Freedom Of The Skies

Everyone knows about the horrors of modern air travel. What almost no one knows is how inventors, entrepreneurs, and government visionaries have teamed up to create new kinds of small planes that can take off from and land almost anywhere. "Escape From Airline Hell" the scenario might be called, and it's coming soon to an airport near you.

People who travel on airlines all have stories about how bad the experience is when things go wrong. Lost or damaged luggage. Unexplained waits on the taxiway, with the passengers strapped in but the plane not allowed to take off. Missed connections and overnight delays because of snow in Denver or fog in San Francisco or thunderstorms in the Midwest.

But the more striking fact is how unpleasant and inefficient the experience can be when nothing in particular has gone wrong. The series of waits: to get over the bridge or through the tunnel or the tollbooth en route to the airport; to drop off the rental car or catch the shuttle bus from the parking lot; to make it to the check-in counter; to pass through the security gate; to get the shuttle to the far-off terminal; to buy coffee or sandwiches to supplement the pretzels offered as food on the trip; to get onto the plane and join the fight for space in the overhead bins. Because any of these waits can turn out to be much longer than "normal," worst-case padding for all of them must be built into plans for leaving home or work to get to the airport. When flight delays were reaching record levels last summer, an executive from an airplane-manufacturing company told me that he'd made a bet with a friend. The bet concerned how long it would be before an argument over a canceled flight or a lost bag led one frustrated person to kill another in an airport. It would have happened already, the man said, except that airport security gates keep passengers from bringing in guns.

Then, on the other end, more waits: for the bags, for the car or taxi from the airport to the home, office, meeting, or vacation site one is trying to reach. That final leg of the trip can be a minor factor for those traveling nonstop from one airline hub city to another—New York to Chicago, say, or Atlanta to Dallas. But it represents a large share of the total travel time for people either beginning or ending their journey somewhere other than in one of these hubs. For trips of 500 miles or less, which include the majority of air journeys, going by commercial airline is effectively no faster than traveling by car. "Think about it," the administrator of NASA, Daniel Goldin, said in a speech in 1998. "You are flying through the air at three hundred to five hundred miles per hour during the part of your trip that is in the commercial airplane. But your average speed from when you left your home to when you arrive at your destination is only fifty or sixty miles per hour."

The steep pricing penalty for last-minute bookings and changes helps the airlines use their fleets efficiently, as does hub-and-spoke routing. But both policies mean less freedom and flexibility for the traveler. Together they have also put air travel distinctly out of phase with the evolution of the modern economy as a whole.

Since at least the early nineties the trend in most businesses has been toward on-demand, always-available products and services that suit the customer's convenience rather than the company's. You can make or receive phone calls from almost anywhere. You can get money at any time from any ATM in almost any part of the world, and you can do your banking at 3:00 a.m. on your home computer rather than queuing up for a teller during bankers' hours. You can order books, clothes, movies, by phone, computer, or fax, and have them delivered overnight.

Through most of the twentieth century commercial air travel was an important part of the movement toward giving people more freedom, flexibility, and control over how they used their time. By the early 1940s airplanes had made it possible to cross the country in one long day of travel, rather than in several days by train. In the 1960s touring families and students could get to Europe on overnight charter flights, rather than having to spend five days on a ship. Businesses could receive timely shipments from distant suppliers and coordinate work among offices in different states or countries.

But starting in the 1990s commercial airlines added more rigidity than flexibility to the system, in order to keep airplanes full while competing on price. More and more of the traffic was routed through a small number of hub airports, although the United States has well over 13,000 "landing facilities," many thousands of which would be suitable for all but the largest planes. Today more than 80 percent of all airline traffic takes off from or lands at one of the fifty busiest airports, and most of it at the twenty-four major hubs. As Dallas-Fort Worth, Dulles, Denver, and O'Hare become saturated with travelers and airplanes, one canceled flight means passengers sitting in the hallways and filling the standby lists for subsequent flights. Weather delays in one part of the country have ripple effects thousands of miles away.

