Why have airline travel times not decreased over the decades?
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When commercial jet aircrafts became available we were able to get pretty close to the speed of sound. This is currently what is limiting the speed of commercial airplanes. When you get to the speed of sound and above the fuel economy goes drastically down. You use several times more fuel going mach 1.1 compared to mach 0.9. We are slowly improving fuel economy and therefore the speed which you can afford to fly at, but even with dramatic improvements in fuel economy we have only been able to increase the speed from about mach 0.85 in the 60s to mach 0.9 today. Something that is hardly noticeable.
So to improve flight times we are talking about supersonic airliners. You might remember that there were some such airplane designs based on supersonic bomber airplanes. Just one of these designs saw some commercial success but even then struggled a lot since the ticket price were much higher then on any other aircraft. The good news is that the increased fuel use in supersonic aircrafts is mostly related to effects around the speed of sound. So a supersonic airliner is able to fly almost twice the speed of sound at an economic rate. And we are seeing development of supersonic civilian aircrafts again, although with smaller private jets at first. We could therefore end up with much faster air travel available soon, although at quite a high price.
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