@@jamesengland7461 Aye, the most focused engines get to 50% thermal efficiency. To say nothing of the Climate boogeyman in the room being an unscientific sham.
@@jamesengland7461 A diplomat, you are not! A salesman, you are not! Rude and not likeable, you ARE! Saying that the 5% fuel efficiency claim is an "utter lie" is rather rude. Whether it is *inaccurate* or not I very much doubt that Petter is lying. Either Petter got his info from someone you disagree with or it may have been an error - either by Petter or his source. Additionally, why not give a link to your source (in addition to more diplomatic language)?
In France, if you are close enough to a TGV station it's no secret that it's better than going by air. Once you factor in the aggro-factor of the airport, getting there, security screening, arriving in advance, the door-to-door time is less by train.
Train stations are usually close to the center of cities because cities tend to grow around train tracks.. Airports are usually deliberately placed a long away from downtown on the other side of the city suburbs.
But France has also placed TGV stations far outside cities for the sake of having straighter, faster lines: Lorraine TGV, Belfort-Montbéliard TGV, among others. While fast, for many this can be an inconvenience.
@@psisteak4122 Well, in Europe, there were major cities before anybody invented things like trains. However, the rail lines and train stations that were built were put in the middle of cities and the airports were mostly built out on what was farmland.
Speaking for Italy, our railway is comparable in duration of travel and prices (at least for internal destinations) to most low-cost airline solutions and many people prefer to take the Frecciarossa from e.g. Milan to Rome or Milan to Naples for business rather than take a flight. The argument that making the trains more attractive will entise people to take a train rather than a plane couldn't be more true.
The Netherlands is a tiny country, so there aren't many airports and thus there aren't many domestic flights. That being said the prices of railway- and bus-travel are extremely high, the timetables are often horrible and many railway schedules are skipped for the most banale reasons (some leaves or a few snowflakes on the tracks and no, I'm not kidding) so it often makes more sense to use a car for your travels, especially if you have to travel a lot.
When I travel in China, I will take the train up to 4 or 5 hours duration (500miles /800km), as they run like clockwork, every half hour, clean and comfortable and door to door are no slower than by air. But for that China had it invest vast amounts of money in high speed rail, to many destinations. Build it and they will come. (from someone who loves to fly)
I just got back from Italy and traveled a bit on a train there and it's so true. God bless your trains, they are so good and cheap. Also making trains more attractive not only reduces the air travel demand, it reduces the car travel demand, so it's so much better than implementing a law to ban cheap flights.
Still, the thought of spending the better part of the day on the train to cross most of China churns my stomach, especially in their 3+2 economy seating.
@@h8GW Business class train tickets in china are cheep, like $20 to $50, but even the economy is very clean and comfortable. At 250kph they surprisingly quiet. But you really show ignorance re China thinking "cross most of China" in "better part of the day" not even a plane can do that
I know this is more focused on aviation, but Internal combusion engines in cars are not that bad, they are closer to 20% thermally efficient. Also that can be improved with things like forced induction or diesel (higher compression) to increase to around 40% relistically.
Toyota and Honda Atkinson-cycle engines are closer to 40%, and they try to stay in that range with their hybrid drivetrains. No forced induction either. My next car, a Corolla hybrid (aka, s Prius).
Indeed. ICE utilise fuel at approx 30%heat, 30%friction, 30% torque at the wheel. Out of that final 30%, 80% of that is used to displace the air in front of the vehicle. EVs have to move the same air. I've yet to see a generator or an electric motor run cold, and unless it's hydro power, the energy source produces heat in transfer, so the figures are somewhat distorted.
@@foxstranglerAnd that is why all Teslas have really low cw values. Even the semi. Also efficient motors, for that matter. Just for comparison, electric is approximately two times as efficient as hydrogen.
@@andrewjoeljackson4653Ah, but F1 has lot so much entertainment factor with those new quiet, super efficient power units. It’s also not really the ICE that makes it so efficient. It’s the entire power unit with engine braking harvest, brake harvesting, etc.
I have switched from using flights from Geneva/Lyon to London to going by train - TGV to Paris, two stops on the Metro (RER actually) and Eurostar. About the same same in time door to door, a bit more expensive but when all factors are taken into account (travel to/from airport, hanging around at the airport, parking,cost of refreshments etc etc) less hassle and WAY more convenient and comfortable. London/Paris used to have the most flights in the world - now very few flights because of Eurostar. Lesson - if the rail system meets travellers needs, they will take the train rather than the plane. I think the French are onto something with their approach to domestic air travel.
Not only France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands are doing the same thing. Flights under 90 minutes are becoming useless as they generally take longer from point to point and more train rides are available with double the capacity compared to planes.
I'd read somewhere that the number of domestic flights in Italy dropped off a fair bit after they built out their highspeed rail lines as they were no longer very competitive against HSR.
5% thermal eficiency for cars? In 1900 maybe? For exemple : "the thermal efficiency of the 1.8L unit in the third-generation Prius (2ZR-FXE) has a thermal efficiency of about 38%".
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used: leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNowThe 5% maybe true in city traffic. While driving on a highway that is not too congested, you have very litte deceleration and acceleration. I the car is hybrid, it will load the battery while decelerating or going downhill and use this energy with the electric motor when appropriate. It is amazing how often my car just stops the combustion engine while driving.
In Germany any domestic flight is supposed to be just a short hop, but in reality it isn't. Once you factor in the hours you need to get to the airport, check in, get through safety, wait for boarding, pick up luggage at the destination and finally take a regional train to the city center where I really want to go I can just as well take the train. Granted, Germany's railway has become less and less punctual lately - but I have experienced the same with flights. So: no short distance flights for me.
The only trains that are reasonably reliable in Germany are the local/regional trains... unless they have to wait and give way to delayed ICEs. Punctuality is absolutely abysmal, to the point that some German trains are not even allowed to go into Switzerland anymore. Factor that plus all-around general incompetence, and you have rail service that is hugely unattractive. The AC doesn't even work on warm days (which there are too many of nowadays), so you sit inside with sweat dripping down your face. This is a pity, as I would rather avoid driving. But the Deutsche Bahn often leaves me no choice. And that's without even considering ticket prices.
@@rallymaniac92 I agree - but planes are not much better. Last time I flew from Hamburg to Florence via Frankfurt: flight time maybe 2h, total time at airports maybe 15h. ALL flights were delayed, up to six hours, check-in took an hour (!) since there was only one person handling a complete Lufthansa domestic flight, plus long queues at security. Planes are shifted from one gate to another with personnel looking at the same screens as the passengers as nobody had any clue where the flight might depart. The price war has ruined previously reliable airlines. It's all about "how many more cents can we save to make any profit at all"?
Depends on your departure time. I went through security at Frankfurt on a Friday 7:30pm without a queue! That is of course a different story on the morning rush hour, but you can book your security time slot for free with Fraport (the airport operator). Retrieving your luggage is actually the worst part of flying now. I waited 70 minutes for my bag from the GRZ-FRA flight on a sunday evening. I would have given them credit for it, as this was the DTM Red-Bull-Ring shuttle and most drivers, mechanics etc. only had carry-ons, so they probably toured some outside stands before bringing different flights to the handling facility. But the same evening, a friend returned from Tunis and waited two hours - a larger plane with holiday people probably all having checked luggage... Fraport has lost too many staff during the pandemic and luggage handling seems to be the worst sector.
@@1999fxdx You haven't been in Germany for a decade or so then. Leaving out the regular strikes by the conductors union, the many years of strict saving take its toll now. You struggle with defective tracks, minimal maintenance on the trains, shortage of staff leading to overtime and illness. And also the not so obvious things like not having heated switches anymore or cutting the bushes along the track. It's incredible how many bush fires you have in the summer so that you can hardly imagine they ever ran steam locomotives
Here in Florida they just opened up the Brightline train that connects Orlando to South Florida. The trouble is the cheap tickets are more expensive than the cost to take a flight. Also, several of the train stations don’t have good local transit options. It’s kind of frustrating, since my wife has family in South Florida, and we live near Orlando. Edit for fairness: the ticket price is a bit more expensive than the flight cost on a discount airline. However, after factoring in baggage fees, etc., the train is probably a bit cheaper.
Virtually empty BriteLine trains roll though my neighborhood several dozen times a day carrying many dozens of tons of steel per passenger. At least the airlines don't fly empty planes.
tix may be more expensive, but when you factor in the cost of driving to tbe airport, parking fees, time etc I discovered pretty quickly travelling between London and Helsinki that using a £50 "low cost airline" actually cost twice as much as a £100 "full service" carrier once that stuff was taken into account (what Ryanair called 'Helsinki' was 70 miles and a €30 train/bus ride from the city, etc)
Brightline is a good start. I have seen videos about the train ride and videos about the problems. The trains look nice outside and inside. Several videos suggest they are very comfortable. Next thing they have to adjust, is road crossing. They need to get rid of road crossings. It was done here in Denmark, around 30 years ago, on our mainlines. Local slow lines still have crossings. It sounds expensive, but the benefits are huge, from safety to maintenance and speed. I know it political and economic hard in the US, but it is worth it. In Italy and Spain (Germany partly) they have got the prices down. They have numerous train companies on the same track, so competition is fierce. You can find dirt cheap tickets. Without competition, capitalism doesn't work. In Europe, the trick is that tracks are owned by the state. They rent out track time, on certain conditions. Often the state has their own trains driving on the same tracks, to ensure connections on low insensitive periods of the day. Here in Denmark it works slightly different: State own tracks, they make schedule. That schedule, private companies can bid on, they get paid to drive this until contract ends. The state collect ticket income and manage the economic side. The companies hire personnel, buy trains and maintain them. So far it is only local lines, but the entire bus network works that way too. It works quite good. It turned out to be a long one, sry.
@@Gert-DK "In Europe, the trick is that tracks are owned by the state" The real trick is to break up vertically integrated incumbents(*) - these _always_ have an incentive to prioritise their own subsidaries over "competitors" (*) NOT the way the British did it (Railtrack was a disaster) The USA has really bad regulatory capture in many areas - rail, aviation, telecommunications and most of the time it happens at state level, not federal New Zealand's Telecoms model is worth looking at. The incumbent telco was broken up into separated(**) lines/infrastructure and dialtone/services companies. The result was an electrifying change from the country being a poster child of how NOT to privatise your state-run telco(***) to one of the most competitive markets in the world, with the newly freed-up lines company offering duct access to previous "competitors" (Imagine your telco offering to lease duct space to cablecos for the last mile rather than forcing them to string new overheads or dig streets - that's what happened) (**) Completely separate shares, board of directors and physical offices with all influences between the two parts cleaved. The "BT model" of a "chinese wall" between the two parts falls down when you realise that "head office" is overlooking everything and can direct the lines side to operate in ways that disadvantage competitores despite being notionally independent of the dialtone side (This is the model to look at in all vertically integrated market dominators - it's what the FTC did to Boeing/United Airlines in the 1930s too. They didn't for AT&T because they got the "universal service for all at an equal price" committment) (***) Quite literally - New Zealand was used as examples in economics lectures of how not to do it
This only works if travelling by train is cheaper. In the UK we have some of the most expensive train tickets in the world due to privatisation. It's cheaper to fly than train in the UK.
Yeah, it's crazy. I looked at the train to Brum and back and it was £200. Flying Southampton - Amsterdam - Birmingham (no direct flights to Brum from Southampton) return was just £10 more expensive.
while your train tickets are expensive due to "privitisation", the root cause is not simply because operators are non-state. you're just seeing the true cost of running such operations. the elephant in the room is that mass transit - especially mass transit away from hyperurban hubs, operate in the red.
_In the UK we have some of the most expensive train tickets in the world due to privatisation._ Incorrect. See TIKhistory's video on the subject: _The UK DIDN'T "Privatize" the Railways_
This is not true. The prices are higher than elsewhere in Europe as there was a decision to make rail passengers bear more of the cost instead of taxpayers. Nothing to do with privatization.
I would like to point out that efficiency difference between 40% and 25% is not "slightly lower", it is _huge,_ as if your engine is only 25% as efficient, you're burning almost twice (60% more, to be precise) as much fuel to do the same amount of work when compared to one with 40% efficiency. I also have issue with your quoted 5% efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Modern ICEs have efficiency number between 30-36% for gasoline and 40-47% for diesel _(Boretti, A.A. Energy recovery in passenger cars. J. Energy Resour. Technol. 2012, 134, 022203),_ and technologies like hybrid drives can help recover even more energy by applying regenerative braking.
@@JanNovak-pg8oe It wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison then, since with the planes he's specifically talking turbojets and turboprops, not the planes themselves. Also it would be extremely hard to come up with any kind of scientifically-correct numbers for the efficiency of a car overall, because there are _so many more_ variables at play, including, but not limited to, how it's driven, it's aerodynamic characteristics, drivetrain efficiency, load factor, hell, even tyre pressure has an effect here.
@@theAessaya True. I must say Peter did not do a good job researching for this video. 😞 Well, AFAIK he is line training captain, automobiles and the science behind them is not his field of expertise.
There's a tendency to focus on small, symbolic parts of the problem, rather than on bigger issues closer to home. Much bigger. But close to home problems, are less comfortable to address. Much easier to carry on about stuff way over there, or things that only affect you yearly.
For 90% of people flying isn't a necessity. It's a luxury and it's easy to scale down without big econonic impact. Inside of the EU where theoretically we have a good rail system flying shouldn't be the standard.
Hi Peter! I am a seaman sailing on those big container ships which you mentioned. The IMO has set a deadline for 2050 on the shipping industry to reach 0 CO2 emissions. I haven't heard of something similar in the aviation industry. And, secondly, those ships carry 150,000 Tons of cargo with a daily consumption around 150-200 tons of fuel/day. They are very efficient in this matter. All the best!
I think the issue is emission per km vs emission per hour. Planes probably less CO2 per kilometer. But an airplane takes about 3.6 seconds to cover that kilometer. Meanwhile, a container ship takes about 1.5 minutes to cover that same kilometer. It's not about how much CO2 we are emitting. It's about the how much we emit per hour. We, humans, and animals, exhale CO2, so we'll never get to zero in that sense either. But the amount per hour is so low that it's not an issue, even with the billions of people on the planet. The planet doesn't care that people travel thousands of kilometers. It cares about how much CO2 is being emitted per hour. We NEED to think this way. Measure CO2 emissions not in gram per km, but in gram per hour. Traveling The Netherlands to China by camel produces more greenhouse gasses per kilometer than an airplane seat. But a camel walks at about 1/200th the speed of the airplane. And how many people will make that trip in the first place? That's the uncomfortable truth. We are used to having this ability, to travel fast, and we don't want to give it up. I myself am a believer in traveling, for enrichment, and for counteracting the otherwise skewed impression you get from a country or culture. I think traveling gives hope. But that's exactly the problem. So... I don't think we will solve this. I honestly don't. But we should at least be honest about that.
@@starbase218 The issue is fuel per unit of capacity per kilometer. For passenger service it is fuel per person per kilometer and for freight it is fuel per ton per kilometer. Passenger service: Airlines and cruise ships tend to be very closely matched with some cruise ships being up to 10 times as efficient. Ferries average about the same as the most efficient cruise ships and if not carrying vehicles can be more than a factor of 10 more efficient than that average. Freight: that is where the 150,000 Tons @valentinalbulet4004 mentioned comes in. Ships are thousands of times more efficient than aircraft for freight, fuel is the primary cost for each, just compare the costs per ton between two port cities. Edit: I left off the reply to your primary point somehow. Per hour is far too granular, CO2 per year is far more useful, and at that scale it is easy to see it is an economics problem. Assuming equal efficiency (which is not far off between large aircraft and large ocean vessels) fuel use is related to the square or sometimes cube of velocity. So, yea, using less fuel requires moving slower. But your argument assumes that half as much stuff will be moved if it moves at half the speed, and basic economics tells us that is an incorrect relationship.
@starbase218 the calculation is normally fuel or CO2 per ton-mile or passenger-mile. Basically how much fuel does it take to move 1 ton of freight or passenger 1 mile. Flying is by far the worst, rail is lowest. Flying cargo takes 50x the CO2 that rail takes.
One of the biggest problems with rail in the US is that the tracks aren't publicly owned: they're owned by the freight train companies. Amtrak (the only passenger rail company in the US, long story) rents their use from freight companies like BNSF, and the result is that passenger rail destinations are physically limited to cities that the freight companies maintain track to, and ticket prices are very expensive because Amtrak has to pay the freight companies so much to use the tracks. They have weird work-arounds for these things too. The last time I took a train that wasn't a regular commuter train, I was going from Orange County (suburb of LA, about 60 miles to the southeast) to Sacramento, which is California's state capital. There isn't a rail line that connects those two places. Instead, I rode an Amtrak bus through all the OC train stations and LA's Union Station, then over the LA mountains to Bakersfield, where I transferred to a train that went to Sacramento. I enjoyed the trip, but it was ridiculous not to be able to take a train from LA (and my local station that runs commuter trains to and from LA every day) to Sacramento. That should be one of the busiest train routes in the state, and they don't even have track for it!
@@littlewink7941 really? Where does the money come from if you don't count taxes? If they were economically viable, you wouldn't need to tax them because they'd make money on their own!
You got that right. Twice as expensive as flying the all 737 airline and 4x more expensive than driving. Someone's definitely paying for Amtrak's new Siemens railcars and Siemens Charger locomotives with Cummins Diesel Engines... and it's NOT just the taxpayers. It's most definitely the riders. Yet they're still limited to 79 MPH (though they're capable of 125 MPH), and have dozens of stops. The posted legal speed limit for pickup trucks in Texas is 85 MPH... making the pickup truck have a seemingly minor, yet significant, speed advantage over the train, especially in the case of new pickups equipped with tech features adopted from the airline industry (namely, adaptive cruise control (aka auto throttle), onboard radar systems, and an autopilot feature adopted straight from the 737, that some truck makers call super cruise, full self driving, or even... autopilot).
@@truckerzachbell If Amtrak trains didn't have to keep stopping and waiting for freight trains, it would definitely be more efficient, at the least. It's federal law that passenger trains take precedence over freight trains, but this is NEVER enforced, for some reason.
Ha, Amtrak might disappoint, but it’s nothing like the unusable Scandinavian trains Mentour refers to. Thousands commute every day on Amtrak NE corridor. Not that expensive either, $82 NY to DC
@@aprilkurtz1589 most US rail is owned by the freight train companies, not the public. Amtrak waits for the freight trains because the Amtrak is on the freight trains' tracks, not the country's tracks.
Love your videos, but in this one I would have liked to hear more comparisons on CO2 emissions per passenger (or per weight measurement for cargo). Even though jet engines may use fuel more “efficiently” than other engines, they are also burning a lot more fuel per passenger (or cargo weight) than other modes of transportation.
literally made the same comment, I get it being invested and made a living out of aviation, but being factual and intellectually honest are values that I care a lot about. Also impressed to see many other comments like ours.
jepp. It was exactly my same toughts. Also a big problem is the tax zero for airline fuel in europe. It should be also zero for train power...or airlines should pay also the vat taxes. Another issues is the incubation of co2 in higher air level should be more harmful than on earth level.
@@LittleSpot They probably should pay VAT for fuel (though probably not for green fuel) but for short haul it would only amount to a few pounds per passenger. The airlines would probably argue that if they did, then maybe they should get a rebate on the other taxes/fees they do pay because they don't pay VAT. It's not the silver bullet some seem to think it is.
Advantage with electric trains and cars is that they are as climate friendly as the source of the electricity. In France we typically operate 80%+ from nuclear and hydro sources, remaining small percentage of gas for peaker plants. The other thing with France is the existence of a world leading high speed train network, and the fact that the big cities are quite widely distributed as the area of France is the second biggest country in Europe (after Sweden)
the problem is one trainline is emiting huge amount of CO2 to be created and/or maintained. 2 you can not be sure about the electricity source since it is now commun with europe that why also green energy contract are bullshit since the electricity is produced globally in europe, 3) diesel train style exist and are mainly used in region and often not take in account in number whereas ATR72 and stuff are . sorry but train is not ecologic either . number are just turned to be shiny by some organism which are funder partly by the SNCF (hello GIEC). and of course in this number petrol refining are giving to aviation and it therefore made rafinment industry carbon neutral so a good way to bring the number up. to finish the marginal kw/h to be produce to replace all aviation industrie is huge and will surely not be produce by a clean way (more porbably fossil based).
However. Most people don't understand that it's not just CO2 emissions. If you for instance take a nuclear power plant, then consider the generated heat. This heat raises the temperature of the atmosphere, which somehow must leave the planet, but it cannot, because only X amount of heat can dissipate back into space. People look at CO2 as the most evil thing. It contributes to an acceleration of the problem, yes. But the true problem is the heat generated. A Joule is a Joule, and eventually, Joules will heat the atmosphere, and too many Joules won't get emitted back out into space. :-(
I would take the examples of what happened in Italy (and possibly) Spain: the train became more useful than the plane. Italy has almost no domestic flights. Ticket prices are kept low due to competition. It’s all down to putting as investment into the rail as road and airport.
It's faster too. Usually I arrived in Marseille around 30 minutes earlier using train. THe traffic in paris could get pretty bad during certain hours if I ought to get to the airport.
@@nntflow7058 it’s a good deal less annoying too. Queues, cramped seating… Even in a crowded train, one can move around, work and have access to one’s baggage.
Rail is pretty nice in Italy indeed. A bit too many connections for my touristy tastes, but at least it's fast, reasonably priced & gets you to lots of places.
Thanks for covering this debate.Ever since the '70s and the growth of higher-speed rail, there has been a rule of thumb within railway circles that any journey that rail can do centre-to-centre in 3hrs or under is one where air cannot compete on time. That rule obviously related to business travel - 6hr was considered the boundary for leisure trips. Those times have effectively expanded in the newer security environment. As you say, perceived reliability of the ground connection factors into this. More directly related to your channel, electric taxi is definitely something I'd be happy to see covered. Thanks again \m/
@@MentourNow No, just no. A modern turbo system is up to about 40% efficient, similar to a turbofan. They have to be to meet Euro standards. There is VASTLY less drag without wings, and with the lower speed (aerodynamic drag loss being proportional to the cube of speed after all). You might lose 10-20% in the transmission, but you lose masses in the coupling of the turbine output to the air too.
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used: leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow 5% is definitely not accurate for an average car. One reason being that hardly any cars use normally aspirated engines these days. And for an apples-to-apples comparison, you would also need to take into account the extra work that planes need to do to travel vertically, which cars just don't need to do at all.
