I am from Italy that geographically is not very easy to connect to the rest of Europe because of the Alps.

Still, below a thousand kms train beats flight 100% of the time!

I travel a lot throughput Europe to meet my special other who travels a lot due to her job.

I used to fly to meet her but , pandemic aside, I discovered that traveling by train was a much better option, mainly because you're on the ground and everything works almost like you're not moving at all.

internet connection is hit and miss of course, but compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all, it seems like a moving office.

Truth is I rarely work on a train, I mainly read, but having the option and the opportunity to book a solitary seat it's such a luxury that I gladly pay the extra money.

Other benefits include: no baggage limit, no early show up routine for no reason, no security or "show your face" checks, no packed up load-in load-out lines, being able to walk away if you need to (a phone call, for example) or because you simply need to stretch a little bit, but my favourite one is night trains where you book a bunk bed, sleep and wake up at the destination. A friend of mine calls it teleportation, you are not traveling between two places, you are waking up in a new place, far from the starting point, without even noticing it.

Trains are a great way to move, especially now that they are so fast.

They aren't cheap in general, that's true, but it's worth it, especially if you compare train fares with low cost offers that are undoubtedly cheaper, but don't even include a real baggage or the option to chose your seat for free (had to pay 6 euros for a seat just two days ago flying from Barcelona)

You were the local shopping stimulus all along.

(It's a song called United Breaks Guitars that you may remember from over a decade ago).

Even when you do have to pay in the US it is typically very generous. Larger size and weight allowance, and you won’t get dinged for being even a few kilos over. And the bottom tier of frequent flyer programs (which is usually trivial to get and keep) waives all these fees anyway. I can’t remember the last time I paid for luggage allowance outside of a trip to or through Europe.

I can't remember the last airliner that I was on that didn't have WiFi. Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?

However this is coming soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Aviation_Network

It's pretty rare, and when they do have it it is incredibly expensive, limited or both. On trains they basically always have it and it's free.

(with the caveat that it's been 2+ years since I was on a plane so I don't know how things have changed)

That depend on the quality of the rail and train. I have had nice experience in Germany, but here in Sweden it is the opposite. The side-to-side movement triggers motion sickness that is only compare to really rough ocean trips, and while the noise is lower than on a plane it is also less regular and higher pitch so it can be quite hard to ignore.

The problems stems from rails and trains here being 30-50 years old and long history of poor maintenance. To make matters worse, almost no lines has redundant tracks so if there is a problem (which there often is because to the issue of maintenance), the train get replace with busses. Night trains in particular tend to have a rather terrible experience with trains that are by now around 50-70 years old. Because of the motion sickness, the handful times I tried it has resulted in me basically being sick for a full day afterward. This doesn't occur if I take a plane or drive.

I don't know if they still do that but it is certainly something that could be instituted if governments wanted it.

2004 Madrid Train Bombings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

Not to disregard your example but from my perspective it is not representative to most of travelers in the Europe.

While taking train for me was more comfortable, most of the times it is not feasible and definitely a lot longer than taking an airplane.

Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.

Let's take, for instance, my hometown in Asturias, Spain. There's technically a train sttation... which will get someone to Madrid in about 8 hours. If someone wanted to go to Barcelona, the fastest route is still via Madrid! Going to Bilbao via the northern corridor by train is a whole 10 hours: The route is prohibitively expensive to tunnel for high speeds.

However, let's look at plane options. There's a single runway airport about an hour away with direct connections to Madrid, Barcelona, Las Palmas, Malaga, Valencia and Tenerife. Pre covid, it also had direct flights to Paris and London. The typical planes that land there aren't private jets, but just the typical narrow bodies that do short routes everywhere in the world: A319 or so.

So yes, there absolutely are plenty of cities in Europe where the train doesn't even begin to be competitive, in either price nor travel time.

Well, and that's about it. I don't care for Paris that much, there are about thousand other places I prefer visiting. Its not that exotic to Europeans compared to Americans, and Paris' painful and obvious drawbacks (its a mega tourist trap, rampant crime, french are often rude if you don't speak perfect parisian french etc.) remove a lot of its allure.

