such as solar, wind, etc.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Replace a love of murder with a love of blogs and the NBA and Matt is turning into the unabomber.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
The Russians are way ahead of us.
THe Wooden Cellphone
The Wooden PC
Disemvowelling is so inelegant and there are so many useful Q and Z codes.
QTH – Position
QRF – I am coming from
QRB – I am bound for
QRL – I’m busy
QRU – I have something for you
QRV – I’m ready
Add an IMI (because the morse symbol for ? are the letters IMI – dit dit, dah dah, dit dit) and it becomes and interogative.
And WTF just means “What the fuck”.
Of course, some Q codes are not quite as useful, like QDM – my magnetic bearing from base is, or QNE – atmospheric pressure at sea level is.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Why just the other night the Missus and I were watching Dr. Who, and the good Doctor and his friend had accidentally fallen into a parallel universe and got out in its modern day London, which was just like our London, except that apparently the Hindenberg had never crashed in that alternative universe b/c there were zeppelins everywhere. And Bluetooths too!
And today I read this!
Yglesias is a wormhole, I think.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
“Yglesias is a wormhole, I think.”
No – just a worm.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Don’t hand me straight lines!
August 15th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Vacuum train. a train in a tube that’s kept in a vacuum. Capable of being propelled electrically from the outside, and going substantially faster then planes becouse they are in a vacuum. Infrastructure is expensive and the design isn’t simple.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
“Huh? Why is this wrong? My understanding has always been that hydrogen provides greater lift. ”
The lift comes from the _difference_ in density between the gas in the balloon and air. The molecular weight of helium is 4, the molecular weight of the hydrogen molecule is 2, and the molecular weight of a nitrogen molecule is 28. Slightly oversimplifying, we will assume that air is all nitrogen. Then the lifting capacity of a helium balloon is proportional to (28 – 4) = 24, while the lifting capacity of a hydrogen balloon is proportional to (28 – 2) = 26. Less than 10% better – not “a lot” better.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Maglev via Bering Strait
August 15th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Shorter Jim-Bob: you’ll take my quarter-acre front lawn over my cold, dead John Deere.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
you’ll take my quarter-acre front lawn over my cold, dead John Deere.
Oh, you should tell him to double down, here. Not only will the mortgage on his McMansion cease to be upside down at this point, there is a fortune to be made in oil shale!
He’s missing a beat if he isn’t investing strongly in a bunch of dirt that has far less energy per square inch than animal dung.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
> It’s just funny to me that most of Matt’s suggestions
> are reminiscent of of life was like 100 years go. It
> is as if he wants to uninvent the airplane and internal
> combustion engine.
100 years ago? 1908; a bit early as automobiles were just coming into the picture. 90 years ago? Say 1920? The era when many of what are now considered the most desirable neighborhoods in our cities were built, to very high standards of construction, with an outbuilding for the newfangled horseless carriage in the back yard?
Again, you start with the fundamental assumption that “progress” is a linear process that always moves forward in time and always makes things better with no false starts, blind alleys, or application of Gresham’s Law to consumer goods or quality of life. I consider that a false assumption.
sPh
August 15th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I also tend to think we will find a way to produce fuel for transoceanic flights, because the alternatives really do stink. But domestic flights? Well, the capacity is already being cut, and I think Perl and Gilbert’s scenario isn’t a bad bet.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Again, the widespread commercial success of both cars and airplanes does indicate progress imo. I guess it comes down to how you define the word.
Carbon capture, solar energy (possibly space based), next generation biofuels (from genetically engineered photosynthetic bacteria), commercially viable nuclear fusion energy – that, to me, is progress. Not dirigibles.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
DTM,
But domestic flights? Well, the capacity is already being cut, and I think Perl and Gilbert’s scenario isn’t a bad bet.
Perl and Gilbert’s scenario is highly implausible and does not represent the view of either the FAA or “analysts” in general, as Plumer notes. Due to the combination of the economic slowdown, recent rapid increases in jet fuel prices, and a relatively old, fuel-inefficient fleet, the U.S. domestic air travel market is expected to contract modestly over the near-term future, after which time growth is projected to resume. Internationally, air travel continues to boom. Airbus and Boeing have received record numbers of orders for new aircraft over the past couple of years, including orders for hundreds of new planes just last month, when oil prices were at their peak.
