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James Fallows
National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly; NPR Commentator; Author, National Defense and Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel
The fundamental impulse that draws people into journalism is the desire to learn about new things, see new things and then have people hear about them. You want to grab people by the lapels and say, "You won't believe what I just saw." It's in this impulse that I decided to write Free Flight, and to tell about the things that I'd seen in the world of aviation that I believe will have an impact on the way all of us make choices about travel in the years to come. The process of stumbling upon some of these developments is an intimate part of the story. I'm going to describe to you what I found and why I think it can be of importance to many of us as we have choices for travel.
Let me explain how I came to write this book after a life spent writing about presidential elections and trade policy with Japan. Almost everybody I describe in this book is what you would think of as a real aviation nut. One of the most interesting statistics about the world of piloting is that as long as figures have been kept, the proportion of pilots who have been women has never been less then four nor more than seven percent. They're all men. They all learned to fly when they were teenagers and have in their office either a poster of an airplane, or a little model of an airplane on their desk, or both or many.
I was not exactly of that group, but I'd had for a long time a moderate interest in the world of flight. I never had the time, money nor household approval to learn about flying anymore than as just a vague interest. I noticed as the years went by, that when I heard that somebody I ran into was a pilot, it got my attention. Probably the litmus test for this is that whenever I read biographies about Prince Charles, what I noticed and envied about him was not his riches, many homes, his ability to wear kilts without feeling embarrassed, not his wife, but that in the course of being trained for the kingship, he'd been sent to flight school. So when about five years ago I had a regular office job with weekends off and my wife seemed to think it was okay if I went out and learned about the world of flight, I thought I would indulge this interest. Since then, I've spent a lot of time reading about airplanes, flying airplanes, going across the country in them.
It's significant to explain why this became interesting to me because some of the interests that brought me to it also propelled the people who are creating the inventions that I have to mention. In the short term, what was interesting to me was the simple distraction. When you are learning how to fly, you don't think about a lot of other things, especially in the last 30 seconds before you land. Your mind is concentrated on, "Oh my God, we're going to die," pulling the plane downward, overcoming the natural revulsion towards having the ground come up at you. So initially, it was simple distraction from the woes of the workday world.
The more time I spent with this activity, the more deeply I found it interesting in a variety of ways: the procedural emphasis of the world of flight, the rules of air traffic control, the rules of currency, and the different aspects of the discipline that you have to learn. And as a matter of simple craft, of expanding one's competence as time goes on rather than letting all faculties wane, and of putting in the throttle on your first solo flight. It was interesting to learn about weather and all the associated knowledge that comes with piloting. What was most deeply engrossing, was the different view of the world that comes from 2,000 feet up: the connectedness of the scenery; the way the San Francisco Bay leads seamlessly to the hills, to the Central Valley, to the Sierras beyond that to Nevada.
I began to pick up things happening in this little world of flying enthusiasts that are going to have spillover effects on the rest of the world. The proportion of U.S. citizens who have current flying certificates is one-quarter of one percent. It seems like a little isolated community, yet this community has historically produced most of the innovations and inventions in flying. When I read their magazines, when I hung around the so-called FBOs and small airports, the things I heard about I was not reading in so-called normal newspapers and magazines—a shift in the nature of available technology that was similar in some ways to the shift created when people invented the semiconductor, personal computer and software revolution of the last 25 or 30 years. There was a time within the last 50 or 60 years when small airplanes—the little Cessnas, the Beeches, the little Pipers—were seen as some kind of reasonable mainstream alternative for practical travel.
After World War II and again after Korea, there were a lot of pilots who had been trained in the military. In those days, car travel was not that fast because there was no interstate system. The airline system was not fully evolved because there weren't turbine engines and there was not the extensive routing we have now. So little planes in the 40s, 50s and early 60s were seen as a realistic travel alternative for a much larger proportion of the public then they are now.
But then the alternatives improved dramatically: The possibilities for automobile travel, despite all its heartbreaks, got better. The interstate highway system was built and average speed across country radically improved. Cars became much better in the last 15 years in terms of safety, comfort and reliability. Airlines improved in a mechanical and safety sense—dramatically—with the coming of jet engines in the 1960s. The accident rate before turbine engines came to airlines versus after turbine engines came to airlines, went down by 90 percent. The airlines now are the safest mode of travel; about the safest thing you can do with your time is to be on an American airliner.
While these alternatives for travel were dramatically improving, the small planes were going into a kind of stagnation. The most dramatic way to see this is to get a movie from the 50's or 60's that includes shots of small planes: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World or The Thomas Crown Affair. You'll notice that almost every aspect of the material culture seems dramatically out of date: telephones have rotary dials, so-called hi-fi's look big and clunky, cars are of the 60's and early 70's.
