Spirit Airlines has announced it is going out of business after 34 years. The ultra-low-cost airline known for its bright yellow planes and deep discount fares said Saturday it has started winding down operations.
bye bye~! let this happen to the rest too. i hope the airline industry crashes and has to be nationalized or some shit idk. better than this. anything would be better than the current mess we have.
Every source I’ve ever looked at has flights pegged as the most polluting form of passenger travel. Plus the pollutants are deposited directly into the upper atmosphere, which no coal rolling asshole in a dually can ever accomplish. That further magnifies their impact. I’d interested in where you’ve drawn your conclusion from.
A single plane emits a lot, but if you are not using a private jet - it enjoys the same benefit as other forms of ‘public transport’: emissions are shared among multiple passengers. Especially if you are in economy, in a packed plane there are a lot of people to correct for that.
Furthermore, emissions for planes are far from uniform for the distance travelled: a disproportionate amount of emissions occurs as take-off.
A short or long haul flight is more efficient than an ICE car [source]. This concerns efficiency though - not total emissions - so if you use a car, but travel a shorter distance, emissions will still be less. Also, this source is from 2023, things will probably have shifted around a bit.
The elephant in the room is obviously the “domestic flight” emissions number sitting proudly at the top of the list. Based on the average length of a UK domestic flight and this source, that’s 20% of all global commercial flights, and just under 50% are under 500 nautical miles/926km, which is still on the highly inefficient end of the spectrum. But then you realize that it only accounts for about 42 million weekly seats when estimates are much closer to 100 million, then you realize it’s 2009 data and you don’t want to deal with this rabbit hole…
That second chart you provided is… tantalizing, and just like my own source I’d much rather have access to the data than the charts they’ve made with it, because napkin math based on their red line falls shy of any sort of accuracy.
If we just rely on the provided numbers, new European internal combustion vehicles are way more efficient than short and long haul flights (cars’ grams of CO2/km should should be divided by ~1.5, which is the US/EUR average vehicle occupancy rate), and the average is dragged down by older ICE cars. New U.S vehicles lose the efficiency battle comically and are about as bad as ultra short haul business flights, lmao. Thanks for the link.
I can’t seem to find the post that had the chart because Lemmy’s search function is ass, but I found this one that’s similar:
The one I was thinking of listed different types of rail, and a couple of them were more polluting than airliners.
Don’t get me wrong, I love trains and most of them are among the lowest-emitting options. But the notion that commercial airlines are the most polluting seems to be a misconception on a per-passenger basis. Private jets, maybe, because they have fewer passengers.
Lemmy’s search function is disappointing, yeah. Carrying on a long tradition of worthless forum search functions I suppose. I envisioned a world where everybody adopted Google’s late 2000s-early ‘10s algorithm but instead even Google has sworn off of it.
I replied to the other comment first because I can’t actually get your media to load. What domain is this? I think it’s an issue with my client because I encounter this frequently in a few communities.
Yes, American rail in particular is… bad. I think the romance of the notion of rail transit is doing a lot of the heavy lifting stateside. So are the new ICE cars, as I stated in my other reply. The new European and Asian models on the other hand should be winning out on efficiency easily, as would their trains, and all hybrids and EVs. Air travel may rank decently in carbon efficiency in the U.S., but I don’t think that remains true elsewhere, where transit industries have been allowed/incentivized/required to improve.
It’s not the original one I was thinking of, but it’s similar. Also, I ignored short haul flights because who the fuck flies somewhere they can take a bus to in less than a day?
A lot of people! Check out the flight distance distribution charted here. (old, 2009-ish data) Big part of the problem. Having to be “on” the whole time while you’re driving isn’t freedom, it sucks. It’s why people want trains. And in their absence they fly.
Okay please point out all these high speed rail projects happening around the country. AFAIK there’s only one in SoCal and its been delayed for years and several orders of magnitude over budget. You people act like its just a matter of snapping your fingers and we suddenly have a high speed rail network, walkable cities, and no need for cars or airplanes.
I’m not opposed to any of this but we’re just as likely to get transporter technology to rid ourselves of cars. Don’t get mad at me for bringing you guys back down to earth.
I mean it’s not like I think trains come from magic. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. If you never start, it will never exist.