Currently we travel to nearby islands with small kids (balearic, canarias, sardinia, corsica, greek ones etc.). We travel home which is 1500km away (1:30 flight to +-nearby airport, or 15h+ multi-train galore), we travel exotic (0 options for trains).

Heck, being Swiss, we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive even for us since we don't commute by them to work every day, and Geneva being border town literally at the edge of confederation surrounded by France has little use of rails for us. France has pretty bad rail situation in comparison - our usual way to Chamonix takes 45mins by car, and 2+h by train. Family of 4 with 2 tiny kids? Never, ever, with all necessary luggage, even for free.

You can't have cheap good reliable railway network even in dense Europe, unless its heavily subsidized. Its a pipe dream, nice one but unless they tax flights into oblivion they will remain as easier and cheaper option for most. Options will be different for rural living and different family settings obviously.

I guess you know that, but if you live in Switzerland you're supposed to have the discount card ("demi-tarif") which makes the train way more affordable. It's still not cheap, especially if you compare with a car trip not taking the price of the car and maintenance into account (which is reasonable if you need the car for other reasons anyway). But in my case at least, without kids, it's really worth being able to use my time to do something productive rather than driving.

Also curious about the Chamonix example: I've never lived in Geneva, but aren't there a ton of other options in Switzerland that are way more connected than the French side? Why choose this example over Swiss resorts?

Besides there are pretty places much closer in France. France is also much cheaper, food better. Not that many reasons to chose otherwise for short weekend trips.

Car is unfortunately a must for family of us, any alternative is world of pain and limitation, even ignoring the prices of trains (just like any other family we know). You need so much equipment for whole family and small kids especially, that using trains means we wouldn't be traveling at all. People we know that don't own the car rent it out every weekend they need and waste tons of time and energy on chasing lower prices. Even with demi-tarif/halb-tax (which makes you waste 200 CHF/USD per head per year for no services), the prices of Swiss trains are properly bad. It still is marginally cheaper to take one's own car even if driving alone, and often much faster.

Frequent experience from times before when I was using Swiss trains for commute/traveling around - you end up standing for quite long amount of time during normal times, many people travel everywhere. Not nice if you are ie tired after long hike/skitour. With small kids, just a horrible experience.

All this ignoring current covid crisis and the fact that in trains here you are stuck in long narrow tube with 100 other people, few coughing, few sneezing, few not wearing masks on nose, or at all because they hold that can of beer for 2 hours to have an excuse, kids not wearing anything at all etc.

Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.

This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.

Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.

By contrast, that's roughly the same price as an annual ticket between central London and a town about 30 miles away.

If you want to go with train from east Germany to Amsterdam you still have to go to Berlin. It still takes ~6.5hr of train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam. Where flight is ~1.5hr - of course getting through security and all it is at least 2.5hr and then depending on which side of Berlin you live transfer from your place to the airport. Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF. You might have direct connection to Berlin HbF but as well some people might have direct connection by bus or train to the airport.

Most trains/ICEs will stop at 2-3 stations in Berlin. Usually they stop at least at Spandau and Hauptbahnhof, and sometimes Gesundbrunnen as well. You should be able to reach one of these stations in at most thirty minutes regardless of where you start.

All of these stations are major transport hubs and thus easy to reach.

Airports not so much: It takes me more than 90 minutes to reach BER[1], meaning I should probably depart from home at least 180 minutes before takeoff if I want to catch my plane most of the time. Note that it is usually recommended to arrive at the airport two hours prior to takeoff (or even three hours for international flights).

Following all the best practices and accounting for delays in public transport would mean I'd have to depart almost four hours prior to takeoff for a domestic flight.

To catch an ICE I usually depart from home about 40 minutes before it leaves Gesundbrunnen, which gives me enough time to grab some sandwiches at a bakery and a coffee that doesn't suck (DB is clearly taking their inspiration from airline food).

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/MTK64gv.png

Of course, one guy was prepared and literally _ran_ to the FEX. We walked and then waited 30 mins for the next one to arrive. :)

So these small cities don't have train stations, yet they have airports?

To get from Poland to Germany or from Netherlands to UK you have to go to major city. Some towns have luck being on the way of such train and you could benefit from it but it is rather exception than rule.

Which in the end makes it basically the same as getting to the airport for most of the people.

