The future is gonna be so fun!
It's automatous. Also this...
One roadblock for the flying train is a security screening process that wouldn't require the TSA to set up shop at your local train station. Akka suggests using retinal scanning after passengers board the train en route to the airport.
The simple solution is to abolish the TSA with extreme prejudice. We've probably lost more cumulative years of life to them than in 9/11 by an order of magnitude.
By 2100, commuters could be zipping around in passenger pods that fly through vacuum sealed tubes at 700 mph, soaring through the skies in autonomous personal rotorcraft that look like quadcopter drones, blasting off in rockets that fly from city to city, or even boarding commercial jetliners to fly more than five times the speed of sound.
Someone should remind this guy that uncritically regurgitating company PR material isn’t “journalism”.
Let’s see… 100 year old scam, impractical disaster waiting to happen, literally physically impossible to be anything other than thermonuclearly expensive, and United PR bullshit.
Harass your local “journalist”.
I could almost see a benefit here in getting rid of airports entirely. You get on your pod at the downtown transit hub, it rolls you out to the airport. There's no parking or anything else, you just slot in to your plane and go to your destination. I can almost see it.
All we have to do is imagine railroads connecting every major city and then actualize it!
That sounds like it poses a ton of engineering challenges to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Like what if you could just get off the plane and go straight to a bus which would take you to a train station? Of course you'd have to sort out the luggage so it'd probably make more sense to have everyone go through the airport anyway. At that point, if there's a train station at the airport, you can just walk to it - or if you're not going to the train, you can go wherever you need to (while also having a chance to eat, use the bathroom, and stretch).
Planes and trains are made of different materials and are designed in different ways. Time that the plane is travelling to and from the station is time it's not serving it's core function, and there's new sources of wear and tear that have to be planned for. The only real advantage to all this is that the passengers "get" to spend more time seated at once, which nobody really asked for.