Not in this country. It’s nearly impossible to get the land to make it possible. Then it’s the fact that large districts are far apart. The economics of rail are tough. You take a 4 hour flight, it becomes a 16 hour rail trip.
Because Big Oil doesn’t profit from high speed trains, since those trains don’t run on fossil fuels (at least not directly). And everyone knows Big Oil rules the US in truth. Every president is just more or less a puppet from them.
The USSR was a lot bigger, less dense, and less developed. They managed rail.
As far as eminent domain goes, half our cities are parking lot and road. You can also simply elevate the rail. Or you can do what the chinese do and not build the station in the city center and instead run subways connecting the rail stations everywhere. IMO this is worse than building the train station near downtown.
Since when do the Chinese build stations outside of the city? I can pick from any 4 stations all centrally located in Shanghai, and get off the train after 4 hours in the heart of Beijing and be in my hotel in 15 minutes.
The same goes for any city.
Chinese build airports outside of the city.
If I would do the same trip with flights, I need travel 1 hour to the airport, be there 1 hour before, 2 hour flight, land 1 hour outside of Beijing. That’s 5 hours if all goes smooth. This is why high speed rail is the preferred option to travel. Especially if you can afford business class.
I suppose there is a lot to get better, like making airlines actually enforcing the “personal item rule”, its one of my biggest annoyances with flying in the US. So many huge bags and people trying to stuff them everywhere. Let people have luggage in the hold again for free.
On the other hand, adjusting for inflation, I have continually paid less to about the same for similar length flights (including luggage fees) since the early 90’s. I miss meals, but the box o’ sandwhich and a free drink hasn’t been horrible. Maybe its sticking with one airline.
Outside the US, I still get served drinks in a glass and a hot cookie or pastry, and often a free alcoholic drink on some of the smaller airlines, so US: you could do better.
I went to rural Thailand back in 2007 to teach English for a month with a group from my university. Our plane died at the gate in Miami and, in order to make all of our connections to get to Thailand we made last minute changes that put us on Thai Air from LAX. Best damn flight I’ve ever been on and it was in basic, seated in the absolute middle of the middle section and I’m someone who’s unable to sleep on a plane unless I have the window. So I was awake for most of those 17.5 hours. Plane was beautiful, crew was beautiful and friendly. There was framed art on the walls and multiple full meals on the flight.
EDIT: Forgot to finish before I posted. The trip back we took Northwestern Airlines and, hoo boy. Meals were served out of a sense of obligation, stacked at last seat of the row to be passed out ourselves. When we hit the part where they wanted people’s seat backs and tray tables up they just went down the row and grabbed end seats with people asleep in them and pushing them up. Such a stark difference.
Yeah, our airlines suck. Every time I take any airline that’s non American based (i.e EU or Asia) the experience is wild. Hell I got free alcohol on the Dutch airlines they didn’t care lol
asian airlines does comfort over stacking people like sardines for profit, because they see the ROI as a constant revenue, rather to rip off a bandaid like with american ones.
At this point I agree, but solely because I’m from Boeing country, and holy mother of fuck do I hate Boeing and the absolute horseshit they’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
Fuck McDonnnell Douglas, goddamn finance bros wore Boeing like a skin suit and destroyed the company.
In reality they will consolidate to 2 companies that collude on price fixing but don’t get broken up, and you’ll eat shit and smile like a good consumer.
bye bye~! let this happen to the rest too. i hope the airline industry crashes and has to be nationalized or some shit idk. better than this. anything would be better than the current mess we have.
I think there will be a time in the future where people will look at how frivolously we travelled around the world with a level of disgust.
Only the rich have the money for frivolous travel
Why does it have to be in the future? I feel that way right now.
There’s nothing wrong with travel. It’s airplane emissions that’s the problem
Its billionaires emissions that are the problem…
what do you mean? just because there were like 200 private aeroplanes at some billionaire’s wedding, doesn’t mean the billionaires are at fault!
just in case
/s
Per passenger per mile, the emissions are less than cars and ships…
Every source I’ve ever looked at has flights pegged as the most polluting form of passenger travel. Plus the pollutants are deposited directly into the upper atmosphere, which no coal rolling asshole in a dually can ever accomplish. That further magnifies their impact. I’d interested in where you’ve drawn your conclusion from.