The one thing that has been preserved in amber is aircraft technology: the planes in those films look like the ones you would find at a small airport today. Unless they've crashed, those planes are the ones still flying in small airports. The planes did not improve: liability law made manufacturers shy from this activity; manufacturers like Cessna were paying attention to the jet market and building Citations and more lucrative jets; the population of pilots was dwindling as the military was training fewer and fewer people. Other aspects of material life were becoming more modern, convenient, economical: small planes seemed like this weirdo artifact. There were hobbyists who enjoyed the activity but nobody could call it practical.
What I began to see when I read magazines and books and traveled around the country to small airports, was the beginning of a technological shift, again like that in high tech when many people in different companies at isolated locations were innovating in some loosely affiliated way, that collectively had the promise of changing how the rest of us lived. Those innovations are the stories that I try to tell in this book. I tell three main cases, three main specimens of innovators, three success stories of entrepreneurship.
One is of the Klapmeier brothers, now of Duluth, Minnesota, originally of Baraboo, Wisconsin, who are now in their early 40s. From the time they were little kids, they were fascinated with airplanes. The elder Klapmeier brother says that when he was a baby, there were only two times when he would stop crying: when his mother would give him her full maternal attention or when they would drive to the approach path to O'Hare Airport and park underneath it, putting baby Alan in a bassinet on the hood of the car so he could watch the jets coming in. The day his younger brother graduated from college, they started their airplane company. Since then they have been building airplanes.
They thought for awhile they would get into the world of kit airplanes—building those for hobbyists who like to assemble their own planes—but they realized this was a limited market. What they needed to do was to build certified planes—planes you can buy off the shelf. Their mission for the last 15 years took an important change in the early 1980s when Alan nearly died in a midair collision in a small plane. He was then in his early 20s, taking instruction on advanced rating, and outside a small airport in the Midwest another plane ran into his. It was a bright sunny day; the other pilot couldn't see anything and spiraled to his death. Alan, who had one of the wings of his plane almost knocked off, managed, miraculously, to get it down safely for a landing. Alan concluded that when he and his brother brought their airplane to market, it would be the safest airplane ever built. They have all sorts of internal features that make it much harder for a pilot to get disoriented. Most crucially, they have built the first airplane ever with a parachute for the entire plane. If there is a problem, a midair collision, a John Kennedy-type episode, if anything else goes wrong, the pilot or passengers pull a handle and a parachute pops out for the whole plane and the entire airplane descends to earth.
I spent a lot of time on them in the book because they are the first entrepreneurs to start from a clean sheet and say, "If we were to design an airplane with the technology of the 1990s and 2000s in mind, not the technology of the 30s and 40s and 50s, what would it look like? How could it be as nice as a car inside? How could its dials be modern? How could it have a big moving map? How could it seem like modern space technology and not like something from the past?" The Cirrus plane company has now delivered more the 200 airplanes to customers, at a rate of one a day. They have a back-log now of 800 orders.
A second group of entrepreneurs is more surprising perhaps: the entrepreneurs within NASA who have decided over the last 15 or 20 years that airline travel was going to reach some kind of unsustainable point. We have a crisis in air travel that is familiar to us today. I describe the way a number of people in NASA, especially the Langley Research Center in Virginia, have found ways over the last 15 or 20 years to find an alternative to the big airport congested travel system. How could alternatives to big airliners become feasible? What about rotorcraft? What about small planes? The reason this story seemed particularly valuable to tell is that the number of stories recounting NASA's efforts in this field in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the network news casts combined over the last 15 years was one. That one story was a story I wrote two years ago in the New York Times Magazine. For some reason, NASA had been publicized only for space, not at all for its airplane technology. This seemed genuine news to bring to the public.
A third entrepreneur I describe in the book is the team of Sam Williams and Vern Raburn who together have formed Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Williams is renowned in the defense world. Within his field, he is an Edison or Newton-like figure. He has given his entire life to making turbine engines. He actually created a turbine-powered jet pack for personal transportation, like in the James Bond movies, and sold some to the Army.
Williams came to his greatest renown in the 1970s and early 80s when he almost personally invented the engine that made the cruise missile possible; engines small, light and reliable enough to have this new technology work. He had a dream of making small airplanes that would use this new technology and Raburn, who was an early software industry veteran—one of the first employees of Microsoft and a life-long aviation enthusiast—has joined with him. Their product is still in what could truly be called the vaporware stage, but they still plan, about a year from now, to fly the first model of a personal jet, a small inexpensive jet. This jet will be like the corporate jets we're familiar with—the Gulfstream, the Citation, the Learjet; the difference is that it will cost about one-tenth as much. It's now being priced at well under one million dollars.
