SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Losing even one in 10 customers would substantially reduce airlines' revenue. They don't make much money on each flight as it is; less income would likely cause them to shrink their service, flying fewer routes less frequently.
The problem wouldn't just be customers who chose not to fly. Some passengers might split trips between self-driving cars and airplanes, which would further reduce airlines' revenue. For instance, a person in Savannah, Georgia, who wants to go to London could choose to change planes in Atlanta—or take a self-driving car to the Atlanta airport, and skip the layover.
These changes could substantially change the aviation industry, with airlines ordering fewer airplanes from manufacturers, airports seeing fewer daily flights and lower revenue from parking lots, and even airport hotels hosting fewer guests. The future of driverless cars is appealing to consumers—which means the future of commercial flight is in danger.
A personal fondling session from a TSA agent named Brad, or 5 hours in your self-driving Mazda that your four-year old smeared peanut butter in?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 12 2019, @03:27AM
Airliners have been getting slower. Compare the cruising speed of a 707 vs a 777 and a 787. See also: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/why-hasnt-commercial-air-travel-gotten-any-faster-1960s [mit.edu]
Go figure. When flight time is a smaller percentage of the total travel time (TSA/check in time, time to airport, etc) speeding it up at a significantly higher cost isn't very attractive. If it takes 5 hours to fly from LA to NY but you need 2 hours to check in and 1+1 hours to travel from airports then cutting the flight time to 3 hours only cuts the total time from 9 hours to 7 hours. How much more would you pay that? What if there was a 1 hour flight delay (weather or whatever), then it's 10 vs 8. It's even worse for flights with a shorter flight time.
The passengers who'd really benefit from supersonic/hypersonic passenger planes are the very rich or powerful - they'd get to bypass the TSA etc (private plane, charter etc).
The advantage high speed trains have is the assumption that fewer terrorists/nutcases will target such trains compared to planes hence the check-in times for trains are much shorter.