“That’s a pretty stunning rate of innovation. The last 44 years? Meh.”
Cars have not changed much either.
The exterior shape of aircraft is dictated by the air and was pretty well optimized early on.
If you pull the body off of cars from all the years since Henry Ford you might be surprised how little has changed.
There is actually a pretty stunning amount of progress that has gone into the cockpit of airplanes but most people don’t look at that, or don’t know what they are seeing when they look.
Go look up how many major plane crashes happened in the 1970’s and then look at the same numbers for the 2010’s
Fair enough. You’re right. Aerospace manufacturers have made great strides with airliner safety. I was talking more from the point of view of the basic flying experience which really hasn’t changed much for the typical passenger (i.e., be herded into a cramped cabin, sit in a crappy seat, eat a crappy meal and take 4-5 hours to fly coast-to-coast). I get your point about cars not really changing much either, and aside from safety, comfort and various bells & whistles, there’s some truth to that. At the same time, I think that we might be starting to enter into a new era of rapid innovation in that field (e.g., with self-driving vehicles). I just don’t see that happening with air travel. I’m not expecting a fundamentally different experience 10 years from now. And, as I mentioned in a another post in this thread, I blame that on the heavy government regulation that exists.