Flying cars: a beneficiary of the 9/11 rule-set reset?
Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at 8:43PM ■"Envisioning a Day When the Skies Will Teem With Air Taxis: A new generation of small jets that fly where no airliner would deign to go," by Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, 19 June 2005, p. A12.
One weird sidelight to the 9/11 attacks was how the resulting rule-set reset on airport security torpedoed a lot of smaller regional airports (I am reminded of my travel through Charlottesville airport last week when the TSA security team consisted of 6 people to process people in vast droves of onsies and twosies). It was the final nail in the coffin for these struggling airports, who were collapsing under the competitive pressure of the hub-ification of the American airline industry, thanks to companies like Southwest (indeed, one of the key choices for where we ended up living after our move was my demand that we live near a SWA hub).
Well, all those hubs still leave a lot of America off-grid. I may feel like the country is my giant commuter grid, but there are so many places where you're really in the wilderness as far as air travel is concerned (like most of Vermont we visited last weekend). There are 429 major airports in America, but a whopping 5,400 more with no scheduled service at all.
To fix this gap, here come the mico-jets of today, armed with onboard satellites and computers that do the air traffic control for smaller airports that have no such technology. The rubric for this emerging suite of technologies is called the Small Aircraft Transportation System, or SATS. We're talking jets designed for just 5 or 6 passengers.
Like so many answers that work best in "shrinking the Gap" (or gaps within the Core), this is a small-but-beautiful approach. I can foresee microloans for microjets for microairlines. And if it can be done here in the Core it can be done in the Gap.
Jet power to the people!
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