@@MentourNow It's great that jet engines are becoming more efficient, but using efficiencies to compare transport types pointless. The global warming potential of a jetliner is nearly three times as damaging as a car (per passenger-km). I get the feeling the rhetoric about climate change within the airline industry is totally subjective.
you are contradicting yourself....because cars as a whole are the biggest contributor to co2 as a single mode of transportation..because they have the most milage at the end of the day....@@ChrisTaylor-NEP
I recently flew from the USA to go to a meeting in Leeds. I was surprised to find that there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore. The only flights are connecting through Belfast, Dublin, or Amsterdam. The train to Leeds is not too long, about 2.5 hours, but it leaves from the Kings Cross station that is on the other side of London from Heathrow, so you have to add another hour of taking at least two trains with bags or a taxi. For someone already in central London, the train is faster, but after traveling 10 hours from the USA, the multiple trains to get to Leeds is too much.
LBA is, for all intents and purposes, a Regional Airport. It IS an International Airport but it's always been a small one and I wasn't aware that it ever had direct flights to/from the the US. Maybe get a map out before you fly next time as Manchester is just up the road. Whilst you're at it maybe just do the most basic of research full stop and you might find the things your complaining about don't need to be issues. "Is there a direct train from Heathrow to Kings Cross? Yes, there is a direct train departing from Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3 station station and arriving at King's Cross St. Pancras station station. Services depart every 10 minutes, and operate every day. The journey takes approximately 55 min." - You could've taken a direct train
@@egpx So at what point does this " I was surprised to find that there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore." not say EXACTLY that?! It would be a bit hard for Eric to be surprised about flights not existing anymore if he hadn't believed that such routes existed. Maybe YOU should read better yourself before telling others to do so 🤔
@@C2K777 the phrase ‘I was surprised to find there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore” say absolutely nothing about the availability of direct flights between Leeds and the US. Eric was talking about the domestic flight he could have connected on to which was a thing until Covid caused the route to be cancelled.
As someone who has traveled fairly frequently from a minor airport internationally via a hub airport, my experience has been that taking a train for the first leg is much more reliable. If there is a problem with my flight I'm probably going to take a train anyway. If I'm not flying onwards it makes even less sense to fly. It would take me an hour to get to the airport maybe 30 mins- hour to get from my destination airport to the city, and then I still have to deal with security check in etc. Or I can take a train without any of those issues and relax for a few hours.
Much agreed. I was once re-routed on a flight itinerary to Katowice, Poland via Warsaw (originally planed via Frankfurt). The last leg, a 20 minute flight, was delayed by 3 hours that day. I could have taken a train, or even a bus, directly from Warsaw and reached my final destination sooner.
@@sncy5303Considering that there are trains around the world that don't have that issues, lack of investment is the problem, not poor technology. If aviation subsidies were cut and train usage would increase, you wouldn't have the same problem. It's just like in the US were cars are heavily subsidised but trains are not so everyone is obliged to drive for anything.
@@ironcito1101No need to wait 5 years with half full planes subsidised by everyone's taxes, just ban them. There is already strong competition on rails, plane are just useless on these routes.
at a 2.5 hour rail trip threshold; there is a good chance the train trip will take less time than going through security and boarding the plane will, anyway.
Oh, absolutely. Make no mistake, I think the idea behind this law makes sense. But the alternatives MUST work and be price competitive for adaptation to happen.
Austria has also a law banning short-haul flights, and Austria heavily subsidizes railway and public transport: for EUR 1000 per year per person you can buy a ticket for almost all ground-based public transport without usage limit.
5% efficiency for cars? I think you can get any percentage you want by "tweeking" the parameters that you use in your survey! Furthermore, the concept of "efficiency" is basically: (things sought / the things that cost). In another words, a gasoline engine with 25% mechanical efficiency is considered a lousy mover, while with 75% of heat generation is considered a good heat generator! Another argument is whether we consider number of passengers and distance when evaluating "efficiency", or the convenience of moving people rather freely for moderate distances (say in the range of 80 to 120 km). If so, then "efficiency" becomes a "relative" measure! However, from a thermodynamics perspective, the "thermal efficiency" of a gasoline I.C.E is between 25 to 29%. Diesel I.C.E is between 27 to 32%. While jet engines (basically gas turbines) are between 32 to 36%. Steam turbines on the other hand, are between 62 to 68% thermal efficiency (some are even more). So, scientifically speaking, these are the ranges of efficiencies we are dealing with and should consider when we evaluate various technologies, (Carnot cycle, Otto cycle, etc.). Needless to say, it is not fair to compare apples with oranges. Each move technology developped to cover what other technology cannot!
Those are before you add a turbo - ICE can go over 50% efficiency with a turbocharger (30-40% would be more normal, similar to multi-spool turbofans, funny that). Its why you can barely buy a car without one now.
@@mycosys Turbos are tools to make more power by "shoving" more air in the engine to allow burning more fuel! Therefore, thermal efficiency is very slightly improved in as much as you augment gas turbine efficiency into the I.C.E. i.e. the 32 to 36% efficiency.
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. As you write, it's all about the total numbers. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used: leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow Thank you. So basically we are comparing real life cycle of each mode of transport to fuel consumption. This is fair comparison. It also sheds light on how we can improve poor performers. For example in the case of cars perhaps carpooling would be a positive thing, among other solutions. What I meant by comparing apples with oranges is that it is unfair to compare air travel technology to land travel technology because they are not interchangeable. We need them both! Therefore the focus should be on enhancing each technology to the best possible within its field, and limit comparisons to members of like technology. I enjoy your topics and that's why I am encouraged to participate.
I appreciate you bringing this up. I think there are some things that need to be better considered to paint a more accurate picture of what is happening and what can be done: 1. Engine efficiency - While I don't agree with all of your figures, for example a modern car engine efficiency, while generally very poor, isn't that poor, a big thing to consider is drag. A plane doing say 500 knots through the air, even up in the much thinner stratosphere, creates a lot of drag. Drag is generally a square factor with speed and thus power needed increases by a cubic factor as power is force times distance. Also, it is well known that jet engines perform most efficiently at or near max throttle. ICE engines are still used in cars specifically because they are more efficient at lower power levels than jet turbines. We tried the gas turbine car and it failed. Even in the Ukraine war, the USA cited the M1 Abrams tank as a sub-optimal choice over the diesel powered Leopard 2 tank in part because of the gas turbine engine guzzling down way too much fuel when not moving the tank around at max speed. 2. End to end efficiency for a trip. So you look at France on a popular high speed TGV route. France for one does a lot of nuclear power and they share power with neighboring Germany who does all fossil fuel and mixes in intermittent renewable energy when the wind blows and when the Sun shines as well as buying nuclear power from France when the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining, which is a lot of the time in Germany. So now France has a relatively green source to power trains that pull the power off of overhead 25 kV AC lines. When you want to ride the train, you just walk up and get on and the train whisks you away. A little bit later after zooming through the countryside on high speed rail you are at your destination and just walk off and are on your way. The TGV train uses up to 16 MWs of power to quickly get you to your destination. So now you look at end-to-end airliner efficiency. To get to the capacity of a TGV train, you have to pull out your A380 airliner. The A380 airliner consumes something like 600 MWs of chemical energy that comes from a combination of polluting dino juice from the ground and inefficiently produced SAF fuel in order to fly through the air at the high speeds it goes at. Notice that 600 MWs of power is a lot more than 16 MWs for the high speed train with similar carrying capacity, plus it has a much dirtier energy source. So you get to the terminal building. You need to wait in line to go through security checks. Gotta take time to check your bags. They need time to move all of your stuff onto the plane. Need to wait for your boarding, call, etc. Delays, delays, and at some point, likely over an hour after you got to the airport, you are finally in the air. Often it is 2+ hours you are on the ground after arriving at the airport before finally getting into the air. So now you fly at a high rate of speed making up for some of that lost time on a regional flight. But then you land, need to taxi around where the engines are wasting a lot of fuel because they cannot operate efficiently at taxiway speed, instead wasting gobs of fuel, pull up to the terminal, eventually deplane, wait for your bags, etc, and maybe in an hour or so you leave the airport after landing and getting everything in order and are on your way. So yeah, that 600 MWs of dirty, climate damaging energy to do the same thing as a high speed train in France that is 'only' using up to 16 MWs of power and getting it from a cleaner power source is significant. To really even it out, maybe you say the plane was only effectively doing that kind of energy burn for half of the time a train would be doing its equivalent energy burn when you add up the end to end efficiency. You still have 300 MW versus 16 MW. 16 MWs is a lot less. I am saying the train would be 20x more efficient per person all things considered, and it is using a far cleaner energy source than a plane is at the same time. 3. The problem with Europe is moving your freight around is hard. You need lots of trucks for this and more and more you use planes for the job. Your high speed rail was so narrowly minded focused on moving people around, you forgot that you also need to move stuff around. This is a problem in the USA as well where there is Amazon Prime and their associated fleet of Boeing 767's, the planes passenger airliners are dumping overboard for other planes like the Boeing 787, spewing out enormous emissions to do Amazon 1 day Prime delivery. (So no, you didn't save that much moving to more efficient planes, the older planes are working harder than ever moving freight around.) Trucks are not fast enough and especially American trains are not fast enough for Amazon Prime delivery. But everybody wants their stuff to show up right away, so Amazon has a very heavy worked fleet of Boeing 767's spewing out enormous emissions to move all of this freight around. Amazon Prime is far from the only air freight operator around and this seems to be where most of the older planes are going. They don't go out of service, but instead often become workhorse freight planes and their emissions are huge. 4. So what is really needed around the world is high speed passenger and high speed freight using tracks more intelligently for both and more point-to-point rail lines to make it all work. The problem with rail is it wasn't fast enough. So now we start doing more high speed trains with passengers and we start to solve the problem. But then you need to add freight back in with both low speed frieght and sharing the high speed lines going at high speeds and the picture starts rounding out and really working. 5. It seems like the problem with getting more to move down rail lines effectively and get the jobs at hand done the way it is being demanded of them is more of a management problem. The technology clearly points to we need to do more trains. They are just more efficient and can be made to haul far more stuff around far more cleanly. It is just when the politics and overall management of the rail system is broken, then you end up taking routes that are far more damaging to the environment such as driving more trucks around and flying more airliners around. Trucks and especially airliners will never hold a candle to what a train can do efficiency wise. 6. With "the hydrogen future" of air travel, don't forget that highly compressed hydrogen is a huge explosion hazard as well as liquid hydrogen that is so hard to keep it cold enough to stay a liquid. Hydrogen is also the most energetic chemical rocket fuel that we have that we have used to power rockets such as the Space Shuttle, which a hydrogen explosion after a solid rocket booster cut into the hydrogen fuel lines / center tank did lead to the destruction of the rocket. All hands were lost only on impact with the ocean because the explosion happened so high up that there was barely any atmosphere left for an explosion to be possible. (Chemical explosions just can't happen in the vacuum of space.) So when you have a loss of containment where hydrogen rapidly expands out and rapidly mixes with atmospheric oxygen and then ignites, you have a big boom. Now say you fill up a major international airport like Charles de Gaulle with large airliners fueled up for international flights around the globe with massive hydrogen storage tanks on site at the airport. And these will be physically massive tanks as hydrogen is a low density fuel with pressure and temperature issues around sticking it on an airliner which is a major problem when you are trying to fly somewhere on hydrogen with room left over for paying passengers. So say there is a fueling mishap at the gate while pumping hydrogen into a parked airliner and this leads to the airliner losing containment of its massive store of hydrogen and it all goes boom! Suddenly you have a massive orgy of explosions as this chain reacts through the whole airport, all of the airliners at the airport, and the huge hydrogen storage tanks. A huge mushroom cloud forms over what used to be the airport as well as leveling everything for miles around the airport and even knocking planes out of the sky that were in the general vicinity of the airport from the massive orgy of shock waves hitting the planes until they structurally failed and dropped out of the sky or blew up mid-air. This would likely end "the hydrogen future" of air travel if not an incident before it. Imagine this but on a much bigger scale with some of the explosions 1,000x more powerful: th-cam.com/video/FsS3HxrXhsQ/w-d-xo.html The explosions at the airport would probably look more like this: th-cam.com/video/993wlZ6XFSs/w-d-xo.html
Good points. Especially last one, even fuel right now is not hermetically contained and leaking by a little, especially on refueling. But jet fuel is hard to get ignited...compared to hydrogen. And hydrogen is also VERY corrosive.
As pointed out by some, The location of Airports are adding extra layer of complexity. By nature they have to be located a bit farther from city centres and even most of them now a days are completely outside the city limits. The public infrastructure to connect those airports with the city are not that convenient in many countries especially in the developing world. Which may result in additional dependencies on motorised vehicles which again comes at great environmental cost. Airports would need supporting public transport infrastructure which adds to both development cost and travel cost.
I don't know about the US, but every major European airport I've visited has had a dedicated rail connection. For smaller airports where only a few planes land each day they tend to use buses instead. The developing world isn't really something I'd be worrying about in the context of short haul flights, since bus travel is far cheaper than flying in those countries.
I can understand it in France, they have an excellent and affordable rail system. In the UK, train travel is so expensive that it is often cheaper to fly.
Also, most trains that compete with regional flights in France are powered by electricity, and France went big on nuclear power plants while having little to no oil.
I've only ever looked at prices from London to Scotland, but I've never seen a train ticket that's less than twice the price of an EasyJet or Ryanair flight. Admittedly the last time I did it must have been 5 years or so ago, so perhaps things have changed.
@@TiagoJoaoSilvathose genius have started shutting down the nukaplants to please the ecologists like in germany. Which now allow them to restart their coal powerplants… Because You know Save gaia and all…
As an American, I will say that not only are the rail networks here primarily geared towards freight, the freight lines own the majority of the railroads here. They seem to prioritize their own trains over passenger trains, even with laws in place that state they're supposed to give priority to passenger trains. If you ever take an Amtrak train on a long-haul trip, you'll get to your destination....eventually. There's a very good chance you'll be several hours late arriving, though. Hope you don't have to be anywhere by a specific time.
The biggest issue with the French short-haul restrictions being implemented in the US is, first, with a poor rail system for commuter passenger travel, it would effect very, very routes. Additionally, as most Americans are used to having to drive much further than Europeans just on a daily commute, if the time convenience of a short haul flight were taken away, the rail option would need to be significantly less expensive, for Americans to not just choose to drive instead.
I agreed with most of the statements in this video, especially the "make the trains cheaper" as a more reasonable solution. But there are aspects of airplane pollution that are not specifically linked to their CO2 emission such as their contrails (I encourage you to look it up, but don't get confused with the chem-trail nonsense). Another aspect is that the pollution occurs at a different altitude than most other sources, which also has an impact. Anyway, it was an interesting video.
Yeah, ppl tend to forget about the other pollutants that burnt fuel (gas, diesel, and jet) produce. It's not just about the CO2. Add in that most of France's rail network is electrified and it should mean marginally cleaner air overall. And cleaner air is better than not-cleaner air IMO.
In 2022, China emitted 38.6 times more greenhouse gases than did international aviation. Anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change should be screaming at China, not aviation.
Our mayor put a 30 million dollar train starion in our small city. Almost nobody uses it because it costs hundreds of dollars to travel less than 2 hours.
As a matter of strictly personal preference and driven out of convenience rather than any exogenous concerns, if I could reach a given destination by rail rather than air for the same cost, end to end, within 1 hour total travel time, I would happily take the train. Unfortunately, the United States is not set up this way.😢
And even worse is that about seventy year ago in the USA on many routes we could do what you described. But trains were too old-fashioned. We let them die off. 😢
@@erniecolussy1705 Some routes in the US make sense for trains, Boston-NYC-Washington DC, some Texas routes, Tampa-Orlando-Miami, LA-San Francisco, LA-Las Vegas and Portland-Seattle-Vancouver are all routes that a proper TGV-like service could make sense.
@@solracer66 we are quite simply lacking infrastructure. If rail lines had been developed in parallel with interstate development, it would be very different. Air infrastructure however is very well developed. If I had the money, I could be on a plane at a tiny regional airport within 1 hour of my location at any given time(RV Nomad) most of the time. I see railroad sidings everywhere but no passenger trains. Why? Freight moves effectively from hub to hub. People do not.
@@solracer66 California has the high speed rail project already being built. It's suffered from serious corruption, push back from everyone, including the same people who'd benefit from it, and instead of taking the Japanese approach of a "proof of concept" by connecting SF-LA, they're trying to connect every population center in the middle of the state. Completion date is already pushing past 2030, despite the project having been approved in 2008. It's a mess, but it needs to happen, I'll just be too old to benefit from it by the time it enters service.
Not taking any sides here! Aren't the bullet trains electric? If they consume no fuel (at least not directly) wouldn't that really make them several time less emisive than aircraft?
@@viinisaari- Depends how that electricity is made and how far the train is from that power source. Electric lines have loses the further the electricity is transferred. Trains also need tracks. Those tracks need to be built. Depending on the landscape that those tracks have to be built in determines how much greenhouse gas is produced building them (mountainous terrain will be much more for example). Research “green” power sources. They are often not as green as they want you to believe. Everything has pros and cons and nothing is for free.
@@gpaull2 While that is true, we are comparing only the fuel. Jet fuel also needs to be manufactured and transported. Airports also need to be built. If you go down that rabbit hole, you'll need to comapre an awful lot of amount of data. So we stick to just emissions.
Let me first say I love planes and flying and your channel is great. There is one factor though which skews some of the comparisons you've made, that is that air travel is only available to a certain percent of the worlds population whereas all the other carbon contributrions mentioned are from a much bigger amount of people. That means on a per capita basis air travel is still a very high carbon contributor. It's great to hear of the new efficient engines and new technologies being explored so hopefully we can all keep flying! And yes those ships are really dirty!
Used your summary in my comment :) Don't agree with everything you say here*, but you still summarize the misconception about the aviation industry's CO2e impact well. * (I also wish "we can all keep flying", but realistically, at the current rate of flying, it's quite sure that we won't be able to and shouldn't).
Another issue with electric planes is that today we restrict lithium ion batteries onboard for very good reasons, imagine having a 15 ton li/ion battery on board, and now imagine anything going even slightly wrong with it... welp...
Good point. Fire fighting has usually involved removing one side of the "fire triangle": fuel, oxidizer, heat. High energy density batteries keep all of those in a sealed package. The electric company I retired from had several lithium storage battery fires; one killed a firefighter. It will take a revolution in battery design to make them safe for aviation, I think.
No, not an issue. Is well known that Li-Ion battery fires can be traced to a specific cause... Bad design, bad manufacturing, poor maintenance and so on. IMO any aircraft using batteries would address every one of these known potential issues and typical certification and regulation should ensure that flying in such aircraft shouldn't be any less safe than today's aircraft.
Well a diesel engine is around 35-40% and petrol is around 25% as far as i know. Not sure how well pushing trains would work here in Sweden, the trains struggle a lot already to keep the schedules and then you have the fact there is only so much room on the rails. Also we could make container ships a thing of the past if we stopped production from going to China instead of local production, then with what 20000 containers on one ship one could argue that they are not that bad considering the huge amount of goods they can move.
The 5% is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. In the video I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to read more about this, here is the source: leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow No, thats not the comparison he makes. He tries to argue the ICE isnt at full power so it isnt as efficient. Then compares it to the bare efficiency of the axial turbine at full power. Its deliberately misleading
@@MentourNow thanks for the link, as a trucker my tool is also sensitive to weight bit like a plane, cause the more weight on the truck the less cargo i can haul, which in turn lowers the profits.
Japan manages precise, almost flawless train schedules. Platforms have marks for each kind of train that identifies where the doors will be when the train arrives; they don't miss the mark by more than a centimeter. No matter how you cut it, trains are far easier to get to and board than airplanes and most are far more comfortable than any airplane economy seat--that's true even in the U.S. which otherwise has an abominable passenger rail system. There's stuff to see out the windows on a train. Obviously, over certain distances, planes have the time advantage. For tourists, it's not near enough of an advantage to opt out of the train alternative. I'm not dissing flying. And I'm especially not dissing planes when it comes to the environment. There are plenty of reasons why they are the default travel mode. However, trains are simply a far more pleasant way to travel. Planes are anything but a pleasant way to travel--even if the seat is up in front. I'm a subsriber and I really enjoy your posts. Thanks.
The worst part of flying is the airport, especially the security theatre, baggage friction and cost in time and money. In the US I chose to drive 3000 miles over flying but would prefer to stay put.
Living in Japan I loved the trains; expensive but fast and clean, available. What I hated while living in France were the trains, dirty, difficult and not convenient.
@@jm3digital The French railway isn't as good as Japan's but we've always found the TGVs clean and comfortable. One of the things we loved about Japan railway stations were all the vending machines with almost anything available, including beer and saki. Been a few years so I don't know it that's still true.
Your chances of getting sexually assaulted as a woman travelling alone on a plane are significantly lower though. Which I would say definitely boosts the comfort level.
It would be interesting if you could do a video about the transportation problems here in Canada. We live in a very large country with a relatively small population where some of our major cities are 4-5 days apart by land transport and some of our more northern communities don't even have year round land routes available. I remember Europeans, when I lived in Germany, being astounded when I would mention driving 2-3 days to visit relatives. Anyway just a thought. We do have some unique challenges here.
Canada is definitely a good case for aviation. The carbon footprint of all the needed infrastructure to connect disparate areas (not just construction, but also maintenance which way too often forgotten) really makes it the best alternative. The low population density also makes it the most economically viable.
50% of population of canada is in the montreal- windsor corridor - an additional 8% live in the Calgary-Edmonton Corridor. The dense greater Vancouver area is another 7% of canadian population. so nearly 2/3 of the population is as accessible to the vast majority of trips, as it would be in Europe. High speed rail wihin these area's ( or rail in Vancouver) would dramatically improve transportation infrastructure in Canada.
So true, my former home town (2,500 ppl) in Northwest Territories lost its jet route- and was replaced with a small twin engine 19 seater. The road distance is 1300 km to the first major air hub (Edmonton) by land, or 750km in a small, loud 19 seater.
Lot of the people in this comment section seem to have zero empathy for people of ordinary means, trying to budget a trip to visit family at least once a year. @@rb239rtr
Haha so true. I can't tell you how many times English or European visitors to Florida also want to stop by the Grand Canyon and Hollywood-- dreaming it's a day or two drive away just like London to Berlin or Berlin to Rome. They just have NO idea about the size of North America.
French watcher here ! I get what you say, that our railway is one of the most well-developed, but even people here find it really expensive and not trustworthy. The train industry in France hasn't stopped deteriorating over the years, with stations closing every year, prices that have been skyrocketting since the end of WWII ... As soon as you get out of big cities, you can't do anything without a car. So now we have an industry where a train ticket costs almost as much as a plane ticket, but the same journey can take up to 6x more time by train for almost the same price. As for reliability, it is a common joke material over here ("the SNCF wishes you a happy 2015 year and apologizes for the delay"). The car is more common by far. So, sad to say, but even some of the best railway network is still not attractive at all, and you made an excellent point when you said that our gov is not making train look better, it is only making plane look worse.
