You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.

Security also seems to be variable enough that you need to add buffer, and then there's the built in incentive to have people sitting around in a shopping mall.

A shopping mall which you can't leave and in which you aren't allowed to bring your own drinks with few exceptions.

can bring a quart zip lock bag stuffed to brim with nips (50ml bottles of booze) through TSA security. While you are technically not allowed to drink them on the plane absolutely nobody gives a shit as long as you are not an idiot about it.

And you can also bring an empty water bottle that there are often stations setup for the purpose of filling next to water fountains.

Mind you, I'm annoyed at the liquids thing given I used to routinely bring bottles of wine or a local liqueur home in carry-on. And I can't any longer.

I recall when those guys in the UK (?) had their plan to explode a plane by mixing some volatile chemicals in the plane toilet. IIRC this kicked off the whole no liquids requirements. At the time I remember reading an article by a chemist on the chances of actually pulling off what they wee planning to do, and it was comical. To not just make a giant poof that mainly singed off some hair they needed to carefully mix the liquids in an ice bath for about 1h (without anyone noticing) and every little shake could potentially mess up the whole thing.

He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.

I think the point of it was that our enemies had figured out that the way to destroy America wasn't to kill our leaders, but rather to convince us that our enemies were inside the country, and then watch us tear each other apart.

>He then went on to what he considered dangerous and mentioned a couple of powders which you can easily bring on board which are much more devastating.

So this is why we also can't bring own cocaine on board in addition to not having own booze. What a shame

bingo! for long-haul flights (>10hrs) i'd even bring two zip locks. Relax and fall asleep right during takeoff while everyone else has to wait for the stupid cart forever.

Security doesn’t have to be that variable. Flights are all planned weeks in advance. TSA can pretty exactly predict the passenger volume in time to schedule enough workers, it’s just that sometimes they don’t. If they were going to be short staffed and needed people to come early, they could notify the airline and the airline could notify you that you needed to come early that day.

I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security. Like 10 minutes average 20 minutes for the 95% percentile and a guarantee that it will never exceed 30 minutes. Seeing lines form around the block and passengers having to wait hours to clear security in some extreme cases is simply not acceptable.

It isn't, but changes that require additional staffing simply aren't going to be tolerated. If you add more staff, that directly translates to higher ticket prices because passengers directly pay for most of the TSA costs. If you expand facilities, that takes away from the valuable real estate the airport would rather use to sell you magazines and duty free. It also harms their Clear revenue stream, who pays airports to make security lines worse as a means to convince people to sign up.

Or we could streamline the process: remove steps that are taking too long for little benefit (typically asking people to remove their shoes) and automate more.

>> I really wish we had strict SLAs for airport security.

What they should really have is a line for clueless people. You know, the people ahead of you who walk thru metal detectors with belts. Then aw-shucks and waste another 5minutes. Then they forgot to take their laptops out of their bag. Aw-shucks again. Then they want to unlace their shoes.

I'd love to have a line for clued-in travelers and one for people who arent.

If only it was only a belt. I've had multiple times where I was behind someone with a concealed firearm that tried to walk through security who somehow "forgot" they had it. One time it seemed the person was on probation as well and shouldn't have even had access to firearms!

Fun times in Texas.

in the us that's the precheck line...

> You can't remove the part where you have to travel to an airport, generally out of town.

Some airports have good connections. In the last month I've been to Berlin and Brussels, and in each case my train journey into the city was about 15-20 minutes (caveat: I happened to be going to the right side of Berlin for the airport, and the Brussels train, while central, was _bizarrely_ expensive).

Of course, some airports, not so much. Grumble mutter Dublin (there is some hope of a rail line, or possibly _two_ rail lines, in about 2040, but until then it's a choice of painfully slow standard buses (1 hour into city), or expensive unreliable express buses (25 mins into city, if they show up)).

But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown. My favourite for this is London City; the (small, weird) plane lands, you walk out a door, and you are at a DLR stop.

Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.

> Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should

There was a company about 15 years ago that developed a double ended jetway so you could load and unload from the front and back simultaneously. They said it shaved about 18 minutes from loading and unloading (combined). On the average flight this would be the equivalent of going about 100mph faster for seemingly a simple change.

They installed a few in Denver and I believe in Calgary. Unfortunately one in Denver had a problem and collapsed and hit the wing of a plane, and so they ripped them all out and no one ever tried again.

Ryanair loads its planes from both ends in most airports (except in airports where they're required to use a jetway). It _helps_ (I was recently on a Ryanair flight from Brussels, a mandatory-jetway airport, and it was noticeably slower than usual to load) but it's still a lot slower than you'd hope.

Ryanair actually orders specialised 737s with built-in airstairs and a few other modifications to facilitate this.

This only really works for 737-sized planes and down, though, where air-stairs are an easy option (AFAIK even A320s can be a bit of a stretch, as they're significantly taller than 737s).

Yeah I've done that on a few euro airlines. It's definitely faster to load, but usually you have to take a bus to the plane, which adds a lot of time and hassle that you don't have with a gate. I still really think that the double ended gate is probably the lowest hanging fruit in terms of speeding up air travel. The only reason I can think of that we don't have it is that you can pay more to be at the front of the plane, so a lot of the benefit goes to the lowest paying passengers. I would still think that this would improve the turn around time for the airplane so that the airline could get more utilization, but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.

> It's definitely faster to load, but usually you have to take a bus to the plane, which adds a lot of time and hassle that you don't have with a gate.