I remember my wife (who I'd just met back then) being somewhat surprised when I told her there were no train stops nearby.

I had two airports within an hour drive though, so we managed.

well personal experience is not always representative - but anyway isn't one of the ways how trains could replace planes by increasing number of connections and speeding them up so that it does become feasible?

I've never seen any situation even remotely insecure in the years I have been taking the train regularly, either in Europe or in Asia.

Unless you conflate 'urban' train (like subways) with long distance train ? But in this case it seems like an unfair comparison : I cannot take the plane to go to work.

I do wonder how the railways justify that even people who are paying first class tickets (which are really expensive) only have, at most, a single attendent for possibly 50 passengers. First class on the airplane and you might have a ratio of 1 to 10.

In Germany, they always seem to have at least two Ticket Collectors so the chance of not having your ticket checked is very low. On many services in the UK, you could get away without a ticket travelling later in the evening when many ticket barriers are left open.

Kerosene must be taxed because it emits a lot of CO2 per flight.

Average ICE bus consumes order of magnitude less per seat than planes. The only reason planes win vs cars is that cars aren't public transport and planes are. So you divide by many more seats.

I would say that longer trips by bus are not as unpleasant as you might suggest - as long as you don't attempt to do them in one go, but rather make stops along the way and get some fresh air, walk around and stretch, get something to eat, or maybe do some shopping if needed.

There's probably something to be said about travelling more slowly and enjoying the locales along the way and maybe using motels for the longer trips, as opposed to viewing travel as purely getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. Of course, to be honest, that might not always be possible either in our fast paced culture.

Now, there can be certain drawbacks in practice:

  - certain places will only have old buses, so no Wi-Fi
  - for some reason many buses don't have USB outlets for charging
  - many buses also disallow you to recline your seat, what's up with that?
  - some of the older buses also have pretty poor AC, then again, the weather in Egypt was pretty hot to begin with
  - for some reason the head rests are always smaller when compared to those in planes, making sleeping less comfortable
  - some of the drivers really love to drive in ways that appear unsafe to the passenger (perhaps due to the long wheelbase and suspension)
  - this feels especially uncomfortable mountainous roads

Though personally I'd still say that trains feel like the safest mode of travel, followed by buses and then planes feeling the least safe of all, regardless of what engineering excellence goes into making them. That's enough to sway my personal choice.

And if that's somehow better for the environment, then why not? Plus, the food in roadside eateries seems better than airplane food.

Is the seat same size as Ryanair?

Vibration so bad that $500 noise cancelling headphones don't cope?

No need to use bus amenities outside of emergencies, just go to them at your nearest rest stop, far more comfortable than any plane!

> Is the seat same size as Ryanair?

I'd say that depends on the bus - many of the older ones or cheaper ones can be cramped, but most are fine. Plus, the chances of having two seats to yourself are higher.

Where planes are better: premium seating options, akin to getting a ride in a car.

> Vibration so bad that $500 noise cancelling headphones don't cope?

That's never been an issue for me headphones or no headphones. Depending on the roads, motion sickness could be a bigger problem for some folks, especially depending on the suspension, much like how some folks also get sick in planes.

I'd say that good buses or trains are amongst the most comfortable in regards to vibrations, followed by planes like Airbus cruising in clear skies, followed by most other buses. Whereas most planes would be less comfortable than those during takeoff, landing, climbing, or whenever there's turbulence or the planes are just older. Older trains would also take one of the latter positions, but they're probably not as bad as planes that are gaining altitude.

Actually, should probably mention boats while we're at it, those can be better in regards to sleeping, but otherwise the experience varies based on the conditions in the sea and size. Of course, the environmental impact is debatable, especially cruise ships.

I did some such trips. Never bothered asking if it was diesel or petrol but whatever. Don't see much difference from a car (in fact it's more convenient than a car cause there's more space).

I’m tall so I prefer to be squeezed for 1 hour instead of 14 hours.

> I’m tall so I prefer to be squeezed for 1 hour instead of 14 hours.

Add 2 hours of standing in queues without your shoes, but yes, planes are faster. I was talking bus vs car though.

It seems like you are comparing fuel per seat for planes with fuel per vehicle for cars. At five seats, that would be equivalent to 11 l/100km, which almost all modern cars should beat. Even if you only count four seats for the car, it would still be 8.8 l/100km, which many cars can beat.