La frequentation des trains TER, qui servent les plus petites gares susceptibles de fermer, a augmente de 75% entre 2002, année de devolution aux regions, et 2022. Connaissez vous un réseau qui a fait mieux?
I still laugh thinking about how Lewis Hamilton complained about the military flyovers at F1 races on environmental grounds. Not only are the flyovers good training (precise time over target training to be specific), but that fuel would just be burned doing something else if not there, those pilots are gonna get their flight hours one way or another.
Adding early arrival at the airports for checkin/security, and waiting for luggage after the flight, plus commuting to/from the airports would often - for short flights up to some hours - put the train into advantage anyway.
well not really if u travel with hands luggage only. i usually arrive 40 min before departure, use fast track to pass security (included in amex card), and on landing i go straight away where i need. ah, and airport is much closer for me by uber vs train station
@@Sky10811 Even with hands luggages intercity train gets the upper hand especially for 120-1000km journey. No hekkin' super tight security checks like airport, only mandatory ID checks when you its almost time for your train to depart. All i need is to arrive 20 to 10 minutes before departure time to print the ticket (which can be booked online)band prepare passport/ID cards, stand in line for at least 5 minutes before enter the platform and boom, off you go. The only main hassle regarding to the cleanliness mostly depends on how skillful the maintenance crews on the stations its stopping by to do a quick cleanups here and there while the passengers were embarked/disembarked from the train which mostly only takes around 10 to 25 minutes each time. While for the comfort issues it depends on the class of the train you order which usually divided into 2 sections like airplane (but with more people on board). Pretty pleasant i would say since most of the times the journey to the airport itself can become a huge nightmare because in the city that i lived, most of the times, the traffic were absolutely against me everytime i have to go to the airport
Hi Mentour, I think you might disagree with me... The longest city-pair in France (I can find) is between Calais and Marseille is about 890km (556 miles), which is about 2 hour of flying. There are far closer city pairs that have significantly higher demands than the 2 cities I've mentioned above. Now here's where you might disagree with, in opinion, if a flight is less than 1000km or not flying to an isolated island, airplanes are not being used to their maximum potential. So given that Calais and Marseille is less than 1000km and none of them are on an isolated island, I personally think that limiting planes to longer flights and to isolated islands is a good move, not just for the environment but also for utilisation.
As someone who lives on an isolated island, I agree completely! Not that my residence has any bearing on the subject matter 😁 Considering the increased wait times and restrictions on air travel introduced this century, short haul flights are a bigger nuisance for the traveler than before. Western Europe is doing a massive push to upgrade and better integrate their railway systems. France already has a great system, but in 10-15 years, when everyone has cought up, we might be looking at the rebirth of rail...😊
There's a train service here locally. I've never used it, because it never operates at times or days when I would be able to use it. It operates towards the city five mornings per week, and the opposite direction on the same evenings. No service on weekends, and forget about going towards the city in the afternoon or vice-versa...
Electric ground taxiing, being able to do your own push-back and turn with an electric motor inside the nose wheel, and electric replacing uses where you'd usually turn your APU on are really interesting to me and would LOVE to hear more about all those topics! Aviation moves very slowly with completely new technologies though, and wonder how long it'll take for this kind of stuff to show on commercial jets, any chance it could make a debut on business jets instead?
This has been repeatedly looked at and the mass penalty is stated as not worth it, whilst proposals to use ground tugs out to the runway threshold fall over on airframes not being designed for the loading of being pulled around by the front wheel in the kind of ways (and speeds) that ground movements currently require
There is A VERY good reason why electric planes and even cars not really a thing (there are some, but not much, they are used more because of restrictions, subsidiaries or novelty, or, as most owners think less ecological damage that will be fixed by hauling around dozens of kilos of dead weight and generating power for it by burning stuff). They may be less effective, but in terms of energy per kilo...batteries suck ass and gasoline reigns supreme. It is not the first time electric cars fight ICE, but we can only observe what will happen.
Those electric features have to get power from somewhere, and the biggest limiting factor on an airplane is weight, rather than space. Adding batteries to an existing airplane design, would reduce capacity for fuel, cargo and/or passengers that plane could carry, making it more expensive for everyone. My guess would be that 'electric' taxiing would be powered *by* the APU, rather than one of the main engines. That would still save a lot of fuel, even if it isn't the absolutist solution people think might be better. In practice, most planes have to run the APU just to keep the A/C on if they want the shut down the engines until ground-power can be connected.
@@miscbits6399 The mass penalty is under 300 lb or 135 kg, and if the aircraft can decrease by that much fuel (that is loaded to allow for taxiing delays and just plain taxiing fuel), then the mass penalty is already nullified.
@@MottyGlix except that engines must be started, tested and fully warmed up before hitting the runway threshold If delayed on the taxiway behind a tug there needs to be some form of power supplied to keep cabin air conditioning operating - having heavy umbilicals between the tug and aircraft pretty much negates the purpose of proposals. If running on internal power, the battery mass needs to be taken into account for such eventualities You can't put self-propulsion electric motors on the main gear as the brakes are already taking up most of the volume (aircraft brakes are HUGE) whilst putting them on the nosegear gets back to the kinds of airframe stresses that the aircraft weren't designed for and which would incur mass penalties at design stage (at least with a tug there's a possiblity of some kind of ties to the main gear to reduce stresses, however airframe stresses from towing are a big issue, especially if an emergency stop is ever needed by the tug - that could send the aircraft straight to the scrapyard. This is why tugs are extremely slow and and use feather touch acceleration/deceleration In short, the airframe mass penalties whether towing or self propelled are significantly more than the mass of electric motors, 135kg doesn't take account of the need for batteries (a 737 weighs upwards of 30 tons. That's a lot of inertia to overcome) and the fuel savings aren't as high as advocates like to make out Fixating on fuel doesn't help - Jet engines use 30% more fuel than piston ones however they're LIGHTER and you need FEWER of them for any given pwoer output, plus they are 95% or lower maintenance cost (it wasn't uncommmon for 4 engine piston planes like Connies to arrive after a long flight with one engine feathered and even with 4 engines working it took around 9 hours to turnaround an aircraft due to per-flight required engine maintenance). As Elon is fond of saying: "the best part is no part" - adding electric motors to drive an aircraft around on the ground is extra expense, reduced range and a potential failure point that needs careful evaluation - otherwise you risk walking yourself into a "VC10" design - these were created to work from hot'n'high airports whose runways weren't long enough to support 707s - by the time they were ready to fly, the airports involved had already solved the issue by extending their runways (for a total cost across all the airports involved of less than ONE VC10, let alone the design program). This left the aircraft as a lame duck as its fuel consumption and range had been compromised in order to perform the intended task, meaning it was uneconomic to fly on normal routes
Air transport is really very efficient and has very comparable or lower CO2 emission than cars. My 2004 Peugeot 407 has 155gCO2/km a320 has around 55g/pass/km. (@MentourNow or any other pilot: please share some fuel consumption data. :) ). The problem, I see with air transport is that it increases the distance people are prepared to travel. Example: a friend was doing an exchange, year in Lisbon (2600 km by road from me) and I came for a visit for New Year's . I would never make this visit if, I would travel by land. The problem is increased distances people travel, not the polution per km. If you HAVE TO go somewhere, you might just as well take an airplane.
I do agree, and am a big fan of aviation, but it’s quite telling that a new A320 has 55g/pass/km. if your Peugeot had 5 passengers in, then it’s emissions would be 31g/pass/km - and that’s an almost 20 year old inefficient ICE. The airline quoted figures always assume a full passenger cabin - if the cabin isn’t full then those figures can drastically increase. From the TGV website, they quote their figure at 3.2g/pass/km, again this would be assuming a full train. That is an astronomical difference! I love how much more efficient aircraft have become, and will continue to fly, but I think it is obviously that despite their efficiencies, airplanes in general just need a hell of a lot of fuel to fly
Moving long distance travel to trains is absolutely key to pushing down transport emissions. Depending on the datasets and methodology, high-speed rail has about 10-50% of the emissions per Person-Kilometer of airliners. The main hindrance to that in the EU are incompatible rail standards and the horrible state of German rail, which blocks traffic from east to west.
Instead of banning shorthaul flights, simply make the trains better, and people will switch. Banning flights just confirms that airlines are a better value for the people.
Hi Peter! I really like your videos, thank you for your thorough coverage :) I'd like to add something here, it bothered me a bit: Yes, jet engines have relatively high THERMODYNAMIC efficiencies of around 40%, while car engines are around 25%(gas) to 30%(diesel). HOWEVER, the energy needed for a set distance and weight is much less for transport on wheels (cars or trains) than in the air. The total energy, and thus emissions, is very high for air travel, even though the engines are more efficient. The efficiency mentioned only measures the ratio of mechanical energy (output) to chemical energy (input), not how much is emitted for a certain route. As an engineer I wanted to place this here because I get how confusing some terminology might be when it gets thrown around in the heated debate around climate change.
The energy invested when ascending is partly compensated by the lower energy demand of the engines while descending. The fact hat jets fly very high where the air density is much lower than on the ground benefits the plane. Finally, an airliner has a much more streamlined shape than a car, and not resistance induced by the wheels. Take all that into account, compute it carefully, and if you make no errors, you might be astonished by the result.
This is the source I used, but note that it is about the efficiency of the CAR, in a typical car journey (including braking and accelerating at the traffic lights) not the raw efficiency of the engine. The same goes for the 25% and 40% efficiencies of turboprops and jets: leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow I would like to make a rough estimation to check these claims. @MentourNow Could you provide the maximum number of passengers that can be taken and the average Kg of fuel used for a Paris -> Marseille using a recent / efficient aircraft, including taxing phases. Side note : Paris isn't exactly there on the map of France (yes, I'm picky).
@@MentourNow Technically we should not compare efficiency, that is not the most important part (it indicates the theoretical margin of improvement), you should compare the energy (in kWh), and the true source of this energy, used to transport one personne from a point A to a point B (including all the part of this "travel"). Yes this is not a simple computation...
In the US we sacrificed a robust passenger rail transport for the Interstate Highway system. No thought was on efficiency, nor on environment, but purely on personal freedom without schedules. My local airport (KEUG) 32 KM (20 miles) flies few places I want to go. The major hub (KPDX) is 200 km (124 mi) away. but there are few linking flights. and when I can drive 1000Km (700 mi) faster than I can get a flight....
In part the interstate highway system was driven by the military. Most people in the US know that President Eisenhower implemented the interstate highway system. Slightly fewer people know that General Eisenhower saw the German Autobahn system during the waning days of WW II. Even fewer know that lieutenant Eisenhower was a long for a trial cross country convoy using the roads existing in the USA during WW I. That convoy took several weeks and they lost some vehicles. This was not what the USA military wanted to accept as normal.
Eh. A good 2-lane road is sufficient for that. Maybe 4 in certain areas. But the military is not why the US built so many highways or why public transport was basically bulldozed. @@johnmcleodvii
Coming from Australia to England i couldn't believe how expensive a short rail rail trip was . The train was much faster than Australia but the price was 5 times more than a similar distance. They need to have a minimum price for trsins there lol.
You make some good points... But a lot of travel is discretionary and reserved for the middle class of the developed world... Whereas transoceanic shipping is typically necessary for people to get food and finished goods. I don't think pilots will ever be in a situation where there's not enough work for them... So at least there's that.
There are three reasons why I would go for train over domestic flight: landscape, space and airports. Others already mentioned the hassles of airports. Won't repeat that. For space, while I never had the chance to go in a A380, I found most flights hard, difficult to place my legs, especially on domestic flights. While being above the clouds is so wonderful, I usually hate flying on shorter routes, especially for this reason. And then there is landscape. Yes, flights can give you amazing views, if you have a window seat and the weather is great. But take a train along the Rein in Germany, or through the Alps, a Shinkansen in Japan etc. Such fantastic close up experiences. Every single time. It is so good to see what is between start and end of journey. These days I rarely travel and mostly it is by car. But usually because when I go, I go to transport something. But I miss the days of going from A to B by train, taking ferry boats etc. I do not miss flying, even though as an engineer I think it is one of the most amazing things and I love to follow your channel.
Tomorrow morning, I could fly from Manchester to London (one way) for £58 at 07:00, a train at the same time will cost £184.70. Even if you add the most expensive ways of getting to and from the airports (local taxi, Heathrow Express), it’s still massively cheaper to fly. It may be different in other European countries but in the UK trains are far too expensive, period.
And yet, If you were to go Manchester to London but via Birmingham, it would cost £64.20. So no, it's not massively cheaper if you know what you're doing.
I don't know which train ticket site you are using, but I can now (15.56) buy a ticket online for tomorrow morning from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston on the 06.55 for £148.10, or the 07.15 for £142.60 or the 07.35 for £125.70. OK, still not cheap, but less than your headline figure and booking ahead brings these costs down considerably. All these trains take about 2hrs 15mins centre to centre, which is far quicker than air plus check-in plus the extra before and after travel needed.
@@jan-lukas Planes arent subsidized, quite the opposite actually. Trains get subsidized left right and center, and still often fail to deliver a competitive product.
The trains actually have to make sense as an option, shocker. For most places rail travel is sort of the awkward middle child between driving yourself and flying. A really good rail network could solve so many problems, it's a shame that such lazy approaches are taken by policy makers.
Same is happening everywhere now. Instead of solving problems, promises to find an easy "fix" are implemented. And then decades-old issues raise their head...like situation with nuclear power in france (its bad, look it up). Or suburbian dystopia and "US-style cities". Or real estate crisis, that will become even worse. It is results of being lazy in past, that come to haunt everyone for not doing their job.
Trains are good for commuting to a city. At least here in belgium, with a car you will be sitting in traffic jams every day. That's it. High speed rail is fine for anything between 400-1000km, but it's way too expensive for me. Taking the car to the south of france from belgium costs me about a fourth compared to taking the TGV.
" According to MDPI, gasoline engines have a thermal efficiency of between 30% and 36% while diesel engines can reach a thermal efficiency of almost 50%"
I was surprised to learn back in 2016 that it would cost roughly the same for me to take the train to DC as it would be to fly there (I live in Iowa). The main problem was getting down to the train station cuz ofc there wasn't a bus service to/from the train station. Luckily, my dad was more than willing to drop me off/pick me up. Yes, what would have been a half-hour + 2 hour flight with a layover in Chicago ended up taking 20 hours instead (with a layover in Chicago). However, I was very comfortable (unlike on a plane) and the only motion sickness I experienced was on a rough bit of track on the return trip. But I am prone to motion sickness and I've never been on a plane where I did not experience motion sickness - including on smooth flights with no turbulence.
Decent high speed trains are also very calm. Sadly the US just doesn't have any. Americans using high speed rail abroad often feel like they just experienced science fiction.
Unfortunately, as you stated, the aviation industry is extremely visible and that makes it an easy target for political goal scoring. As such, the reality of the aviation industry's contribution to global emissions doesn't really matter. While I'm personally in favour of using high-speed rail for journeys where practical, I think it's also worth pointing out that the majority of railway "companies" in France are owned by the stare-owned company SNCF (TGV, Ouigo, Eurostar, Thalys, Lyria etc). The French government has a history of protectionism with respect to SNCF and irs subsidiaries - for example, their attempts to block Deutsch Bahn from operating through the Channel Tunnel to London St Pancras.
Aviation emissions do matter. 1. No individual sector makes up "that" much. Serious reductions have to happen across ALL sectors. 2. Aviation has a disproportionately large climate impact relative to its raw amount of CO2 due to high altitude of a part of their emissions. 3. Aviation is especially inefficient with its emissions, transporting far fewer people and less cargo per ton of CO2-equivalent than any other mode of transportation. But imo the most important point is sadly usually ignored: The Rich. A tiny rich percentage of the population makes up an absurdly disproportionate amount of aviation emissions with private jets, using air cargo, and simply accumulating insane mileage. It's not the average family that books one round trip for a vacation every couple years, but "businessmen" who fly around the globe on the regular. Formula 1 racks up most of its emissions by transporting teams via aircraft, not on the race track. Horse breeders and athletes have a dedicated horse air transportation industry... The US for example would already meet its emission goals of 10 tons/capita if everyone lived like the bottom 50% of incomes (which is around 9.5 tons/year). But thanks to the upper 50%, and especially the top 1% at over 80 tons/year, they average 20 tons/capita instead. And aviation emissions are even more unequal!
Actually, France had history of being blindly in love in aviation and it was close to diminish role of rail transportation. Fortunately, Japan had its Shinkansen and then fuel crisis came in, which resulted in electric TGV and nuclear power plants supplying them. With trains having advantage in all of three hour routes covering most of large traffic generators domestic flights are unnecessary. That being said international flights will stick around for long time, because even with two or three hours extra waiting before and after the flight you are able to cover larger distances in reasonable time.
@@T33K3SS3LCH3N Using the A320 as an example, it consumes about 750 gallons of fuel per hour, for 150 passengers; 5 gallons per passenger-hour. The cruise speed is just over 500 mph, resulting in fuel consumption of 1/100 gallon per passenger mile. Cars can reach about 1/250 mile per passenger mile, but only if fully loaded. A couple traveling cross country by car would rival the fuel efficiency of the A320 because airliners are normally near or at capacity.
An interesting fact is that the national rail operators had larges shares in a national short-haul airline (France Inter), to propose fast travel across the country, when the TGV didn't existed yet, but with a small catch...the airline couldn't proposed flight at specific times of the day, that would interfere with the departure time of the train service to protect SNCF business.
On a railway subject....I live in the Seattle area and have knowledge of the rail in the area. The fuselage trains from Spirit in Wichita actually go right by the spur that feeds the Everett plant on the way to the Renton plant....as such, there is still direct rail linking the two. When Everett starts the 737 line, those trains will get there a few hours sooner than a trip to Renton. There was a rail line headed north from the Renton plant industrial area through Bellevue and out to the Cascades that shut down about 20 years ago. Parts of it did become trails and forced the end of a really cool dinner train service that is still missed by many today.
@@MentourNow The 5% number is way off. I recommend having a look at these sources: - Assessing the efficiency potential of future gasoline engines (EPA, 2018, www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-10/documents/high-efficiency-ic-engine-sae-2018-04.pdf ) A 2016 Honda is shown to have a peek Brake Thermal Efficiency (BTE) of 37% and a BTE of 34% on a wider range of RPM (See page 6). - Improving Thermal Efficiency of Internal Combustion Engines: Recent Progress and Remaining Challenges (2022, www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/17/6222 )
Why do you compare the efficiency of airliner (a form of mas transport) to cars (an individual transport ) and not to trains ? Maybe because if you compared it to trains you would end up with data pointing to airliners being extremely inefficient ?
Because the point I was making was to show why electrification of aviation is not the same as electrification of cars.. you are talking about something completely different. I’m not against using trains, I love using them myself, but that’s not what this episode is about
@@mycosysthat’s just the thermal efficiency of the engine itself. Add in wind resistance, friction from the tyres, and energy loss through the torque converter/clutch, and a lot of energy is wasted.
Rail will never take over "short flight" routes in Australia for the simple reason of limited rail schedules with the fact that passenger trains have to mingle with freight trains for large sections of routes and it's just easier, cheaper and faster to send someone to another city in the same state by plane. The Royal Flying Doctor service is a national icon here for a damn good reason.
@@littlewink7941 Not here, there is *no dedicated* high speed rails. it's all mixed-traffic rails. I used to live in a small town along the Syd-Melb XPT corridor - there was more freight trains rumbling through on a weekly basis than the XPT ran, such they eventually build a dedicated Bypass Loop a few klicks out of town so a passenger train can sit safely whilst waiting for a freight to come from the other direction.
Thanks for clarifying the 5% stat in your community post, I think it's unfair to compare the newest aircraft to the oldest cars though. Also using rail travel rather than flying when travel times are comparable is a low hanging fruit so makes perfect sense. Just because something isn't the most major part of a problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve it! However I agree with you that trains should be incentivised rather than making flying more expensive. You are my favourite TH-camr at the moment and I'm loving your content on both channels, thanks for your hard work!
It isn't comparing to the oldest cars, that's comparing to brand new internal combustion engine vehicles, either diesel or gasoline. Cars before emissions controls were added were a bit less inefficient. I remember a road trip in convoy with a brand new SUV that was the first production year where emissions controls were required. The fuel tank was still sized the same as the year before. That monstrosity had a fuel range of about 180 miles. Our SUV (admittedly with 2 fuel tanks had a range of about 550 miles. And for those asking why we had 2 SUVS on the trip. We didn't. We had 6 or 7 moving about 35 people and backpacking gear. Yes, they were crammed to capacity. Our SUV had 9 out of 20 seats filled and we were towing a U-Haul filled with backpacks.
Uh... MAJORLY incorrect on the internal combustion engine efficiency. The rule of thumb is around 30% efficiency, but there are some examples, generally diesel which hit closer to 40%. Some enormous ship engines hit around 50%. So you might want to edit the part where you say 95% of the energy is wasted as heat. It's more like 60-70%, which is still a lot but it is a far cry from 95%.
And that's an important factor. Trains are easily electrified, planes are not. Use trains for shorter travel and planes for longer travel. I'm with France on this one
I don't have exact numbers but trains will either not consume fuel due to electrification or if they do be magnitudes more efficient. Rail is literally the most efficient form of travel we have and not by a small margin.
@762rk95tp comparison should be done as per emissions from fuel for planes vs emissions from the full cycle of electricity produced for the train. it might be much dirtier depending what is the sorce fir electricity
as long as aviation fuel is not taxed (all train energy costs are taxed) and a lot of airport investment is done using public money you cannot compare costs of air travel and trains.
Those Very Large Container ships are actually hugely efficient even on raw bunker crude. One need to remember that the cylinders are often 1m bore with a 5m stroke. The combustion temperatures vastly exceeding those of cars or trucks, which means they can get nearly complete combustion of the fuel. The any particulates remaining are easily captured using only fractional amounts of the HP available. Further, a number of commercial vessels use those large combustion engines not to drive a propeller _per se_ but a turbo generator making electric power.
Other issue is batteries do not generate thrust unlike a jet engine so it'll have to be a prop. And planes land lighter than they did taking off because of burning fuel. With batteries it'll weigh the same on landing as it did taking off so MTOW's are going to be severely reduced or MLW will have to increase
Same as a turbine needing a prop or a fan. A modern turbofan mostly generates its thrust with the fan, the jet is just a small bonus. For weight: Batteries aren't dense enough anytime soon to replace anything but the very shortest of short-haul flights. And on those flights, planes that use kerosene also weigh almost the same on landing as it did taking off.
@@benoithudson7235 Btw youre probably thinking of turoprops, those use turbines to drive a propeller that creates thrust. Im fairly sure turbofan engines still rely on the jet, not the fans.
