Why are airlines making bigger planes and not faster planes?

Question

I (and i'm sure everybody else) don't really enjoy travelling! So why don't airbus/boeing make a plane that goes faster?

Answer 1

never thought of that but you're so right! i dont know why they do that

Answer 2

Efficiency is the reason. Big planes carry more people and more people equals more ticket sales. Fast planes cannot carry many passengers and use a huge amount of fuel.

Answer 3

to quote Snoop Dogg "If it don't make Dollars then it don't make cents"

think about it.

look up how much money the Concord made in it's life time vs a 747.

Answer 4

The airlines are in business to make money.

The faster planes cost too much in maintenance and fuel.  They also tend to hold less passengers so they are not profitable.

This is what happened to the Concord

The trend today is to build larger, lighter planes, with more fuel efficient engines, that can carry more passengers.  These planes are more profitable.

Answer 5

bigger planes consume lesser fuel than compared to making more trips on a faster plane which equates to more money being earned

Answer 6

Existing planes are travelling close to Mach 1,beyond which SONIC BOOM will occur..This is undesirable  as it is very loud and may cause nuisance to humans and livestock restricting planes like the Concorde to flying only over water restricting it's routes and destinations.

Supersonic planes need to be streamlined in design to achieve speed.Therefore it's narrow body(cabin) cannot carry many passengers.

Lastly,such planes burn lots of fuel.

Since faster is not a viable option,they have made planes bigger to increase airline revenues.

However,all is not lost for the frequent flyers and speed junkies..We may see in the future theHYPERSONIC Jets travelling near the edge of space which does not have the above limitations experienced by our present air crafts.

Answer 7

most larger planes are already pretty close to going mach 1.. but with the regulations the way they are, they cant exceed mach 1 over land, only over the water. so unless the laws change, there is no need to build faster planes.. the concord flew over mach 1 but it burned a ton of fuel as well. so its not economical either

Answer 8

they used to have the concord tht was really fast but i think one crashed and killed all on board.

Answer 9

Currently, airliners cruise about .7-.8 Mach (420-480kts).  To get more performance, requires more engine power; which in turn requires more fuel.  This is not a linear progression, as one gets closer to 1.0Mach, the power (and fuel burn) required to overcome drag becomes quite large. There's no free lunch in engineering, so if one is carrying extra fuel-payload has to come off.  That means fewer passengers to gain maybe 3-4 miles a minute extra groundspeed.  It's more profitable to carry as many passengers as possible per route per unit time, than to get them there maybe an hour or two faster than the competition.  

Keep in mind that the extra fuel is going to cost-the passenger.  Concord not only charged a full-fare first class ticket, but tacked on a "concord fee" for lack of a better term.  That was to help cover the cost of fuel burn per customer.  Its lesson to the airline industry was that the majority of passengers aren't going to pay $6-8K to arrive at a destination a few hours earlier than they otherwise would.

Answer 10

The cost of building an airplane that will fly faster than the speed of sound turned out to be prohibitive.  It just isn't practical to build an airliner to fly faster than about 650 MPH.

The cruising speeds of airliners now are close to that speed, and that is as fast as we (the human race as consumers of air travel) can afford to go.

The real reason for the new generation of super-humongous airliners like the Airbus A-380 is to help relieve the boredom of long flights by giving passengers a space in which to get up and move around.  Some of these airplanes will contain fitness centers, boutiques, and casinos.  Less boring!

Answer 11

Airlines don't make planes.

They buy them from aircraft manufacturers.

That said, manufacturers make what airlines will buy.

Airlines are about trying to make a profit.

That means cramming as many cattle in the cargo class, and not really caring how long it takes to get em there!

Answer 12

The reason is simply economics. faster planes mean less load and that means a higher fare per passenger that was why Concorde never made a profit it was subsidized by the french and English govt's. Bigger planes are needed now because the growth in the number of passengers means you have to put more planes in the air or build bigger planes. As the airports are maxed out on plane capacity the only choice that makes sense is to build bigger planes so you can carry more people with less planes. The other reason the don't build faster is that to go faster means to go super sonic which is illegal in most countries another reason Concorde couldn't compete with the slower planes.

Answer 13

It's easier to make a plane bigger, than to make it faster?

Answer 14

they did tests, ridged tests that is and then they decided that it should be against the law for any plain to go faster then the speed of sound as it was to big of a nuisance, the sonic boom that is. a huge part of it was that certain plain builders did not want to have to work on a faster plain, and that way they would limit computation.

Answer 15

The more passengers that are on any given flight, the more profitable the flight. And, obviously, the bigger the plane - the more passengers.

Answer 16

more people, can charge less but still makes a higher profit

Answer 17

The reason airliners are not going faster is that it requires more fuel, and right now fuel is a huge part of the operating cost of an airline (25% to 33% of total costs).

Ironically, the fastest airliners are the ones designed before the 1970s, such as the 747 and the Concorde.  These aircraft were designed when fuel was cheap and high speed was an important advantage of air travel.  The 747 can fly faster than any other airliner currently in service; its successors placed more of an emphasis on economy rather than speed.

In fact, air travel is slower than it was 40 years ago.  Not only are the most modern airliners designed for slower speeds, but airlines fly aircraft at the most economical speeds, rather than the fastest speeds (the fastest speeds are never the most economical speeds). In addition to this, vastly greater air traffic today requires airliners to fly slower along more complex routes in order to accommodate all the airplanes in the air, so getting from point A to point B is not nearly as direct or uncrowded as it used to be.

For example, a 747 can fly from Paris to London in half an hour if it is flown in a reasonably straight line at the speed that it was designed for, but real-world flights between these cities take more than twice that time, because of traffic, slower speeds to save fuel, and so on.  The difference is even bigger for longer routes.

Answer 18

They wouldn't make more money on a faster plane.  They do make more money on a bigger plane.  Not surprising, the airlines want to make money, so the planes they buy have to be designed to be as profitable as possible.  Interesting topic though.