I'm still waiting for vacuum tube trains and underground motorways. ![Roll Eyes ::)](/Smileys/default/rolleyes.gif)
3 hour flights across the Atlantic.
Didn't the Concorde do this before it was decommissioned? I thought it did.
Not 3, but it was much quicker than what we have now. (I just checked, 3 hours 30. Impressive).
And that's the point. The fact Concorde happened in the late 60s did imply we might be zooming across the Atlantic in a couple of hours by now.
But we aren't. Why?
Is it because faster than sound speeds and Concorde were all a hoax?
No, it's because F=ma, the more 'a' you want, the more 'f' you have to apply. For spacecraft going to the moon this wasn't a huge issue. Once the initial F was applied to get the craft on a trajectory to the moon (and that was a shitload of F, have you seen a Saturn V rocket, I have at the Kennedy Space Centre and they are ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE) the craft was in a vacuum so there was nothing stopping it. OK, there was earth's gravity slowing it down but, basically, they didn't have to keep their foot on the pedal, so to speak, to keep going.
But planes fly in the atmosphere, there's a load of wind resistance - you can feel that if you've been in a strong wind, now imagine you're travelling at hundreds of miles an hour let alone thousands.
And you have gravity trying to pull the plane back to earth.
So planes have to constantly apply thrust to keep going and this is costly. The faster you want to go, the more thrust you have to apply.
Concorde was fast but it wasn't cheap, even with the prices they charged it ran at a loss, they kept it going more for the prestige than because they were raking it in.
Until we find a cheap way of applying a lot of thrust we aren't going to be zipping across the Atlantic in a couple of hours and we aren't all going to have pleasure flights to space.
So instead of speed airlines have gone down the comfort route - we now have better food and seats and entertainment systems. This isn't because "they" are up to something. It's because of physics.