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Boeing: Last Week Tonight
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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"Too big to fail", or: "congress is bought and paid for ".
You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.
That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.
Oh no!
...I mean until planes run on hydrogen. The climate really wouldn't mind covid levels of global aviation for another decade or so.
OTOH the US is of course in a tough spot, they're reliant on aviation for domestic transport because they never bothered to invest in rail. And don't come and say "the US is too large": You can have a high-speed sleeper train from NYC to LA, 14 hours total travel time shouldn't be hard to achieve, eight of which you can spend sleeping in perfect comfort, ten if you're indulgent. Proper food. You can even take a shower. Leave in the evening, arrive in the morning, especially as a travelling businessman consider it a hotel on wheels. You can fit a bloody McDonalds in a train if you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE5G1kTndI4
This is a video from a US-based urbanist channel, and I particularly want to call attention to the modes graph at around the 6 minute mark. This compares driving, high speed rail, and air travel with the distance traveled and figures out the time factor for each compared to the distance. A destination within an hour's drive tends to be better to drive, and then trains become better, and at some point, air travel is better.
As the video points out, the exact numbers depend a lot on individual people, but in general, high speed rail tends to beat air when the destination is within 750 miles.
One problem the US has isn't just that it's big, but that there are huge swaths of absolutely goddamn nothing for the span of several states. This is especially true north of Texas. Go from Minneapolis and trace west, and see how long it takes before you come near a city anyone outside the region cares about. Significantly south of that line is Denver, and you had to cross the Dakotas to get there. Then you're hitting Salt Lake City after another large state's worth of travel (about 500 miles, so we are still within the range where high speed rail would be better). If you were to stay to the north, you wouldn't find much of anything until you get to the west coast.
What that means is that we can have rail that links up the east coast, the Great Lakes states, and the south east and Texas, and then another set of high speed rail that hugs the west coast. Linking those two up, though, is a huge task, and air travel will be faster.
We're likely to have two different networks that, at best, are only connected to the south. Flights across the Plains and Rockies are here to stay. That said, even getting that done would be a huge improvement.
CityNerd is a great channel, but his mode graph leaves out sleepers: Of those 14 hours travelled, how many do you actually count as travel time? I'd say subtracting the time you spend leisurely sleeping and eating at the minimum, make that 10 hours, you might also save on hotel check-in and check-out, the additional travel to that hotel, and other small stuff. Four hours travel time are very competitive.
The schedule is more restricted but I doubt many people visit more than one far-away city in a day. HSR sleepers aren't also really a thing, at least I'm not aware of any it's all conventional rail but that doesn't mean that it's some utopian far-out concept. Over here in Europe sleepers aren't high-speed simply because they don't need to be. And/or because our train infrastructure actually sucks and you can't take a sleeper from Helsinki to Lissabon, quite comparable a route to NYC-LA.
One important thing is to make sure that those trains are actually nice: When the Austrians doubled down on sleeper trains they quickly found out that the more expensive tickets actually sold very well and with newer trains they basically got rid of the whole mid-range, it's either a decent compartment with shower and everything or a capsule. Business-class or hostel-class. People are willing to, and almost demand, to spend money on the ticket that they would otherwise spend on a hotel room for a night. Lean into that, make sure the bread rolls are crunchy and the coffee has a decent standard and people are going to flock to it. About all the staff having a Viennese accent of course doesn't hurt the ÖBB.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=wE5G1kTndI4
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=wE5G1kTndI4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Comac is coming. They might not ever sell a plane in the US but Africa, then wider Asia, then Europe will buy some.
Boeing will continue to exist though, agreed.
If I was in Embraer leadership I'd be scrambling to design a jet in the 737 class right now. It's just one step up from what they already make. Embraer is already popular with US regional airlines and would be more acceptable in the US market than Comac.
The A220 is tough to compete against though. If Airbus goes up to a A220-500 they’ve got a small, hyper-efficient 737 already. And it’s not like the A320 neo isn’t already in place.
Definitely agree that no US airline would be willing to stand the political fallout from buying a C919, whatever deal they could secure or however confident they felt in the reliability and safety of it.