What they have in mind is that the vision of corporate jet travel that is now available to a tiny minority of the world's population could be available much more broadly through air taxi systems that could take you directly from the San Jose airport to the Walla Walla airport, from Birmingham to Buffalo, from Savannah to Waco. It could avoid all the delays of the hub-and-spoke airline system. The story of my book is about entrepreneurs who collectively are trying to find ways to change the way we travel, so you are not herded like cattle into LAX or San Jose or SFO. You're not delayed in a trip from Seattle to Atlanta because there are storms in Denver. They think they can do this.
Will what they are trying to do actually come to pass? Expect that within a relatively small number of years we will have a new way we can travel. There are reasons to believe that the revolution in air travel can be almost as important as the revolution in information technology.
First, the problem of "airline hell" is not going to solve itself. It can only get worse. In tech industry terms, what's wrong with the airline model now is that the system does not scale. The more traffic goes through the system, the disproportionately worse the congestion becomes. The background factor here is that over the last 20 years of airline deregulation, the airlines have learned something about us that we don't often admit. We think we want airplanes to be convenient, we want them to be nice, we want to have a good time.
The airlines know that what we really care about is price; they've learned that in the last 20 years since they have been allowed to compete on price. For them to offer fares that are on average 30 percent lower than they were 20 years ago, they have to keep planes full. They have to keep big planes full. The only way to keep big planes full is to aggregate traffic at the hubs - to have a hub and spoke system so you don't go non-stop from Savannah to New Orleans, but you go through Atlanta, DFW and LAX. This means that right now, while the U.S. has 5,000 airports that could handle jet planes, 70 percent of traffic goes through 31 of them. The more the traffic goes up, the higher the percentage in the hubs, with all the ripple effects we're familiar with. The ways to solve the problem have a very hard time getting ahead of that curve. The FAA released a plan about two months ago for adding 30 percent to the capacity of the system over the next 10 years—that's all to the good. The FAA predicts that demand will grow by 60 percent in that same time. If the FAA's dreams come true, we will be worse off then we are now. The system can't solve itself.
The second reason to think this will happen: The idea of a different transportation system based on smaller planes, going to smaller airports, is in sync with the times. The information industry has evolved away from the central computing center, from everybody going to one place to process information, and towards distributed intelligence, distributed access. There are ATMs around the world, there are terminals around the world; the idea is to move away from congestion wherever possible. When you fly for hours and hours across the country, the only time you see a lot of traffic is on the approach lanes to SFO and LAX. The rest of the system is grossly under utilized. By moving capacity to the smaller airports, where people actually want to go, you can have an overall travel system that is much more efficient for everybody involved. They can start near where they want to leave and go directly to where they want to go. The proof that this is a desirable outcome is the fact that everybody who has the economic means to choose a corporate jet, chooses a corporate jet. Nobody who can use a corporate chooses to go commercial. The most heartbreaking thing for them if their businesses fail is giving up that airplane. If more people could have that choice, more people would like it.
The third reason to think this will happen is that the technology is right. For 50 years there have been dreams of Jetsons-type systems of people all having their own little airplanes and all going place to place. It's never really happened. Certain technological breakthroughs have happened now that make it plausible in a way it was not before. The most important of these is engine technology. The great variable in whether flying is comfortable and especially whether it is safe is whether you can use jet engines. Jet engines are reliable and take you very high above the bad weather. With Sam Williams and with some allied developments, suddenly jet engines are lighter and less expensive then they were before. The other great technological innovation is electronics. If you have instrument ratings in flying you could essentially have done it with the same technology in the 1940s. The new technology to provide moving maps, precision approaches—things to make you much more aware all the time of where you are—has transformed everything else about life so it might as well transform how people can fly.
A fourth reason to think that this will happen is that organizationally, things have a reached a kind of sweet spot. NASA, very delicately, very inexpensively, very lightly, has found a way, loosely, to ally lots of different entrepreneurs so they are going in the same direction. NASA has certain kinds of competitive grants they work for. NASA has spent less then one dollar per U.S. citizen collectively over the last decade on these projects. Yet many people involved think that it has allowed them to achieve things they could not have done.
The fifth reason to think that this will happen is that it is actually happening. People are delivering products to the market. The electronics involving avionics are in kind of wonderful renaissance. Many companies - Avidyne, AvroTech - are bringing radically wonderful new products to the market. They're still much more expensive then computer technology in the non-aviation world, but it's being delivered. Cirrus has delivered 200 planes, delivering them one a day. This argument will be all the more compelling if Eclipse actually delivers its plane next year, but if it doesn't Safire will, or Jet Cruiser will, or somebody else will.
