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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a disruption in airline industry is needed. Maybe one of those mega tech billionaires (Bezos, Musk, Page/Brin etc.) can pay more attention to this market and see investment opportunities. Such disruption would need to go beyond airlines and go towards plane manufacturers level. The fact that there are so little aircraft producers in the world, so monopoly actually starts from there and flows downwards at airline levels. Computing (for simulations), manufacturing such as advanced composites and 3D printing have advanced enough to streamline aircraft manufacturing. Heck it feels like we just ignored commercial airline market altogether and jumped straight to the commercial space market. If we have an advanced tech to go space exploring then I am sure we can bring significant changes to the crumbling airline industry.

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Not likely to happen. It is a very expensive and difficult process to get a new airframe FAA certified to carry commercial passengers, which is part of why the Dreamliner took so long to be delivered. Couple that with basically zero margin for airlines and you have a perfect storm of "it's really expensive to make a new plane and no one will pay for it if you do".

There's a reason you see so many 20+ year old CRJ-900s and MD-80/90s at the airport. Airlines literally cannot afford new planes, and aircraft makers can't get new airframes through the regulator process easily enough. Boeing struggled to get fly-by-wire to pass FAA regulations, how do you think they'd fare trying to replace aluminum with 3D printed plastic?

The GA industry is running up against the same problems. Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers. Recently there has been some push back against the FAA's certification programs due to the fact that MEMS systems are inherently more reliable instruments than gyroscopes powered by engine driven vacuum pumps. This resulted in some legislative changes and now you can (IIRC) replace many gages in old aircraft with newer electronic variants and not need a Supplementary Type Certificate (basically like getting your car re-titled to replace the tape deck with a CD player).

tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.

> Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers.

This neatly illustrates why: http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png

It's not just certification, either. Product liability accounts for a large part of this increase: "Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...)

Yea, I'm really comparing two disparate issues here. The aircraft cost, for previously certified airframes, ie. the C172SP, as opposed to an SR22 or something, is almost entirely liability liability inflated while avionics are more heavily driven by certification.

This is why the experimental market is doing so well right now. No need to pay for either :P

Agree. Govt regulations can become a a major road block. As much good these regulations provide for the safety of consumers, they sure can prove out to be a hurdle for innovation when ill enforced. For example, I have heard from friends doing compliance testing with FTC for new hardware and how govt appointed contractors or their own employees literally go through thick books to make sure EVERYTHING checks out. Rules and regulations are good. But they can also be implemented smartly. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to work with FAA. For example, having a person on the floor doing manual stress testing on the airframe can be cumbersome and time consuming. Maybe some sort of automated solution involving a robot can expedite things, at least for the comprehensive initial check. Then bring in a manual person to do sanity check.

The history of accidents from well intended people doing the wrong things even when it cost them their lives creates a very different culture. It may seem wasteful, but that mostly the mismatch between doing something correctly thousands of times and doing it correctly millions of times. You can pay attention and do a complex things correctly thousands of times, but for millions that simply does not work.

If the medical industry worked like the FAA the jobs would be boring, and ~30,000+ fewer people would die a year.

Plenty of large successful businesses run on razor thin margins, however the airline industry is not lean. The internal waste is immense.

Source: Had an airline for a client, saw how sausage gets made

Same in healthcare. I work in one of the EMR companies, usually onsite at clients, and the whole operation is appalling in wasted human time and just cash wasted on stupid things.

Do tell!

I have one for our EMR: You can easily configure checkboxes, but not radio buttons, on an order form. Argh.

I don't see a problem with the aircraft themselves. Modern airliners are excellent for the most part. The parts that aren't excellent (like the seats and entertainment systems) are installed by the airlines after the manufacturer is done.

Musk has repeatedly stated that his goal is to get space travel to be like airline travel. Airliners, with their rapid turnaround and zero refurbishment between flights other than cleaning the cabin and refueling the plane, are the model he's shooting for with his rockets.

Essentially all of the problems in air travel come from the airlines, not the airline manufacturers. All of the problems discussed in this article are about ancient backend computer systems that don't get the job done very well, not the actual aircraft.

I would wager there is more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns) than there would be in manufacturing improvements.

What most people don't realize is that an airliner is a $40-240 million dollar investment that needs intensive regular maintenance. Nobody gives a shit if you can shave 100lbs off the weight of the fuselage if you also have to replace the entire thing during every D check.

>more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns)

FWIW, many ideas have been tried in this space. Assigned seating vs not assigned. Dual boarding through both the front and rear door of the aircraft. Charging for carry on luggage. Tons of time and motion studies. Nothing really compelling has ever come out of it, for various predictable reasons. The big one, to me, is that airlines are compelled to pack people tightly. Couple that with human behavior, and you're done. It only takes one person to hold up everyone else, because aisle space (as compared to seat space) doesn't make money.

Pilot friend told me we know exactly how we could make airliners ~twice as fuel-efficient by making the fuselage a more aerodynamic shape than a flat cylinder. But no-one wants to have to build each seat row in a slightly different shape.

Sounds suspect, as I think airlines would take the hit on seat design if it meant halving their fuel costs.

Richard Branson once suggested that "If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

The airline industry is already established and low margin so it's not an easy opportunity for disruption. Combine that with heavy regulation and needing tons and tons of very specific expertise and I doubt any VC would touch most of it with a 10 foot pole

The European industry was massively disrupted in the last decade or two by budget airlines.

There's not only the western European companies, but even cheaper eastern ones like Wizz Air and AirBaltic.

That's true but it shows that the current industry already is driving down costs to rock bottom and is a bad target for the Silicon Valley style disruption, especially when existing players will just copy whatever you do

TSA would be the part to disrupt, and it's not like that was ever rational to begin with—people aren't likely to realize or admit it's mostly a scare tactic to fill jobs.

But as I mentioned, it's subject to heavy regulation and most of their job description in mandated by the government. Where the money is might be selling hardware to the TSA but that's probably a big risk

No, i mean removing or gutting the TSA by removing the human part would help everyone (but TSA agents, of which I know a couple—just another instance of automating away painful inefficiency, unfortunately, as they agree they're not doing shit to actually stop people compared to the machines).

Selling machines to TSA is easy. You just have to be Homeland Securty Chief for a bit first.

Maybe, but it is hard to do this. The are not a lot of airplanes made every year the global market is less than 10,000 per year and most of that isn't commercial airplanes. (Quick google says that General Aviation accounts for 5000 airplanes, while AirBus is about 600 and Boeing is about 700 - I know there are a few more makes not counted in the above numbers but this is enough to say less than 10,000). With production numbers that small you cannot get many scale benefits from producing airplanes.

If airplanes were as common as cars you would see little KIA two seat airplanes selling for $15,000. Honda and Ford would be a little more. But we need to ship a lot more airplanes for that to work.

The most likely disruption will be from self-driving cars. Trips under 300 miles will be more pleasant and almost as fast, or faster for shorter trips.

It's not an easy problem to solve. A very capable organization, ITA Software, was able to rewrite the shopping part. They failed, however, on delivering a new tech reservations system. Not for lack of money or talent either.

Google bought them for $700M.

What part of this article makes you think the planes are the problem?

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