The emission of gases in the upper atmosphere by airplanes also worsens their climate heating effect by 300% (source: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/m...)

If you want to discuss actual practice, though, 75% of European international ground travel is by private car, not train.

That said, we can simply state the per-passenger-distance efficiency of different transport modes and leave the "you shoulds" to others.

Though yes, take-offs add considerably to the consumption. Landings don't, as aircraft are typically gliding in at or close to idle thrust.

Efficiency for very-long-range flights is actually reduced as total take-off weight (TOW) must be reduced, exchanging payload (passengers) for fuel.

For very short flights, fuel burn is about 10l/100km-passenger. At intermediate ranges, that falls to about 3l/100km-passenger. See:

https://www.fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/arbeiten/TextBurz...

The only high-trust portions are when reverse thrusters are engaged, typically for a few seconds following landing, or if TOGO power is invoked for an aborted approach.

Again: the original claim was that both take-off and landing were high-fuel-consumption flight segments. That's untrue. Under normal conditions only take-off is, and even most deviations from a nominal approach have a fairly minor impact.

You're going to extreme lengths to avoid admitting this, and are making the issue personal to boot. Any particular reason for that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186605

Asking if you've been on a plane that entered a holding pattern isn't "making it personal".

Again: You're going to extreme lengths to avoid admitting error.

From the ICAO manual on CDO: https://cfapp.icao.int/tools/ATMiKIT/story_content/external_...

> 1.1.4.6 With the need to ensure that CDO does not compromise safety and capacity, it may not always be possible to fly fully optimized CDO. As well, it may be necessary to stop a descent and maintain level flight for separation or sequencing purposes. The aim should be, though, to maximize CDO to the extent possible, whilst not adversely affecting safety and/or capacity.

Obviously level flight near sea level is less fuel efficient than at cruising altitude.

Likewise, descending into a significant headwind, or avoiding adverse weather will require more fuel than the optimal.

I'm not saying that a continuous descent is actually guzzling gas like crazy. There's very many smart people that have been optimising fuel usage in planes for decades.

I just want to emphasise that while the ideal descent is very fuel efficient, not every descent is ideal.

And of course, it varies significantly based on the plane.

This paper shows that interestingly, some A330 models used equivalent, or even more, fuel on approach than takeoff. Although I speculate that's more due to very efficient takeoffs rather than inefficient approaches.

https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/ICRAT_2014_YSC_HB_final.pdf

Oddly enough, nobody asked that question.

I'm not saying that a continuous descent is actually guzzling gas like crazy.

Well, at least you're admitting as much.

For a trip segment, takeoff and climbout are the initial high-fuel-flow phase. Note that LTO (landing and take-off) data are based on flight segments at and below 3,000 ft. AGL, which is 1/10 or less of cruise height of FL30 -- FL40. See Fig. 1 of your reference. The LTO data (limiting climbout / descent phases to <= 3000ft) are relevant to local emissions concerns near airports, the focus of the paper, but not to total fuel / emissions of an entire aircraft flight profile as we're discussing here, and omit 90%+ of the relevant climb/descent characteristics. As discussed in the paper.

Figure 2. also provides a strong clue as to why the LTO data show lower total fuel use in the approach vs. climbout phases, again, <=3000 ft: the aircraft monitored are spending 2-5x longer in the approach phase. That is, they're climbing out steeply, with very high fuel-flow rates, whilst they're descending slowly (and hence, spending more total time <=3000 ft) at a much lower fuel-flow rate.

Again: you're wrong, given your own cited reference.

https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/ICRAT_2014_YSC_HB_final.pdf

Continuous descent operations are the optimal, but there's plenty of suboptimal airport approaches that require level flight at a height where fuel efficiency is far less than at cruising altitude.

Nor can they actually read and interpret the sources they did scrounge up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207783

not really efficient.

I'd imagine the emissions would be infinitely greater than an electric car. For an ICE car with two people, you'd be closer.

Not if you include the emissions caused by generating the electricity.

I'm Italian, I thought "our" trains were bad, but in the UK it's much worse. Barely 40% of the network is even electrified, in 2021!

