This is how they launch some jets on aircraft carriers. It sounds ridiculous to apply that to a passenger jet, but not really any more ridiculous than the fact that we routinely fly through the air for thousands of miles in the first place.
I'm no expert, but catapulting a sturdy ~30 ton fighter plane seems like a fundamentally different engineering challenge to catapulting a ~400 ton aluminum can.
Catapults just shorten the runway needed. The plane still needs a ton of fuel to climb to altitude. Plus, I doubt you'd ever get a lot of civilians to fly off a catapult...
The goal is to reduce the onboard fuel needed to achieve flight. I thought that was obvious from the parent comment.
> Plus, I doubt you'd ever get a lot of civilians to fly off a catapult...
I'm sure many short-sighted people said that about passenger air travel in general. Plus, if you actually watch a video of a modern catapult launch, you will see that it would be mostly invisible to passengers.
The amount of fuel needed to become airborne is a fraction of the amount of fuel needed to achieve cruising altitude. So using a catapult would only save a puny amount of fuel, as well as add risk to takeoffs.
Plus, if you actually watch a video of a modern catapult launch, you'd realize that you're speaking out of your ass. Going from 0-170mph (the rotation speed of an A320), in a short amount of space is going to impart huge G forces on both the aircraft as well as the crew and passengers. Catapults also fail, and a "cold cat" on an airline sized plane (without zero/zero ejection seats for everyone) means a mass fatality event.
Man, HN is just full of people suffering from Dunning-Kruger.