@@termitreter6545 No, I'm sure the comment is about the current evolution to high bypass fans which is a main reason why today's turbofans are enormously larger in diameter compared to previous low bypass turbofans. High bypass turbofans kind of use a turbine's many blades like ducted props to push an enormous amount of uncombusted air.
Yes the cost of train tickets can be more expensive than an air flight. An aircraft only needs an airport at each end of its journey. A train needs a track, stations etc over the whole distance. But in my own case here in France from a time point of view the train is quicker because there is less waiting around in airports, and the station is far closer to where I live (less than 10 minutes) compared to the nearest airport being over an hour away.
Countries that have found the right balance between public control and private competition over rails, or just a very well organised public system, can absolutely beat air travel in cost. The problem of course is that most countries have a strong conservative faction that will actively sabotage public infrastructure because it doesn't fit into their "small government" philosophy (yet are totally comfortable with banging out billions for car infrastructure...)
Actually, sometimes it’s really better to use railway instead of airlines but in lots of cases it doesn’t work. Example for this is Germany. Personally, I would prefer to go by rail from Berlin to Munich or Frankfurt/ Main but railway ticket prices are often higher than airplane tickets. More over, the punctuality of the German Railway DB is very poor
As someone who lives close to only a small airport, restrictions to short haul flights would screw me over so hard. Over half of my flights are connecting flights, and I'd lose many hours if I can't take a plane to Madrid first (which takes about an hour), and I'd have to take a train, then arrive early and do the check-in and all. it could easily add 3 hours to my average flight to EU destinations (which is about 5-6 hours now).
I'd love to hear more about electric taxying. Living in the US you can often spend a lot of time taxying waiting for your slot at busy airports (New York, Atlanta etc.) so I think being able to spend all that ground time on electric power only would seem to offer huge benefits both to airlines and to the local environment
The problem with that is where to get all this power... First you need to power the motors pushing the wheels, directly... Fine and well, since the "line up and wait" is a staccato stop-motion, so the motors aren't running the whole time... BUT the A/C for the passengers and crew IS. The lights are ON 100% of the run... AND you're not seriously going to try to tell 100-500 passengers PER PLANE to sit in the hot and dark on the tarmac for the half-hour MINIMUM they'll be away from the gate and thereby the power router that keeps the plane humming until the pilots light-off engines to take over as it is... Then calculate the various heights of "travel seasons" just in the U.S. when planes are subject to routine waits as along as 2 hours out there, shuffling up through the stop-n-go lines to get to the runway... If you thought passengers were unruly already, you haven't seen ANYTHING yet... SO those batteries are going to have to GET BIG, if they go to electric taxiing. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 Use a tug with an APU on it to move the aircraft to the end of the runway. That way all the extra weight stays on the ground. Even if the tug was diesel powered I'd bet it would be much more efficient than taxying on turbines.
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 most aircraft serving airports that are really congested, like LGA in New York, are equipped with an APU. Having the APU provide the electrical power for the AC, lights and the wheel tug is far far more fuel efficient than using the main engines to move the aircraft, and then to see them idling while they're waiting minutes or more to move. And on landing, the main engines could be shut down once the aircraft is safely off the runway, and leave the APU to handle the movement to the gate. And since the APU is already on the plane, there's no additional weight for batteries and the like.
@@fantabuloussnuffaluffagus If you're hellbent on ground-based power, why not use a rail or slot and drag system? Think of how the old cable-cars and trolleys USED to get around, at least in early San Francisco (that I can recall off the top of my head)... The basic electrics wouldn't handle the hills with steel wheels on steel rails, so they installed enormous cableworks underground to literally drag them along... The ground personnel could bring out the attachment hardware, and while the engines light-off and warm up (at whatever schedule needs kept, the cable and rail system can haul the bird around to the end of the runway, and even get administered by Tower or some "Ground Control" up to the point of lining up... The tiller control in the cockpit could still function as an "emergency over-ride" in case something goes wrong or the pilots see something that the Tower doesn't... whatever... BUT then you no longer need tugs, fuel, additional equipment on the plane, and the whole idea/system is "backwards compatible", meaning with an appropriate towing hardware any plane currently in service can remain in service and just cut all the fuel costs for all the taxiing... ONLY use idle up to operating temperature, give or take a little wait-time and take-off... There are alternatives, is my point. I get that. I'm just not necessarily 100% sold on "We NEED electric powered taxi functions!"... AND there isn't much less efficient about getting around than pushing air to begin to move a ground vehicle. If it were otherwise cars would ALL have giant propellers and jets on them... ;o)
@@joncalon7508 You're still assuming that little bitty APU can push an airplane that weighs (frequently) in excess of 100,000 pounds. It's designed to keep the requisite systems operating on electrical power, though... NOT to push a jet in any sense of the word. I know for a fact, getting zapped by electricity sure impresses you at how powerful the stuff is, but it still takes a HUGE amount of it to move that kind of weight, no matter how efficient you try to make it. Now that we have an electric 18-wheeler, take a good solid look at one. They didn't get even a tiny bit smaller... and that should tell you something about the shear amount of power it takes to drag so much ass around... AND those only have to deal with around 40 tons or so (80,000 pounds). Nothing against the idea of electric taxiing, itself. There probably IS a way to do it. I just don't think we're going to toss together an idea that the engineers wouldn't yet have thought about in the mad dash to save fuel and lower costs by now. I think the APU could probably help, but it's going to need a metric sh*tload of batteries alongside... and probably spend a serious amount of airborne time just recharging that while the main engines actually propel the plane. ;o)
Here in Australia a train is a very hard sell. You can dive in half the time and if you shop around you can get a flight for about the same as the fuel cost in your car. The last time I went to Sydney the cost was; Drive is cheapest, flight and train were about the same except it was an hour in a Bombardier Dash 8 or eight hours an a machine spawned in hell.
There is little rail travel in Australia other than in the South East. East West is tourist only as is North South and even the rail gauge is not uniform.
To be fair australia is a barren country in the middle so it is understandable why air travel is so prevalent. If you go In a train it would take a long time to travel as well. Plus australia is quite big. By the way big fan of australia. That country is amazing
@@hollandsemum1: There are 28 million people in Australia. There are 330 million people in the U.S. Australia is about the same size as the continental U.S. The distances between major metro areas in Australia is huge compared to between metro areas in the U.S. Can you see why rail might work better in the U.S. than in Australia? Had the U.S. government underwritten passenger rail at the same level as it did for automobile and plane travel we'd have a great system. (actually, before cars and planes, the government heavily subsidized rail by, among other things, giving them one square mile of land on alternating sides of train right-of-way--that's an awful lot of land that the railroads basically squandered) That didn't happen so rail companies focused on freight. And even the freight system is bad. There isn't a freight train that moves much faster than 50 mph.
@@hollandsemum1 The main problem with US railways is very simple, it was grossly outdated when its being compared with Japan or even Europe. Had US already tought about developing HSR since the day when Japan succeded with their Shinkansen, then US train networks can compete with domestic flights similar like what happened in Japan.
Getting grey hydrogen isn't ecological in any way, getting green hydrogen requires vast amount of electricity as electrolysis is 40% efficient (and then multiply by efficiency of compressing, storing and burning) and we are nowhere of surplus of renewable electricity now. Trains can be 100% renewable if grid is 100% renewable.
Hello Petter, i have a question about the CFM Leap engines. As a ramp agent for a certain US airline that only flies 737s, I have noticed when a MAX starts up, there is a deep, low pitched howl that lasts for a couple seconds
@@johnkowalkowski4269 I have quite sensitive hearing as well, and I'm pretty sure that whine is there on the CFM56 engines, but it can't be heard because the overall roar is louder
France has a high speed rail network which is why those short haul flight bans make sense and why they will work. Same goes for Germany, Spain and Japan. In places where it isn't feasible or viable for high speed rail like Australia the plane makes much more sense.
It absolutely does not work in Germany. The service is unreliable and too expensive. And a lot of the high speed trains (ICE) actually run on regular tracks at slower speeds instead of the 300kph like on the Cologne-Frankfurt section. Take Frankfurt-Dresden for example. Train: 4:20h Plane: 55 minutes Car: 5:30h Taking the earliest opportunity by train at 7:18am, you're not reaching Dresden before 11:40am, while you can catch a flight at 7 and be in Dresden at 8 most likely with minimal waiting time for your luggage. Get a hire car and you're in downtown Dresden at 9 at the latest. I happily spend two hours extra for security in the morning to be able to reach my meeting on the same day and not having to travel the evening before.
Saying planes are more efficient than cars is a bit narrow sighted. Even though it is strictly true, the amount of energy per KM per passenger is massive compared to cars. That's because flying at airplane speeds requires exponentially more energy than driving a car. Don't get me wrong, I do understand what you say but you may be misleading people to believe travelling by planes has a lower carbon footprint than travelling by car which couldn't be further from the truth.
I am curious where you got the 5 % efficiency number for a "normal" internal combustion engine car. What I have learned during my education (masters of science in engineering, specialized in energy systems, Lund University in Sweden) is that that they usually are around 20-30 %. And that is also what I find when I double check online and in litterature. I have enjoyed your videos for a long time, but that number really stands out to me.
Turbos regain some of the lost energy though the exhaust. The internal drag of pistons and conrods, crank, etc. is quite significant, and heat loss into cooling water and lubricating oil, with engines designed to run at around 85 degree Celsius.
How about mentioning that airlines have to pay literally NOTHING for their fuel in taxes? The only reason planes can be so cheap is because they are literally unfairly advantaged before trains. But yeah, people just hate on short haul flights because muh contrails
I recently traveled from Paris to Bayonne in the south of France via TGV. The price for my first class ticket was €72 from Paris-Montparnasse station. In addition I paid €1.50 for a short metro ride to the station for a total of €73.50. A flight from Paris to Biarritz could have been as cheap as €105 including baggage and other add-ons. Toss in a minimum of €11.45 for the airport train and €2 for the bus and the cost would have been at least €118.45 and could easily have been more with more flight add-ons as I'm comparing a first class train ticket with a coach flight. The time to fly would have been a lot longer as the flight is listed at 1:25 and with CDG's check-in queues (I had a large bag) and the need to transfer to terminal 2G I'd need to figure on being at least 2.5 hours early if not more. So now we have 4.0 hours plus the train time and another short metro ride and a long walk at CDG from the train station and likely it would be over 6.5 hours best case counting the time on the Biarritz end to get my luggage and take the bus. Contrast that with 4 hours on the train plus maybe 1/2 hour to get to the train station and some padding and the train is at least an hour and a half faster, is also cheaper and is a lot more comfortable and relaxing. The price difference would have been even more with a coach train ticket too, that would have been maybe €20 cheaper depending on demand. Based upon all those factors taking the train was an easy decision and I don't regret my decision for a second.
Hey, thanks for the video. I gotta say that over here in the good ol' USA the railways are quite out of date and don't have high speed capacity like in the EU
Petter, Thanks for a well done and interesting video. However, I do suggest you double check your "efficiency" numbers. Brake Thermal Efficiency (g/hp-hr or g/kWh) is about 25% for most spark-ignited engines and 35% for most diesel engines used in light road vehicles. The very best Diesels reach 45% BTE for the larger diesels used in trucks and other larger applications. Gas turbine engines generally have lower BTE than diesels, except for the largest ones used in large airliners, cruise ships, and the largest gas turbine gen-sets. Also please double check your turboprop vs. turbofan efficiency numbers. Turboprop aircraft usually require less fuel than a similar sized jet, so I would like to know the source that prompted you to claim turbofans were more efficient.
electric tugs might be a useful alternative, to retrofitting existing designs. but I think there is also a degree to which taxiing gives the planes engines a warmup and cooldown period which you wouldn't want to eliminate completely.
Surprised you didn’t refer to the survey that said 40% of the French think that people should be restricted to four airline flights per life time. Perhaps that concept is simply too insane to acknowledge! Really enjoy your videos!
Only 4 flights per life time? That's insane, 2 round-trips per life time. Only 1 round-trip if there is a layover in both directions. Even 4 round-trips would be insane. Especially since Paris is one, if not the biggest, tourist destination in the world.
I can assure you that the survey you are mentionning is not reliable. This has been relayed everywhere in the media though... There is a very small minority full of ideology that finds a relay through the media and which we hear express their "opinion" over and over again. But you have to remember that France is home to the pioneers in aviation with the most aerdromes and flying clubs in Europe. It's also one of our most advanced (and last sadly) industry, which provides a lot of employement. Aviation is in our DNA.
No. The fact is a famous engineer just made a quick calculation in a tv show or an interview, and all the media and anti-green speakers (right, far-right) used it to accuse greens of attacking freedom bablabla. The number was just an arithmetic average per world citizen. Nothing to do with actual restriction by law. Wouldn't make sense anyway. Restrictions will come "naturally" from other reasons, like lower incomes, higher petrol prices, ... economical stuff. This video was excellent, covering many angles with honesty, knowledge ans clarity. Thank you very much.
One of the things I've loved for a long time is using carbonic acid to synthesize jet fuel. The US Navy figured it out, but because the only way to do it efficiently required nuclear power - and at the time the US was anti-nuclear - the program was scrapped. If the French gov't really wanted to push green tech, this would be a great way to do it. Keep the energy density and engineering legacy while eliminating drilling and carbon impacts in one go. The USNRL has a video up on the tech, if you're interested (Gordon McDowell may have posted it, but it's not dependent on all his usual Th cycle molten salt reactor hullaboo)
Electric ground taxiing: Forty years ago I did a fuel-savings study for an airline which was curious about taxing a twin on one engine instead of two, so this area has been a topic for some time. One thing to consider is how much weight (if any) will be added to the flying weight -- a very touchy subject with operators. Other operational considerations include things like the necessary time for temperature stabilization of the engines prior to takeoff. If the NLG is to have the driven tires, can enough friction be developed at even aft CG (least weight on the NLG) for all scenarios, including upward-sloped surfaces and contaminated-surface conditions? Finally (at least for now), any tractive use that the NLG tires are put to will subtract from their available turning (yaw) force, since there is a maximum friction force which can be developed by a tire and it has to be "shared" between the longitudinal and lateral components (in physics terms, the orthogonal components of a resultant force).
Do you think a hydraulic driven "engine" in the wheels similar to smaller excavation machines would be lighter/more efficient/able to run on the APU? I can see electric engines being somewhat disappointing from a weight/power perspective. Hydraulics definitely have the torque, and can be relatively compact.
@@myne00 A hydraulic motor running at the aircraft's 3000 psi system pressure could be compact, and certainly would not lack for delivered torque. Difficulties would remain when it comes to getting that torque onto the pavement (as I talked about above), and perhaps system reliability. Early 727's had nose gear brakes, but they proved troublesome and airlines one-by-one deactivated them ahead of Boeing dropping the feature altogether on later production aircraft. But that was generations of aircraft design expertise ago.
I can't imagine it would be a smart idea to put motors in the nose gear. It would seem to be a no-brainer to me that the motors should have to go on the main gear, just like the brakes are.
@@AlexandarHullRichter That might well be true from a physics standpoint -- the amount of force needed might be beyond what the nose could provide... plus hydraulics already go to the MLG. But there are also more contraints on the MLG in terms of parts interferences and articulations (e.g. bogie). It has to "do" more things, so interfacing a drive system is problematic, if less so for an all-new aircraft design. I mentioned NLG since someone elsewhere in the comments brought that up. The thing is, if it needs to be big enough that the NLG won't work, then it's probably too heavy to be feasible. Airlines get weight-unhappy starting in the low tens of kilograms.
@@marcmcreynolds2827 i wasn't thinking motors needed to be big to work, though I don't know, simply that the NLG wouldn't carry enough of the plane's weight or have enough traction to move the plane around reliably like the main gear do.
In 2005 when I was in college one of my environmental engineering professors worked on a project with his research students that could help reduce the environmental impact of commercial Aviation. He was trying to get the backing of various environmental groups for his work but was constantly rejected. He used to tell us this story of how Greenpeace told him "We don't care about this. We just want aviation ended, altogether, for good". That's how these people think. They don't care about the bigger picture or Humanity as much as they care about their own agenda.
Just because aviation is a small part of emission doesn't mean we shouldn't try to decrease it (by the way I'm a huge fan of aviation since childhood). It is very dispensable, probably more than many other area (like food or housing) and has close to zero margin of improvement (the "impressive" 20% improvement in fuel efficiency has been between generation 20 to 30 years appart, there's no chance to get the required 80% in 25 years to follow). But there's a point: we focused on this part because it's the less costly part to get rid of compared to all of the rest, require probably the less effort, and would have overall a small impact. So I get it totally that's it's stupid to focus on it first. But in the end, aviation as it is today will have to end, and will subsist in a much smaller form
Ultimately though even with aviation having an incentive to use less fuel the technology does not exist yet to do so in a considerable way. Meanwhile trains and catenary is old and known technology in a country that has good knowledge to construct more of it. And with France still keeping some nuclear power the electricity is not as dirty as in, say, Germany. Short hauls got the target here because they spend far less percentage of time in the more efficient cruising altitudes and frankly I think if anything will be targeted in aviation that is a fair one. I have some hope that new aviation technology can destroy that argument but so long as it exists in concept animations and quick demos it's not going to be as convincing. At the least the environmentalists are rightfully criticizing the SNCF and do so quite a lot. It's slow and sluggish but the Paris-hub issue has been known for some time and has been intent to change that. The south-west HSR line for example is in progress. But in general Paris being the center of the universe has always been an issue in France (for the rest of France). The cost issue has been another source of outcry and is for a multitude of issues (land, energy, subsidies, etc). The government has been worse at addressing this part unfortunately. Side note, I believe container ship transport is actually quite efficient for what it does.
Actually, petrol internal combustion engines are between 30 and 35% efficient, not the 5% quoted in this video. The biggest difference between an airliner and a car is the carbon emissions per person/per mile. Airliners carry many people so from that point of view they are more efficient.
HST TGV travel Paris-Bordeaux (575 km) departure Paris city centre 9:04am - arrival Bordeaux city centre 11:14am, travel time 2hr10 mins. , 3 October 2023, Best price at 25 euros.
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You are wrong about gas car fuel efficiency-5% is an utter lie. The actual figure is 25-30%. You didn't check your facts on that one.
Love the impartiality. It is hard these days. Only the extremes talk so congrats on your research.❤
@@jamesengland7461 Aye, the most focused engines get to 50% thermal efficiency. To say nothing of the Climate boogeyman in the room being an unscientific sham.
@@jamesengland7461 A diplomat, you are not! A salesman, you are not! Rude and not likeable, you ARE! Saying that the 5% fuel efficiency claim is an "utter lie" is rather rude. Whether it is *inaccurate* or not I very much doubt that Petter is lying. Either Petter got his info from someone you disagree with or it may have been an error - either by Petter or his source. Additionally, why not give a link to your source (in addition to more diplomatic language)?
The concrete industry creates as much if not more emissions than all of transportation combined but no one seems to care about it..
In France, if you are close enough to a TGV station it's no secret that it's better than going by air. Once you factor in the aggro-factor of the airport, getting there, security screening, arriving in advance, the door-to-door time is less by train.
France is
Europes Arabs …
Train stations are usually close to the center of cities because cities tend to grow around train tracks.. Airports are usually deliberately placed a long away from downtown on the other side of the city suburbs.
@@johnstuartsmithGive me please one example of French city grown around train tracks ...
But France has also placed TGV stations far outside cities for the sake of having straighter, faster lines: Lorraine TGV, Belfort-Montbéliard TGV, among others. While fast, for many this can be an inconvenience.
@@psisteak4122 Well, in Europe, there were major cities before anybody invented things like trains. However, the rail lines and train stations that were built were put in the middle of cities and the airports were mostly built out on what was farmland.
Speaking for Italy, our railway is comparable in duration of travel and prices (at least for internal destinations) to most low-cost airline solutions and many people prefer to take the Frecciarossa from e.g. Milan to Rome or Milan to Naples for business rather than take a flight. The argument that making the trains more attractive will entise people to take a train rather than a plane couldn't be more true.
The Netherlands is a tiny country, so there aren't many airports and thus there aren't many domestic flights.
That being said the prices of railway- and bus-travel are extremely high, the timetables are often horrible and many railway schedules are skipped for the most banale reasons (some leaves or a few snowflakes on the tracks and no, I'm not kidding) so it often makes more sense to use a car for your travels, especially if you have to travel a lot.
When I travel in China, I will take the train up to 4 or 5 hours duration (500miles /800km), as they run like clockwork, every half hour, clean and comfortable and door to door are no slower than by air. But for that China had it invest vast amounts of money in high speed rail, to many destinations.
Build it and they will come. (from someone who loves to fly)
I just got back from Italy and traveled a bit on a train there and it's so true. God bless your trains, they are so good and cheap.
Also making trains more attractive not only reduces the air travel demand, it reduces the car travel demand, so it's so much better than implementing a law to ban cheap flights.
Still, the thought of spending the better part of the day on the train to cross most of China churns my stomach, especially in their 3+2 economy seating.
@@h8GW Business class train tickets in china are cheep, like $20 to $50, but even the economy is very clean and comfortable. At 250kph they surprisingly quiet.
But you really show ignorance re China thinking "cross most of China" in "better part of the day" not even a plane can do that
I know this is more focused on aviation, but Internal combusion engines in cars are not that bad, they are closer to 20% thermally efficient. Also that can be improved with things like forced induction or diesel (higher compression) to increase to around 40% relistically.
Toyota and Honda Atkinson-cycle engines are closer to 40%, and they try to stay in that range with their hybrid drivetrains. No forced induction either.
My next car, a Corolla hybrid (aka, s Prius).
Indeed. ICE utilise fuel at approx 30%heat, 30%friction, 30% torque at the wheel. Out of that final 30%, 80% of that is used to displace the air in front of the vehicle. EVs have to move the same air. I've yet to see a generator or an electric motor run cold, and unless it's hydro power, the energy source produces heat in transfer, so the figures are somewhat distorted.
@@foxstranglerAnd that is why all Teslas have really low cw values. Even the semi. Also efficient motors, for that matter. Just for comparison, electric is approximately two times as efficient as hydrogen.
came here to say this as well....and Formula 1 engines, arguably the most efficient ICEs in the world are around 50%
@@andrewjoeljackson4653Ah, but F1 has lot so much entertainment factor with those new quiet, super efficient power units. It’s also not really the ICE that makes it so efficient. It’s the entire power unit with engine braking harvest, brake harvesting, etc.
I have switched from using flights from Geneva/Lyon to London to going by train - TGV to Paris, two stops on the Metro (RER actually) and Eurostar. About the same same in time door to door, a bit more expensive but when all factors are taken into account (travel to/from airport, hanging around at the airport, parking,cost of refreshments etc etc) less hassle and WAY more convenient and comfortable.
London/Paris used to have the most flights in the world - now very few flights because of Eurostar. Lesson - if the rail system meets travellers needs, they will take the train rather than the plane.