What I find particularly funny about this, it that Maggie Thatcher was a strong proponent to keeping the trains in public ownership, believing that privatising them was a bridge two far, even for her. Her successor on the other hand, they weren’t so bothered.

However the recovery of passenger number after privatisation is undeniable. While the private model wasn’t great, the previous public ownership was even worse. Hopefully our second stab at public ownership goes better, this time we have very successful models like TfL to work from.

When Sweden privatised rail traffic, it still kept the track ownership in a single entity, and train operators bid for slots on the existing rail network.

This gets you into a somewhat healthy competition between operators, hopefully (longer-term) driving down the price and driving up the quality for consumers.

Comparing air and rail, a first class train ticket between Malmö and Stockholm (most direct car route seems to be 613 km) is (with the ex-monopoly train operator) 895 SEK to 1 735 SEK , and is about 4.5h city centre to city centre.

A flight seems to be between 862 SEK (RyanAir, one carry-on luggage, 168 SEK with nothing, they say) and about 300 SEK. Listed flight time is 1h 20, airport would either be MMX or CPH (the latter has really good rail from the same rail station as the train in the previous para, taking about 21 minutes, then maybe 3-10 minutes at the airport). On the Stockholm end, you have either the fast airport train (ca 15 minutes), the slower (but cheaper) commuter train (ca 40 minutes) or airport buses (probably similar price as the commuter train, about the same speed at no traffic at all).

Total travel time for "same start, same destination", train 4h 30m, airplane maybe 3-4h. I don't, genuinely, know what "class of service" the plane would be, ut short-haul you get pretty much the same seats and you may have the middle seat unoccupied for "business".

And for reference, London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley is 645 km by car, using the same route planner

Rail should not be a for-profit business, it is a public service and a natural monopoly. 100% of the money the public pay to make a journey should go back into maintaining the network and running the trains.

I'm happy for a few execs to get their 100k+ salaries and for it to be justified by all the "hard work" and "value" they bring. But taking money from ticket sales, calling it profit and handing it to shareholders has to stop, it means the public get a dysfunctional rail service because there is no investment. Or it works, but the ticket prices are stratospheric.

The Transport for London corporation is a good example of how it should be done.

The main benefit from privatization was a significant reduction in fares combined with massive growth in availability (people take for granted things today that were huge problems then: punctuality, safety, etc.). The rail network in the UK is publicly-owned, what is private is the franchise to operate on a certain route. The lack of investment, if any exists, has come from the govt...and I am not sure there is a lack of investment either...HS2 is going to cost £100bn...£100bn is a large number (as ever, I think people mean...London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK).

Also, trains in Europe aren't really cheaper. Tickets are subsidised in Europe, in the UK passengers pay. The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).

TfL is a great example: sucks down tens of billions in public money to subsidise the wealthiest people in the country...the North-East is still missing motorways and we are spending £20bn on the Elizabeth line...okay. The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line. The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density (also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce).

TfL no longer receives any central government funding (beyond COVID money, but every aspect of public transport in the U.K. got buckets of money for that), this is despite being required to maintain a significant chunk of London surface roads and bridges. Something that councils normally receive central subsidies for.

Additionally for Crossrail, the Dft only provided £5b in direct funding. The remainder is either loans TfL will have to repay, or has come from locally collected taxes like council tax, and business rates. All of which only impact London residents and businesses.

> also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce

That’s hardly fair. London is the only capital city in the world where it’s public transport get zero subsidies, and costs have to be covered entirely by fare collection and advertising. The central government told people not to take public transport, then forced TfL to run a full service, despite there being 60% fewer passengers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that isn’t going to be financially possible, despite TfL always having 6 months of emergency operating capital on hand. Additionally TfL’s status as a local authority means it can’t operate in a deficit, ever. So it can’t borrow to cover short term cash flow issues. Long story short, government rules and requirements placed TfL in a position where it was either getting a bailout, or collapsing. Nothing short of 3 years of spare operating capital, approximately £30b, would have prevented this situation.

Also worth mentioning that every other public transport operator in the U.K. also collapsed, and needed to be bailed out as well. So it’s a little unfair to single out TfL.

I'd say TfL is far far more popular than any of the private companies and for good reason.

