No. With the holds at gates and taxi times, even if the scheduled flight time were 10 minutes, my experience is that flights usually have 1 hour of waste: taxiing, waiting in line to take off, waiting in a holding pattern to land, waiting for the previous flight at the arrival gate to leave.
How about passing out parachutes and jumping off at your stop?<p>I'm a bit leery of using the following for picking up passengers though ( but if not, perhaps a special suit with pants open at the derriere might help jettison excess cargo
!8-)):<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPUPOTczy7I&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejunkworthknowing%2Ecom%2Ftechnology%2Ffulton%5Fskyhook&feature=player_embedded" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPUPOTczy7I&eurl=http%3A%...</a>
I might. I'd at least try it if given a substantial discount. Flying coach is already an uncomfortable experience. I wouldn't be surprised if short flights were actually more comfortable standing.
I suspect that if RyanAir offers this they will nickel and dime those standing passengers for everything to recoup the lost ticket revenue. For example, in the standing configuration they effectively eliminate the overhead storage, that's one more bag passengers will have to check.
They said they polled 120K people on their website to gauge the sentiment for this idea. Isn't it true that polls that depend on self-selection are very biased? That obviously doesn't completely invalidate the idea, but isn't it a bit much to use it as supporting evidence?<p><i>The answer was an overwhelming 'yes' if the tickets were free. Two-thirds of respondents said they’d stand on flights of less than an hour if their tickets were free; 42% were willing to do so for tickets that were half-off.</i><p>In this case, who knows, it may be only that the hardcore, frequent fliers responded to the poll and that the majority of fliers actually hate the idea.
Given the trend in people packing less into smaller luggage, I wonder how feasible it would be to completely dispense with the overhead lockers and the cargo areas and have a bilevel plane, with slightly more room at the seats to stuff your things.
I've wondered why an airline doesn't try a "capsule hotel" style setup ever since I went to Japan.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel</a><p><a href="http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule/</a><p>If you built a section of plane for it specifically, I bet you could fit as many people, and I'd love to be able to lay out and sleep. Maybe the engineering or safety wouldn't be possible, but if it was, I think it'd be fantastic.