|
James Fallows
National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly; NPR Commentator; Author, National Defense and Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Given the antipathy of the public to general aviation and small airports, how do you see pilot training increasing to man the new fleet of small airplanes you envision?
A: Of the many problems involved in this vision, pilot training is surprisingly among the minor ones. Vern Raburn, one of the founders of Eclipse, has a dream, an ambition to sell a fleet of 30,000 airplanes. That would make him a newly rich man if he could do that. He wants there to be 30,000 air-taxi airplanes and all of them to be Eclipse jets. More power to him. Let's suppose that those 30,000 were used around the clock for air-taxi services and we had six or eight pilots per airplane, to have them manned continuously. If it were eight pilots per airplane, that would mean 240,000 additional pilots. There are already almost 700,000. To scale up to 240,000 over a period of years seems an achievable feat. The main limit on pilot training is a sense of where the jobs are. It's not really the facilities, it's not really the enthusiasm of these mainly young men and a few young women, but it is the sense of how they're going to make a living doing it.
Q: A flight instructor I know of speaks of looking for "command presence" in potential pilots. Maybe this explains the four to seven percent of pilots who are women. How do you describe command presence and can it be learned?
A: If this were the main factor, my wife would be pilot and not me. I don't know why this is more interesting to men than women, other than to observe 1) that it is, and 2) most of the women pilots that I know are very good, 3) when my wife is doing the radio communications rather than me she gets a much nicer reception from the air traffic controllers.
I don't know whether any of the specific skills required for piloting are gender specific at all. It seems to me, as a hand-eye matter, it's not really that taxing except on landing. Landing is difficult; the rest is not in a hand-eye matter. What's difficult is the multi-tasking, all the different stuff you have to learn, but women seem just as good at that as men. Why do more men than women like the NFL? I think it's the same reason that explains this piloting gap.
Q: Is it true that for journeys under 500 miles, it is faster to drive to then to fly and if so, why?
A: One of the studies from NASA's Langley branch shows that effective speed of air travel has actually gone down. The airplanes themselves are getting faster, but the whole flying experience is getting slower, because the padding experience of flying is worse: getting to the airport, waiting in the lines, the luggage—all the things you do other than being in the plane.
Bruce Holmes of NASA Langley kept a chart of his own travel over the last couple of years on a door-to-door basis and found that on journeys of less then 500 miles, on average, it was slower to fly then to drive. You can find exceptions when everything goes just right and you live near the airport, but on average, the padding and inefficiency of getting to and from the hub airports—especially if you have to make a change—mean that if sheer efficiency is your concern, you would drive from here to LA.
Q: The three innovative examples you mentioned were American; what innovations are happening outside the U.S.?
A: It's not simply my parochialism that is making me concentrate on the U.S. innovators. The U.S. is aviator heaven compared to the rest of the world: It's least expensive to fly here; the airspace is least controlled; a very large proportion of the world's private pilots is based in the U.S. There are very interesting innovations in composite design coming out of Europe, from Germany and Switzerland in particular. Diesel engine technology is being done in Europe because of different fuel concerns there. There are some electronics innovations from Australia and I assume there will be assembly of various planes done in Asia. There is a reason that a lot of this coming of out of the U.S.: It's the combined heart of amateur aviation, the electronics revolution and defense contracting.
Q: You say that small aircraft production has gone into a tailspin. Is there any indication that the new technologies in small aircraft will equate a real market acceptance?
A: Yes: In 1978, a bad year for the United States in general but a good year for small plane production, there were 18,000 small airplanes built and sold. At some of the low points in the mid-1990s, less than 1,000 small airplanes were bought and sold. I don't have the most recent numbers, but clearly the trend is up. The last three or four years have been strong ones for the small airplane business, partly driven by corporate jets and the general tech boom, but it has been driven by some of these new companies. Cirrus in particular, went from delivering five or six planes in 1999 to delivering about 50 planes in the year 2000 to delivering one plane a day this year, and they plan to deliver two planes a day next year. So they are responsible for a very significant share of the output.
Q: How will consolidation in the airline industry affect the experience of flying commercially?