If we funded it properly and extended this approach (running things for the people, not for shareholders) to the rest of Britain it would be a good thing.

I covered most of what you replied to in my answer.

What subsidies? Please be explicit. London contributes £36b more each year to public purse than it receives in public spending [1]. I’m not sure how a net £36b fiscal contribution to to the tax pot can be considered a subsidy, unless your saying it’s unfair that London subsidies the rest of the U.K. to the tune of £36b a year.

I would also point out that Londons contribution to rest of the U.K. has grown £10b over the last 4 years. So London is receiving even less for its tax pounds than ever before.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...

> I covered most of what you replied to in my answer.

I can’t see how that true. I pointed out that a number of things you said were either untrue or misleading.

It would be the same story if it were the government operating the trains and private company maintaining the network: of course you're not going to get one organisation to put in more effort when it's a different organisation that sees the benefits. The big success story of privatisation is Chiltern, where there was a long-term arrangement with a single operator that took responsibility for the integrated system of trains, stations and so on. (Though it's notably also one of the few cases where there was real competition between rail lines).

> London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK

A smaller proportion of London tax revenue is reinvested there than anywhere else, and projects with a lower objective outside London BCR get funded while higher BCR projects in London get delayed.

> The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).

The amount of public subsidy going on rail is trivial compared to the amount of public subsidy that explicitly or implicitly goes to roads (such as the huge amount of public land taken out of productive use), and that's even more biased towards the wealthy and carries much bigger negative externalities (pollution, much worse safety record).

> The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line.

No it isn't, you're comparing the concrete realised costs of Crossrail with the made-up estimates for fiber rollout.

> The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density

Density is the solution; it's the reason why London is so much more productive and ends up subsidising the rest of the country.

I agree on the "density solutions" however. This just isn't viable, we need other solutions and getting rid of individual transport is a fantasy.

While I did meet one person who regularly flew Manchester/London he lived very close to the airport so it wasn't too much extra hassle for him. It's only 200 miles / 2 hours on the train so the flights were mostly for connecting at Heathrow to international flights. Flights tended to be more popular London/Scotland where you're looking at 4 hours on the train.

Rail has several advantages, time-wise. Airports are far from city centres and security theatre takes a lot of time. Cheap flights also tend to use smaller, more remote airports because they are cheaper to use than big hubs close to large cities.

As a European who has taken more than one 16 hour train ride where I could have taken a 2.5 hour plane trip, I really think night trains done properly could be a game changer.

If we charged $100-200 per ton of CO2, which is supposedly more than recapture would cost, that would only be about $1-2 per 50 miles. From the numbers being quoted here, it sounds like that would do very little to bring prices in line.

Either charge for all the carbon, or start harshly dropping the quotas.

Even after carbon tax, electric aircraft is still a technology in its infancy, compared to electric trains. Are you proposing that the government should spend billions of $$$ on an experimental technology when a proven alternative exists?

I'm 'commenting too fast' to reply, but show me any of your examples in flight please.

500+ miles range. Building it right now. Plus Wright Electric, Bye Aerospace’s eflyer 800, etc.

Why do people so easily and confidently claim something can’t be done?

EDIT: and YES this is true. Battery specific energy is 200-400Wh/kg. That is PER kilogram. And larger planes are NOT less efficient per passenger than smaller ones. Small and large jets or propeller aircraft have a out the same life to drag ratio. If anything, larger tend to be better due to Reynolds Number effects.

There is maybe not one misconception about electric flight that I’ve seen repeated most often by Internet skeptics than this false idea that “bigger is disproportionately harder for electric planes.” It is simply. Not. True.

Look at the specific energy of jet fuel compared to batteries on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

And no, don’t switch topic to range. That is a known constraint. Focus on SCALE. It is scale-independent to zeroth and first order at least!

This comes up every single time, and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. :D

The claim that larger size in particular is a problem is false. Efficiency, including structural efficiency, actually tends to improve with scale beyond 100 seats.

> We sadly cannot make large battery powered airplanes with a usable range and speed unless we get up the gravimetric density.

This, again, is often repeated but false from a technical standpoint. 9 seater and 100 seater, for the same range, scale just fine between them and with clean sheet design we can use existing 200-400Wh/kg gravimetric density. Scale. Isn’t. The. Problem.