A single plane emits a lot, but if you are not using a private jet - it enjoys the same benefit as other forms of ‘public transport’: emissions are shared among multiple passengers. Especially if you are in economy, in a packed plane there are a lot of people to correct for that.
Furthermore, emissions for planes are far from uniform for the distance travelled: a disproportionate amount of emissions occurs as take-off.
A short or long haul flight is more efficient than an ICE car [source]. This concerns efficiency though - not total emissions - so if you use a car, but travel a shorter distance, emissions will still be less. Also, this source is from 2023, things will probably have shifted around a bit.
The elephant in the room is obviously the “domestic flight” emissions number sitting proudly at the top of the list. Based on the average length of a UK domestic flight and this source, that’s 20% of all global commercial flights, and just under 50% are under 500 nautical miles/926km, which is still on the highly inefficient end of the spectrum. But then you realize that it only accounts for about 42 million weekly seats when estimates are much closer to 100 million, then you realize it’s 2009 data and you don’t want to deal with this rabbit hole…
That second chart you provided is… tantalizing, and just like my own source I’d much rather have access to the data than the charts they’ve made with it, because napkin math based on their red line falls shy of any sort of accuracy.
If we just rely on the provided numbers, new European internal combustion vehicles are way more efficient than short and long haul flights (cars’ grams of CO2/km should should be divided by ~1.5, which is the US/EUR average vehicle occupancy rate), and the average is dragged down by older ICE cars. New U.S vehicles lose the efficiency battle comically and are about as bad as ultra short haul business flights, lmao. Thanks for the link.
I can’t seem to find the post that had the chart because Lemmy’s search function is ass, but I found this one that’s similar:
The one I was thinking of listed different types of rail, and a couple of them were more polluting than airliners.
Don’t get me wrong, I love trains and most of them are among the lowest-emitting options. But the notion that commercial airlines are the most polluting seems to be a misconception on a per-passenger basis. Private jets, maybe, because they have fewer passengers.
Lemmy’s search function is disappointing, yeah. Carrying on a long tradition of worthless forum search functions I suppose. I envisioned a world where everybody adopted Google’s late 2000s-early ‘10s algorithm but instead even Google has sworn off of it.
I replied to the other comment first because I can’t actually get your media to load. What domain is this? I think it’s an issue with my client because I encounter this frequently in a few communities.
Yes, American rail in particular is… bad. I think the romance of the notion of rail transit is doing a lot of the heavy lifting stateside. So are the new ICE cars, as I stated in my other reply. The new European and Asian models on the other hand should be winning out on efficiency easily, as would their trains, and all hybrids and EVs. Air travel may rank decently in carbon efficiency in the U.S., but I don’t think that remains true elsewhere, where transit industries have been allowed/incentivized/required to improve.
Ah fuck, on second glance it won’t load on my end either. I just copied the link from this post:
https://sopuli.xyz/comment/22812246
It’s not the original one I was thinking of, but it’s similar. Also, I ignored short haul flights because who the fuck flies somewhere they can take a bus to in less than a day?
A lot of people! Check out the flight distance distribution charted here. (old, 2009-ish data) Big part of the problem. Having to be “on” the whole time while you’re driving isn’t freedom, it sucks. It’s why people want trains. And in their absence they fly.
What’s the alternative though? High speed rail would be nice, but since that won’t happen, you’d just have all those people driving cars instead.
What’s the alternative?
Names existing, tried and tested alternative that has been working well for 200 years
Naw, can’t do that, it’d be hard.
(This is you)
Id love to see a bullet train from LA to Tokyo
Okay please point out all these high speed rail projects happening around the country. AFAIK there’s only one in SoCal and its been delayed for years and several orders of magnitude over budget. You people act like its just a matter of snapping your fingers and we suddenly have a high speed rail network, walkable cities, and no need for cars or airplanes.
I’m not opposed to any of this but we’re just as likely to get transporter technology to rid ourselves of cars. Don’t get mad at me for bringing you guys back down to earth.
I mean it’s not like I think trains come from magic. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. If you never start, it will never exist.
There’s one in Texas that seems to have high potential of actually happening.
https://www.texashsr.com/project/
Why won’t it happen? High speed rail is a mature proven technology
Not in this country. It’s nearly impossible to get the land to make it possible. Then it’s the fact that large districts are far apart. The economics of rail are tough. You take a 4 hour flight, it becomes a 16 hour rail trip.