I think the French are onto something with their approach to domestic air travel.
Not only France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands are doing the same thing. Flights under 90 minutes are becoming useless as they generally take longer from point to point and more train rides are available with double the capacity compared to planes.
@@grigandy Flying between Dutch and/or Belgian cities would also be a bit ridiculous, due to the short distances.
Let me just say that I appreciate your logical, down-to-earth reasoning! Greetings from Denmark! 🇩🇰
I'd read somewhere that the number of domestic flights in Italy dropped off a fair bit after they built out their highspeed rail lines as they were no longer very competitive against HSR.
but flying is fun@@grigandy
5% thermal eficiency for cars? In 1900 maybe? For exemple : "the thermal efficiency of the 1.8L unit in the third-generation Prius (2ZR-FXE) has a thermal efficiency of about 38%".
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNowThe 5% maybe true in city traffic. While driving on a highway that is not too congested, you have very litte deceleration and acceleration. I the car is hybrid, it will load the battery while decelerating or going downhill and use this energy with the electric motor when appropriate. It is amazing how often my car just stops the combustion engine while driving.
In Germany any domestic flight is supposed to be just a short hop, but in reality it isn't. Once you factor in the hours you need to get to the airport, check in, get through safety, wait for boarding, pick up luggage at the destination and finally take a regional train to the city center where I really want to go I can just as well take the train. Granted, Germany's railway has become less and less punctual lately - but I have experienced the same with flights. So: no short distance flights for me.
The only trains that are reasonably reliable in Germany are the local/regional trains... unless they have to wait and give way to delayed ICEs. Punctuality is absolutely abysmal, to the point that some German trains are not even allowed to go into Switzerland anymore. Factor that plus all-around general incompetence, and you have rail service that is hugely unattractive. The AC doesn't even work on warm days (which there are too many of nowadays), so you sit inside with sweat dripping down your face. This is a pity, as I would rather avoid driving. But the Deutsche Bahn often leaves me no choice. And that's without even considering ticket prices.
@@rallymaniac92 I agree - but planes are not much better. Last time I flew from Hamburg to Florence via Frankfurt: flight time maybe 2h, total time at airports maybe 15h. ALL flights were delayed, up to six hours, check-in took an hour (!) since there was only one person handling a complete Lufthansa domestic flight, plus long queues at security. Planes are shifted from one gate to another with personnel looking at the same screens as the passengers as nobody had any clue where the flight might depart.
The price war has ruined previously reliable airlines. It's all about "how many more cents can we save to make any profit at all"?
Depends on your departure time. I went through security at Frankfurt on a Friday 7:30pm without a queue! That is of course a different story on the morning rush hour, but you can book your security time slot for free with Fraport (the airport operator).
Retrieving your luggage is actually the worst part of flying now. I waited 70 minutes for my bag from the GRZ-FRA flight on a sunday evening. I would have given them credit for it, as this was the DTM Red-Bull-Ring shuttle and most drivers, mechanics etc. only had carry-ons, so they probably toured some outside stands before bringing different flights to the handling facility. But the same evening, a friend returned from Tunis and waited two hours - a larger plane with holiday people probably all having checked luggage... Fraport has lost too many staff during the pandemic and luggage handling seems to be the worst sector.
Yeah what’s going on? 50 years of German trains leaving right on the second and all of a sudden so many delays.
@@1999fxdx You haven't been in Germany for a decade or so then. Leaving out the regular strikes by the conductors union, the many years of strict saving take its toll now. You struggle with defective tracks, minimal maintenance on the trains, shortage of staff leading to overtime and illness. And also the not so obvious things like not having heated switches anymore or cutting the bushes along the track. It's incredible how many bush fires you have in the summer so that you can hardly imagine they ever ran steam locomotives
Here in Florida they just opened up the Brightline train that connects Orlando to South Florida. The trouble is the cheap tickets are more expensive than the cost to take a flight. Also, several of the train stations don’t have good local transit options. It’s kind of frustrating, since my wife has family in South Florida, and we live near Orlando.
Edit for fairness: the ticket price is a bit more expensive than the flight cost on a discount airline. However, after factoring in baggage fees, etc., the train is probably a bit cheaper.
Virtually empty BriteLine trains roll though my neighborhood several dozen times a day carrying many dozens of tons of steel per passenger. At least the airlines don't fly empty planes.
tix may be more expensive, but when you factor in the cost of driving to tbe airport, parking fees, time etc
I discovered pretty quickly travelling between London and Helsinki that using a £50 "low cost airline" actually cost twice as much as a £100 "full service" carrier once that stuff was taken into account (what Ryanair called 'Helsinki' was 70 miles and a €30 train/bus ride from the city, etc)
Brightline is a good start. I have seen videos about the train ride and videos about the problems.
The trains look nice outside and inside. Several videos suggest they are very comfortable.
Next thing they have to adjust, is road crossing. They need to get rid of road crossings. It was done here in Denmark, around 30 years ago, on our mainlines. Local slow lines still have crossings.
It sounds expensive, but the benefits are huge, from safety to maintenance and speed.
I know it political and economic hard in the US, but it is worth it.
In Italy and Spain (Germany partly) they have got the prices down. They have numerous train companies on the same track, so competition is fierce. You can find dirt cheap tickets. Without competition, capitalism doesn't work.
In Europe, the trick is that tracks are owned by the state. They rent out track time, on certain conditions. Often the state has their own trains driving on the same tracks, to ensure connections on low insensitive periods of the day.
Here in Denmark it works slightly different: State own tracks, they make schedule. That schedule, private companies can bid on, they get paid to drive this until contract ends. The state collect ticket income and manage the economic side. The companies hire personnel, buy trains and maintain them. So far it is only local lines, but the entire bus network works that way too. It works quite good.
It turned out to be a long one, sry.
In the US, in Europe it's much closer, because much less subsidies.
@@Gert-DK "In Europe, the trick is that tracks are owned by the state"
The real trick is to break up vertically integrated incumbents(*) - these _always_ have an incentive to prioritise their own subsidaries over "competitors"
(*) NOT the way the British did it (Railtrack was a disaster)
The USA has really bad regulatory capture in many areas - rail, aviation, telecommunications and most of the time it happens at state level, not federal
New Zealand's Telecoms model is worth looking at. The incumbent telco was broken up into separated(**) lines/infrastructure and dialtone/services companies. The result was an electrifying change from the country being a poster child of how NOT to privatise your state-run telco(***) to one of the most competitive markets in the world, with the newly freed-up lines company offering duct access to previous "competitors" (Imagine your telco offering to lease duct space to cablecos for the last mile rather than forcing them to string new overheads or dig streets - that's what happened)
(**) Completely separate shares, board of directors and physical offices with all influences between the two parts cleaved. The "BT model" of a "chinese wall" between the two parts falls down when you realise that "head office" is overlooking everything and can direct the lines side to operate in ways that disadvantage competitores despite being notionally independent of the dialtone side (This is the model to look at in all vertically integrated market dominators - it's what the FTC did to Boeing/United Airlines in the 1930s too. They didn't for AT&T because they got the "universal service for all at an equal price" committment)
(***) Quite literally - New Zealand was used as examples in economics lectures of how not to do it
This only works if travelling by train is cheaper. In the UK we have some of the most expensive train tickets in the world due to privatisation. It's cheaper to fly than train in the UK.
Yeah, it's crazy. I looked at the train to Brum and back and it was £200. Flying Southampton - Amsterdam - Birmingham (no direct flights to Brum from Southampton) return was just £10 more expensive.
while your train tickets are expensive due to "privitisation", the root cause is not simply because operators are non-state. you're just seeing the true cost of running such operations. the elephant in the room is that mass transit - especially mass transit away from hyperurban hubs, operate in the red.
_In the UK we have some of the most expensive train tickets in the world due to privatisation._
Incorrect. See TIKhistory's video on the subject: _The UK DIDN'T "Privatize" the Railways_
Interstate travel by train here in the US is a luxury trip.
This is not true.
The prices are higher than elsewhere in Europe as there was a decision to make rail passengers bear more of the cost instead of taxpayers.
Nothing to do with privatization.
I would like to point out that efficiency difference between 40% and 25% is not "slightly lower", it is _huge,_ as if your engine is only 25% as efficient, you're burning almost twice (60% more, to be precise) as much fuel to do the same amount of work when compared to one with 40% efficiency.
I also have issue with your quoted 5% efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Modern ICEs have efficiency number between 30-36% for gasoline and 40-47% for diesel _(Boretti, A.A. Energy recovery in passenger cars. J. Energy Resour. Technol. 2012, 134, 022203),_ and technologies like hybrid drives can help recover even more energy by applying regenerative braking.
Isn't Peter talking about overal efficiency? I mean the whole car, not just the engine?
@@JanNovak-pg8oe It wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison then, since with the planes he's specifically talking turbojets and turboprops, not the planes themselves.
Also it would be extremely hard to come up with any kind of scientifically-correct numbers for the efficiency of a car overall, because there are _so many more_ variables at play, including, but not limited to, how it's driven, it's aerodynamic characteristics, drivetrain efficiency, load factor, hell, even tyre pressure has an effect here.
@@theAessaya True. I must say Peter did not do a good job researching for this video. 😞
Well, AFAIK he is line training captain, automobiles and the science behind them is not his field of expertise.
@@JanNovak-pg8oe yup, that cappens to everyone :) That's why I put the original comment out.
There's a tendency to focus on small, symbolic parts of the problem, rather than on bigger issues closer to home. Much bigger. But close to home problems, are less comfortable to address. Much easier to carry on about stuff way over there, or things that only affect you yearly.
‘I’ll fly my helicopter less, if you cut your car use by the same proportion’. Any takers?
Nah, every decision has a political ulterior motive under the guise of altruism. I see this benefitting a very specific airline.
Indeed! It's the usual policy of the elected inepts, whoever they are.
It will never change.
@@Steeyuvor simply letting everyone work remotely (when possible).
For 90% of people flying isn't a necessity. It's a luxury and it's easy to scale down without big econonic impact. Inside of the EU where theoretically we have a good rail system flying shouldn't be the standard.
Hi Peter! I am a seaman sailing on those big container ships which you mentioned.
The IMO has set a deadline for 2050 on the shipping industry to reach 0 CO2 emissions. I haven't heard of something similar in the aviation industry.
And, secondly, those ships carry 150,000 Tons of cargo with a daily consumption around 150-200 tons of fuel/day. They are very efficient in this matter.
All the best!
I think the issue is emission per km vs emission per hour. Planes probably less CO2 per kilometer. But an airplane takes about 3.6 seconds to cover that kilometer. Meanwhile, a container ship takes about 1.5 minutes to cover that same kilometer.
It's not about how much CO2 we are emitting. It's about the how much we emit per hour. We, humans, and animals, exhale CO2, so we'll never get to zero in that sense either. But the amount per hour is so low that it's not an issue, even with the billions of people on the planet. The planet doesn't care that people travel thousands of kilometers. It cares about how much CO2 is being emitted per hour. We NEED to think this way. Measure CO2 emissions not in gram per km, but in gram per hour. Traveling The Netherlands to China by camel produces more greenhouse gasses per kilometer than an airplane seat. But a camel walks at about 1/200th the speed of the airplane. And how many people will make that trip in the first place? That's the uncomfortable truth. We are used to having this ability, to travel fast, and we don't want to give it up. I myself am a believer in traveling, for enrichment, and for counteracting the otherwise skewed impression you get from a country or culture. I think traveling gives hope. But that's exactly the problem.
So... I don't think we will solve this. I honestly don't. But we should at least be honest about that.
Greenheads have nothing to do with science... or reality.
@@starbase218 How many Kilos of freight is that flight carrying? versus how many is that cargo ship carrying?
@@starbase218 The issue is fuel per unit of capacity per kilometer. For passenger service it is fuel per person per kilometer and for freight it is fuel per ton per kilometer.
Passenger service: Airlines and cruise ships tend to be very closely matched with some cruise ships being up to 10 times as efficient. Ferries average about the same as the most efficient cruise ships and if not carrying vehicles can be more than a factor of 10 more efficient than that average.
Freight: that is where the 150,000 Tons @valentinalbulet4004 mentioned comes in. Ships are thousands of times more efficient than aircraft for freight, fuel is the primary cost for each, just compare the costs per ton between two port cities.
Edit: I left off the reply to your primary point somehow. Per hour is far too granular, CO2 per year is far more useful, and at that scale it is easy to see it is an economics problem. Assuming equal efficiency (which is not far off between large aircraft and large ocean vessels) fuel use is related to the square or sometimes cube of velocity. So, yea, using less fuel requires moving slower. But your argument assumes that half as much stuff will be moved if it moves at half the speed, and basic economics tells us that is an incorrect relationship.
@starbase218 the calculation is normally fuel or CO2 per ton-mile or passenger-mile.
Basically how much fuel does it take to move 1 ton of freight or passenger 1 mile.
Flying is by far the worst, rail is lowest. Flying cargo takes 50x the CO2 that rail takes.
One of the biggest problems with rail in the US is that the tracks aren't publicly owned: they're owned by the freight train companies. Amtrak (the only passenger rail company in the US, long story) rents their use from freight companies like BNSF, and the result is that passenger rail destinations are physically limited to cities that the freight companies maintain track to, and ticket prices are very expensive because Amtrak has to pay the freight companies so much to use the tracks.
They have weird work-arounds for these things too. The last time I took a train that wasn't a regular commuter train, I was going from Orange County (suburb of LA, about 60 miles to the southeast) to Sacramento, which is California's state capital. There isn't a rail line that connects those two places. Instead, I rode an Amtrak bus through all the OC train stations and LA's Union Station, then over the LA mountains to Bakersfield, where I transferred to a train that went to Sacramento. I enjoyed the trip, but it was ridiculous not to be able to take a train from LA (and my local station that runs commuter trains to and from LA every day) to Sacramento. That should be one of the busiest train routes in the state, and they don't even have track for it!
The biggest problem in the US is that public services aren`t public.
Good. I don’t want my taxes going to a waste money pit that private companies already deem economically unviable.
@@merlingt1 we should stop funding roads then. They are a money pit, and aren't commercially viable.
Roads are totally economically viable, and if you tax fuel, cheap.@@AlexandarHullRichter
@@littlewink7941 really? Where does the money come from if you don't count taxes? If they were economically viable, you wouldn't need to tax them because they'd make money on their own!
"The train is so expensive and can't be trusted" -- This pretty much sums up Amtrak in the US.
You got that right. Twice as expensive as flying the all 737 airline and 4x more expensive than driving.
Someone's definitely paying for Amtrak's new Siemens railcars and Siemens Charger locomotives with Cummins Diesel Engines... and it's NOT just the taxpayers. It's most definitely the riders. Yet they're still limited to 79 MPH (though they're capable of 125 MPH), and have dozens of stops. The posted legal speed limit for pickup trucks in Texas is 85 MPH... making the pickup truck have a seemingly minor, yet significant, speed advantage over the train, especially in the case of new pickups equipped with tech features adopted from the airline industry (namely, adaptive cruise control (aka auto throttle), onboard radar systems, and an autopilot feature adopted straight from the 737, that some truck makers call super cruise, full self driving, or even... autopilot).
@@truckerzachbell If Amtrak trains didn't have to keep stopping and waiting for freight trains, it would definitely be more efficient, at the least. It's federal law that passenger trains take precedence over freight trains, but this is NEVER enforced, for some reason.
Ha, Amtrak might disappoint, but it’s nothing like the unusable Scandinavian trains Mentour refers to.
Thousands commute every day on Amtrak NE corridor. Not that expensive either, $82 NY to DC
@@Nill757 I hear you there! Unusable trains seem to be the norm and not the exception...
@@aprilkurtz1589 most US rail is owned by the freight train companies, not the public. Amtrak waits for the freight trains because the Amtrak is on the freight trains' tracks, not the country's tracks.
You forgot to mention that layovers were not impacted. I often fly from the US to Nantes via CDG on AF
Love your videos, but in this one I would have liked to hear more comparisons on CO2 emissions per passenger (or per weight measurement for cargo). Even though jet engines may use fuel more “efficiently” than other engines, they are also burning a lot more fuel per passenger (or cargo weight) than other modes of transportation.
Why do you think he didn't talk about emissions only nebolous "efficiency".
Exactly my thoughts
literally made the same comment, I get it being invested and made a living out of aviation, but being factual and intellectually honest are values that I care a lot about. Also impressed to see many other comments like ours.
jepp. It was exactly my same toughts. Also a big problem is the tax zero for airline fuel in europe. It should be also zero for train power...or airlines should pay also the vat taxes.
Another issues is the incubation of co2 in higher air level should be more harmful than on earth level.
@@LittleSpot They probably should pay VAT for fuel (though probably not for green fuel) but for short haul it would only amount to a few pounds per passenger. The airlines would probably argue that if they did, then maybe they should get a rebate on the other taxes/fees they do pay because they don't pay VAT.
It's not the silver bullet some seem to think it is.
Advantage with electric trains and cars is that they are as climate friendly as the source of the electricity. In France we typically operate 80%+ from nuclear and hydro sources, remaining small percentage of gas for peaker plants. The other thing with France is the existence of a world leading high speed train network, and the fact that the big cities are quite widely distributed as the area of France is the second biggest country in Europe (after Sweden)
Go away with your stupid climate religion frogs.
the problem is one trainline is emiting huge amount of CO2 to be created and/or maintained. 2 you can not be sure about the electricity source since it is now commun with europe that why also green energy contract are bullshit since the electricity is produced globally in europe, 3) diesel train style exist and are mainly used in region and often not take in account in number whereas ATR72 and stuff are . sorry but train is not ecologic either . number are just turned to be shiny by some organism which are funder partly by the SNCF (hello GIEC). and of course in this number petrol refining are giving to aviation and it therefore made rafinment industry carbon neutral so a good way to bring the number up. to finish the marginal kw/h to be produce to replace all aviation industrie is huge and will surely not be produce by a clean way (more porbably fossil based).
However. Most people don't understand that it's not just CO2 emissions. If you for instance take a nuclear power plant, then consider the generated heat. This heat raises the temperature of the atmosphere, which somehow must leave the planet, but it cannot, because only X amount of heat can dissipate back into space. People look at CO2 as the most evil thing. It contributes to an acceleration of the problem, yes. But the true problem is the heat generated. A Joule is a Joule, and eventually, Joules will heat the atmosphere, and too many Joules won't get emitted back out into space. :-(
France is currently the largest country in EU (Sweden 528K km², mainland France only is 544K km²).
France is the 3rd largest country in Europe after Russia and Ukraine.
Sweden is 5th at roughly 450 000 km² compared to France ~550 000 km².
I would take the examples of what happened in Italy (and possibly) Spain: the train became more useful than the plane. Italy has almost no domestic flights. Ticket prices are kept low due to competition. It’s all down to putting as investment into the rail as road and airport.
It's faster too. Usually I arrived in Marseille around 30 minutes earlier using train. THe traffic in paris could get pretty bad during certain hours if I ought to get to the airport.
@@nntflow7058 it’s a good deal less annoying too. Queues, cramped seating… Even in a crowded train, one can move around, work and have access to one’s baggage.
Well I don't want to be Italy so F off.
Rail is pretty nice in Italy indeed. A bit too many connections for my touristy tastes, but at least it's fast, reasonably priced & gets you to lots of places.
we did indeed take the high speed train from rome to naples. was a really good and friendly way of traveling there.
Thanks for covering this debate.Ever since the '70s and the growth of higher-speed rail, there has been a rule of thumb within railway circles that any journey that rail can do centre-to-centre in 3hrs or under is one where air cannot compete on time. That rule obviously related to business travel - 6hr was considered the boundary for leisure trips. Those times have effectively expanded in the newer security environment. As you say, perceived reliability of the ground connection factors into this.
More directly related to your channel, electric taxi is definitely something I'd be happy to see covered. Thanks again \m/
That rule also changes as the speeds of rail transportation changes, TGV is an insanely fast and efficient form of transportation.
"WTW efficiency of gasoline ICEV ranges between 11-27 %, diesel ICEV ranges from 25 % to 37 %".
Your 5% is a bit pessimistic.
And modern turbo engines are closer to diesels.
It’s not so much the engine itself as it’s effectiveness when used in the vehicle.
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read up on how they did the analysis.
@@MentourNow No, just no. A modern turbo system is up to about 40% efficient, similar to a turbofan. They have to be to meet Euro standards.
There is VASTLY less drag without wings, and with the lower speed (aerodynamic drag loss being proportional to the cube of speed after all). You might lose 10-20% in the transmission, but you lose masses in the coupling of the turbine output to the air too.
not to mention Toyota's new gasoline engines making power at 40% efficiency, with drivetrain losses ~36%.
The internal combustion engine of passenger cars has an efficiency around 25% ballpark. Some Atkinson cycle engines go much higher.
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNowthe cited source is wrong because car as a whole has 0% efficiency - all energy get lost after a round trip.
@@MentourNow 5% is definitely not accurate for an average car. One reason being that hardly any cars use normally aspirated engines these days. And for an apples-to-apples comparison, you would also need to take into account the extra work that planes need to do to travel vertically, which cars just don't need to do at all.
@@MentourNow It's great that jet engines are becoming more efficient, but using efficiencies to compare transport types pointless. The global warming potential of a jetliner is nearly three times as damaging as a car (per passenger-km). I get the feeling the rhetoric about climate change within the airline industry is totally subjective.
you are contradicting yourself....because cars as a whole are the biggest contributor to co2 as a single mode of transportation..because they have the most milage at the end of the day....@@ChrisTaylor-NEP
I recently flew from the USA to go to a meeting in Leeds. I was surprised to find that there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore. The only flights are connecting through Belfast, Dublin, or Amsterdam. The train to Leeds is not too long, about 2.5 hours, but it leaves from the Kings Cross station that is on the other side of London from Heathrow, so you have to add another hour of taking at least two trains with bags or a taxi. For someone already in central London, the train is faster, but after traveling 10 hours from the USA, the multiple trains to get to Leeds is too much.
LBA is, for all intents and purposes, a Regional Airport. It IS an International Airport but it's always been a small one and I wasn't aware that it ever had direct flights to/from the the US.
Maybe get a map out before you fly next time as Manchester is just up the road. Whilst you're at it maybe just do the most basic of research full stop and you might find the things your complaining about don't need to be issues.
"Is there a direct train from Heathrow to Kings Cross?
Yes, there is a direct train departing from Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3 station station and arriving at King's Cross St. Pancras station station. Services depart every 10 minutes, and operate every day. The journey takes approximately 55 min." - You could've taken a direct train
@@C2K777 maybe you should read the original post correctly as nowhere does it claim there has ever been a direct service between LBA and the US.