And while no game-changing new air travel technologies, akin to hybrid and electric technology for autos, are likely to appear in the near-term future, average air travel energy efficiency is expected to continue to improve steadily through the cumulative effect of many small changes. Rail is only moderately more energy-efficient per passenger-mile than air in terms of operating energy, and may be less energy-efficient than air when total energy consumption per p-m is compared (clearing land for railtrack and actually building the track consumes vast amounts of energy). Additionally, rail could not substitute for any overseas flights at all, is not competitive on time with any flights longer than a few hundred miles, and is not competitive on cost with shorter flights, so rail is not a serious alternative.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Incidentally, why couldn’t high tech airships represent progress? Basically their only defining characteristic is using the aerostatic method of producing lift, and I don’t see any reason in principle why there couldn’t be modern airships that were as much an improvement on Zeppelins as modern cars are on Model Ts or modern airplanes are on the Wright Flyer.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
It’s hard to see how modern airships could be even remotely as large an improvement over Zeppelins as modern cars are over Model Ts or modern planes are over the Wright Flyer. The use of helium rather than hydrogen would prevent another Hindenburg-style disaster, but the overall safety gain from using helium would probably be small. Electronic technology would allow better navigation and passenger entertainment. New materials would allow for a lighter gondola (partially offset by the lower bouyancy of helium). Better engines would also save some weight. But the fundamental limitations would still remain. Because they are essentially giant balloons, airships are difficult to control and very, very slow.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Most air travel is for business purposes and could be replaced with better teleconferencing technology, which is a hell of a lot easier to invent and cheaper to build than new transportation infrastructure.
August 16th, 2008 at 6:11 am
As the costs of air travel increases, places like Hawaii, or the Caribbean should begin to decline. the total number of people who can afford a trip to Hawaii will go down. Lighter than air ship travel would kill many current tourist areas. It is too slow and too expensive to get there.
August 16th, 2008 at 9:41 am
I, too, love the idea of airship travel. If I were filthy rich, I’d much rather own an airship than a yacht. Airships are pleasing to the eye, and they fly close enough to the ground to offer a view. Slow? Compared with a plane, sure; but no one ever disembarked from an airship with jet lag.
There’s a quantifiable aesthetic difference between “old” travel vehicles – trains, ships, airships – and “new” cars and jet aircraft. The former, outfitted right, are as desirable a part of the traveling experience as the destination. Cars and planes are merely boxes that go from point A to point B – or, more typically in air travel, point A to frenzied transfer point to point B.
Airship travel cost remains an issue: Small-capacity (20 passengers or less) fares appear to roughly double plane fares on comparable routes. Costs are more comparable to transoceanic ship fares. Unless airships can carry more passengers, they don’t have much future, at least as public transport.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:01 am
This is already happening. The increase in air fares is killing Hawaiian tourism. http://www.mercurynews.com/travel/ci_9431285
Maybe Cokie is not such as dumbass (okay, she is) – the average joe from the west coast is starting to find Hawaii unaffordable and one day it will go back to being an “elite” destination.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:25 am
> The use of helium rather than hydrogen would
> prevent another Hindenburg-style disaster, but
> the overall safety gain from using helium would
> probably be small.
The known sources of helium (primarily the Oklahoma gas fields IIRC) are starting to decline and no new sources have been found for a long time, which could be a real disaster for high-tech manufacturing. I think it is generally accepted at this point that the aluminum paint on the Hindenburg’s skin was ignited by a large spark of static electricity as the zeppelin approached the mooring mast; the hydrogen ensured complete destruction but the result for the aircraft and passengers would have been the same if the lifting gas had been helium.
As for why dirigibles are not “progress”: anything done in the past is obsolete, archaic, and useless; we can only have more of exactly what we have now which is perfect, without flaw, and can’t possibly be part of a blind alley.
sPh
August 16th, 2008 at 10:32 am
“The only oil shortage right now is political. We have scads of oil offshore, scads in Alaska, scads in oil shale. None of it is accessible for political reasons. I think it goes without saying that the oil currently locked up behind political walls will become available”
Ok, sure, but do you really think all that oil will be accessible at the prices we’ve enjoyed for the last 40 years? If oil shale is so wonderful, why weren’t we drilling for that at the same time as we were pumping the oil out of Texas, Oklahoma, and LA? We may not be running out of oil, but we’re definitely running out of cheap oil. And air travel as we know it may not be possible under expensive oil. We should probably think of alternatives so we don’t lose out standard of living.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:43 am
I tried to calculate if in principle an airship would be more economic than an airplane.