Those who can pay enough for first-class seats and last-minute tickets can better fit travel to their own schedules. And those who can amortize the cost of a corporate jet see airplanes as the miracles of freedom they originally were. One springtime evening when I was living in Seattle, I took a ride in a ten-passenger jet owned by a software billionaire who was going to Monterey, California, for a dinner meeting—and coming back the same night. He and I and one other guest bound for the dinner left Seattle around five, spent two hours in the air each way, were flown by a team of two professional pilots, and were back a little past midnight. The fastest connection on a commercial airline, with a change in San Francisco, would have meant leaving Seattle at 1:00 p.m. and getting back at noon the next day. But that private jet had cost well over $10 million, and the direct operating costs for the trip were well over $12,000 not counting the pilots' pay.

There have been few dramatic changes in large-aircraft design since the 1960s, when the Concorde and the Boeing 747 made their debuts. But planes from Boeing and Airbus have become ever more efficient, more reliable, less polluting, quieter. Despite occasional horrific crashes, modern airliners are about the safest means of travel ever devised. Airline pilots may sound like corny travel guides when they come onto the intercom, and through the vast majority of a flight they do little more than monitor the engine gauges, autopilots, and "moving map" displays of where the plane is heading. But to have any knowledge at all of the world of flying is to respect the experience, judgment, and training that airline pilots must accumulate. No other group of professionals is retrained and retested so frequently. An oddly compelling book called The Black Box (1998), edited by Malcolm MacPherson, consists of little more than cockpit transcripts from flights that encountered serious trouble. In most cases the planes crashed and everyone died; in a few the pilots brought them in with minimal damage. In virtually all the cases the competence of the crews as they tried to cope with disaster must be called heroic.

Why does a system that is so technically advanced and admirable lead to such unpleasant results? Because for more than a generation the money, effort, and innovation in civilian aviation have gone toward planes that can carry hundreds of passengers between Atlanta and Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, or any other "hub pair" at 400-500 miles an hour with ever higher reliability and ever lower cost per mile. While Boeing and Airbus have fought for this market, such companies as Gulfstream, Learjet, Challenger, Raytheon, and Cessna have poured effort and money into developing ever faster and sleeker jets that can take corporate officials or millionaires wherever they want to go whenever they want to go there. The result is like a land-travel system consisting of long-distance rail lines for most passengers and private limousines for a tiny elite.

It is a system that is nearing the limits of its capacity. Only so many airplanes can land at La Guardia or take off from LAX. At least two dozen of the major hub airports are classified as "seriously congested," working near their theoretical maximum capacity for takeoffs and landings in busy periods. Federal officials predicted last fall that overall airline traffic in the United States would more than double by 2010, with most of the increase occurring in the already busiest airports.

What could relieve the overload and change the tedious realities of travel? I believe that the answer is being invented by entrepreneurs at a variety of start-up companies who are allied with sympathizers within the federal government in trying to create new air-travel alternatives to airlines. The government's role here, which is more than a decade old but has received virtually no publicity, is consistent with the century-long history of federal support for aviation. In the past this support came mainly through military contracts, but now the government is dealing with new, tiny companies and trying to help them survive without making them into mini-defense contractors permanently dependent on federal funds.

Eventually these projects should make it possible for many people to travel much of the time the way a few very rich people do now: in greater comfort, without fighting their way to and from crowded hubs, leaving from the small airport closest to their home or office and flying direct to the small airport closest to their destination. This would be made possible by a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small planes that offer much of the speed and as much as possible of the safety of big airliners, at a small fraction of the cost of today's corporate jets.

The people racing to create new systems of air transportation are nearly all men who learned to fly as teenagers. I can't recall one I've interviewed who didn't have a poster of an airplane on his office wall or a little model plane on his desk. They think about airplanes all the time, and many say they started their companies because they wanted to have a different kind of plane to fly. Some of them argue, or at least dream, that if they make new planes that are nice enough (more comfortable, easier to fly, less expensive, above all much safer than today's small aircraft seem to be), then larger numbers of the public will eventually decide to become pilots themselves. Those pilots could then take advantage of the now underused network of small airports and relieve strain on the big hubs.

Whether or not the pilot population increases in the long run, for the foreseeable future small planes will make a difference mainly if they constitute the operating fleet for a new national system of air taxis. A supply of inexpensive, safe, comfortable small planes, flown by hired pilots and available at rates comparable to today's coach air fares, could bring freedom and convenience to a broader share of the traveling public than the class to whom "flying commercial" is a badge of shame.

