Delightful to see the original and lateral thinking. Kees, congratulations for pushing it beyond the first negative responses of the “it’ll never work” variety.
Maybe it won’t. But the thinking behind it – and the general response on Pprune – is surely being quietly observed by many an aeronautical enginner and market analyst in Boeing, Airbus and a few others.
Kiwilad in post 34 pointed out that most people don’t know/aren’t given a choice as to the aircraft type they’ll be traveling on. I agree, and I think an increasing proportion of travelers are more concerned with the combination of price/comfort/direct flight, not necessarily in that order. The relative speed advantage of a jet over a turboprop over 1-1.5 hour sectors, when considered in the context of all the time getting to an airport, checking in and waiting, just seems risible. And if you can get a TP aircraft closer to the passenger than would be possible with a jet, hurrah. Operators,as we’ve seen in the USA in the last few weeks, are more than a little concerned with the cost of fuel, however much they might have hedged.
In my industry, the rising fuel cost component is already nudging shipowners to reduce speed and maintain their weekly port call schedules by inserting another vessel in the cycle. It could be the seventh, the ninth or the eleventh ship but the savings are in the high millions. Sounds easy enough in liner shipping, yes, where there is an icreasing capacity glut; I know it’s more difficult in aviation where the parameters of fuel efficiency are much more restrictive. Just perhaps, you’ve come up with the right idea at the right time.
All you need now is a better name than "TurboLiner" and that reflects all the thoughtful Pprune input. That might perhaps better be left to JetBlast.