Essay on The New Age of Free Flight

With the help of incentives from NASA, scores of small companies had been racing to develop cheaper, safer, more comfortable small planes intended to appeal not just to hard-core enthusiasts but to the general public. If such planes were to catch on, Fallows realized, they could introduce a desperately needed measure of flexibility and convenience to our maddeningly inefficient air-transport system. Now all but the wealthiest travelers have to book seats far in advance, and end up routed through congested hubs. A small-plane fleet, however, could enable travelers to summon a small-plane "air taxi" on short notice and fly directly from the nearest small airport to the desired destination without breaking the bank (Alter, Regal).

As long as airplanes have existed, there have been scores of little startup companies with an idea for a brand-new plane. It's almost heart-breaking to read the chronicles of aviation entrepreneurs, because ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them just fail miserably. It becomes clear that people have gone into the business not because they were businessmen, but because they wanted to be around airplanes. Most of the businesses go down in some sort of humiliating failure. What's different now is the combination of that impulse with a market opportunity, some maturing technology, and a supportive role from the government. One thinks those three things together give these people more of a chance than their predecessors thirty years ago might have had (Brown, 13).

The sorts of innovations people are designing into the system could really make a huge difference in coping with both of those things. If one had better engines, one could fly above and around the weather; if there were better weather-guidance systems one would know where planes were in relation to weather systems; if one had planes that were a lot easier to fly one wouldn't have the John Kennedy scenario....................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY