News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by fulafel on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:26AM (#24575235)
We need to drastically cut down on air travel, its growth and the excerbated effects from emissions in the upper atmosphere are really unsustainable pending technological developments that seem far off[1].

[1] excluding some very different modes of air travel, like lifting gas based aircraft.

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by bleepblorp on Thursday September 24, 2020 @04:02AM (#24576403)
I think the pandemic is going to take care of that.

We're looking at years before people will feel it's safe to travel again and borders are reopened to tourism.

No industry can survive that long without revenue. Once major portions of the civil aviation industry, and it's supply chains, start going into receivership it's going to take a very long time to get it started again. Unmaintained equipment decays, and employees who have found other jobs won't necessarily come back to their old jobs when their ex-employers want them.

Restarting the aviation industry after a multi-year shutdown will require rebuilding a lot of hardware, (re)hiring a lot of people, and rebuilding a vast amount of institutional knowledge. This will take years or even decades--and I wouldn't want to fly on the first airliner to come off a restarted production line staffed mostly by new employees and flown by pilots without much recent experience.

No one has ever needed to attempt restarting an entire industry since the demilitarization of the economy following WWII, and it's unclear if it's even possible anymore.

By the time all is said and done, most people may well be used to doing things other than flying and the demand might not even re-emerge.

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by aventuri on Thursday September 24, 2020 @02:32AM (#24575895)
It looks like Airbus is betting on hydrogen as next fuel for planes..

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/airbus-reve...

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by diebeforei485 on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:26AM (#24576832)
Now that Zoom meetings have been normalized, a lot of business travel is not going to come back (ever).

Vacations will still exist.

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by jryle70 on Thursday September 24, 2020 @10:21AM (#24578854)
We need to make air travel more sustainable, eliminating unnecessary ones such as business trips that can be replaced with online conference. Air travel is still crucial because personal witness and person to person interaction can't be replaced with other forms of communication. Racism and nationalism thrive on isolation and ignorance, not to mentioned impact to mental health.
Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by BurritoAlPastor on Thursday September 24, 2020 @02:40AM (#24575946)
It takes about 80 hours to get from San Francisco to New York City by train.
Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by amtr4ckaway on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:45AM (#24576311)
But it's a fantastic journey, or at least it was before covid...

A 2-person sleeper car used to cost a bit less than 2 coach tickets on a plane, at the expense of a 66-hour delay (plus another 6-12 hours of actual delays). And it was glorious.

Okay, you didn't always have the time. But when you did, Amtrak was the way to go. That book you meant to read? Done, along with the pulp novel you didn't really mean to read. Side projects? Easy to work on when you're watching the continental US from an observation car with a transparent ceiling.

And the meal cars. I am going to miss the meal cars, which Amtrak was phasing out even before covid because "my generation doesn't like taking to people". But in the past 5 years, those meal cars were the only place where I got to candidly talk with a more or less random slice of the American population. And that's including my cross-country road trips!

You got free meals with a sleeper car, but there was only one dining room and seating was random, so you'd see different people every meal. And you'd just talk, politely, for about an hour with people who you probably would have never otherwise interacted with.

I miss that.

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by distances on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:54PM (#24580701)
Europe still has extensive passenger rail network, but in my experience a train trip is roughly twice the price of flying in 500-1000 kilometer journeys. That needs to change somehow before trains can have a chance of a renaissance.
Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by rwmj on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:27AM (#24576202)
But a few seconds to start up a video call.
Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by KozmoNau7 on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:26AM (#24576200)
And it takes 2 minutes to set up a Zoom/Teams/Jitsi call.

A lot of air travel is completely needless and only done "because we can".

Re:The Final Airbus A380 Has Been Assembled by blewboarwastake on Thursday September 24, 2020 @07:18AM (#24577450)
Why is this being commented multiple times in an article about flying? If you want to talk to someone in person, or have to be somewhere for work you don't just video conference and forget about it. They are two different things.