Eh. e.g. the north atlantic tracks have been around since the 1960s. GPS wasn't available to the public until Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in the 1980s.
The OP means that satnav ensures that two aircraft on a reciprocal or identical track will now pass over one another, whereas there used to be navigational slop that would give some unintentional but useful lateral displacement.
Ironic that you should use the term 'slop', since that's exactly how they avoid flying the same route across the Atlantic tracks for example (Strategic Lateral Offset Procedure).
Also worth noting for the transatlantic paths is the direction of traffic. When it's morning in North America, traffic is predominately westbound. When it's night, traffic is predominately eastbound.
Right now, it's the middle of the day (12:50p Central). There's a bit of a mix[1], but it's still predominately westbound.
The consequence of this is that most traffic will be separated by at least 2000 feet. Eastbound traffic will (generally) be at odd Flight Levels (so 29000 feet, 31000 feet, etc.) while Westbound traffic will be at even FLs (30000 feet, etc)[2]. This assumes RVSM airspace.
Newer ships aren't necessarily much better. Mærsk's E class container ships still burn bunker fuel. The Triple E Class made improvements in efficiency and emissions, but are still burning bunker fuel at about 50% of the emissions per container than the previous class.
From what I understand, these ships are huge and cover very large distances. This requires a lot of fuel. Bunker is the cheapest fuel for this use-case (it, -- sort of literally -- being a bottom of the barrel sort of thing).
Not sure what the global impact would be of banning bunker, or (trying to) refine it. Economic or environmental.
Assuming identical efficiency (no clue on this point), you would end up paying about 50% more for the same amount of "energy." We would also be dramatically increasing the worldwide demand for diesel and we'd still have the leftover residual product from refining that was previously used to fuel these ships.
50%+ margin increase on containerized shipping seems pretty significant.
The 747 is certainly iconic, but I hate to be the one to tell you that 747 production may be coming to an end as the industry has zero interest in inefficient four-engine jets.
Basically no interest in the passenger or freighter model at this stage (the newest series, the -8I/-8F, has attracted barely over 100 deliveries). Same story for the A380, whose orders basically stopped in 2014. Freight and passenger service are both moving to more efficient twin-engine wide-bodies.
Can you give some specific examples of "more efficient twin-engine wide-bodies"? I'm very interested in the aviation industry, but terribly ignorant of it.
The hilarious thing is that the KC-46 is basically a means of keeping the Boeing 767 production line open and operating and producing airplanes even though Boeing has replaced it with the 777 and 787 for commercial customers. They may be new production aircraft, but they are not modern in any sense of the word. See also: The POTUS being about the only customer actually interested in purchasing the 747-8i these days.
The B-1 was designed for a role (low altitude nape of the earth bombing) that was obsolete before they worked out the bugs in the jet (Russian interceptor and fighter aircraft got look-down shoot-down capability). The B-1 was kept alive because of its electronic warfare capabilities, but efficiency of the bomb trucks matter more than high-speed delivery in a hostile radar environment these days.
There have never been very many operational Tu-160 bombers in service. The Tu-160 is focused on the standoff weapon role, and is ideally meant to delivering tactical ordinance while enemy air defense is still in effect. Standoff weapons are expensive, even compared to "smart" conventional weapons.
Tu-95 is a big dumb bomber much in the way the B-52 is; since it also has/is getting the standoff capability, it's hard to argue the purpose of the Tu-160.
A lot of the newer bombers were built with the nuclear role in mind; in reality the world went in the direction of smart conventional weapons instead. For that role, aircraft like the Tu-95 and BUFF are more ideal, as they can just act as a large "bomb truck" and drop a large quantity of guided conventional munitions very efficiently once air defenses are suppressed.
The shuttle's promise (inexpensive frequent launches) never materialized. Instead it was an incredibly complicated and expensive system to operate, launch, service, and recover. SpaceX's approach is to take the approach that's cost-effective and simple (but no more simple than necessary) and then to try to iteratively improve it to achieve reusable spaceflight. The "works like an airplane" thing is a great strategy if the thing can take off and get to orbit like an airplane, but to this point we (humanity) have not had the technology to produce a single-stage-to-orbit reusable spaceplane. Once we have to stage it and add boosters of various sorts, it quickly has all the same problems as a "traditional" rocket, but with all of the added complexity of a space plane. The Skylon approach purports to tackle this, but at this stage is more fiction than science (funding aside, there's a long way to go).
The Energia (Russian shuttle) program originally planned to have a system like the Shuttle with even more of the rocket returnable to launch site (boosters/core stage (Energia had the "main engines" on the tank rather than the orbiter)) but also abandoned that plan (and indeed the entire program, shortly thereafter).
There's been Russian military use of grid fins on supersonic rockets and missiles for many decades. It's my understanding that supersonic flow is not a problem, rather transonic (mercifully a relatively short period on either an accelerating or decelerating rocket) behavior is the problem.
It's a launch platform without clear future missions or funding. After the surplus RS-25 engines from the shuttle program are used (designed to be re-usable, they are heavy and expensive and will be destroyed by the launches) it's not clear what will power the launch vehicle. It's a very expensive big rocket with an unclear future in both engineering and political terms.
I guess this is my concern as well. I'm not sure what the need is for the shiny new object in this case; I've never felt limited by Vim, but perhaps there are particular features or capabilities that the author is interested in?
