Re:Five Technologies That Will Rock Your World
by jessriedel on Monday November 13, 2017 @04:10PM
(#15690277)
To add to your last paragraph for folks who find this surprising: If you take a airplane and let the area of the wings go to infinity while taking their wing mass and thickness to zero, the vehicle would expend arbitrarily little energy maintaining altitude; it's basically a giant, extremely slowly falling parachute. Real-world wings do not achieve this of course, but not nearly as much energy needs to be expended compared during cruise as (say) simply hovering by pointing the engine at the ground (if your engine was even powerful enough to do that).
Flying is much more SPACE efficient. With good computer control you could stack hundreds of "roads" worth of capacity vertically.
Can save time (and thus indirectly energy) by flying directly from A-to-B. This is ignoring the time gained by the likely much faster cruising speeds, as well.
Flying doesn't have to be THAT inefficien, either. Plenty of general aviation aircraft, especially slower ones, can achieve MPG that is really not that bad. The Mooney M20, for instance, cruises at 180mph and burns 10 gallons an hour - so 18mpg. Not bad given the speed! A car going that first will be consuming much more fuel.