Flying is the worst. With each commercial flight, Americans get groped, jostled, cramped, and corralled like cattle. But the Transportation Security Administration isn’t the only government agency that needlessly adds to our jet-setting woes, writes Andrea Castillo. If not for Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) meddling in supersonic flight innovation, we could zip around the world in a fraction of the time.
By the mid-1970s, engineers were building “supersonic” aircraft capable of traveling well above 767 miles per hour (mph), the speed of sound. In 1976, U.S. military pilot Eldon W. Joerz managed to navigate the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” to a blazing 2,193 mph—almost three times the speed of sound. But innovation in in air travel speeds came to a grinding halt after Joerz’s record-setting feat in ’76.
You can thank the FAA for this continued mediocrity in air travel, explains Castillo. In 1973, amid ample developments in supersonic flight, the FAA bizarrely decided to prohibit supersonic travel (SST) over the U.S. But things could be changing, as the appetite for “permissionless innovation” policy-reforms grows and technologists and even policymakers begin to see airspace as another platform for innovation.
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