Quick Note: This is apart of the rail network exploration series and gets the same disclaimer.
So what about planes? Air travel is usually the largest counterpoint to trains. Usually the claim is that flying is faster. And currently, it is, but that is partially due to the current speed of trains rather than an always case. Trains can be more direct than planes. Depending on your airport of origin and destination, your flight may take far, far longer than what it would have taken you to drive. By the way, I am not including the time spent going through security, just the stated flight times including layovers. When you look up some flights, they may include overnight layovers due to going west in order to go east, making the flights rather ridiculous in length.
In these explorations, I may mention the time or cost of a flight to compare it to a rail trip. These flights were looked up using Google Flights, to go along with the idea of impromptu vacations or business trips. This does mean that some airlines ended up being excluded. Southwest was easily the most noticeable of these. They would often have shorter flights than the ones I picked but since their prices don’t show up on Google, they were not included. Fair warning on that. I looked at different flights 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 3 months out as well as the flight during the 4th of July weekend (July 4-8). These prices are from March 22-25, April 5-8, and June 7-10, respectively. I don’t know if any of these dates would cause special pricing in certain airports but I wanted to give some context to the flight prices and times. Some of the trips may not be from those time frames, fair warning. I only grabbed some flights from those time frames.
Finally, while I would normally avoid the issue of safety, due to this post being written in mid-March, I feel that it probably needs to be addressed. I don’t know much if anything about the safety of airplanes or trains beyond having traveled on both. I don’t have any experience in this area nor sufficient knowledge about them. However, some of the underlying assumptions with the safety of airplanes has been called into question recently. While the mechanics of safety, ie. who determines what is safe or quality, are likely to be very similar between trains and planes, there is one likely benefit of trains and cars over planes: they usually stay on or close to the ground. You are not thousands of feet in the air. If something fails on a train, hopefully speaking, you don’t have as far to travel to get to a safe location. If you happen to have more knowledge on this than I, feel free to chime in on whether a train is safer than an airplane or driving on a highway (with multiple other drivers).
In summary, I will sometimes mention flights as a comparison to driving or trains using some quick searches with Google Flights. I may also mention connections to airports as this is often a point of entry for international visitors. However, I will not mention airports much beyond this as they are not meant to be the focus of this series. Thank you for reading and following along.
unknownclimate 