Comment by komali2

Every improvement to heavier-than-air air travel is a waste of resources. Mass rapid transit over land became a solved problem in 12th century Germany when mine workers put wagons on wooden rails, and same for air travel when the Montgolfier brothers floated a sheep, duck, and rooster in a hot air balloon for the pleasure of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Planes spend a tremendous amount of fuel, cramp people into a tiny space, require substantial engineering efforts and time to upkeep, are incredibly difficult to automate, incredibly difficult to route efficiently, require gobsmacking infrastructure to safely take-off, land, and route, and thousands of manhours of training and hundreds of humans per plane, per day, to handle every aspect of operation. And yet still sometimes they crash, sometimes even on purpose.

Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to. They're so simple to automate you can create an entire scale model automated system in your basement with safety features and routing, and reprogram it, with the knowledge within just a couple books. They take up far less space and their routing is simpler, their infrastructure may on the surface seem larger but in reality are basically one and done two slabs of iron that are dead simple to maintain. They're already electrified, already automated, already safe, already more comfortable, already faster point-to-point when you consider that they can take you from one city center to another and require far less security since they can't be crashed into buildings by hijackers (so you can show up 10 minutes before departure and stroll on).

For getting over oceans we should use blimps, which are awesome, or humongous sailing ships, which would also be awesome. Hell if you want you can even "fly" the most modern of sailing ships. There's your plane, you degenerates that chose planes as your special interest. Pick a real one, pick hydrofoil sailing ships instead.