The air resistance is proportional to square of speed, so by going 10 times slower we would cut fuel consumption 100 times.
Because airship would have 1000 times the volume of an airplace, its cross-section would be 100 times larger.
Thus, an airship 10 times slower than a plane would have an identical fuel consumption.
There are various necessary corrections to those numbers, but it seems that an airship would be 10 times slower with no efficiency gain.
Which gives a rise to the truly revolutionary idea: an ocean-crossing high altitude SLOW plane, twice slower and using 1/4 of energy. So, one would have a choice of a roundtrip to Europe for, say, regular, at 1000 bucks, slow, at 400 bucks and supersoning, at 2500 bucks. After further though, I would increase space per passenger on the slow planes, hence the fare would not be 1/4 but, with 50% more space, 40%.
I am not sure if this is aerodynamically possible — slower plane would mean larger wings, hence back to the problem of higher resistance, I just have no idea.
August 16th, 2008 at 10:53 am
About a newest Boeing 787:
Fuel consumption. The combination of new materials, increased electrification, design and engines all lead to the expected reduction in operation fuel consumption of 20% compared to current aircraft of a comparable size.
Boeing calculates that the 787 will deliver fuel consumption of approximately 2.4 l/100 passenger-kilometers, assuming average modal load factors.
In its 2002 report, The Environmental Effects of Civil Aircraft in Flight, the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) noted that in terms of fuel use:
Allowing for the effects…leading to a factor of around 3 [times greater] in the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide from aircraft compared to terrestrial transport, travelling by air is broadly equivalent to one or two people travelling in a passenger car. The Commission has already pointed out in its Eighteenth and Twentieth Reports that passenger cars are more environmentally damaging than any other form of surface transport. The comparisons presented here show that air transport is in the same category, albeit with a much better safety record.
So perhaps my revolutionary SLOW planes could vastly cut fuel consumption of already quite economic travel!
August 16th, 2008 at 10:55 am
> If oil shale is so wonderful, why weren’t we drilling
> for that at the same time as we were pumping the oil
> out of Texas, Oklahoma, and LA? We may not be running
> out of oil, but we’re definitely running out of cheap oil.
As I am sure the OP is well aware, processing oil shale to get the oil out is devastating to the environment. It requires very large quantities of water which often doesn’t exist where the shale is. And the area of Canada where the shale is is so uninviting for human life that even oil workers who enjoy tough living don’t tend to want to move there. But hey, if that is what it takes so that we can keep driving 750hp cars to get a jug of milk…
sPh
August 16th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Just to throw in another mode–back during the last energy crisis there was discussion of powering jet airplanes by beaming microwaves to them from power satellites. Cool, huh?
August 16th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Most of the power used by a modern plane is used to generate lift, something an airship doesn’t need. Also, air resistance is based on shape, cross section, and speed. Drag goes up at the square of the speed, so an airship can be much more efficient than a similar massed aircraft. Airships do not need large airports if they are designed with vectoring propellers so they can thrust in any direction.
The main limitations of airships is the physics of the lift system. You can only lift so much with a cubic meter of helium or hydrogen, and no more. Aircraft can be much more flexible as to load and speed.
Modern materials would make airships that would far outstrip any 1930’s vehicle (think A380 vs. DC-3) but of course they’d be made as light as possible, to get minimum size for maximum load… so who knows if they’d be any safer than their 19th and 20th century forebearers. However, the first airline, DELAG, flew before WWI with airships and never lost a passenger… and more than half the Hindenburg crew and passengers SURVIVED. And we have modern weather forecasting, so disasters like the USS Shenanndoah (flew into a thunderstorm line and was ripped apart) would be rare… a modern airliner can be destroyed by a thunderstorm too.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Yep, as I understand it the efficiency gain of airships over airplanes comes from not needing to use power for lift.
Incidentally, I also understand that people have had some experimental success with vehicles that combine aerostatic and aerodynamic lift, which I gather are sometimes known as “hybrid” airships. The basic idea is that you can potentially pick your point on the efficiency/speed tradeoff line between full airships and full airplanes.