@@egpx So at what point does this " I was surprised to find that there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore." not say EXACTLY that?! It would be a bit hard for Eric to be surprised about flights not existing anymore if he hadn't believed that such routes existed. Maybe YOU should read better yourself before telling others to do so 🤔
@@C2K777 the phrase ‘I was surprised to find there are no direct flights from London Heathrow to Leeds anymore” say absolutely nothing about the availability of direct flights between Leeds and the US. Eric was talking about the domestic flight he could have connected on to which was a thing until Covid caused the route to be cancelled.
As someone who has traveled fairly frequently from a minor airport internationally via a hub airport, my experience has been that taking a train for the first leg is much more reliable. If there is a problem with my flight I'm probably going to take a train anyway.
If I'm not flying onwards it makes even less sense to fly. It would take me an hour to get to the airport maybe 30 mins- hour to get from my destination airport to the city, and then I still have to deal with security check in etc. Or I can take a train without any of those issues and relax for a few hours.
Much agreed. I was once re-routed on a flight itinerary to Katowice, Poland via Warsaw (originally planed via Frankfurt). The last leg, a 20 minute flight, was delayed by 3 hours that day. I could have taken a train, or even a bus, directly from Warsaw and reached my final destination sooner.
@@sncy5303Considering that there are trains around the world that don't have that issues, lack of investment is the problem, not poor technology. If aviation subsidies were cut and train usage would increase, you wouldn't have the same problem. It's just like in the US were cars are heavily subsidised but trains are not so everyone is obliged to drive for anything.
If trains are better, people will choose them. There is no need to ban aircraft. Let them compete.
@@ironcito1101No need to wait 5 years with half full planes subsidised by everyone's taxes, just ban them. There is already strong competition on rails, plane are just useless on these routes.
@@grigandy Don't subsidize air travel. But don't subsidize trains, either.
at a 2.5 hour rail trip threshold; there is a good chance the train trip will take less time than going through security and boarding the plane will, anyway.
Oh, absolutely.
Make no mistake, I think the idea behind this law makes sense. But the alternatives MUST work and be price competitive for adaptation to happen.
@@MentourNow certainly, the effort would be better spent in improving the alternative. and the US is a poster child for not improving rail service.
Austria has also a law banning short-haul flights, and Austria heavily subsidizes railway and public transport: for EUR 1000 per year per person you can buy a ticket for almost all ground-based public transport without usage limit.
5% efficiency for cars? I think you can get any percentage you want by "tweeking" the parameters that you use in your survey!
Furthermore, the concept of "efficiency" is basically: (things sought / the things that cost).
In another words, a gasoline engine with 25% mechanical efficiency is considered a lousy mover, while with 75% of heat generation is considered a good heat generator!
Another argument is whether we consider number of passengers and distance when evaluating "efficiency", or the convenience of moving people rather freely for moderate distances (say in the range of 80 to 120 km).
If so, then "efficiency" becomes a "relative" measure!
However, from a thermodynamics perspective, the "thermal efficiency" of a gasoline I.C.E is between 25 to 29%. Diesel I.C.E is between 27 to 32%. While jet engines (basically gas turbines) are between 32 to 36%. Steam turbines on the other hand, are between 62 to 68% thermal efficiency (some are even more).
So, scientifically speaking, these are the ranges of efficiencies we are dealing with and should consider when we evaluate various technologies, (Carnot cycle, Otto cycle, etc.). Needless to say, it is not fair to compare apples with oranges. Each move technology developped to cover what other technology cannot!
Those are before you add a turbo - ICE can go over 50% efficiency with a turbocharger (30-40% would be more normal, similar to multi-spool turbofans, funny that). Its why you can barely buy a car without one now.
@@mycosys
Turbos are tools to make more power by "shoving" more air in the engine to allow burning more fuel!
Therefore, thermal efficiency is very slightly improved in as much as you augment gas turbine efficiency into the I.C.E. i.e. the 32 to 36% efficiency.
no, they recover energy form the exhaust, @@nidaldajani728 and have given efficiency over 50%
The 5% I mention in the video is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. As you write, it's all about the total numbers. I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This is the source I used:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow
Thank you. So basically we are comparing real life cycle of each mode of transport to fuel consumption.
This is fair comparison.
It also sheds light on how we can improve poor performers. For example in the case of cars perhaps carpooling would be a positive thing, among other solutions.
What I meant by comparing apples with oranges is that it is unfair to compare air travel technology to land travel technology because they are not interchangeable. We need them both!
Therefore the focus should be on enhancing each technology to the best possible within its field, and limit comparisons to members of like technology.
I enjoy your topics and that's why I am encouraged to participate.
I appreciate you bringing this up. I think there are some things that need to be better considered to paint a more accurate picture of what is happening and what can be done:
1. Engine efficiency - While I don't agree with all of your figures, for example a modern car engine efficiency, while generally very poor, isn't that poor, a big thing to consider is drag. A plane doing say 500 knots through the air, even up in the much thinner stratosphere, creates a lot of drag. Drag is generally a square factor with speed and thus power needed increases by a cubic factor as power is force times distance. Also, it is well known that jet engines perform most efficiently at or near max throttle. ICE engines are still used in cars specifically because they are more efficient at lower power levels than jet turbines. We tried the gas turbine car and it failed. Even in the Ukraine war, the USA cited the M1 Abrams tank as a sub-optimal choice over the diesel powered Leopard 2 tank in part because of the gas turbine engine guzzling down way too much fuel when not moving the tank around at max speed.
2. End to end efficiency for a trip. So you look at France on a popular high speed TGV route. France for one does a lot of nuclear power and they share power with neighboring Germany who does all fossil fuel and mixes in intermittent renewable energy when the wind blows and when the Sun shines as well as buying nuclear power from France when the wind isn't blowing and the Sun isn't shining, which is a lot of the time in Germany. So now France has a relatively green source to power trains that pull the power off of overhead 25 kV AC lines. When you want to ride the train, you just walk up and get on and the train whisks you away. A little bit later after zooming through the countryside on high speed rail you are at your destination and just walk off and are on your way. The TGV train uses up to 16 MWs of power to quickly get you to your destination.
So now you look at end-to-end airliner efficiency. To get to the capacity of a TGV train, you have to pull out your A380 airliner. The A380 airliner consumes something like 600 MWs of chemical energy that comes from a combination of polluting dino juice from the ground and inefficiently produced SAF fuel in order to fly through the air at the high speeds it goes at. Notice that 600 MWs of power is a lot more than 16 MWs for the high speed train with similar carrying capacity, plus it has a much dirtier energy source. So you get to the terminal building. You need to wait in line to go through security checks. Gotta take time to check your bags. They need time to move all of your stuff onto the plane. Need to wait for your boarding, call, etc. Delays, delays, and at some point, likely over an hour after you got to the airport, you are finally in the air. Often it is 2+ hours you are on the ground after arriving at the airport before finally getting into the air. So now you fly at a high rate of speed making up for some of that lost time on a regional flight. But then you land, need to taxi around where the engines are wasting a lot of fuel because they cannot operate efficiently at taxiway speed, instead wasting gobs of fuel, pull up to the terminal, eventually deplane, wait for your bags, etc, and maybe in an hour or so you leave the airport after landing and getting everything in order and are on your way.
So yeah, that 600 MWs of dirty, climate damaging energy to do the same thing as a high speed train in France that is 'only' using up to 16 MWs of power and getting it from a cleaner power source is significant. To really even it out, maybe you say the plane was only effectively doing that kind of energy burn for half of the time a train would be doing its equivalent energy burn when you add up the end to end efficiency. You still have 300 MW versus 16 MW. 16 MWs is a lot less. I am saying the train would be 20x more efficient per person all things considered, and it is using a far cleaner energy source than a plane is at the same time.
3. The problem with Europe is moving your freight around is hard. You need lots of trucks for this and more and more you use planes for the job. Your high speed rail was so narrowly minded focused on moving people around, you forgot that you also need to move stuff around. This is a problem in the USA as well where there is Amazon Prime and their associated fleet of Boeing 767's, the planes passenger airliners are dumping overboard for other planes like the Boeing 787, spewing out enormous emissions to do Amazon 1 day Prime delivery. (So no, you didn't save that much moving to more efficient planes, the older planes are working harder than ever moving freight around.) Trucks are not fast enough and especially American trains are not fast enough for Amazon Prime delivery. But everybody wants their stuff to show up right away, so Amazon has a very heavy worked fleet of Boeing 767's spewing out enormous emissions to move all of this freight around. Amazon Prime is far from the only air freight operator around and this seems to be where most of the older planes are going. They don't go out of service, but instead often become workhorse freight planes and their emissions are huge.
4. So what is really needed around the world is high speed passenger and high speed freight using tracks more intelligently for both and more point-to-point rail lines to make it all work. The problem with rail is it wasn't fast enough. So now we start doing more high speed trains with passengers and we start to solve the problem. But then you need to add freight back in with both low speed frieght and sharing the high speed lines going at high speeds and the picture starts rounding out and really working.
5. It seems like the problem with getting more to move down rail lines effectively and get the jobs at hand done the way it is being demanded of them is more of a management problem. The technology clearly points to we need to do more trains. They are just more efficient and can be made to haul far more stuff around far more cleanly. It is just when the politics and overall management of the rail system is broken, then you end up taking routes that are far more damaging to the environment such as driving more trucks around and flying more airliners around. Trucks and especially airliners will never hold a candle to what a train can do efficiency wise.
6. With "the hydrogen future" of air travel, don't forget that highly compressed hydrogen is a huge explosion hazard as well as liquid hydrogen that is so hard to keep it cold enough to stay a liquid. Hydrogen is also the most energetic chemical rocket fuel that we have that we have used to power rockets such as the Space Shuttle, which a hydrogen explosion after a solid rocket booster cut into the hydrogen fuel lines / center tank did lead to the destruction of the rocket. All hands were lost only on impact with the ocean because the explosion happened so high up that there was barely any atmosphere left for an explosion to be possible. (Chemical explosions just can't happen in the vacuum of space.) So when you have a loss of containment where hydrogen rapidly expands out and rapidly mixes with atmospheric oxygen and then ignites, you have a big boom. Now say you fill up a major international airport like Charles de Gaulle with large airliners fueled up for international flights around the globe with massive hydrogen storage tanks on site at the airport. And these will be physically massive tanks as hydrogen is a low density fuel with pressure and temperature issues around sticking it on an airliner which is a major problem when you are trying to fly somewhere on hydrogen with room left over for paying passengers. So say there is a fueling mishap at the gate while pumping hydrogen into a parked airliner and this leads to the airliner losing containment of its massive store of hydrogen and it all goes boom! Suddenly you have a massive orgy of explosions as this chain reacts through the whole airport, all of the airliners at the airport, and the huge hydrogen storage tanks. A huge mushroom cloud forms over what used to be the airport as well as leveling everything for miles around the airport and even knocking planes out of the sky that were in the general vicinity of the airport from the massive orgy of shock waves hitting the planes until they structurally failed and dropped out of the sky or blew up mid-air. This would likely end "the hydrogen future" of air travel if not an incident before it.
Imagine this but on a much bigger scale with some of the explosions 1,000x more powerful: th-cam.com/video/FsS3HxrXhsQ/w-d-xo.html
The explosions at the airport would probably look more like this: th-cam.com/video/993wlZ6XFSs/w-d-xo.html
Good points. Especially last one, even fuel right now is not hermetically contained and leaking by a little, especially on refueling. But jet fuel is hard to get ignited...compared to hydrogen. And hydrogen is also VERY corrosive.
Wow! That's a really short essay 😊
As pointed out by some, The location of Airports are adding extra layer of complexity. By nature they have to be located a bit farther from city centres and even most of them now a days are completely outside the city limits. The public infrastructure to connect those airports with the city are not that convenient in many countries especially in the developing world. Which may result in additional dependencies on motorised vehicles which again comes at great environmental cost. Airports would need supporting public transport infrastructure which adds to both development cost and travel cost.
I don't know about the US, but every major European airport I've visited has had a dedicated rail connection. For smaller airports where only a few planes land each day they tend to use buses instead.
The developing world isn't really something I'd be worrying about in the context of short haul flights, since bus travel is far cheaper than flying in those countries.
Railways pay for the tax on the electricity they consume, but international flights in Europe pay no taxes for fuel.
I can understand it in France, they have an excellent and affordable rail system. In the UK, train travel is so expensive that it is often cheaper to fly.
Lots of islands in the UK too. Those tend to make train travel tricky.
Also, most trains that compete with regional flights in France are powered by electricity, and France went big on nuclear power plants while having little to no oil.
@wojciechgrodnicki6302 Most people are not travelling to those islands though
I've only ever looked at prices from London to Scotland, but I've never seen a train ticket that's less than twice the price of an EasyJet or Ryanair flight. Admittedly the last time I did it must have been 5 years or so ago, so perhaps things have changed.
@@TiagoJoaoSilvathose genius have started shutting down the nukaplants to please the ecologists like in germany.
Which now allow them to restart their coal powerplants…
Because
You know
Save gaia and all…
As an American, I will say that not only are the rail networks here primarily geared towards freight, the freight lines own the majority of the railroads here. They seem to prioritize their own trains over passenger trains, even with laws in place that state they're supposed to give priority to passenger trains. If you ever take an Amtrak train on a long-haul trip, you'll get to your destination....eventually. There's a very good chance you'll be several hours late arriving, though. Hope you don't have to be anywhere by a specific time.
Same with Canada
Once the squabble with China is done. You should get the Chinese to build a high speed mag lev line from NY to LA. 2,600 miles in 13 hours.
It's not secret that the aviation industry lobbied hard so passenger trains wouldn't develop in north america. shame.
The biggest issue with the French short-haul restrictions being implemented in the US is, first, with a poor rail system for commuter passenger travel, it would effect very, very routes. Additionally, as most Americans are used to having to drive much further than Europeans just on a daily commute, if the time convenience of a short haul flight were taken away, the rail option would need to be significantly less expensive, for Americans to not just choose to drive instead.
I agreed with most of the statements in this video, especially the "make the trains cheaper" as a more reasonable solution. But there are aspects of airplane pollution that are not specifically linked to their CO2 emission such as their contrails (I encourage you to look it up, but don't get confused with the chem-trail nonsense). Another aspect is that the pollution occurs at a different altitude than most other sources, which also has an impact. Anyway, it was an interesting video.
also airlines are the only industry that pay 0 in taxes for their fuel. Not really a level playing ground
Yeah, ppl tend to forget about the other pollutants that burnt fuel (gas, diesel, and jet) produce. It's not just about the CO2.
Add in that most of France's rail network is electrified and it should mean marginally cleaner air overall. And cleaner air is better than not-cleaner air IMO.
In 2022, China emitted 38.6 times more greenhouse gases than did international aviation. Anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change should be screaming at China, not aviation.
@@SadisticSenpai61 the electrified rail network is even better when you consider a lot of it is nuclear with a sprinkling of hydro, wind, and solar
@@NGCAnderopolis Yes, we should ban air travel. Even better al engine travel. Let's go back to horses! Problem solved.
Our mayor put a 30 million dollar train starion in our small city. Almost nobody uses it because it costs hundreds of dollars to travel less than 2 hours.
As a matter of strictly personal preference and driven out of convenience rather than any exogenous concerns, if I could reach a given destination by rail rather than air for the same cost, end to end, within 1 hour total travel time, I would happily take the train. Unfortunately, the United States is not set up this way.😢
And even worse is that about seventy year ago in the USA on many routes we could do what you described. But trains were too old-fashioned. We let them die off. 😢
@@erniecolussy1705 Some routes in the US make sense for trains, Boston-NYC-Washington DC, some Texas routes, Tampa-Orlando-Miami, LA-San Francisco, LA-Las Vegas and Portland-Seattle-Vancouver are all routes that a proper TGV-like service could make sense.
@@solracer66 we are quite simply lacking infrastructure. If rail lines had been developed in parallel with interstate development, it would be very different.
Air infrastructure however is very well developed. If I had the money, I could be on a plane at a tiny regional airport within 1 hour of my location at any given time(RV Nomad) most of the time.
I see railroad sidings everywhere but no passenger trains. Why? Freight moves effectively from hub to hub. People do not.
@@solracer66 California has the high speed rail project already being built. It's suffered from serious corruption, push back from everyone, including the same people who'd benefit from it, and instead of taking the Japanese approach of a "proof of concept" by connecting SF-LA, they're trying to connect every population center in the middle of the state. Completion date is already pushing past 2030, despite the project having been approved in 2008. It's a mess, but it needs to happen, I'll just be too old to benefit from it by the time it enters service.
@@erniecolussy1705 We didn’t “let them” die off. The auto industry actively killed them.
Not taking any sides here!
Aren't the bullet trains electric? If they consume no fuel (at least not directly) wouldn't that really make them several time less emisive than aircraft?
yes and yes
@@viinisaari- Depends how that electricity is made and how far the train is from that power source. Electric lines have loses the further the electricity is transferred. Trains also need tracks. Those tracks need to be built. Depending on the landscape that those tracks have to be built in determines how much greenhouse gas is produced building them (mountainous terrain will be much more for example).
Research “green” power sources. They are often not as green as they want you to believe. Everything has pros and cons and nothing is for free.
Not only the bullet trains.
In France in 2019 71% of the km driven by TER (regional train) was electric.
@@gpaull2 While that is true, we are comparing only the fuel. Jet fuel also needs to be manufactured and transported. Airports also need to be built. If you go down that rabbit hole, you'll need to comapre an awful lot of amount of data. So we stick to just emissions.
@@gpaull2and because green power is not perfect we shouldn't use it. Great argument, have a nice day
Let me first say I love planes and flying and your channel is great. There is one factor though which skews some of the comparisons you've made, that is that air travel is only available to a certain percent of the worlds population whereas all the other carbon contributrions mentioned are from a much bigger amount of people. That means on a per capita basis air travel is still a very high carbon contributor. It's great to hear of the new efficient engines and new technologies being explored so hopefully we can all keep flying! And yes those ships are really dirty!
Used your summary in my comment :)
Don't agree with everything you say here*, but you still summarize the misconception about the aviation industry's CO2e impact well.
* (I also wish "we can all keep flying", but realistically, at the current rate of flying, it's quite sure that we won't be able to and shouldn't).
Another issue with electric planes is that today we restrict lithium ion batteries onboard for very good reasons, imagine having a 15 ton li/ion battery on board, and now imagine anything going even slightly wrong with it... welp...
Good point. Fire fighting has usually involved removing one side of the "fire triangle": fuel, oxidizer, heat. High energy density batteries keep all of those in a sealed package. The electric company I retired from had several lithium storage battery fires; one killed a firefighter. It will take a revolution in battery design to make them safe for aviation, I think.
No, not an issue. Is well known that Li-Ion battery fires can be traced to a specific cause... Bad design, bad manufacturing, poor maintenance and so on. IMO any aircraft using batteries would address every one of these known potential issues and typical certification and regulation should ensure that flying in such aircraft shouldn't be any less safe than today's aircraft.
Well a diesel engine is around 35-40% and petrol is around 25% as far as i know.
Not sure how well pushing trains would work here in Sweden, the trains struggle a lot already to keep the schedules and then you have the fact there is only so much room on the rails.
Also we could make container ships a thing of the past if we stopped production from going to China instead of local production, then with what 20000 containers on one ship one could
argue that they are not that bad considering the huge amount of goods they can move.
20-25% without a turbo. up to 50% with. i have no idea where he got 5%
The 5% is not the raw efficiency of the engine itself. In the video I said: "The efficiency of a conventional CAR with a normally aspirated internal combustion engine is just 5%". That's the efficiency of a car in a typical journey, including accelerating and braking between traffic lights, etc. The 40% and 25% efficiency numbers for jetliners and turboprops also refer to the efficiency that these planes get from a typical passenger flight, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to read more about this, here is the source:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow No, thats not the comparison he makes.
He tries to argue the ICE isnt at full power so it isnt as efficient. Then compares it to the bare efficiency of the axial turbine at full power. Its deliberately misleading
@@MentourNow thanks for the link, as a trucker my tool is also sensitive to weight bit like a plane, cause the more weight on the truck the less cargo i can haul, which in turn lowers the profits.
Japan manages precise, almost flawless train schedules. Platforms have marks for each kind of train that identifies where the doors will be when the train arrives; they don't miss the mark by more than a centimeter. No matter how you cut it, trains are far easier to get to and board than airplanes and most are far more comfortable than any airplane economy seat--that's true even in the U.S. which otherwise has an abominable passenger rail system. There's stuff to see out the windows on a train. Obviously, over certain distances, planes have the time advantage. For tourists, it's not near enough of an advantage to opt out of the train alternative. I'm not dissing flying. And I'm especially not dissing planes when it comes to the environment. There are plenty of reasons why they are the default travel mode. However, trains are simply a far more pleasant way to travel. Planes are anything but a pleasant way to travel--even if the seat is up in front. I'm a subsriber and I really enjoy your posts. Thanks.
The worst part of flying is the airport, especially the security theatre, baggage friction and cost in time and money. In the US I chose to drive 3000 miles over flying but would prefer to stay put.
Living in Japan I loved the trains; expensive but fast and clean, available. What I hated while living in France were the trains, dirty, difficult and not convenient.
@@jm3digital The French railway isn't as good as Japan's but we've always found the TGVs clean and comfortable. One of the things we loved about Japan railway stations were all the vending machines with almost anything available, including beer and saki. Been a few years so I don't know it that's still true.
Your chances of getting sexually assaulted as a woman travelling alone on a plane are significantly lower though. Which I would say definitely boosts the comfort level.
@@Ellie-rx3jt: Unless a carriage is completely empty of any other people the chance of a rape occurring is no greater on a train than a plane.
It would be interesting if you could do a video about the transportation problems here in Canada. We live in a very large country with a relatively small population where some of our major cities are 4-5 days apart by land transport and some of our more northern communities don't even have year round land routes available. I remember Europeans, when I lived in Germany, being astounded when I would mention driving 2-3 days to visit relatives. Anyway just a thought. We do have some unique challenges here.
Canada is definitely a good case for aviation. The carbon footprint of all the needed infrastructure to connect disparate areas (not just construction, but also maintenance which way too often forgotten) really makes it the best alternative. The low population density also makes it the most economically viable.
50% of population of canada is in the montreal- windsor corridor - an additional 8% live in the Calgary-Edmonton Corridor. The dense greater Vancouver area is another 7% of canadian population. so nearly 2/3 of the population is as accessible to the vast majority of trips, as it would be in Europe.
High speed rail wihin these area's ( or rail in Vancouver) would dramatically improve transportation infrastructure in Canada.
So true, my former home town (2,500 ppl) in Northwest Territories lost its jet route- and was replaced with a small twin engine 19 seater.
The road distance is 1300 km to the first major air hub (Edmonton) by land, or 750km in a small, loud 19 seater.
