How the jet engine created the weekend city break

HostIt's pretty common for people to spend a Friday night at an airport just to wake up on the other side of a continent for a quick trip. We think of a thousand miles as something we can cover between dinner and bedtime, but that's a very new way to live. I was thinking about how much work it used to be to go anywhere, and it seems like it all comes back to the way we fly. What was it about the switch to jet engines that actually changed our lives from staying home to hopping between cities for a couple of days?

GuestIt really comes down to how much we can trust the machine. Before the jet engine, planes used big piston engines, which are basically the same thing you find under the hood of a car. They have hundreds of little metal parts moving up and down at high speeds. Those engines were heavy, they shook the whole plane, and they broke all the time. You couldn't just fly a plane across the ocean, land it, and turn it right back around for another trip. It had to be poked and prodded by a crew of mechanics for hours. When the jet engine came along, it changed the math of travel because it's so much simpler. It's basically a big straw. You suck air in the front, squeeze it, set it on fire, and blow it out the back. There are way fewer parts to break, so the planes could stay in the air much longer.

HostSo, because the engines didn't break as much, the airlines could just run more flights?

GuestExactly. It meant the planes could work like buses. In the old days, a plane might spend more time on the ground being fixed than it spent in the sky. That made tickets very expensive because the airline had to pay for the plane even when it was sitting in a shed. Once jets took over, an airline could keep a plane flying for sixteen hours a day. When you spread the cost of the plane over that many more flights and that many more people, the price of a seat drops through the floor. That's the first time the idea of a weekend away became something a normal person could actually pay for.

HostI hear you on the cost, but I wonder if it was just about the money. Even if a ticket was cheap, if it takes ten hours to get somewhere, you're still not going for the weekend. Is the jet really that much faster than the old propeller planes?

GuestIt's much faster, but not just because the engine is stronger. It's because of where the jet allows you to fly. Propeller planes have to stay down where the air is thick because those big blades need a lot of air to push against. But the air down there's full of weather. You have wind, clouds, and storms that toss the plane around. It slows you down and makes everyone sick. A jet engine loves thin air. It can push a plane up to thirty or forty thousand feet where the air is smooth and clear. You're literally flying over the weather. You can go twice as fast as an old propeller plane because there's less air rubbing against the wings to slow you down. Suddenly, a trip that took two days on a train or twelve hours in a shaky prop plane only takes three hours. That's the difference between a long journey and a quick hop.

HostBut wait, if we're flying that high, we're totally cut off from the world. It feels less like traveling and more like sitting in a waiting room that happens to move. Does that lack of a real journey actually make people want to travel more, or does it just make the destination the only thing that matters?

GuestIt definitely makes the destination the star of the show. When the journey is smooth and boring, it stops being a scary thing you have to prepare for. It becomes a bridge. If you're vibrating for ten hours in a loud, cold cabin, you need a week to recover when you land. But if you sit in a quiet jet for two hours, you can walk off the plane and go straight to a museum or a restaurant. The jet engine took the work out of the travel. It turned the act of going somewhere into something you do without thinking, like taking an elevator. That mental shift is what created the city break. You're not going on an expedition; you're just going to a different street for dinner.

HostI guess that makes sense, but it feels like it has made every city start to look the same. If everyone can get to Prague or Barcelona in two hours for fifty bucks, those places just get flooded. Does the jet engine end up ruining the very thing it makes easy to reach?

GuestThat's the big tension. The jet made the world smaller, but it also made it more crowded. When travel is this easy, the city becomes a product. But we have to look at the other side too. Before this, seeing a different culture was only for the very rich or people moving their whole lives. Now, a student or a nurse can see the ruins in Rome over a long weekend. We swapped the quiet, slow travel of the past for a world where everyone gets to see everything. It turned the map from something we look at into something we actually use.

HostIt's wild that a change in how we burn fuel ended up changing how we think about a Saturday morning.

GuestThe real shift happened when the Boeing 707 started flying because it was the first plane that could move hundreds of people at once across the sea without stopping to fix a single bolt.

HostThat simple tube of fire turned the whole map into a neighborhood where a cup of coffee is only a few hours away.