Ah, that depends on the airport. Haven’t been on one of those in a few years; I think Ryanair and friends managed to grab a lot more proper gate space during Covid when the higher-end airlines were practically giving it away.

(Years ago, I was on a Ryanair flight to Brussels airport which used a jet bridge, because it’s mandatory there… But the jet bridge was in the middle of nowhere, served by a bus. Half-convinced Ryanair does this sort of thing deliberately, to live up to their brand image of being quite annoying.)

> but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.

It _definitely_ is, at least for short-haul stuff.

> Boarding also always takes far longer than you'd imagine it should, mostly due to people being people. In principle you could board an airliner in a couple of minutes, but only with perfect behaviour from all passengers, so good luck with that.

I don't know why there isn't just a bunch of seats in the terminal laid out the same way as the plane. Sit there and wait, and then when it's time to board, the people at the end get on first, tada, everyone is boarded and we're not stopping each other from getting in.

In practice, the airlines order status of various kinds when boarding which roughly correlates to how much money people spend with the airline.

Yep, and the status folks want to both board first and be in the front of the plane, which clogs everything up during boarding.

You’d need each gate to have as much seating as a plane. Don’t think I’ve ever been in an airport with gates that big.

Anyway, people would just ignore it.

It's because the overhead space is limited. Airlines have spent decades trashing, losing, and delaying checked luggage, so everyone tries to cram everything into the overheads. Since there's never enough room for everyone to do that, higher classes have to board first so they can. It would be nice if first class could at least be at the back so the line didn't completely stall in reverse order, but they also want to get out (the front) first, and you will never convince the other passengers to wait for that.

> But for many routes, really security, and the sheer poor layout of the airport, is the big slowdown

Washington Dulles aka IAD is a fine example. It has a vast security area below deck for regular folks and a smaller one up top where all the Clear and Pre flyers go. That should be inverted.

Then, after security, passengers must walk 300m and change levels to catch a small shuttle train. Or, to take the special mobile lounge bus things. If you take the train, it drops you off 500m from the gate area, so you have tonget off the train, climb the stairs, walk through a tunnel, climb the escalator, and then walk the remainder of the terminal to your gate. It is absolutely laughable how poor Dulles is, esp considering its importance to United.

Dublin airport is also terrible once you are actually at the airport. Security there can be glacial.

Or you're traveling to an airport near the city from out of town. For me it's over an hour and the associated cost--rarely drive myself--is often as much as the flight.

Solution: giant tunnel to underground downtown terminal.

Planes land outside the city, taxi to the downtown terminal.

Denver's airport is apart from the actual city, and there are light rail lines connecting it with downtown. That system... does not work very well, owing to crappy light rail and the fact that most people still aren't where they need to be even if they took that to Union Station.

If you're suggesting this hypothetical giant tunnel would actually have the planes taxiing all the way to a whole airport underneath a city... I don't see that solving more problems than it would create.

Yes, the planes taxi to a terminal under the city.

It would create problems, but the problems would be for the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure, not for the passengers.

Airplanes are not fundamentally that much bigger than trains, which routinely go under the city.

Trains don't need wings, so they're a lot easier to build tunnels for..

Yes, they are - if you count wings, which are the main point of a plane.

So as a reader one can assume that either a) I forgot about the wings (I guess I must be an idiot) or b) I am using a broader set of reference objects than simply "current passenger transportation modes". There are many man made objects much bigger than airplane wings. Fitting an aircraft carrier, or a container ship, or a skyscraper, moving under a city, would be much, much harder than fitting an airplane. Not to mention that if we strongly applied this engineering constraint, it's not beyond the realm of imagination that we could produce airliners with removable or foldable wings, or where the passenger compartment slides out, or tunnels with deep grooves for the wings, etc.

You have airports that are pretty convenient to the city (assuming that's where you're going). Boston. SFO is at least on BART. The old Hong Kong airport. But newer airports tend to be pretty far out because they presumably need more land and that land isn't available near the city.

It's also because city residents will not, under any circumstances, allow a new airport to be built anywhere near them.

> Security also seems to be variable

This has always confused me because it seems like it seems like the easiest possible prediction problem. Nearly everyone buys their tickets in advance, often weeks ahead of time.

Why can’t they text you the day before and say “The airport will be quiet/normal/chaotic for your flight tomorrow, so please arrive 1/2/3 hours before takeoff?”

Would you change your plans to arrive earlier/later if airport is chaotic/quiet?

I wouldnt, doesn't matter if airport is in bloody state of war.

Yeah, I would.

On a quiet day I measured 7 minutes from stepping out of the bus and being through security.

I wouldn’t change the flight itself, but I’d certainly use it to decide when I set out for the airport. Not by a ton but it’s easily the difference between a leisurely farewell breakfast and scarfing down a muffin on the run.

> a 3-dimensional bus

It's not. There are "air routes." Your plane will be delayed if they are too busy or cannot be sequenced into arrivals from the route at an appropriate rate. This happens flying into JFK and a fair amount flying out of it.

Landing and takeoffs put the plane within seconds of domestic infrastructure below. It's even more controlled.

Your pilot is considering all of this, plus weather deviations, along the entire journey and at the destination, before you even leave. Your '3d bus' doesn't actually exist unless you're flying private VFR. Then, and pretty much only then, can you get out there and just "fly around."

Finally your "2d bus" can just stop. It can literally just stop and do nothing. Your plane cannot without significantly implicating your life.