BOOK
The Gist: Meet The Wingnuts Planning Your Little-jet Future
$25
If all goes according to plan, in a few years we may be using small jets as "air limos." For a cost comparable to today's commercial airfare, planes with two to eight passenger seats could pick you up at an uncrowded municipal airfield near your home and drop you off at a similar field near your destination - thereby avoiding major airports and the hopelessly clogged hub-and-spoke system foisted upon us by the big airlines.
The subjects of James Fallows' Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel are those trying to turn this dream into a reality. Fallows goes inside two startups - Duluth, Minnesota-based Cirrus Design and Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Eclipse Aviation - to examine how modern-day Wilburs and Orvilles are working to develop planes small, fast, and cheap enough to change air travel.
The author - a pilot, plane enthusiast, and correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and other national magazines - doesn't skimp on the engineering details. Fallows explains with impressive clarity why the curvature of a wing matters and how the carburetor in a piston-engine plane works. He also devotes considerable space to outlining the daunting business challenges faced by an airplane maker trying to defy gravity and raise investment capital simultaneously.
Some readers will no doubt find this fascinating; for others, sections of the book (particularly those dedicated to Fallows' own experiences flying small planes) feel like a stopover at a newly renovated airport - interesting for a while, but soon you get itchy to move on to your real destination.
Fallows arrives at that destination in the final chapter, when he begins to consider how the air limo scenario might actually work - and whether it will work, given some significant hurdles. First, the small planes still need to be made safer and technologically smarter, and second, complaints about noise will surely arise as hundreds of quiet little airfields turn into mini-airports. Other questions are left unanswered: Who's going to pilot all the air limo jets? Will these drivers become as rife as cabbies and have a tendency to honk the horn at everybody else in the sky?
Burning questions aside, Free Flight is an important book; it breaks news on a development that has attracted scant media attention. Among the countless writers whining about the continuing air travel nightmare, Fallows is among the first to suggest that we might awaken from it soon.
PublicAffairs: www.publicaffairsbooks.com.
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