Large planes tend to be used on longer routes, in fact. Smaller planes are needed for their granularity on short routes.

The reason we see 9 passenger electric planes first is pretty obvious: cheaper and faster to develop small planes than large. Big aircraft manufacturers are much more risk averse as well. A large new clean sheet aircraft can take literally decades to develop. Not true for small aircraft. And again, generally the granularity of small planes means they’re more useful than large planes for shorter routes. This all reinforces the false notion that there is some technical reason why we “CAN’T” make large electric planes when there really, truly isn’t.

For instance, consider the Learjet 70/75. 8 passenger, dry mass of 6 some tonnes. Over 700kg per passenger. 14 passenger Falcon jets do better at about 500kg per passenger. 737 Max8 with 210 passengers gets about 215kg/passenger. So if anything, overall structural efficiency improves with scale! At least up to ~200 passengers. (Caveat is that these are typically private jets with a different seating arrangement... but so are the example electric aircraft. So they'd similarly benefit from scale up to larger seat capacity.)

The 737 Max8 has a massive advantage over the LearJet of massively lower surface area per passenger. It's not comparable at all. In an electric aircraft where the bottleneck is the battery as far as weight goes this is not a relevant comparison.

You have two regimes. One where the dominant factor is structural efficiency is mass. One where the dominant factor is area. You cannot compare the two. It is simply a completely deficient comparison.

Do you want an actually correct comparison? Keep the 737 Max 8. Now compare it to a PAC P-750XL, dry mass of 1.6 tons over 9 passengers. That's 181kg per passenger, less than the Max-8.

Now that's the aluminium version. The Max-8 uses a massive amount of composites - the composite version of the P-750XL is expected to be significantly lighter still.

It's absolutely not a fiction. A 787 Max-8 consumes 18 liters (!!!) of kerosene at >60% thermal efficiency, per passenger, per hour. That's 175kW of useful energy consumption per passenger. To fly one hour at 400Wh/kg assuming 100% energy efficiency you need to add 437 kg of batteries PER PASSENGER.

The real key to making electric aircraft feasible is to increase the efficiency dramatically. (Also, jets don’t have >60% thermal efficiency if you use the HHV of the fuel.) just a swap out of the fuel for battery gets you to a few hundred miles of range at best. Enough maybe to compete with the California HSR, but not much more.

It’s like how a Tesla Model S is not a battery swapped sedan. It’s a custom clean sheet design. That’s why you can get 400 miles of range in it instead of just 150 miles.

Likewise, you need a clean sheet battery electric aircraft design. That’s why the Eviation Alice is able to get significant range. Incorporate 777x-like folding wingtips and possible truss braced high aspect ratio wings, natural laminar flow like sailplanes, you could increase L/D to about double current aircraft. Things like that allow 1000 mile range. Substantial enough for short haul trips, which are about half of all passenger miles.

A Tesla Model S doesn't have any more weight efficiency than a battery swapped sedan. It's just as heavy as a battery swapped sedan, it's just built to handle the weight better.

The main factor in the Alice having a lower L/D is flying at less than half the airspeed and thus drastically reducing parasitic drag. There are no easy gimmes. You're going to have to sacrifice range and speed.

So far electric airplanes are somewhat worse than piston aircraft. They will never rival jets until we drastically increase energy density.

The turbine efficiency of modern turbojets is actually around 60% and there are turbines with more than that. The overall efficiency is actually lower because of propulsive inefficiency, but electric aircraft have that exact same problem.

Also, the airplane manufacturer business is ripe for disruption. You have an extremely bureaucratic and dysfunctional Airbus battling an even more dysfunctional and mismanaged Boeing. Surely there is room for a hydrogen startup to come in and devastate these two monopolies. Often I wonder how much the world would be different if we had 100 Elon Musks instead of just one.

As far as disruption, the issue is that there is no opportunity for competition. Countries are rabidly protectionist about their airplane industries, and any newcomer even with a completely superior product (See: Bombardier C-Series) will get absolutely destroyed by sanctions, tarrifs, or even secondary export controls (Gripen, Avro Arrow, etc...). You cannot succeed unless you are American, and even in America Boeing has massive undue influence.

