5 ms·
Better for the planet though.
by dude250711 8d ago
Better for the planet though.
- dlcarrier 8d agoOcean liners use several times more fuel per passenger mile than airliners.
- dewey 8d agoThats a bit of an odd comparison as they are in pretty different categories and don’t really compete against each other.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- dlcarrier 8d agoThey don't in this case, because there's plenty of other airlines offering competing service, but when disruptions do prevent air travel, for example with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, travelers cruising to their destination will burn far more fuel. Granted, the difference in emissions of either form of traveling are absolutely nothing compared to the emissions of Eyjafjallajökull itself.
- stockresearcher 8d agoThe speed of the ship makes a huge difference in fuel consumption. Cruise ships/ocean liners usually go as fast as practicable, which leads to terrible fuel efficiency. Reducing speed from 20 knots to 15 knots may cut fuel consumption in half or more. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of comparisons you’ll see will have, for example, a 5-day journey by cruise ship compared with an airline flight covering the same distance. Usually measured not in fuel consumed but carbon emissions. Ok, but shouldn’t the more accurate comparison be a 5-day cruise compared to an airplane trip plus 5 days in a hotel?
- dlcarrier 8d agoI once bought an overnight train ticket from France to Italy, instead of spending more on a high-speed train ticket and a hotel night. It would have been a great idea, if the train didn't have its heater stuck on, in August, and a broken emergency pull cord in an unknown car, which resulted in multiple unintended stops that required the staff enter every cabin to reset the pull cords, before resuming. I learned to check the reputation of the train line, like I would a hotel. Anyway, traveling efficiency is a factor of the speed and size of the vessel and the viscosity of what it's traveling through. It's non-linear, and scaling up the vessel size slowly adds efficiency, and speeding up the vehicle or increasing the viscosity quickly reduces efficiency. Boats have an advantage by getting very big, but a really, really big disadvantage if they go fast, which is why huge boats going slow is their most common use, mostly for cargo, but sometimes for people, when the ship itself can be a destination. Trains can't get very big, but air is much less viscous than water, so they can go a few times faster without major losses. This is why rail is really popular for transporting cargo across the US and Canada, although it's not fast enough for long distance passenger travel. The absolute peak in energy efficiency comes from a large vessel moving through a very-low viscosity atmosphere, which is what airliners are able to do, by traveling in the stratosphere, eliminating the majority of the drag, and allowing for effectively uncapped speeds. Really, the faster an airplane can travel, the higher it can go, further reducing drag and increasing efficiency. The limit is technological, not physical, but current airplanes traveling around mach 0.8 get very high cruise efficiency from both being large and being in a low-viscosity atmosphere.
- reaperducer 8d agoOcean liners use several times more fuel per passenger mile than airliners. So what? Two things can be bad at the same time. Nobody mentioned ocean liners except you. Why not bring up the greenhouse gases from landfills while you're at it? Whatabouting everything is so last decade.
- tialaramex 8d agoThere is exactly one actual ocean liner left, QM2 which goes between my home city and New York. Most of the ships you're thinking of are Cruise liners, which are not in fact (unlike an airliner or ocean liner) designed to prioritize travel but are instead floating hotels which might happen to travel from one place to another.
- TomatoCo 8d agoWhat's the alternative?
- tialaramex 8d agoReally often the alternative was not to make the journey. Whether that's the in-person visit to a customer site which could have been a video call (or an email) or the trip to go see how your Porsche was made in the factory. WG21 (the C++ Standards Committee) only began to allow you to present proposals or attend committee meetings without flying around the world in... 2020 because of Pandemic restrictions. Video conferencing was one of the technologies in Engelbart's "Mother of all demos" in 1968. Remember that year, not 2008, not even 1998, it was demonstrated in 1968 and yet I bet several readers of this comment have flown on an aeroplane to do something they could have done using video conferencing, almost sixty years later. What a joke.
- TomatoCo 6d agoOh, of course, but I mean for moving people who want to move around. Someone else observed that ocean liners are less efficient than planes, so if you wanna go overseas there's no alternative. Except, of course, for business meetings which can be virtual (or just an email). I'm asking what's a practical alternative assuming we still want people to be able to go overseas. I agree for land routes high speed rail is better, too. I don't really understand my downvotes just for asking about alternatives.
- w4yai 8d agoWho knows. Maybe someone will decide to compensate with 2 flights instead of one.
- Havoc 8d agoDon't think so. The people will still need to fly and incidents like these mean lots of planes are out of place and may need to fly extra to reposition
- tcfhgj 8d agomost flights are not necessary
- IshKebab 8d agoDefine "necessary". Good luck.
- tcfhgj 8d agothe flight doesn't contribute to preventing harm to anyone
- MaxBarraclough 8d agoIt's not uncommon to travel for medical care, or for medics to travel for work.
- tcfhgj 8d agoIf you set traveling and flying equal, I very much think it is.
- MaxBarraclough 6d agoNo, it's as I said. There was a famous case in 2017 where a surgeon was violently removed from an overbooked United Express airliner. He had refused to leave voluntarily, as doing so would have meant not seeing his patients the next day. [0] I'm not sure this strictly counts as travelling for work, but the points remains. Plenty of people fly abroad for medical care. [1] Over 2,000 flights were cancelled in this incident. Over 300,000 would-be passengers were affected. [2] It's implausible that nobody's medical care was affected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_removal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism [2] https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/uk-airport-disruption-flights-cancelled/ https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/uk-airport-disruption-f...