Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2008–2018years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you're interested in the concept of personal airplanes replacing commercial flight, I highly recommend "Free Flight" by James Fallows.
There's a lot of things working against the concept. Weather constraints and sport pilot restrictions are logistical issues, but by far the #1 issue is cost. The Transition, Terrefugia, and A5 aren't doing much to solve this by selling for $190-300k, so they definitely won't be changing how the general public travels.
Regardless, I couldn't be happier with my Sport License. For now I can only afford to rent, and not much at that. Were it not for the LSA category though, flying would still just be a wish.
- James Fallows wrote an interesting book a decade ago called Free Flight. Part of the book covered the dismal state of general aviation, resulting from a death spiral in which product liability suits played a prominent role. The rest of the book is about attempts to revive the industry.
So, yes, this is about a stagnant industry that has invested little in engineering over the last 50 years or so. Most general aviation aircraft have a lot in common with cars in Cuba. With that context, I took some of the comments in the article as being directed not at the conservatism not of manufacturers, but of owners doing retrofits and experimental plane builders.
- You did not provide a service by snipping the first fifth off a good article in The Atlantic, just so readers could skip to the part where they start talking about the guy who started Citrix.
This whole story is really interesting; it involves entrepreneurship in one of our least agile, most fucked up industries (air travel). If you've done a lot of business travel, it also (I hope) has some emotional resonance, because business air travel is an abusive experience.
I started following James Fallows after I heard him on NPR talking about "Free Flight", a book I recommend even though it wasn't particularly predictive. "Free Flight" is a book about the Cirrus SR-20 and the Eclipse E500; the former is a short-hop prop plane with advanced navigation and a whole-plane parachute, the second is an ultra-efficient jet the size of an SUV. Both are trying to establish an "air taxi" market for short-hop flights between underused airports.
I love the idea of being able to drive to a tiny airport, walk up to a counter, show my ID, go right out to a small waiting airplane, and being in the air 5 minutes later. That somewhat interesting software is being used to price the legs ($300-$1200 now, 1-2 orders of magnitude below charter, on par with business class or full-fare coach now) seems like a footnote.
- At first glance this sounded like the rebirth of the proposed restructuring of the commercial airline industry as covered in the book "Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel"[0], by James Fallows (2001). Back then the business model was to marry a fleet of very cheap passenger jets[1] with the huge number of little used airports dispersed around big cities. The book mentions two companies as leading the industry, Cirrus Design[2] and Eclipse Aviation[3]. The startup collapsed during the financial crisis. I remember reading an analysis of the difficulty of scheduling individual pickups to thousands of small airports, essentially a full blown traveling salesman problem that had to be updated in real time with each new reservation. The promise was to cut an hour or so off the total travel time by using small airports near the customer's home and destination.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Flight-Inventing-Future-Travel/d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_light_jet