Two of the companies deeply involved in the race to create this fleet are the Cirrus Design Corporation, of Duluth, Minnesota, and Eclipse Aviation, of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Cirrus is the first company to begin large-scale production of a genuinely new small airplane, which it calls the SR20. Eclipse is the company that is moving fastest toward the production of jet planes priced at well under a million dollars apiece, versus at least three to four times that much for all competitors. Its first plane is scheduled for delivery in 2003. Several other companies are working toward the same goal: Lancair, of Bend, Oregon, which makes a small, fast, propeller-driven plane like the SR20; Safire Aircraft, of West Palm Beach, Florida, which is planning a small jet to compete with the Eclipse; established airplane makers, including Cessna, of Wichita, Kansas, and newcomers such as Honda and Toyota, of Japan, which are all considering developing the new class of planes; and equipment manufacturers, such as Avidyne, of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Garmin, of Olathe, Kansas, which are producing advanced electronic systems for use in the new planes. But for the moment Cirrus and Eclipse are setting the pace.

These companies face all the standard perils of start-ups in complicated manufacturing industries. For Cirrus the main challenge is a continuing struggle to raise working capital. For Eclipse it is to deliver the product it has promised to investors and customers. But if these companies falter, some of the others are likely to take their place. Building airplanes has for decades been a notorious way to lose money. The new contenders believe that this time market conditions and technological possibilities are on their side.

In the fall of 1998 Bruce Holmes noticed that it was taking him longer and longer to get where he wanted to go. Holmes, an official at NASA, had been trained as an engineer, and his first instinct was to quantify and measure. So he decided to use himself as a kind of test probe to see exactly what had happened to the air-transportation system.

Holmes lived in Newport News, Virginia, near his work at NASA's Langley Research Center. When he took a business or personal trip that involved air travel, he would note the exact time he stepped out the door. He would glance at his watch at different stages of his journey: when he got to the airport, after he'd gone through the check-in line, after he'd found a seat on the plane, and after the plane had finally begun to roll. He would record the time the plane landed and would make a final entry when he reached the hotel, office, or meeting site that was his destination.

"You know W. Edwards Deming?" Holmes asked when he described this ritual to me, at our first meeting last year. Deming was an American consultant whose prime analytic tool in the study of how to increase productivity was taking minute measurements at each stage of a factory's production process. "My friends like to say, 'Deming would be proud!'"

The log was just the beginning. When the trip was over, Holmes would calculate the "great circle" distance (what most people would call "as the crow flies") between his starting point and his destination and compare it with the total time spent en route; the result was his effective travel speed, on what he calls a "doorstep to destination" basis. Holmes, himself a pilot, would then use flight-planning software to see how long the same trip would have taken in a variety of modest propeller-driven planes—not corporate jets, not million-dollar turboprops, but a typical Cessna, Mooney, or Beech Bonanza. These planes are much slower than mighty Boeing or Airbus jets, and he would allow time for refueling stops. His aim was to see exactly how modern the modern transportation system is.

What Holmes began to see was that if he was going anyplace within 500 nautical miles (that is, on a trip from Newport News to Boston or anyplace nearer), his effective speed by air averaged 75 knots, or somewhat faster than he could have traveled by car. (The aviation world uses nautical miles rather than statute miles to measure distance, and knots rather than mph to measure speed. A nautical mile is about 15 percent longer than a statute mile, and a knot is a nautical mile per hour.) Going by car, of course, would have been much less expensive than going by airplane, and it would have allowed him more flexibility in departure and return times. Given that airliners can travel through the sky at 400 knots, this is impressive testimony to how much of the average airline trip is spent other than in the air. Holmes's worst short journey was from Boston to Newport News when a string of thunderstorms caused delays throughout the hub-and-spoke system. That trip took twenty-seven hours, for an average speed of 15 knots. For trips of 1,000 miles Holmes averaged 125 knots. For trips of 2,000 miles he averaged 200 knots. Holmes thought, I have my proof.

For coast-to-coast hauls, of course, flying is superior to driving. And for people who live close to major airports, short-haul trips, too, can be fast on an airline. But for the past five years the effective speed of air travel, especially for short trips, has been declining, because passengers spend so much of their travel time doing something other than whooshing through the sky in a jet. This wasted time—in lines and traffic jams and crowded hubs—is what small planes going direct to small airports could reduce.

His obsessive travel logging was the culmination of a process that had begun in 1989. Bruce Holmes had recently turned forty, and he was wondering how to spend the rest of his working life. He had always been interested in airplanes: he took his first flight when he was five years old, soloed when he was in high school, and earned money in college giving flight lessons and transporting bodies for funeral homes. Holmes is a fit-looking man with a full head of straight, light-brown hair and a genial air. His style of speaking combines an engineer's precision with the sort of "busting paradigms" talk found at corporate seminars on the new economy.

Holmes had gone to work at NASA in 1974 and had become involved in various projects for the better design of airplanes. Although NASA's role in space exploration dominates news about the agency, its full name is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and it is a major center for research into the technology of normal flight.

I'm a professional pilot and I detest the process of going by plane unless I'm doing the flying. 9-11 has made flying even more painful. I understand the necessity of stepped up security but after this goes on for a while people are going to hate the thought of putting up with the hassle of going to the airport if they don't already. I don't think this idea of using small planes on direct routings is feasible however. I can't imagine how it could be profitable and I'm sure the ATC system couldn't handle a sky crowded with thousands of them. The airline system of hub and spoke is dead. I'm just not sure what's going to replace it.

(The aviation world uses nautical miles rather than statute miles to measure distance, and knots rather than mph to measure speed. A nautical mile is about 15 percent longer than a statute mile, and a knot is a nautical mile per hour.)

Editor to James Fallows: Are you sure you want to leave all of that in the article?

JF: Yes. Common people don't understand what a knot is and, besides, I have to make the article longer so they will think I'm smart.

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I'm sorry. I've always thought James Fallows was a pompous, condescending know-it-all. A number of years ago he was the honcho at another magazine and was fired before the new boss walked in the door. Think I know why.

I don't know about the economics, but I would think ATC could handle it just fine, given appropriate airport fees to fund them. How much does ATC cost per plane? Remember that most of these flights would occur outside of the crowded airspace around major airports such as LAX. Instead, you'd see increased traffic at, say, VNY (Van Nuys). A decentralized system would require far less complex operations than one where all traffic converged on a few major points.

I can vouch for the central point of this article. I have a good friend who flies his own plane, and I have spent many happy hours as a passenger. (I'm hopeless at flying the plane, but real good at changing frequencies on the radio and running the GPS). In flying with him, I discovered that counting the time it took to get to LAX, check in and wait for the flight, plus the flight time, was considerably longer than the time taken to go to VNY (15 minutes away instead of an hour), check in (1 hour commercial versus 15 minutes to pack the plane), and fly, despite the flight speed being about 1/3 that of the jet. The small plane was 160knots versus 500 knots for the commercial jet, but that still didn't make up the crippling difference in time to get to the airport and on the plane.

The main drawback is that the plane was about as cramped as a 1980s Subaru, with similar quality interior materials. The fashion-conscious will insist on a jet. But it wasn't any more cramped than today's tourist class seats. And as long as my friend was flying, I had no fear of disaster; he was a truly meticulous individual.

So could this type of flying be made palatable to the average joe? Depends, but with improvements in technology, I don't see why not. My friend's flight cost about the same as a commercial flight for two people, so costs aren't that far out of line even now.

Skyjet.com will reserve you a private jet for an extraordinarily high price - until, that is, you compare it to normal first class airfare for the number of people who would fit on the plane. A cost to coast flight for eight people will run you about $25,000. That's about the same as a non-stop first class fare for eight.

I would certainly like to see general aviation take off (ahem, bad pun, sorry). As I predicted in earlier FR posts (look 'em up if you don't believe me), private jets have received increased interest from time and security conscious corporations.

Unfortunately, the implications for terrorism might be grave, so this whole project may be a non-starter until we've taken care of bin Laden and friends :-(.

As a non-lover of flying, this kind of gushing over the potential of small craft travel lacks realism or observation of real-life flying experience. Talk to people who have lived and worked in Hawaii and Alaska about the safety and feasiblility of many small craft doing the work of airliners.

The little things are always crashing!--They are also at the whim of weather to a much greater extent than big airliners. I don't look forward to an age of these planes buzzing overhead--hobby pilots are enough of a nuisance where I live, much less chauffeur-pilots...

Reads like wishful thinking of a flying enthusiast. What will replace airline flying is no flying at all...but better acceptance of long-distance communication. Let the billionaires play with their dangerous toys.

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