Is it just me, or are airliners slower than they used to be?

"Byker" wrote in
:

The average Southwest flight only travels 653 miles for an average of
one hour and 55 minutes

Fortunately Airbus and Boeing have both remembered how important speed
is and this is reflected in their latest models where .85 Mach seems to
be the minimum standard cruise speed.

A lot better than the 'bad old days' of the 737 'Classic' 300, 400 and
500 series which crawled along at an agonizing .74 Mach, with their
accompanying terrible ride in turbulence a long flight into a headwind
was like cruel and unusual punishment.

That's an interesting datapoint.

I speculate here, but perhaps back in the day the "senior" models (707,
747, DC-8) got the more refined "cruise wing", while "junior" models
like the 737 Jurassic were seen to only do rather short flights where
higher mach numbers were not seen as important. And so the wing was
optimized more for shorter runways and less for cruise speeds. And then
the 737 started doing 4+ hour flights. Aaaarrrgh...

Again, just a thought I'm having. No hard data to support it.

Thankfully nowadays supercritical wing profiles and so forth ensure you
can get both M0.85 and decent field performance. A far cry from those
gorgeous, sharp 60s wings like on the DC-8, but it works.

The Convair 880 cruised at .89 Mach and the 990 a little faster, but they
could not compete with Douglas and Boeing.
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)