Because Big Oil doesn’t profit from high speed trains, since those trains don’t run on fossil fuels (at least not directly). And everyone knows Big Oil rules the US in truth. Every president is just more or less a puppet from them.
Thankfully oil’s a dying industry now
Because there’s zero political will to do so, our nation is huge, and there’s no land to build this rail on without lots of eminent domain seizures.
The USSR was a lot bigger, less dense, and less developed. They managed rail.
As far as eminent domain goes, half our cities are parking lot and road. You can also simply elevate the rail. Or you can do what the chinese do and not build the station in the city center and instead run subways connecting the rail stations everywhere. IMO this is worse than building the train station near downtown.
Since when do the Chinese build stations outside of the city? I can pick from any 4 stations all centrally located in Shanghai, and get off the train after 4 hours in the heart of Beijing and be in my hotel in 15 minutes. The same goes for any city. Chinese build airports outside of the city. If I would do the same trip with flights, I need travel 1 hour to the airport, be there 1 hour before, 2 hour flight, land 1 hour outside of Beijing. That’s 5 hours if all goes smooth. This is why high speed rail is the preferred option to travel. Especially if you can afford business class.
Shanghai station is north of downtown, most HSR goes into Hongqiao anyway.
The communist agrarian country has less issues with eminent domain? You don’t say
China has 18 cities over 10 million and 113 over 1 million. You can look up stuck nail houses to see the issues they had with eminent domain.
It’s not that expensive to get people to agree to give up their homes if you’re building tons of new housing and can just give them that.
Like the ones they did for the border wall?
I know: Zeppelins.
The alternative is simply not going on a jaunt to Greece. It’s a luxury.
I suppose there is a lot to get better, like making airlines actually enforcing the “personal item rule”, its one of my biggest annoyances with flying in the US. So many huge bags and people trying to stuff them everywhere. Let people have luggage in the hold again for free.
On the other hand, adjusting for inflation, I have continually paid less to about the same for similar length flights (including luggage fees) since the early 90’s. I miss meals, but the box o’ sandwhich and a free drink hasn’t been horrible. Maybe its sticking with one airline.
Outside the US, I still get served drinks in a glass and a hot cookie or pastry, and often a free alcoholic drink on some of the smaller airlines, so US: you could do better.
People complain video games have too many micro transactions, but they learned from the American airline companies.
I can take a 2hr trip in Asia and get a full damn meal.
God damn son, you commie fuck, won’t you think about the shareholders?
Some guy could buy his 3rd yacht if you weren’t so fucking greedy that you need to be “treated like a human being with a modicum if dignity”
I went to rural Thailand back in 2007 to teach English for a month with a group from my university. Our plane died at the gate in Miami and, in order to make all of our connections to get to Thailand we made last minute changes that put us on Thai Air from LAX. Best damn flight I’ve ever been on and it was in basic, seated in the absolute middle of the middle section and I’m someone who’s unable to sleep on a plane unless I have the window. So I was awake for most of those 17.5 hours. Plane was beautiful, crew was beautiful and friendly. There was framed art on the walls and multiple full meals on the flight.
EDIT: Forgot to finish before I posted. The trip back we took Northwestern Airlines and, hoo boy. Meals were served out of a sense of obligation, stacked at last seat of the row to be passed out ourselves. When we hit the part where they wanted people’s seat backs and tray tables up they just went down the row and grabbed end seats with people asleep in them and pushing them up. Such a stark difference.
Yeah, our airlines suck. Every time I take any airline that’s non American based (i.e EU or Asia) the experience is wild. Hell I got free alcohol on the Dutch airlines they didn’t care lol
asian airlines does comfort over stacking people like sardines for profit, because they see the ROI as a constant revenue, rather to rip off a bandaid like with american ones.
At this point I agree, but solely because I’m from Boeing country, and holy mother of fuck do I hate Boeing and the absolute horseshit they’ve been doing for the last 20 years.
Fuck McDonnnell Douglas, goddamn finance bros wore Boeing like a skin suit and destroyed the company.
In reality they will consolidate to 2 companies that collude on price fixing but don’t get broken up, and you’ll eat shit and smile like a good consumer.
Presenting: TrumpAIR