This revolution is going to occur because the problem won't solve itself, because the idea is right, the technology is right, the organization is right and the products are actually appearing. So that's the case for. Now let me give you the case against—why it's not going to happen and why we have to resign to airline hell for the foreseeable future. First: Airplane companies have always failed and these ones will fail too. The world of aviation is an almost uniquely unfavorable combination of very high capital requirements, very long lead times, and very high regulatory and legal exposures. When I was interviewing Alan Klapmeier a year or two ago I mentioned a friend of mine, a journalist, who had gotten $20 million to start a Net company on the basis of a one-page good idea. Klapmeier, who spent all of his time trying to raise capital for the wind tunnels, for the prototypes, for the safety measures, for the assembly lines to produce an actual airplane was driven crazy by that. The capital requirements are enormous and it takes years and years and years to certify a plane and then test it. After you've tested and delivered them, they still have the capacity to kill people and so you have all that legal risk. This is why the airplane business has been a graveyard of entrepreneurial hopes for most of the 20th century and so based on the odds, you'd have to think that's what it will still be.
Second: The modern American public, taken one by one, is extremely suspicious of small planes and is likely to reject them individually for a very long time in the future. Pilots are a tiny minority of Americans. A fondness for small planes for their own sake is not widespread and when people go to the airport, they think that anything other than a 757 is not a "real" plane. A real plane is a great big one that inside feels like a motel rather than an airplane. Anything that makes you more intimately exposed to the fact that you are up in the air is something that most people don't like. While you could hypothesize that the most luxurious corporate jet could overcome that resistance, there is very little evidence that people will go this way, especially when the image of safety for small planes is wrapped up by the names Payne Stewart, John Denver and John Kennedy. These planes are known mainly when they kill famous people so the individual market resistance is likely to be great.
Third: Taken collectively, Americans are also likely to be suspicious of small airplanes. I mentioned their individual resistance; their collective resistance has to do with the noise that small airplanes are thought to bring to small airports, to the idea that smaller will be seen as the province simply of a super-rich elite and not something that can affect the average person. So there is very little idea that politically, there will be any kind of muscle for keeping small airports open or for having any further public subsidy for this project.
Fourth: There are all sorts of scaling practicalities, which in their way rival those of the current airline system. Suppose you made it possible to call up an air taxi service tomorrow, to be picked up at least from Reed Hillview Airport and taken directly to Pocatello. When you get to Pocatello, what do you do? Where is a rental car? Where do you stay? How do you have rental cars available for people who are going to all of these small airports? Where do you get enough pilots to run this fleet of air taxis? What about the liability exposure that is bound to come with so many more planes in the sky? What about controlling traffic? It's not simply the case that the air will become full. Most of the time in a small plane you see nothing else in the sky, but there is undeniably an extra complexity of having so many more planes in the sky. In general, it just is so complicated a can of worms that to open this possibility is likely to discourage people before they get very far.
The final reason for thinking this will not happen is that, one way or another, this problem may indeed solve itself before the small plane alternative takes full form. The way it would solve itself is not with the airlines finding some different way to handle their business. I have great sympathy for the airlines. They are doing what we ask of them. They are being extremely safe and they are keeping prices low and they are putting up with our complaints. They can't do much else. They can't really fly point to point. The way the problem could conceivably solve itself is if, through the continued work of those of you in Silicon Valley, we need to travel less; if it actually became possible to have meetings without travel, to have virtual workplaces and virtual telecommunication. I am suspicious of this line of argument. The more people have been able not to travel, the more they have actually traveled over the last ten years. That, in sum, is the case against the small plane model. It's always failed and it will fail again. We won't accept them individually or collectively. It will be too complicated to do and maybe we don't need to travel at all, later on.
Those are the two sides of the argument. Is it going to be a plausible alternative within five years to call an air taxi service to pick you up at a nearby airport and take you to another small airport? Within the next ten years will it be a realistic choice? I am in the pro-camp if we take the ten-year: the force of technology is there and these aviation nuts are trying hard. They're going to keep trying until we come with them.
An argument for the last 15 years that has been confined to the Oshkosh Air Show, to Flying Magazine, to discussions at FBO's is likely to involve the rest of us. This technology world of aviation is, in a strange way, like the homebrew computer club of 25 years ago. These are people who are used to talking to each other, whose designs are likely to have a larger impact because the pressure from the existing airline model is likely to drive people that way.
Then we will be discussing things like the balance between the public and private role in creating some new air transport system. And what would be the level of acceptable risk if we had more planes in the sky? Acceptable risk is a strange term, but a real one. Twelve people on average drown every day in the U.S., yet we still bathe and swim. It seems to be an acceptable risk. We'll have to debate what is the acceptable risk of small plane flight. There is something interesting going on, being hatched by people much like the technologists of this Valley. I will be content to see the way they bring some of their innovations to the rest of us over the years to come.
