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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

There's an entire industry of companies dedicated to kiosks, security etc. But the reality of time at the airport is margin to avoid costly missed connections and mandatory security checks which aren't things which can be cut with technology.

The bigger problem for a business case for paying extra to fly supersonic is that convenience is as much about timing of landing as length of flight, especially in an era where portable computers and digital connectivity exists and regular long haul flights are generally comfortable enough for the average business class flyer to sleep on. Cutting three or four hours out of an 12 hour flight doesn't sound quite so exciting when you realise that it's a choice between 8 hours in a seat or 12 hours in a lie flat bed with a choice of departure times and arrival airports.

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> missed connections and mandatory security checks which aren't things which can be cut with technology

Yes they can. Clear makes security a breeze. And small, efficient planes make direct flights competitive with connecting ones.

It really doesn't. All it does is allow you to cut the line. I love Clear, and I use it all the time, but it doesn't make security faster, it just makes it faster for you. If everyone was enrolled in Clear, security would take exactly the same amount of time.

Well if we're gonna be pedantic about it, clear does make it marginally faster by using biometrics instead of having a human inspect identity docs.

I’ve watched people attempting to use the kiosks. The TSA agents are basically just as fast in the average case, and way faster in the worst case.

The biggest delays are people who don’t have their ID and ticket ready when they get to the front of the line, and people who can’t figure for the life of them how to use the kiosks without additional assistance.

Well if people pay for it, you can have more security processors and process more people at once. So it is a parallelizable problem solvable with more money. If everyone had their own personal security processor, then security only adds a few minutes on each end.

A lineup anywhere is a sign of not enough money being paid, so people pay with their time.

I do bet that some of the fee you pay to Clear goes to the TSA, which pays for more security staff.

> All it does is allow you to cut the line

More poignant examples: mobile passports and global entry. Fundamentally faster (checks performed when you enroll, and then automatically, and while you get off the plane), and scalably so.

More intensive security checks have made passing through many airports slower than it was 20 years ago despite e-tickets etc: the bottleneck is security regimes wanting more thorough checks, not the speed at which passports can be scanned. Obviously better economies of scale for direct flights reduces time lost to the hub and spoke model, but that's not a startup opportunity for someone wanting to focus on things other than planes ;-)

No it doesn't. I laugh at the people who pay out the ear to skip 10 minutes in a line. Most of your time is spent emptying your pockets and unloading your suitcases into boxes and clear doesn't help with that at all. (They keep adding more and more requirements for what can't stay in your luggage.) The solution to faster air travel is to delete the TSA.

Hear hear. So how do we get that rolling?

The TSA made what was something that individual airports paid for to meet regulatory requirements into a federal agency. It's the laws & requirements, not the specific labor agency doing it.

For example, the TSA added pre-check, which does speed up security by reducing requirements.

And the UCIS has added kiosks for global entry and us citizens, which effectively increases the number of security processing 'staff' at checkpoints, making things faster.

> And small, efficient planes make direct flights competitive with connecting ones.

No it doesn't, because the limitation at most major airports is the number of takeoff and landing slots. More, smaller, planes would reduce capacity because you can only have a plane takeoff every 3 minutes or so.

Small planes allow one to bypass a congested airport in a huge city when going from one medium city to another, by right-sizing to the crowd that wants to go between them. Among other benefits, it makes the huge city airport less congested.

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