Lot of the people in this comment section seem to have zero empathy for people of ordinary means, trying to budget a trip to visit family at least once a year. @@rb239rtr
Haha so true. I can't tell you how many times English or European visitors to Florida also want to stop by the Grand Canyon and Hollywood-- dreaming it's a day or two drive away just like London to Berlin or Berlin to Rome. They just have NO idea about the size of North America.
French watcher here ! I get what you say, that our railway is one of the most well-developed, but even people here find it really expensive and not trustworthy. The train industry in France hasn't stopped deteriorating over the years, with stations closing every year, prices that have been skyrocketting since the end of WWII ... As soon as you get out of big cities, you can't do anything without a car. So now we have an industry where a train ticket costs almost as much as a plane ticket, but the same journey can take up to 6x more time by train for almost the same price. As for reliability, it is a common joke material over here ("the SNCF wishes you a happy 2015 year and apologizes for the delay"). The car is more common by far. So, sad to say, but even some of the best railway network is still not attractive at all, and you made an excellent point when you said that our gov is not making train look better, it is only making plane look worse.
La frequentation des trains TER, qui servent les plus petites gares susceptibles de fermer, a augmente de 75% entre 2002, année de devolution aux regions, et 2022. Connaissez vous un réseau qui a fait mieux?
High speed lines are replacing flights between the biggest cities, it does not take 6 times more time, it's even shorter
I still laugh thinking about how Lewis Hamilton complained about the military flyovers at F1 races on environmental grounds. Not only are the flyovers good training (precise time over target training to be specific), but that fuel would just be burned doing something else if not there, those pilots are gonna get their flight hours one way or another.
Did Lewis really complain about that ? If he is so concerned about the environment stop racing Formula 1 ... and making millions of $ in the process !
Adding early arrival at the airports for checkin/security, and waiting for luggage after the flight, plus commuting to/from the airports would often - for short flights up to some hours - put the train into advantage anyway.
well not really if u travel with hands luggage only.
i usually arrive 40 min before departure, use fast track to pass security (included in amex card), and on landing i go straight away where i need.
ah, and airport is much closer for me by uber vs train station
@@Sky10811 Even with hands luggages intercity train gets the upper hand especially for 120-1000km journey. No hekkin' super tight security checks like airport, only mandatory ID checks when you its almost time for your train to depart. All i need is to arrive 20 to 10 minutes before departure time to print the ticket (which can be booked online)band prepare passport/ID cards, stand in line for at least 5 minutes before enter the platform and boom, off you go. The only main hassle regarding to the cleanliness mostly depends on how skillful the maintenance crews on the stations its stopping by to do a quick cleanups here and there while the passengers were embarked/disembarked from the train which mostly only takes around 10 to 25 minutes each time. While for the comfort issues it depends on the class of the train you order which usually divided into 2 sections like airplane (but with more people on board). Pretty pleasant i would say since most of the times the journey to the airport itself can become a huge nightmare because in the city that i lived, most of the times, the traffic were absolutely against me everytime i have to go to the airport
Hi Mentour, I think you might disagree with me...
The longest city-pair in France (I can find) is between Calais and Marseille is about 890km (556 miles), which is about 2 hour of flying. There are far closer city pairs that have significantly higher demands than the 2 cities I've mentioned above. Now here's where you might disagree with, in opinion, if a flight is less than 1000km or not flying to an isolated island, airplanes are not being used to their maximum potential. So given that Calais and Marseille is less than 1000km and none of them are on an isolated island, I personally think that limiting planes to longer flights and to isolated islands is a good move, not just for the environment but also for utilisation.
As someone who lives on an isolated island, I agree completely! Not that my residence has any bearing on the subject matter 😁
Considering the increased wait times and restrictions on air travel introduced this century, short haul flights are a bigger nuisance for the traveler than before. Western Europe is doing a massive push to upgrade and better integrate their railway systems. France already has a great system, but in 10-15 years, when everyone has cought up, we might be looking at the rebirth of rail...😊
There's a train service here locally. I've never used it, because it never operates at times or days when I would be able to use it.
It operates towards the city five mornings per week, and the opposite direction on the same evenings. No service on weekends, and forget about going towards the city in the afternoon or vice-versa...
Electric ground taxiing, being able to do your own push-back and turn with an electric motor inside the nose wheel, and electric replacing uses where you'd usually turn your APU on are really interesting to me and would LOVE to hear more about all those topics! Aviation moves very slowly with completely new technologies though, and wonder how long it'll take for this kind of stuff to show on commercial jets, any chance it could make a debut on business jets instead?
This has been repeatedly looked at and the mass penalty is stated as not worth it, whilst proposals to use ground tugs out to the runway threshold fall over on airframes not being designed for the loading of being pulled around by the front wheel in the kind of ways (and speeds) that ground movements currently require
There is A VERY good reason why electric planes and even cars not really a thing (there are some, but not much, they are used more because of restrictions, subsidiaries or novelty, or, as most owners think less ecological damage that will be fixed by hauling around dozens of kilos of dead weight and generating power for it by burning stuff). They may be less effective, but in terms of energy per kilo...batteries suck ass and gasoline reigns supreme. It is not the first time electric cars fight ICE, but we can only observe what will happen.
Those electric features have to get power from somewhere, and the biggest limiting factor on an airplane is weight, rather than space. Adding batteries to an existing airplane design, would reduce capacity for fuel, cargo and/or passengers that plane could carry, making it more expensive for everyone.
My guess would be that 'electric' taxiing would be powered *by* the APU, rather than one of the main engines. That would still save a lot of fuel, even if it isn't the absolutist solution people think might be better.
In practice, most planes have to run the APU just to keep the A/C on if they want the shut down the engines until ground-power can be connected.
@@miscbits6399 The mass penalty is under 300 lb or 135 kg, and if the aircraft can decrease by that much fuel (that is loaded to allow for taxiing delays and just plain taxiing fuel), then the mass penalty is already nullified.
@@MottyGlix except that engines must be started, tested and fully warmed up before hitting the runway threshold
If delayed on the taxiway behind a tug there needs to be some form of power supplied to keep cabin air conditioning operating - having heavy umbilicals between the tug and aircraft pretty much negates the purpose of proposals.
If running on internal power, the battery mass needs to be taken into account for such eventualities
You can't put self-propulsion electric motors on the main gear as the brakes are already taking up most of the volume (aircraft brakes are HUGE) whilst putting them on the nosegear gets back to the kinds of airframe stresses that the aircraft weren't designed for and which would incur mass penalties at design stage (at least with a tug there's a possiblity of some kind of ties to the main gear to reduce stresses, however airframe stresses from towing are a big issue, especially if an emergency stop is ever needed by the tug - that could send the aircraft straight to the scrapyard. This is why tugs are extremely slow and and use feather touch acceleration/deceleration
In short, the airframe mass penalties whether towing or self propelled are significantly more than the mass of electric motors, 135kg doesn't take account of the need for batteries (a 737 weighs upwards of 30 tons. That's a lot of inertia to overcome) and the fuel savings aren't as high as advocates like to make out
Fixating on fuel doesn't help - Jet engines use 30% more fuel than piston ones however they're LIGHTER and you need FEWER of them for any given pwoer output, plus they are 95% or lower maintenance cost (it wasn't uncommmon for 4 engine piston planes like Connies to arrive after a long flight with one engine feathered and even with 4 engines working it took around 9 hours to turnaround an aircraft due to per-flight required engine maintenance).
As Elon is fond of saying: "the best part is no part" - adding electric motors to drive an aircraft around on the ground is extra expense, reduced range and a potential failure point that needs careful evaluation - otherwise you risk walking yourself into a "VC10" design - these were created to work from hot'n'high airports whose runways weren't long enough to support 707s - by the time they were ready to fly, the airports involved had already solved the issue by extending their runways (for a total cost across all the airports involved of less than ONE VC10, let alone the design program). This left the aircraft as a lame duck as its fuel consumption and range had been compromised in order to perform the intended task, meaning it was uneconomic to fly on normal routes
Air transport is really very efficient and has very comparable or lower CO2 emission than cars. My 2004 Peugeot 407 has 155gCO2/km a320 has around 55g/pass/km. (@MentourNow or any other pilot: please share some fuel consumption data. :) ).
The problem, I see with air transport is that it increases the distance people are prepared to travel. Example: a friend was doing an exchange, year in Lisbon (2600 km by road from me) and I came for a visit for New Year's . I would never make this visit if, I would travel by land. The problem is increased distances people travel, not the polution per km. If you HAVE TO go somewhere, you might just as well take an airplane.
I do agree, and am a big fan of aviation, but it’s quite telling that a new A320 has 55g/pass/km. if your Peugeot had 5 passengers in, then it’s emissions would be 31g/pass/km - and that’s an almost 20 year old inefficient ICE. The airline quoted figures always assume a full passenger cabin - if the cabin isn’t full then those figures can drastically increase. From the TGV website, they quote their figure at 3.2g/pass/km, again this would be assuming a full train. That is an astronomical difference!
I love how much more efficient aircraft have become, and will continue to fly, but I think it is obviously that despite their efficiencies, airplanes in general just need a hell of a lot of fuel to fly
Moving long distance travel to trains is absolutely key to pushing down transport emissions. Depending on the datasets and methodology, high-speed rail has about 10-50% of the emissions per Person-Kilometer of airliners.
The main hindrance to that in the EU are incompatible rail standards and the horrible state of German rail, which blocks traffic from east to west.
@@T33K3SS3LCH3N agreed - and I am the the UK, you should see the state of our railways 😂 poor service and expensive
France's ban on short flights sounds as effective as New York's right to repair act
Instead of banning shorthaul flights, simply make the trains better, and people will switch. Banning flights just confirms that airlines are a better value for the people.
Hi Peter! I really like your videos, thank you for your thorough coverage :) I'd like to add something here, it bothered me a bit:
Yes, jet engines have relatively high THERMODYNAMIC efficiencies of around 40%, while car engines are around 25%(gas) to 30%(diesel). HOWEVER, the energy needed for a set distance and weight is much less for transport on wheels (cars or trains) than in the air. The total energy, and thus emissions, is very high for air travel, even though the engines are more efficient. The efficiency mentioned only measures the ratio of mechanical energy (output) to chemical energy (input), not how much is emitted for a certain route.
As an engineer I wanted to place this here because I get how confusing some terminology might be when it gets thrown around in the heated debate around climate change.
The energy invested when ascending is partly compensated by the lower energy demand of the engines while descending. The fact hat jets fly very high where the air density is much lower than on the ground benefits the plane. Finally, an airliner has a much more streamlined shape than a car, and not resistance induced by the wheels. Take all that into account, compute it carefully, and if you make no errors, you might be astonished by the result.
Thank you!
Where did you get the 5% at 3:30? According to Wikipedia it's 20-40% for a gas-powered road car. That is a night and day difference.
This is the source I used, but note that it is about the efficiency of the CAR, in a typical car journey (including braking and accelerating at the traffic lights) not the raw efficiency of the engine. The same goes for the 25% and 40% efficiencies of turboprops and jets:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow I would like to make a rough estimation to check these claims. @MentourNow Could you provide the maximum number of passengers that can be taken and the average Kg of fuel used for a Paris -> Marseille using a recent / efficient aircraft, including taxing phases.
Side note : Paris isn't exactly there on the map of France (yes, I'm picky).
@@MentourNow Technically we should not compare efficiency, that is not the most important part (it indicates the theoretical margin of improvement), you should compare the energy (in kWh), and the true source of this energy, used to transport one personne from a point A to a point B (including all the part of this "travel"). Yes this is not a simple computation...
In the US we sacrificed a robust passenger rail transport for the Interstate Highway system. No thought was on efficiency, nor on environment, but purely on personal freedom without schedules. My local airport (KEUG) 32 KM (20 miles) flies few places I want to go. The major hub (KPDX) is 200 km (124 mi) away. but there are few linking flights. and when I can drive 1000Km (700 mi) faster than I can get a flight....
In part the interstate highway system was driven by the military. Most people in the US know that President Eisenhower implemented the interstate highway system. Slightly fewer people know that General Eisenhower saw the German Autobahn system during the waning days of WW II. Even fewer know that lieutenant Eisenhower was a long for a trial cross country convoy using the roads existing in the USA during WW I. That convoy took several weeks and they lost some vehicles. This was not what the USA military wanted to accept as normal.
Eh. A good 2-lane road is sufficient for that. Maybe 4 in certain areas. But the military is not why the US built so many highways or why public transport was basically bulldozed. @@johnmcleodvii
@@johnmcleodviimodern marvels did an awesome episode about it. And yeah it’s now lost to the dustbin of time
Coming from Australia to England i couldn't believe how expensive a short rail rail trip was . The train was much faster than Australia but the price was 5 times more than a similar distance. They need to have a minimum price for trsins there lol.
I read that it's more per km than Concorde...
Any public transport in the UK is expensive.
Rails are a natural monopoly.
Minimum or maximum?
@MottyGlix ha ha yes I should have said maximum price 😔 Or just one set price like here.
You make some good points... But a lot of travel is discretionary and reserved for the middle class of the developed world... Whereas transoceanic shipping is typically necessary for people to get food and finished goods. I don't think pilots will ever be in a situation where there's not enough work for them... So at least there's that.
You raise an interesting point, but what about the economies of those places dependent on tourism?
There are three reasons why I would go for train over domestic flight: landscape, space and airports.
Others already mentioned the hassles of airports. Won't repeat that. For space, while I never had the chance to go in a A380, I found most flights hard, difficult to place my legs, especially on domestic flights. While being above the clouds is so wonderful, I usually hate flying on shorter routes, especially for this reason.
And then there is landscape. Yes, flights can give you amazing views, if you have a window seat and the weather is great. But take a train along the Rein in Germany, or through the Alps, a Shinkansen in Japan etc. Such fantastic close up experiences. Every single time. It is so good to see what is between start and end of journey.
These days I rarely travel and mostly it is by car. But usually because when I go, I go to transport something. But I miss the days of going from A to B by train, taking ferry boats etc.
I do not miss flying, even though as an engineer I think it is one of the most amazing things and I love to follow your channel.
Tomorrow morning, I could fly from Manchester to London (one way) for £58 at 07:00, a train at the same time will cost £184.70. Even if you add the most expensive ways of getting to and from the airports (local taxi, Heathrow Express), it’s still massively cheaper to fly. It may be different in other European countries but in the UK trains are far too expensive, period.
And that isn't even for HSR but conventional rail. Even here in Germany prices are much lower, but we also have to finally end subsidizing planes
And yet, If you were to go Manchester to London but via Birmingham, it would cost £64.20.
So no, it's not massively cheaper if you know what you're doing.
I don't know which train ticket site you are using, but I can now (15.56) buy a ticket online for tomorrow morning from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston on the 06.55 for £148.10, or the 07.15 for £142.60 or the 07.35 for £125.70. OK, still not cheap, but less than your headline figure and booking ahead brings these costs down considerably. All these trains take about 2hrs 15mins centre to centre, which is far quicker than air plus check-in plus the extra before and after travel needed.
@@jan-lukas Planes arent subsidized, quite the opposite actually. Trains get subsidized left right and center, and still often fail to deliver a competitive product.
That's a short hop that should definitely be price competitive.
The trains actually have to make sense as an option, shocker. For most places rail travel is sort of the awkward middle child between driving yourself and flying. A really good rail network could solve so many problems, it's a shame that such lazy approaches are taken by policy makers.
Same is happening everywhere now. Instead of solving problems, promises to find an easy "fix" are implemented. And then decades-old issues raise their head...like situation with nuclear power in france (its bad, look it up). Or suburbian dystopia and "US-style cities". Or real estate crisis, that will become even worse. It is results of being lazy in past, that come to haunt everyone for not doing their job.
Trains are good for commuting to a city. At least here in belgium, with a car you will be sitting in traffic jams every day. That's it. High speed rail is fine for anything between 400-1000km, but it's way too expensive for me. Taking the car to the south of france from belgium costs me about a fourth compared to taking the TGV.
" According to MDPI, gasoline engines have a thermal efficiency of between 30% and 36% while diesel engines can reach a thermal efficiency of almost 50%"
Thats right not 5% 👍
I was surprised to learn back in 2016 that it would cost roughly the same for me to take the train to DC as it would be to fly there (I live in Iowa). The main problem was getting down to the train station cuz ofc there wasn't a bus service to/from the train station. Luckily, my dad was more than willing to drop me off/pick me up.
Yes, what would have been a half-hour + 2 hour flight with a layover in Chicago ended up taking 20 hours instead (with a layover in Chicago). However, I was very comfortable (unlike on a plane) and the only motion sickness I experienced was on a rough bit of track on the return trip. But I am prone to motion sickness and I've never been on a plane where I did not experience motion sickness - including on smooth flights with no turbulence.
Decent high speed trains are also very calm. Sadly the US just doesn't have any. Americans using high speed rail abroad often feel like they just experienced science fiction.
Unfortunately, as you stated, the aviation industry is extremely visible and that makes it an easy target for political goal scoring. As such, the reality of the aviation industry's contribution to global emissions doesn't really matter.
While I'm personally in favour of using high-speed rail for journeys where practical, I think it's also worth pointing out that the majority of railway "companies" in France are owned by the stare-owned company SNCF (TGV, Ouigo, Eurostar, Thalys, Lyria etc).
The French government has a history of protectionism with respect to SNCF and irs subsidiaries - for example, their attempts to block Deutsch Bahn from operating through the Channel Tunnel to London St Pancras.
Aviation emissions do matter.
1. No individual sector makes up "that" much. Serious reductions have to happen across ALL sectors.
2. Aviation has a disproportionately large climate impact relative to its raw amount of CO2 due to high altitude of a part of their emissions.
3. Aviation is especially inefficient with its emissions, transporting far fewer people and less cargo per ton of CO2-equivalent than any other mode of transportation.
But imo the most important point is sadly usually ignored: The Rich.
A tiny rich percentage of the population makes up an absurdly disproportionate amount of aviation emissions with private jets, using air cargo, and simply accumulating insane mileage.
It's not the average family that books one round trip for a vacation every couple years, but "businessmen" who fly around the globe on the regular. Formula 1 racks up most of its emissions by transporting teams via aircraft, not on the race track. Horse breeders and athletes have a dedicated horse air transportation industry...
The US for example would already meet its emission goals of 10 tons/capita if everyone lived like the bottom 50% of incomes (which is around 9.5 tons/year). But thanks to the upper 50%, and especially the top 1% at over 80 tons/year, they average 20 tons/capita instead. And aviation emissions are even more unequal!
The French government has a history of protectionism agreed but protectionism also applies to French industry as a whole.
Actually, France had history of being blindly in love in aviation and it was close to diminish role of rail transportation. Fortunately, Japan had its Shinkansen and then fuel crisis came in, which resulted in electric TGV and nuclear power plants supplying them. With trains having advantage in all of three hour routes covering most of large traffic generators domestic flights are unnecessary. That being said international flights will stick around for long time, because even with two or three hours extra waiting before and after the flight you are able to cover larger distances in reasonable time.
@@T33K3SS3LCH3N Using the A320 as an example, it consumes about 750 gallons of fuel per hour, for 150 passengers; 5 gallons per passenger-hour. The cruise speed is just over 500 mph, resulting in fuel consumption of 1/100 gallon per passenger mile. Cars can reach about 1/250 mile per passenger mile, but only if fully loaded. A couple traveling cross country by car would rival the fuel efficiency of the A320 because airliners are normally near or at capacity.
An interesting fact is that the national rail operators had larges shares in a national short-haul airline (France Inter), to propose fast travel across the country, when the TGV didn't existed yet, but with a small catch...the airline couldn't proposed flight at specific times of the day, that would interfere with the departure time of the train service to protect SNCF business.
On a railway subject....I live in the Seattle area and have knowledge of the rail in the area. The fuselage trains from Spirit in Wichita actually go right by the spur that feeds the Everett plant on the way to the Renton plant....as such, there is still direct rail linking the two. When Everett starts the 737 line, those trains will get there a few hours sooner than a trip to Renton.
There was a rail line headed north from the Renton plant industrial area through Bellevue and out to the Cascades that shut down about 20 years ago. Parts of it did become trails and forced the end of a really cool dinner train service that is still missed by many today.
I'm really interested in your sources for that 5% for NA petrol cars. I mean imagine my 44kW polo making .8 MW of heat. 🙃
This is the source I used:
leehamnews.com/2023/02/17/bjorns-corner-sustainable-air-transport-part-58-summary-part-2/
@@MentourNow The 5% number is way off. I recommend having a look at these sources:
- Assessing the efficiency potential of future gasoline engines (EPA, 2018, www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-10/documents/high-efficiency-ic-engine-sae-2018-04.pdf )
A 2016 Honda is shown to have a peek Brake Thermal Efficiency (BTE) of 37% and a BTE of 34% on a wider range of RPM (See page 6).
- Improving Thermal Efficiency of Internal Combustion Engines: Recent Progress and Remaining Challenges (2022, www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/17/6222 )
Why do you compare the efficiency of airliner (a form of mas transport) to cars (an individual transport ) and not to trains ?
Maybe because if you compared it to trains you would end up with data pointing to airliners being extremely inefficient ?
Because the point I was making was to show why electrification of aviation is not the same as electrification of cars.. you are talking about something completely different.
I’m not against using trains, I love using them myself, but that’s not what this episode is about
I DID specifically mention (at 14:35) that the per-seat efficiency of trains is many times better than that of aircraft.
@@MentourNow what you said was entirely untrue, ICE efficiency is from 20% NA to 50% Turbo
@@mycosysthat’s just the thermal efficiency of the engine itself. Add in wind resistance, friction from the tyres, and energy loss through the torque converter/clutch, and a lot of energy is wasted.
same applies to the plane, but moreso, @@jb-br8bf
Rail will never take over "short flight" routes in Australia for the simple reason of limited rail schedules with the fact that passenger trains have to mingle with freight trains for large sections of routes and it's just easier, cheaper and faster to send someone to another city in the same state by plane.
The Royal Flying Doctor service is a national icon here for a damn good reason.
If you have high speed passenger rail it uses dedicated high speed rail lines, so no slow moving freight trains.
@@littlewink7941 Not here, there is *no dedicated* high speed rails. it's all mixed-traffic rails.
I used to live in a small town along the Syd-Melb XPT corridor - there was more freight trains rumbling through on a weekly basis than the XPT ran, such they eventually build a dedicated Bypass Loop a few klicks out of town so a passenger train can sit safely whilst waiting for a freight to come from the other direction.
Thanks for clarifying the 5% stat in your community post, I think it's unfair to compare the newest aircraft to the oldest cars though. Also using rail travel rather than flying when travel times are comparable is a low hanging fruit so makes perfect sense. Just because something isn't the most major part of a problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve it!
However I agree with you that trains should be incentivised rather than making flying more expensive.
You are my favourite TH-camr at the moment and I'm loving your content on both channels, thanks for your hard work!