Also the SAFs are looking pretty good. Point is, I don't think we should decide that planes are bad of all sudden, that doesn't seem like a very wise thing to do given the massive benefits of air travel. Rail is also great but rail shines for cargo and large volume traffic between urban cores

Throw in all the current eVtol start-ups and I don't see that much difference between the US and Europe.

I do agree that an electric/hydrogen jet is the kind of disruptive tech that could upend the market, but due to the long lead times, stringent certification and very political markets it's an arguably even tougher market than cars or rockets.

I am only a lowly software engineer so I don't know that much about planes or batteries. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong, and I hope I am.

But both of these are second order effects. And they mostly cancel out.

I am a materials scientist with a background in physics and I have also developed electric motors for electric aircraft. I have a good understanding of how the systems scale. You were mixing up the exponential range equation with simple size scaling. if it were true, then large aircraft of any type would be much less efficient than smaller aircraft of the same type. This is most certainly not true. In fact, usually the efficiency increases with scale. A 777x is much more efficient than a Gulfstream or some smaller regional jet per passenger mile.

If you double the weight of "the plane", that includes the batteries and motors.

If you start with doubling just the structure, then you might need to add 50% more batteries, not "twice as much". Then to lift those batteries it takes another 30%. Then you add bigger motors which adds even more weight, etc. etc. By the time you finish, the total weight will be about 2x your initial weight.

There is difficulty in scaling planes, but it's not because more mass requires more fuel. A fixed percentage devoted to fuel works fine, if you're assuming the same route for both planes.

> All-electric designs have been demonstrated for small air vehicles. However, such prototypes have not been scaled up to more than ten passengers due to the specific energy (E*) limitations of current battery technology. [...] A significant proportion of the energy expenditure would be used to transport the mass of the batteries; this mass would not decrease during a flight as would that of conventional fuel.

Are these sources wrong, or too simplistic in their analysis, or am I misinterpreting what they're saying?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft#Batteries

[2]: Structural Power Performance Targets for Future Electric Aircraft - https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/19/6006

I have no idea why people keep thinking that batteries would work worse for 100 seats rather than nine seats. The technology is independent of scale except in the trivial sense that you need proportionally more battery and cost since you’re 10 times larger. True the range is less, but we have built jets that can go 40,000km. We don’t need that much range to do short flights, comparable in length to the California HSR project. Existing battery technology is more than sufficient for that.

We can? Present tense, certified, operational aircraft in service? Or do you mean that people are working on building them now and hope to have them in service at some point in the future?

And CO2 is good for plant growth, right?

https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the-liana...

It's entirely possible the externalities of having people (and goods) unproductive for longer periods of time is worse than simply getting them where they need to be.

Markets are not efficient at considering externalities at all.

Am I misunderstanding your position?

Air travel is blamed for up to 3.5% of climate impacts; it's not an insignificant contributor...

1) All people share one atmosphere 2) Well-reviewed science shows that individual decisions like taking a flight make the atmosphere less hospitable for all.

That type of problem is literally the reason the term externality was coined.

No, the opposite of "effectively". That's like saying you can't plan an effective route because CSP, or you can't use SAT solvers to design things.

Markets aren't perfect, and that's all that proof manages to show. They could still be 99.99% accurate based on that logic. It's a cute thought experiment, not something practical.

Maybe we could train more experts to avoid them needing to fly all over; buy and serve local.

A lot of efficiency options are left off the table sticking with the status quo.

When we count externalities such as the carbon footprint, trains easily beat planes.

Finally, TGV and Ryanair are not comparable experiences.

Capacity also means flexibility. When the service is frequent enough, you don't have to plan in advance. You can buy the tickets just before departure for a reasonable price. You don't have to adjust your schedule to make it to the specific train, as you can also take the next one 30 minutes later.

Different modes of transport have their own strengths and weaknesses. Switching to another mode never makes things unambiguously better. If you want to switch to another mode, you also have to change your habits to take full advantage of the strengths of the new mode.

Also... Business travel should be entirely eliminated in favor of Zoom and video tour calls. Only when someone needs to vacation or do actual physical work should they travel by plane.

The few times I have done it - lowest class with an actual bed - it was pretty minimal as a hotel experience but great to be able to wake up, step off the train and go to town!