agreed although considering how much fuel that must burn…
all that said it seems like there are a number of projects on the go to resurrect it or find its successor. i’m betting we’ll have something up in the next ten years.
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Back shortly before they shut everything down they redid the cabins again (might have been the 3rd or 4th time since they first started flying). They put in new lighter weight seats (which were still not shabby - just narrow, about 18" wide if I recall) and saved enough in fuel costs to pay for the rehab.
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yeah i’m not surprised. i was reading about it earlier and it seemed like it used something like 4x fuel for 3x speed for the same passenger weight, or something like that.
Seems very reasonable. It’s obviously going to use more fuel to go faster and higher. I expect flying higher gains a lot of efficiency due to the air being thinner.
for sure, my point is mostly just that it’s expensive
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From a fluid mechanics course I once took:
For a jet, thrust goes as the square of the air density. Air resistance goes as the cube of the air density. So as a jet flies higher what it loses in thrust is more than made up for air resistance lost.
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