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One further thought regarding passenger confidence - for any aircraft, landing is the most dangerous part of the flight, so don't forget the saying about landing a glider: Every landing is a forced landing.
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smart a$$.  truth.
I took my daughter for some sailplane piloting lessons. It was quiet, surreal and simply a wonderful experience. As in all moving objects, you have to manage your energy. It's one thing to have one or two people aboard. 150+? Nah, I'd want that throttle to fight back against reality trying to kill all of us.
All it would take is one large glider full of people to go splat because the wind changed... and we're done. Commercial aviation is hysterically safe, amazingly efficient and inexpensive. Don't let the climate change whackos tell you otherwise.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Looks like they will be coming next year according to the video 
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“There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.” -Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe, And Everything
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It's a nice thought, but you're dealing with overcoming a lot of physics that are not in your favor.
First one is weather which has many moving parts, such as windspeed, wind direction, barometric pressure gradients, and temperature. Transport requires an ability to go from point A to point B reliably. A glider will be influenced by all the weather factors that could make it impossible to get to point B.
Second one is energy. While a glider can use the weather factors to its advantage, in nominal conditions the distance it travels is based on altitude and glide slope. Something has to get the glider to the required altitude to complete the trip. It makes little difference whether it's a plane or a slingshot, it requires the same energy, more or less. Though not an exact comparison, have you ever tried to fly a kite on a still day? The only way to keep it up is to get it high enough to maybe catch some wind and if that doesn't happen, all you can do to keep the kids happy is to run back and forth with it.
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Makes sense, maybe airships are a better idea (Jacquers had a nice video about that), this seems to become reality for cargo transport next year with the "Flying Whale" from a French firm.
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We already do. Modern jets are gliders that have just enough power to do the job safely and burn as little fuel as possible doing it. I would have sold my grandmother for a 1% fuel burn improvement when I worked for the local airplane company.
Take the 787 as an example. It carries 33,384 gallons of fuel. It flies 7400 miles. That works out to .22 miles per gallon (worst case, no reserves).
The 787 carries 330 passengers in a dual class configuration so that works out to 73 passenger miles per gallon.
So, you and the spouse hop in your RAV 4 Hybrid and drive LA to NY and back, taking every side trip that interests you, and you'll use the same amount of fuel as your one way trip to Australia.
Be warned, though. If you are driving at Mach .85 (650 mph) the speeding tickets will really add up.
Also, gliders can't do go-arounds. So, no thanks.
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I could definitely see where something like spaceship one could have at least four gliders arranged in circumference, their wings folded in, of course.
If you shot that thing into the stratosphere and released them all, it'd probably be possible to get them nearly anywhere in the US, assuming a TX launch.
The problem with gliders is you can't wait around for clearance. You have to land "now", mostly. There'd be different amounts of leeway where you could trade circling off altitude, but I think you'd still mostly need or want dedicated landing strips along with some smartly located emergency ones.
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There are major airports (plural) in the US where right now there is a significant problem with over utilization.
Too many planes in too little physical space.
Unknown to me why that is even allowed. The Airlines just keep scheduling more planes. Seems like there should be a exponential fee structure in place.
Only real limit is the number of gates.
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It's literally the N-body problem, I think.
Even centralizing all of the ATC data, you just can't predict where all the blips are going to be an hour from now because all the variables are (most cases, quite literally) moving targets.
So even though you can maybe "schedule constrain" departure/arrival airport "zones", I'm going to guess the real issue creating problems is kind of the same as people getting bumped off flights.
We want to utilize our airports to at least 90% or something. Whatever max capacity it is, we don't want to permanently give up more than 10% of that capacity as emergency buffer. So when all the pool balls on the table collide just 'wrong' you end up with a bunch of the balls clustered around only two of the pockets.
That's part of why I think just having some "emergency" airports, where the whole thing is basically airport overflow parking (but for planes/gliders) is probably a pretty solid idea.
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Wordle 932 2/6*
⬛🟩🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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Wordle 932 4/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
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🟩🟨🟩⬜🟨
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Wordle 932 2/6
⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
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2 for me too!
Wordle 932 2/6*
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"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Wordle 932 4/6
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“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Wordle 932 3/6
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Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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I have a legacy software to draw very sophisticated charts.
but I only need a small piece of these charts.
I want to re-write the code charting this small piece of charts.
How hard it is to do this? any experience to share?
diligent hands rule....
modified 6-Jan-24 15:49pm.
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MFC to WPF or what? I did some conversions from C++ to C# for a complex math problem. That was pretty straight-forward since the finished C# code was not that different from C++ once you got into it.
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WinForm in my mind.
diligent hands rule....
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It varies widely depending on the project.
For user interface stuff (at least assuming windows) if you were using like, MFC before, you're basically going to need to rewrite that part using the original code as a reference.
For algorithmic stuff it depends. If you're doing pointer ops all over the place that will be difficult to port as you need to change it to indexing into arrays (typically). Otherwise, if you're using things like vector and map they have direct corollaries in C# so that kind of thing is easier.
Just remember structs are on the stack and classes are on the heap in C#. That has a lot of different ramifications, such as changing how they are passed to functions (byval instead of byref). Be careful when porting that kind of thing from C++ which makes little distinction between classes and structs.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Out of curiosity, is an enum a class or struct?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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In C and C++ it doesn't really matter. In fact it's compiled into constant nothings basically (removed).
In C# it's a ValueType which makes it closer to a struct than a class in terms of how it behaves - stack vs heap, etc.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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