It isn't comparing to the oldest cars, that's comparing to brand new internal combustion engine vehicles, either diesel or gasoline. Cars before emissions controls were added were a bit less inefficient. I remember a road trip in convoy with a brand new SUV that was the first production year where emissions controls were required. The fuel tank was still sized the same as the year before. That monstrosity had a fuel range of about 180 miles. Our SUV (admittedly with 2 fuel tanks had a range of about 550 miles.
And for those asking why we had 2 SUVS on the trip. We didn't. We had 6 or 7 moving about 35 people and backpacking gear. Yes, they were crammed to capacity. Our SUV had 9 out of 20 seats filled and we were towing a U-Haul filled with backpacks.
@@johnmcleodvii Then go find that 5% figure from anything built after 1960
@@johnmcleodvii Dude Toyota's new engine line is 43% thermal efficient...
Uh... MAJORLY incorrect on the internal combustion engine efficiency.
The rule of thumb is around 30% efficiency, but there are some examples, generally diesel which hit closer to 40%.
Some enormous ship engines hit around 50%.
So you might want to edit the part where you say 95% of the energy is wasted as heat. It's more like 60-70%, which is still a lot but it is a far cry from 95%.
Every industry tries to point the finger at others while they embrace the idea of profits at any cost.
Will you make a video about the differences between ground control and the tower. What you guys talk about and when you talk about it and so on?
A comparison of fuel consumption per seat kilometer for trains and aircraft such as a 737 would have been helpful.
That might be complicated as most main rail lines in Europe are electrified.
And that's an important factor. Trains are easily electrified, planes are not. Use trains for shorter travel and planes for longer travel. I'm with France on this one
I don't have exact numbers but trains will either not consume fuel due to electrification or if they do be magnitudes more efficient. Rail is literally the most efficient form of travel we have and not by a small margin.
@762rk95tp comparison should be done as per emissions from fuel for planes vs emissions from the full cycle of electricity produced for the train.
it might be much dirtier depending what is the sorce fir electricity
as long as aviation fuel is not taxed (all train energy costs are taxed) and a lot of airport investment is done using public money you cannot compare costs of air travel and trains.
Those Very Large Container ships are actually hugely efficient even on raw bunker crude. One need to remember that the cylinders are often 1m bore with a 5m stroke. The combustion temperatures vastly exceeding those of cars or trucks, which means they can get nearly complete combustion of the fuel. The any particulates remaining are easily captured using only fractional amounts of the HP available.
Further, a number of commercial vessels use those large combustion engines not to drive a propeller _per se_ but a turbo generator making electric power.
Interesting technology, fuel preheated to thin it, the raw fuel is like light grade grease.
Other issue is batteries do not generate thrust unlike a jet engine so it'll have to be a prop. And planes land lighter than they did taking off because of burning fuel. With batteries it'll weigh the same on landing as it did taking off so MTOW's are going to be severely reduced or MLW will have to increase
Actually, batteries, way slightly less when discharged, except lithium oxygen batteries 😉
Same as a turbine needing a prop or a fan. A modern turbofan mostly generates its thrust with the fan, the jet is just a small bonus.
For weight: Batteries aren't dense enough anytime soon to replace anything but the very shortest of short-haul flights. And on those flights, planes that use kerosene also weigh almost the same on landing as it did taking off.
@@benchoflemons398 damn relativity xD
@@benoithudson7235 Btw youre probably thinking of turoprops, those use turbines to drive a propeller that creates thrust. Im fairly sure turbofan engines still rely on the jet, not the fans.
@@termitreter6545 No, I'm sure the comment is about the current evolution to high bypass fans which is a main reason why today's turbofans are enormously larger in diameter compared to previous low bypass turbofans. High bypass turbofans kind of use a turbine's many blades like ducted props to push an enormous amount of uncombusted air.
Yes the cost of train tickets can be more expensive than an air flight. An aircraft only needs an airport at each end of its journey. A train needs a track, stations etc over the whole distance. But in my own case here in France from a time point of view the train is quicker because there is less waiting around in airports, and the station is far closer to where I live (less than 10 minutes) compared to the nearest airport being over an hour away.
Countries that have found the right balance between public control and private competition over rails, or just a very well organised public system, can absolutely beat air travel in cost.
The problem of course is that most countries have a strong conservative faction that will actively sabotage public infrastructure because it doesn't fit into their "small government" philosophy (yet are totally comfortable with banging out billions for car infrastructure...)
Actually, sometimes it’s really better to use railway instead of airlines but in lots of cases it doesn’t work. Example for this is Germany. Personally, I would prefer to go by rail from Berlin to Munich or Frankfurt/ Main but railway ticket prices are often higher than airplane tickets. More over, the punctuality of the German Railway DB is very poor
As someone who lives close to only a small airport, restrictions to short haul flights would screw me over so hard. Over half of my flights are connecting flights, and I'd lose many hours if I can't take a plane to Madrid first (which takes about an hour), and I'd have to take a train, then arrive early and do the check-in and all. it could easily add 3 hours to my average flight to EU destinations (which is about 5-6 hours now).
I'd love to hear more about electric taxying. Living in the US you can often spend a lot of time taxying waiting for your slot at busy airports (New York, Atlanta etc.) so I think being able to spend all that ground time on electric power only would seem to offer huge benefits both to airlines and to the local environment
The problem with that is where to get all this power... First you need to power the motors pushing the wheels, directly... Fine and well, since the "line up and wait" is a staccato stop-motion, so the motors aren't running the whole time... BUT the A/C for the passengers and crew IS. The lights are ON 100% of the run... AND you're not seriously going to try to tell 100-500 passengers PER PLANE to sit in the hot and dark on the tarmac for the half-hour MINIMUM they'll be away from the gate and thereby the power router that keeps the plane humming until the pilots light-off engines to take over as it is... Then calculate the various heights of "travel seasons" just in the U.S. when planes are subject to routine waits as along as 2 hours out there, shuffling up through the stop-n-go lines to get to the runway...
If you thought passengers were unruly already, you haven't seen ANYTHING yet... SO those batteries are going to have to GET BIG, if they go to electric taxiing. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 Use a tug with an APU on it to move the aircraft to the end of the runway. That way all the extra weight stays on the ground. Even if the tug was diesel powered I'd bet it would be much more efficient than taxying on turbines.
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 most aircraft serving airports that are really congested, like LGA in New York, are equipped with an APU. Having the APU provide the electrical power for the AC, lights and the wheel tug is far far more fuel efficient than using the main engines to move the aircraft, and then to see them idling while they're waiting minutes or more to move. And on landing, the main engines could be shut down once the aircraft is safely off the runway, and leave the APU to handle the movement to the gate. And since the APU is already on the plane, there's no additional weight for batteries and the like.
@@fantabuloussnuffaluffagus If you're hellbent on ground-based power, why not use a rail or slot and drag system?
Think of how the old cable-cars and trolleys USED to get around, at least in early San Francisco (that I can recall off the top of my head)... The basic electrics wouldn't handle the hills with steel wheels on steel rails, so they installed enormous cableworks underground to literally drag them along... The ground personnel could bring out the attachment hardware, and while the engines light-off and warm up (at whatever schedule needs kept, the cable and rail system can haul the bird around to the end of the runway, and even get administered by Tower or some "Ground Control" up to the point of lining up... The tiller control in the cockpit could still function as an "emergency over-ride" in case something goes wrong or the pilots see something that the Tower doesn't... whatever... BUT then you no longer need tugs, fuel, additional equipment on the plane, and the whole idea/system is "backwards compatible", meaning with an appropriate towing hardware any plane currently in service can remain in service and just cut all the fuel costs for all the taxiing... ONLY use idle up to operating temperature, give or take a little wait-time and take-off...
There are alternatives, is my point. I get that. I'm just not necessarily 100% sold on "We NEED electric powered taxi functions!"...
AND there isn't much less efficient about getting around than pushing air to begin to move a ground vehicle. If it were otherwise cars would ALL have giant propellers and jets on them... ;o)
@@joncalon7508 You're still assuming that little bitty APU can push an airplane that weighs (frequently) in excess of 100,000 pounds. It's designed to keep the requisite systems operating on electrical power, though... NOT to push a jet in any sense of the word.
I know for a fact, getting zapped by electricity sure impresses you at how powerful the stuff is, but it still takes a HUGE amount of it to move that kind of weight, no matter how efficient you try to make it.
Now that we have an electric 18-wheeler, take a good solid look at one. They didn't get even a tiny bit smaller... and that should tell you something about the shear amount of power it takes to drag so much ass around... AND those only have to deal with around 40 tons or so (80,000 pounds).
Nothing against the idea of electric taxiing, itself. There probably IS a way to do it. I just don't think we're going to toss together an idea that the engineers wouldn't yet have thought about in the mad dash to save fuel and lower costs by now. I think the APU could probably help, but it's going to need a metric sh*tload of batteries alongside... and probably spend a serious amount of airborne time just recharging that while the main engines actually propel the plane. ;o)
Here in Australia a train is a very hard sell. You can dive in half the time and if you shop around you can get a flight for about the same as the fuel cost in your car. The last time I went to Sydney the cost was; Drive is cheapest, flight and train were about the same except it was an hour in a Bombardier Dash 8 or eight hours an a machine spawned in hell.
There is little rail travel in Australia other than in the South East. East West is tourist only as is North South and even the rail gauge is not uniform.
To be fair australia is a barren country in the middle so it is understandable why air travel is so prevalent. If you go In a train it would take a long time to travel as well. Plus australia is quite big. By the way big fan of australia. That country is amazing
@@hollandsemum1: There are 28 million people in Australia. There are 330 million people in the U.S. Australia is about the same size as the continental U.S. The distances between major metro areas in Australia is huge compared to between metro areas in the U.S. Can you see why rail might work better in the U.S. than in Australia? Had the U.S. government underwritten passenger rail at the same level as it did for automobile and plane travel we'd have a great system. (actually, before cars and planes, the government heavily subsidized rail by, among other things, giving them one square mile of land on alternating sides of train right-of-way--that's an awful lot of land that the railroads basically squandered) That didn't happen so rail companies focused on freight. And even the freight system is bad. There isn't a freight train that moves much faster than 50 mph.
@@hollandsemum1 The main problem with US railways is very simple, it was grossly outdated when its being compared with Japan or even Europe. Had US already tought about developing HSR since the day when Japan succeded with their Shinkansen, then US train networks can compete with domestic flights similar like what happened in Japan.
Getting grey hydrogen isn't ecological in any way, getting green hydrogen requires vast amount of electricity as electrolysis is 40% efficient (and then multiply by efficiency of compressing, storing and burning) and we are nowhere of surplus of renewable electricity now. Trains can be 100% renewable if grid is 100% renewable.
Hello Petter, i have a question about the CFM Leap engines. As a ramp agent for a certain US airline that only flies 737s, I have noticed when a MAX starts up, there is a deep, low pitched howl that lasts for a couple seconds
I think is because of the bowed rotor.
Flew in a MAX, the engines definitely have a different whine all the time. My wife has very sensitive hearing and found it excruciating.
@@johnkowalkowski4269 I have quite sensitive hearing as well, and I'm pretty sure that whine is there on the CFM56 engines, but it can't be heard because the overall roar is louder
France has a high speed rail network which is why those short haul flight bans make sense and why they will work. Same goes for Germany, Spain and Japan. In places where it isn't feasible or viable for high speed rail like Australia the plane makes much more sense.
Australia is the one place where High Speed Rail is absolutely the best option. Long distances, mainly flat, few large rivers and large urban centers.
It absolutely does not work in Germany. The service is unreliable and too expensive. And a lot of the high speed trains (ICE) actually run on regular tracks at slower speeds instead of the 300kph like on the Cologne-Frankfurt section.
Take Frankfurt-Dresden for example.
Train: 4:20h
Plane: 55 minutes
Car: 5:30h
Taking the earliest opportunity by train at 7:18am, you're not reaching Dresden before 11:40am, while you can catch a flight at 7 and be in Dresden at 8 most likely with minimal waiting time for your luggage. Get a hire car and you're in downtown Dresden at 9 at the latest. I happily spend two hours extra for security in the morning to be able to reach my meeting on the same day and not having to travel the evening before.
Having rode the TGV across France it is way better than if you hopped on a short flight. It was so smooth and quiet.
Saying planes are more efficient than cars is a bit narrow sighted. Even though it is strictly true, the amount of energy per KM per passenger is massive compared to cars. That's because flying at airplane speeds requires exponentially more energy than driving a car.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand what you say but you may be misleading people to believe travelling by planes has a lower carbon footprint than travelling by car which couldn't be further from the truth.
I am curious where you got the 5 % efficiency number for a "normal" internal combustion engine car.
What I have learned during my education (masters of science in engineering, specialized in energy systems, Lund University in Sweden) is that that they usually are around 20-30 %. And that is also what I find when I double check online and in litterature.
I have enjoyed your videos for a long time, but that number really stands out to me.
Turbos regain some of the lost energy though the exhaust. The internal drag of pistons and conrods, crank, etc. is quite significant, and heat loss into cooling water and lubricating oil, with engines designed to run at around 85 degree Celsius.
He’s most definitely right re 20+%. There might’ve been a heat engine in the 1800s that was ~5%.
How about mentioning that airlines have to pay literally NOTHING for their fuel in taxes?
The only reason planes can be so cheap is because they are literally unfairly advantaged before trains.
But yeah, people just hate on short haul flights because muh contrails
I recently traveled from Paris to Bayonne in the south of France via TGV. The price for my first class ticket was €72 from Paris-Montparnasse station. In addition I paid €1.50 for a short metro ride to the station for a total of €73.50. A flight from Paris to Biarritz could have been as cheap as €105 including baggage and other add-ons. Toss in a minimum of €11.45 for the airport train and €2 for the bus and the cost would have been at least €118.45 and could easily have been more with more flight add-ons as I'm comparing a first class train ticket with a coach flight. The time to fly would have been a lot longer as the flight is listed at 1:25 and with CDG's check-in queues (I had a large bag) and the need to transfer to terminal 2G I'd need to figure on being at least 2.5 hours early if not more. So now we have 4.0 hours plus the train time and another short metro ride and a long walk at CDG from the train station and likely it would be over 6.5 hours best case counting the time on the Biarritz end to get my luggage and take the bus. Contrast that with 4 hours on the train plus maybe 1/2 hour to get to the train station and some padding and the train is at least an hour and a half faster, is also cheaper and is a lot more comfortable and relaxing. The price difference would have been even more with a coach train ticket too, that would have been maybe €20 cheaper depending on demand. Based upon all those factors taking the train was an easy decision and I don't regret my decision for a second.
And by train you get to enjoy the beautiful view !
@@DamienDu90300 If you book the top level like I did indeed you do!
Hey, thanks for the video. I gotta say that over here in the good ol' USA the railways are quite out of date and don't have high speed capacity like in the EU
Petter, Thanks for a well done and interesting video. However, I do suggest you double check your "efficiency" numbers. Brake Thermal Efficiency (g/hp-hr or g/kWh) is about 25% for most spark-ignited engines and 35% for most diesel engines used in light road vehicles. The very best Diesels reach 45% BTE for the larger diesels used in trucks and other larger applications. Gas turbine engines generally have lower BTE than diesels, except for the largest ones used in large airliners, cruise ships, and the largest gas turbine gen-sets.
Also please double check your turboprop vs. turbofan efficiency numbers. Turboprop aircraft usually require less fuel than a similar sized jet, so I would like to know the source that prompted you to claim turbofans were more efficient.
Electric taxiing sounds interesting
There is a lot of stuff we can still do
electric tugs might be a useful alternative, to retrofitting existing designs. but I think there is also a degree to which taxiing gives the planes engines a warmup and cooldown period which you wouldn't want to eliminate completely.
I'm a simple man. I see mentor now video, I like.
And I like that… why make things complicated 😂
Surprised you didn’t refer to the survey that said 40% of the French think that people should be restricted to four airline flights per life time. Perhaps that concept is simply too insane to acknowledge! Really enjoy your videos!
Only 4 flights per life time? That's insane, 2 round-trips per life time. Only 1 round-trip if there is a layover in both directions. Even 4 round-trips would be insane. Especially since Paris is one, if not the biggest, tourist destination in the world.
You can make surveys say whatever you want...
I can assure you that the survey you are mentionning is not reliable. This has been relayed everywhere in the media though... There is a very small minority full of ideology that finds a relay through the media and which we hear express their "opinion" over and over again. But you have to remember that France is home to the pioneers in aviation with the most aerdromes and flying clubs in Europe. It's also one of our most advanced (and last sadly) industry, which provides a lot of employement. Aviation is in our DNA.
No. The fact is a famous engineer just made a quick calculation in a tv show or an interview, and all the media and anti-green speakers (right, far-right) used it to accuse greens of attacking freedom bablabla. The number was just an arithmetic average per world citizen. Nothing to do with actual restriction by law. Wouldn't make sense anyway. Restrictions will come "naturally" from other reasons, like lower incomes, higher petrol prices, ... economical stuff.
This video was excellent, covering many angles with honesty, knowledge ans clarity. Thank you very much.
@@amirobolant8356no jancovici clearly spoke about restriction.
One of the things I've loved for a long time is using carbonic acid to synthesize jet fuel. The US Navy figured it out, but because the only way to do it efficiently required nuclear power - and at the time the US was anti-nuclear - the program was scrapped.
If the French gov't really wanted to push green tech, this would be a great way to do it. Keep the energy density and engineering legacy while eliminating drilling and carbon impacts in one go.
The USNRL has a video up on the tech, if you're interested (Gordon McDowell may have posted it, but it's not dependent on all his usual Th cycle molten salt reactor hullaboo)
Electric ground taxiing: Forty years ago I did a fuel-savings study for an airline which was curious about taxing a twin on one engine instead of two, so this area has been a topic for some time. One thing to consider is how much weight (if any) will be added to the flying weight -- a very touchy subject with operators.
Other operational considerations include things like the necessary time for temperature stabilization of the engines prior to takeoff. If the NLG is to have the driven tires, can enough friction be developed at even aft CG (least weight on the NLG) for all scenarios, including upward-sloped surfaces and contaminated-surface conditions? Finally (at least for now), any tractive use that the NLG tires are put to will subtract from their available turning (yaw) force, since there is a maximum friction force which can be developed by a tire and it has to be "shared" between the longitudinal and lateral components (in physics terms, the orthogonal components of a resultant force).
Do you think a hydraulic driven "engine" in the wheels similar to smaller excavation machines would be lighter/more efficient/able to run on the APU?
I can see electric engines being somewhat disappointing from a weight/power perspective. Hydraulics definitely have the torque, and can be relatively compact.
@@myne00 A hydraulic motor running at the aircraft's 3000 psi system pressure could be compact, and certainly would not lack for delivered torque. Difficulties would remain when it comes to getting that torque onto the pavement (as I talked about above), and perhaps system reliability. Early 727's had nose gear brakes, but they proved troublesome and airlines one-by-one deactivated them ahead of Boeing dropping the feature altogether on later production aircraft. But that was generations of aircraft design expertise ago.
I can't imagine it would be a smart idea to put motors in the nose gear. It would seem to be a no-brainer to me that the motors should have to go on the main gear, just like the brakes are.
@@AlexandarHullRichter That might well be true from a physics standpoint -- the amount of force needed might be beyond what the nose could provide... plus hydraulics already go to the MLG. But there are also more contraints on the MLG in terms of parts interferences and articulations (e.g. bogie). It has to "do" more things, so interfacing a drive system is problematic, if less so for an all-new aircraft design.
I mentioned NLG since someone elsewhere in the comments brought that up. The thing is, if it needs to be big enough that the NLG won't work, then it's probably too heavy to be feasible. Airlines get weight-unhappy starting in the low tens of kilograms.
@@marcmcreynolds2827 i wasn't thinking motors needed to be big to work, though I don't know, simply that the NLG wouldn't carry enough of the plane's weight or have enough traction to move the plane around reliably like the main gear do.
Excellent point of view. I love this channel, for my is the best source for civil aviation.
The problem with improving efficiency is that is easily outweighed by an increasing number of flights
Yep, that’s true
How does that make improving efficiency a “problem”? That makes it a necessity.
In 2005 when I was in college one of my environmental engineering professors worked on a project with his research students that could help reduce the environmental impact of commercial Aviation. He was trying to get the backing of various environmental groups for his work but was constantly rejected. He used to tell us this story of how Greenpeace told him "We don't care about this. We just want aviation ended, altogether, for good". That's how these people think. They don't care about the bigger picture or Humanity as much as they care about their own agenda.
Those people are awful. Flights and travel are good, we need to travel.
The grant distribution system is a powerful political tool.
Just because aviation is a small part of emission doesn't mean we shouldn't try to decrease it (by the way I'm a huge fan of aviation since childhood). It is very dispensable, probably more than many other area (like food or housing) and has close to zero margin of improvement (the "impressive" 20% improvement in fuel efficiency has been between generation 20 to 30 years appart, there's no chance to get the required 80% in 25 years to follow). But there's a point: we focused on this part because it's the less costly part to get rid of compared to all of the rest, require probably the less effort, and would have overall a small impact. So I get it totally that's it's stupid to focus on it first. But in the end, aviation as it is today will have to end, and will subsist in a much smaller form
Yes more information on the aviation industrie's other approaches to fuel saving ideas would be great.
Ultimately though even with aviation having an incentive to use less fuel the technology does not exist yet to do so in a considerable way. Meanwhile trains and catenary is old and known technology in a country that has good knowledge to construct more of it. And with France still keeping some nuclear power the electricity is not as dirty as in, say, Germany. Short hauls got the target here because they spend far less percentage of time in the more efficient cruising altitudes and frankly I think if anything will be targeted in aviation that is a fair one. I have some hope that new aviation technology can destroy that argument but so long as it exists in concept animations and quick demos it's not going to be as convincing.
At the least the environmentalists are rightfully criticizing the SNCF and do so quite a lot. It's slow and sluggish but the Paris-hub issue has been known for some time and has been intent to change that. The south-west HSR line for example is in progress. But in general Paris being the center of the universe has always been an issue in France (for the rest of France). The cost issue has been another source of outcry and is for a multitude of issues (land, energy, subsidies, etc). The government has been worse at addressing this part unfortunately.
Side note, I believe container ship transport is actually quite efficient for what it does.
Some nuclear power? That is understatement of all times, they are THE biggest user of it (percentage-wise).
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Ok I knew we used it quite a bit but I checked and damn I didn't know it was over HALF.
Actually, petrol internal combustion engines are between 30 and 35% efficient, not the 5% quoted in this video. The biggest difference between an airliner and a car is the carbon emissions per person/per mile. Airliners carry many people so from that point of view they are more efficient.
HST TGV travel Paris-Bordeaux (575 km) departure Paris city centre 9:04am - arrival Bordeaux city centre 11:14am, travel time 2hr10 mins. , 3 October 2023, Best price at 25 euros.