A: I'm sure it will be another big step forward. To give the airlines their credit, their main duty is to be safe and they are phenomenally safe. Their next duty is to be inexpensive and they are, if you are willing to lock yourself into the rigidity of their plans. The main penalty they've imposed on us is the need to have any kind of flexibility in your life, which the rest of the economy now fosters in every way; the airlines make you pay through the nose. To an extent, there is real competition among airlines now on price, but decreasingly so as they have their regional strongholds—United owns Denver, American owns DFW—then consolidation would reduce that. I think it would be an extension of what we already know, because they are already quite consolidated and sort of Balkanized region by region.
Q: Why can't they build a plane out of the same material as a "black box"? And will getting a pilot's license ever become as routine as getting a driver's license?
A: If you made it out of the black box it would be too heavy to fly. I also wonder why the black box is orange. Whether it will be as routine as driving is actually an interesting social management question to me. Overall, flying an airplane, especially in bad weather, especially in instrument conditions, is a lot more demanding than driving a car most of the time.
In terms of whether the ordinary person is suited for it: it was not obvious when automobiles were invented that everybody could use them. There were serious proposals in the early days for having so-called pilot's licenses for automobiles. In "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" in The Wind in the Willows, the premise is that cars are too dangerous for any kind of normal being to control. If you look on the highways and see ordinary people making split-second, life and death decisions as they merge on freeways, it's a miracle we're not all dead on the freeway.
If there were the expectation that everyone could master the skills of airplane control, as a lot of teenagers—especially boys—do with flight simulators, it could become a quite widespread skill. During World War II, all sorts of people were rushed through flight training. With dramatic advances—computer driven—it could become a lot simpler. I don't know if it would be as widespread as automobiles, but it could become a lot more widespread in principle.
Q: What's the most outrageous suggestion for fixing "airline hell" that you've heard of?
A: One suggestion would be that everyone should just stay home: Pascal or someone said that most of life's problems come from the inability to stay in one's own room. At the Oshkosh air show last month I heard Burt Rutan, a legendary airplane designer, have his own innovative solution: that we should have tens of thousands of mini-airports, essentially one on every block. They'd work like aircraft carriers. The idea is that the energy absorbed when each airplane roared to an instantaneous stop would be stored in springs and used to launch the next airplane on a catapault. His argument was that most of the flight would be uneventful, and people would enjoy the two or three seconds of deceleration. I was thinking that my grandmother would really like that, a baby in arms would like that. So I guess Rutan's suggestion would win the prize for me.
Q: Will we switch over to global positioning technology from radar at some point, and what will the effect be?
A: Yes, this is certain to happen and its effect will be good. Almost all pilots now use global positioning systems, certainly if they're doing any instrument flying, to navigate themselves. The airlines certainly do, as do the majority of private planes.
The air traffic control system is antiquated in two dramatic ways. The most dramatic way is the CB-style communications system, where if any one person is talking, no one else can talk. This is fine if you're over the middle of Wyoming, and nobody else wants to talk. But when you're trying to get clearance to get into San Francisco airspace or make a turn or whatever, it's a real limitation. Wireless data transmission clearly has to take a role there.
The other is the reliance on radar, which is a very important tool. It's useful for finding weather and for seeing where the planes are, but it simply is not precise and real-time enough to handle the modern traffic saturation. When many GPS-based systems like the so-called ADS-B come into being, they can make travel both safer and increase the capacity of the system by letting planes safely fly closer together.
Q: Have airlines cut back on the amount of air they circulate inside planes, and do you foresee any point in the future when an airplane could become the vehicle for afflicting hundreds of people at once with a highly contagious disease?
A: I believe, though I don't actually know, that airlines have cut down on this because it costs them money run the air conditioning systems, and they learned that the survivable rates of airflow are slower than they had thought before. Saying that airlines respond fundamentally to safety concerns means that if people actually started getting sick, not just sick and tired, but actually sick from this kind of air situation, the airlines would do something about it. But again, the airlines respond to two things: safety problems and price. We show them that we value price, and if they're saving us money by giving us little pretzels, by making us breathe our neighbor's air, as long as we're not dying, they're going to keep doing it. This is the market at work.
Q: How will Bush's "Big Business" orientation affect the experience of air travel?
A: As a person who rises above partisanship and wishes all presidents well, I look for the time when the administration expresses views on 1) technology in general—whether technology has a role in America's future, and 2) air technology. Perhaps the hopeful thing to cling to here is that the president was a fighter plane pilot in his youth. Perhaps these memories can be reawakened. He can think, yes, this is a technology that can affect how the rest of his people live.
