As my colleague Bonchie reported earlier today, Joe Biden seemed to have lost his mind when it came to talking about trains and planes.
Biden is trying to push his infrastructure plan, which is mostly not infrastructure. Toward that end, he was talking about what the future might be like if we had high-speed trains and planes that went much faster.
But in typical Biden fashion, his figures were just downright crazy.
“What we’re really doing is raising the bar on what we can imagine. Imagine a world where you and your family can travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas on a high-speed train close to as fast as you can go across the country in a plane,” Biden said at the White House.
He added: “I tell the kids, the young people who work for me, tell my kids when I go on college campuses: they’re going to see more change in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years. We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds — supersonic speeds. To be able, figuratively, if you may, if we decide to do it, traverse the world in about an hour, travel 21,000 miles an hour. So much is changing and we have got to lead it.”
Bonchie did a great breakdown about how insane this was.
The problem isn’t “raising the bar on what we can imagine.” We can imagine all kinds of things and have done so. The question is what’s workable in reality—not to mention what’s safe—which is the most important thing in commuter rail or plane, not what’s the fastest.
NRO’s Jim Geraghty pointed out in a new column Thursday some specific examples of how ridiculous Biden’s comments were.
Yesterday, Biden said, “We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds — supersonic speeds. To be able, figuratively, if you may, if we decide to do it, traverse the world in about an hour, travel 21,000 miles an hour.”https://t.co/RnG96VYegi
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
The first part of this vision is relatively realistic. The old, retired Concorde plane had a maximum speed of 1,354 mph, more than twice the speed of sound.https://t.co/RnG96VYegi pic.twitter.com/7TaUfcJJz4
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
The Soviet version of the Concorde, the Tupolev Tu-144, had a top speed of 1,600 miles per hour, and that sounds really appealing, as long as you can overlook the fact that 12.5 percent of all the Tu-144s ever built crashed.https://t.co/RnG96VYegi pic.twitter.com/j2MqpmkZ5t
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
That could be a small problem.
The crash of a Concorde jet just outside Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000 didn’t help, but what really forced supersonic passenger jets into retirement was that they wasn’t cost-effective. Fuel costs would often exceed the revenue from the passengers.https://t.co/RnG96VYegi pic.twitter.com/vkYguLvp5m
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
Not to mention, what happened to all the climate crisis questions? This seems inconsistent with what Biden is otherwise pushing and claiming. We’re going to spend more and be less fuel-efficient? And have a lot more carbon emissions?
Oh, and supersonic flight over U.S. land is currently banned because the sonic booms can break windows. However, we might be able to mitigate that through improvements in technology. https://t.co/RnG96VYegi
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
But Biden’s vision of a passenger aircraft that can “traverse the world in about an hour, travel 21,000 miles an hour” is a strong argument for mandatory drug testing in the White House.https://t.co/RnG96VYegi
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
The fastest jet in the world is the SR-71 Blackbird, perhaps the most famous spy plane in the world, and it travels at 2,100 mph.
Biden envisions passenger airliners traveling ten times as fast as that. pic.twitter.com/tncvTP5WyH
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
President Biden might as well have promised warp speed, a hyperdrive, or teleportation. It goes well with his promise to cure cancer if elected president.https://t.co/RnG96VYegi
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 8, 2021
That’s the problem with Biden in a nutshell: He talks, but what he says often doesn’t exist in reality — and the media very rarely calls him out on it, not just the lies but the utter fantasy of some of the things he says.
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