Even most businesspeople aren't really that hyper-scheduled on trips--especially the ones that can't book whatever class they want.

And to your latter point, I can afford higher-class tickets but it comes back to what I could do with the money instead like a nice dinner. I don't tend to have a budget per se but I do recognize tradeoffs.

Have you ever picked a slightly more expensive nonstop flight instead of one with a layover for a vacation?

This is similar. 3.5 hours vs 7 hours is a pretty good difference.

You can take a 3.5 hours flight in the morning and have energy to see a city the whole day after that. Maybe not after a 7 hour flight unless you are a pretty experienced and motivated traveler who can sleep the entire flight and have the mental energy to enjoy new things after that.

I do actually think you're right, but the counterpoint is that airlines have slowed down all their flights to save money, and no one has come in offering a faster flight in exchange for more money.

Maybe the delta just isn't enough to matter? Or maybe people aren't willing to pay for it.

I’d say the tech isn’t there yet.

Remember we’re still pretty early in the history of aviation.

We know the tech is there. It used to take 45 minutes to fly from LAX to SFO. Now it's 70 minutes. That's not a tech problem, it's a logistics/fuel problem. But if people really valued the difference, they would offer a 45 minute flight for more money.

Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

So why can't I buy a BOS->SFO flight that is one hour shorter for more money? Probably because of a lack of willingness to pay.

> Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

Catching favorable winds and burning more fuel. It is in the airlines best interest to have the plane in position for the next flight, so they will burn the fuel when they need to. However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of problems that means they would make less money than with the current schedule.

> However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of problems that means they would make less money than with the current schedule.

There is always a price where this isn't the case. My overall point is that that price is still too high and people aren't willing to pay, and we don't really know if that's the case (but maybe the airlines probably do).

They aren’t going to make that flight time very often so even if it was offered at a premium, they just could not deliver that product consistently.

That depends entirely on how much "slightly more expensive" is. For the vast majority of the travelling public, they'll choose the cheaper option and we know that because that's what they choose already.

If that was the case, most nonstop flights between non-major cities would not exist at all.

Most major airports are at their physical limit in terms of both airfield and gate traffic and are charging extremely high gate fees. I'm not in airline logistics but I would bet my bottom dollar that is the true constraint in having more traffic fly into hubs.