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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

This happened in 1963. Planes had only been flying for 60 years at that point; it really is pretty amazing how quickly we progressed on technology during those early years. We still fly 737s, which are descended from a design that first flew in 1967. As well as the C130, which was part of this story. And don't get me started on B-52s, which are even older.

We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.

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The progress of aviation technology fascinates me. We went from the wright flyer to the B-52 in just 50 years and then in the next 70 years went from the B-52 to... pretty much still the B-52 (at least in terms of payload/range/airspeed).

You could probably come up with something similar to Moore's law for for those stats over those first 50 years. Makes me wonder if/when computing will reach a similar plateau. It's felt like we're close for a while, but at least if you allow for a somewhat flexible definition, it just keeps trucking along.

We basically built towards a local maximum of what's physically possible for fossil-fuel powered sub-sonic aircraft; we also pushed into super-sonic, but the efficiency and noise pretty much preclude that for all but military and niche commercial operations.

However, there have been huge improvements in other areas, like efficiency and safety. Take a look at this fatal accident charts, and remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows.

https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Acci...

> remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows

We can chart that directly, and I agree it's impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...

Yep, thanks! Was looking for a chart like that but didn't find one on a quick search.

And yeah, that's a huge improvement in safety. So while the general shape of airplanes, and range and speed might seem similar, the airplanes themselves and the whole ecosystem around them (pilots, maintenance, airline and airport ops, air traffic control, and so on) are far safer.

I think the progress is mainly limited by cost of fuel and sonic boom. But progress has been made in so many other areas. Planes are safer quieter lighter and more reliable. Some parts of computers also stopped progressing. For example keyboards haven’t changed much and neither have laser printers. ;)

Progress is limited by security clearance.

The US has incredible aircraft but no incentive to 'share'.

The USAF was third in the world for supersonic flight hours in the 1990's. First was British Airways second was Air France.

And BA was limited because the US banned supersonic flights overland, something widely seen (at least in Europe) as sour grapes after Boeing's attempt at building a supersonic airliner failed.

The military doesn’t optimize for fuel burn though, which limits practicality in the cutthroat commercial sector.

Commercial supersonic flight has been done before with the Concorde and the Tu-144. While it might not be as big a money maker as standard commercial flights, I’m sure there are people willing to shell out big bucks to reduce their 15-hour flight to 3 hours.

Because of the fuel burn, they also don’t go that far. Military supersonic planes regularly do aerial refueling to make up for it.

At the kind of range that Concorde and the Tu-144 operated at, you can either spend three hours in a plush but narrow seat, or you can leave at night in a lie-flat business seat and wake up refreshed after a 6-8 hour sleep.

Yep. With travel time to and from the airport the savings isn’t compelling

Nobody is building passenger jets that go Mach 5.

Yeah, the numbers I wrote are rather exaggerated. But even just the Mach 2 that the Concorde could achieve would halve long-distance travel times.

Some things are limited by unchanging physics, like what shapes work aerodynamically, limitations imposed by the speed of sound, the maximum amount of thrust that can be generated by a kilogram of fuel, and so forth. Once humans figure out what basically works, we keep making incremental improvements towards optimality given the physical constraints. In such scenarios the first steps always look the biggest.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner doesn't look very different from the 737 and its predecessors. But under the hood are some revolutionary technologies: fly-by-wire all-electronic controls, and construction primarily from carbon fiber composite materials rather than the traditional steel, aluminum, and titanium. It's actually pretty revolutionary, but it still looks and feels like a fairly normal plane, because it's the physics of air flow that dictates basic things like shape.

Right.

There have always been novel concept planes but they usually fall apart for practical reasons

* SSTs like Concorde use a lot more fuel and have to be narrow, to the point of sacrificing comfort

* blended wings are not desirable for passenger comfort; people like windows and hate middle seats

* airplanes have to fit within the constraints at operating at airports that currently exist. Cities are not going to build new airfields or modify existing ones for billions of dollars for what might be a technological fad instead of a long term improvement, so you pretty much need to fit existing gates, existing runway widths and weight limits, etc. The A380 needed such modifications and therefore could not be flown everywhere.

For many of these physical boundaries, airplanes (as well as cars) are nowhere near the limits. E.g. fuel efficiency of engines is usually well below 50%.

> We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.

That's because the seminal work rapidly evolved into something that's good-enough, and in some cases, close to optimal.

If you look around, wherever you're sitting, you'll find plenty of other human-engineered objects from a similar design-trajectory.

My coffee mug looks a whole lot like cups from Mesopotamia and earlier.

On the other hand snowshoes though look nothing like snowshoes from 50 years ago.

'nothing like' is quite the hyperbole - but yes even airplanes and computers are quite a bit more advanced than F-8 Crusaders and Whirlwind machines of 1955. Probably at least as much more than snowshoe advances. It's just the basics are all still there.

The same is true of computers which seem to have been created in practically final form so concisely summarized by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...

On a whim I have investigated old computer architectures and was surprised to find myself completely at home despite when they call the 'instructions' 'orders'. :)

Which is why software patents are so silly. When it's all 1s and 0s under the covers, everything else just flows logically.

The thing that throws me the most is that in 1901 we had the first powered heavier-than-air flight, a flimsy thing which flew for a few minutes; by 1915 there were thousands of aircraft routinely running all sorts of missions in the war.

But to be fair, the Wright brothers first flight might be the start of an era, but the history of aviation has at least 1 century of intense experimentation and developing leading up to that.

The U-2 was 1955-1957 still flying today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

We went from the Wright Brothers to landing on the moon within a single lifespan. It's crazy to think about how fast aerospace developed.

And microcomputers are not yet 60 years old...

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