REVOLUTION IN GLOBAL TRAVEL
HUMAN DESIRE TO GO FURTHER AND FASTER
Global transportation is on the verge of a revolution. In the nineteenth century, the locomotive transformed how people moved vast distances overland. The United States was unified when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. The transcontinental railroad reduced travel time from the east to the west coast from months to less than a week.
In the twentieth century, aviation made the world smaller as people could travel between continents in a matter of days or hours. For example, before the advent of long-range aviation, passengers took ocean liners like the Queen Mary II that took seven days. Today, modern aviation makes the trip from New York to London in approximately seven hours. The trip was even shorter if someone paid to travel on the supersonic Concord that traveled from New York to London in under three hours.
However, not all international flights are short, and from my own experience, some flights are impossibly long. Today’s longest flights average between 15–18 hours, with the longest flight from New York to Singapore taking under 19 hours. Thankfully due to investments by pioneers such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and…