The average Southwest flight only travels 653 miles for an average of one
hour and 55 minutes
Fortunately Airbus and Boeing have both remembered how important speed is
and this is reflected in their latest models where .85 Mach seems to be the
minimum standard cruise speed.
A lot better than the 'bad old days' of the 737 'Classic' 300, 400 and 500
series which crawled along at an agonizing .74 Mach, with their accompanying
terrible ride in turbulence a long flight into a headwind was like cruel and
unusual punishment.
That's an interesting datapoint.
I speculate here, but perhaps back in the day the "senior" models (707, 747,
DC-8) got the more refined "cruise wing", while "junior" models like the 737
Jurassic were seen to only do rather short flights where higher mach numbers
were not seen as important. And so the wing was optimized more for shorter
runways and less for cruise speeds. And then the 737 started doing 4+ hour
flights. Aaaarrrgh...
Again, just a thought I'm having. No hard data to support it.
Thankfully nowadays supercritical wing profiles and so forth ensure you can
get both M0.85 and decent field performance. A far cry from those gorgeous,
sharp 60s wings like on the DC-8, but it works.
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