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Comment by gibspaulding | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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