That said, it may be that even hybrids are too slow to take over much transoceanic passenger service. But transoceanic cargo service is a different matter–as long as you can substantially beat cargo ships on speed, it seems there could be a market for cargo-carrying airships.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Oh, and on safety:
If you are willing to fly around in an airplane full of jet fuel, I don’t really see a problem with flying around in an airship full of hydrogen. I realize there would be a marketing issue, though, which again suggests the first viable applications might be cargo rather than passenger based.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Its interesting how the framing is so all-or-nothing.
There are two margins that play an important part in the response of the air transport market to Peak Oil … the extensive margin and the intensive margin.
On the extensive margin, the marginal type of air transport in terms of fuel efficiency are precisely the short hops that are most readily replaced by both the 110mph and 220mph classes of HSR. The most fuel efficient planes are the large, long haul planes. So a capture of a substantial market share by HSR would increase the average fuel efficiency of air travel.
In air transport by sea, the equivalent technology to HSR may well be ground effect wings which would travel at similar speeds to HSR. Given the geography and substantially greater fuel efficiency compared to regular air, a flyship line running down from Miami through the Bahamas to the Lesser Antilles and Venezuela could well be viable long term.
On the intensive margin, the impact of fuel prices on air travel is an increase in costs per mile … but while that prices air travel out of a part of the market, there is a long, long way to go before air travel is too expensive for all demand. And the longer term limits on biofuels are total biocapacity, so the same reduction in air travel miles that would result from paying full costs for sustainable, renewable fuel would also make it more feasible to fuel the balance with liquid biofuels.
Today, at current costs of biodiesel from a system that has been developed to produce vegetable oils for human consumption, some of the demand for travel on jet aircraft could be satisfied at a price that could pay for the fuel.
So if we are considering a “No Jet Aircraft At All” projection … if it is due to the top half or quarter of demand for air travel not being there because of a collapse in national income, we are in Great Depression territory … if we do not have the capacity to produce biofuels at all for even the most lucrative of transport tasks, then the ability of our agricultural system is under severe stress and we are in Famine territory.
In other words, “no jet aircraft at all” is pointing toward a dramatically dystopic future where not being able to fly would not rank up near the top of our worries.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Nuh-uh. We can run airplanes on McCain’s steely will and general manliness.
August 16th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Modern materials would make airships that would far outstrip any 1930’s vehicle
“Far outstrip” in what sense? Modern airships are virtually no faster than airships of the 1930s. It would take around 45 hours to get from New York to London by airship. Airships are also extremely vulnerable to winds and adverse weather conditions. The ride would be bumpy and travel times much less predictable.
(think A380 vs. DC-3)
You’ve got to be kidding. The A380 is a vast improvement over the DC-3 in virtually all aspects of performance. Much faster, much more comfortable, much safer, much more fuel-efficient, much more reliable, much cheaper. I doubt a modern airship could improve on a 1930s model to a comparable degree in even one of these areas, let alone all of them.
August 16th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
So after reading around a bit, a couple more things people have incorporated into the latest hybrid aircraft designs are hover-cushion landing systems (with a vacuum mode to provide anchoring) and something called “Dynamic Buoyancy Management” (which apparently uses compressed outside air for trimming purposes), all of which apparently allow for STOL or even VTOL on unimproved surfaces. According to a couple of the articles below, one of these projects is looking for speeds of up to around 174 MPH and a range of 6000 miles, and predicting applications in short-haul/commuter passenger services, cruise-type services, and cargo services (including military applications).
Anyway, here are a few links about one product in development:
http://www.popsci.com/aeros/article/2006-02/flying-luxury-hotel
http://science.howstuffworks.com/aeroscraft.htm
http://www.aerosml.com/ml866/model.html
Lockheed-Martin is apparently working on something similar:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/020606p2.xml
And a video of a test-flight of the Lockheed-Martin aircraft:
http://www.snotr.com/video/619
August 17th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Actual topic. Writing is worthy of attention.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Since airplanes use a large portion of their fuel just to take off, clearly a big boost to efficiency could be attained by catapulting them off the runway using a linear induction railgun. This would be even better than the technology used for the Fireball XL5, which could go into space.
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