DBWI: Jet airliners more common

IOTL, jet airliners are used relatively rarely, being mostly restricted to long-range intetcontinental flights, with short and medium-range flights being handled by turboprop and propfan aircraft. What sort of POD would it take to make jets more common?
 
Jet airliners are cool but impractical. No wonder the majority of jet airline flights are the even cooler yet even more impractical supersonic flights.
 
Prevent the de Havilland Comet disasters of '54. Without 6 planes crashing in the span of 2 months investors and would-be passengers wouldn't have been scared off by the jet liner's alleged "death trap" reputation. All of that extra money could have gone into developing more cost-effective engines.
 
Converting that Boeing military fuel tanker/transport into an airliner sure could cut into ocean liner business. I don't think people would appreciate the speed and lack of noise and vibration though.
 
It all comes down to engine bypass ratio: the engine manufacturers have been struggling to increase the bypass ratio on their jets beyond 3:1, and that means that unless the aircraft are flying very high (impracticable for short-haul use where they wouldn't have time to climb to cruise altitude) efficiency is much worse than a propfan/turboprop. It doesn't help that there have been a number of disasters on the way that would have almost worked - GE had nightmares and almost exited the jet engine business in the early 1950s when they tried to get a two shaft engine into production, Rolls Royce went bankrupt and folded after the composite fan blade disaster in the 1970s, and P&W are currently in Chapter 11 protection after the failure of the geared turbofan system. These would all have allowed step changes in bypass ratio (to be fair the GE two shaft idea eventually did), but the pain the companies went through trying to get there meant that trying to get investment in a new high-bypass jet engine is almost impossible so progress is very slow indeed.

Interestingly Whittle was predicting that jets would get up to 10:1 bypass ratios back in the late 1940s, if that had actually come to pass then the turboprop/propfan would never have happened - you could have done everything with bypass jets at higher speeds and vastly cheaper than at present. That would have all sorts of fascinating implications - imagine being able to fly from London to Los Angeles nonstop rather than having to stop to refuel in Canada on the way, or affordable transatlantic flights that take 8 rather than 24 hours.
 
I wonder what the effect of having faster short/medium haul travel earlier would be. IOTL, it took Boeing's groundbreaking 7J7 to achieve that.
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Prevent the de Havilland Comet disasters of '54. Without 6 planes crashing in the span of 2 months investors and would-be passengers wouldn't have been scared off by the jet liner's alleged "death trap" reputation. All of that extra money could have gone into developing more cost-effective engines.
Personally I've always thought it was noise restrictions imposed on US domestic routes that crippled the jetliner, stop the not in my town movement and the short to medium haul routes might have become viable for pure jets.
 
Personally I've always thought it was noise restrictions imposed on US domestic routes that crippled the jetliner, stop the not in my town movement and the short to medium haul routes might have become viable for pure jets.
OOC: Don't jets make less noise than prop-powered planes?
IC: I think the Saudi civil war of 1956-1963 had a bigger impact. The skyrocketing of oil prices scared many airlines from buying jets for anything other than the longest routes.
 

Archibald

Banned
Valium sales would have been lower. Those propfans are damn noisy, to the great dismay of airport neighboring people...
 
Officially, early jet airliners were too fuel-hungry at low altitudes. More fuel-efficient turbofans ... earlier .... could have reduced that disadvantage earlier, but ultimately politics and economies of scale decided their fate.
For example, more courage and commitment to manufacture Avro Jetliners would help, since they were perfectly-sized to connect the busiest North American cities (e.g. Montreal and New York). Instead, the USAF told Avro to concentrate on making CF-100 interceptors.
Talk about "winning the peace" after the Korean War!
The USAF won the peace after WW2 by gutting civilian airline fleets with war-surplus Douglas and Curtiss and Lockheed airliners. Inexpensive American-built airliners made it impossible for second world nations to compete.
 
I think the prevalence of high speed trains did a lot to stifle the development of the jetliner. Why fly from an airport on the d=edge of town when a train will take you from the CBD to CBD in 3 hours.
 
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