Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel By James Fallows.
Public Affairs, 256 pages, $25.00
Breaking Gridlock: Moving toward Transportation That Works By Jim Motavalli.
Sierra Club Books, 304 pages, $23.00
If ever there were a time for top-to-bottom reassessment of the U.S.transportation system, now is that time. James Fallows's Free Flight, published last summer, and Jim Motavalli's just-released Breaking Gridlock provide stimulating insights into the ways better technology and sensible planning might come together to improve methods of travel.
Fallows offers a forward-looking account of how technologicalinnovation promises to transform the small-airplane industry. Motavalli attemptsan ambitious overview of the entire transportation landscape. Ranging widely fromantsy cyclists and gridlocked motorists to fast trains and "green" buses,Motavalli's story is inevitably a less cheery one. His conclusion in the lastchapter: "We've taken just about every wrong turn in building a transportationnetwork in America."
Fallows makes the most of his more congenial material. In his view, air travelis on the verge of a new golden age as new technologies promise to make smallplanes cheaper and safer. Flying from one small airport to another, such planeswill increasingly liberate travelers from the hurry-up-and-wait frustrations ofthe big airlines' hub-and-spoke system.
In building his case, Fallows frequently draws on his own knowledge as apilot. This adds to the authority and interest of the book, but occasionally onesenses that he is writing as an avowed enthusiast. Civilians--as the enthusiastsrefer to the rest of us--may occasionally wonder whether the revolution will turnout to be quite as sweeping as Fallows and his fellow flyers hope.
But after decades of stagnation in aircraft building, it's clear that smallplanes are improving rapidly and becoming cheaper. Some of the new planesdescribed by Fallows sell for as little as one-third the price of equivalentmodels of just a few years ago. That hardly puts them in the Volkswagen Beetleclass, but it undeniably opens up some interesting market possibilities.
Small planes are also becoming safer. Until recently, purchasing a low-costplane meant buying a propeller plane powered by a traditional--and traditionallytemperamental--piston engine, as opposed to the more reliable jet engine. Atypical propeller plane requires an engine only slightly more powerful than thatof a luxury car. But piston engines have more independently moving parts than jetengines and therefore more chance of things going wrong.
How can small planes be made safer? As Fallows reports, one innovativesolution now being implemented involves equipping piston-engine planes withparachutes. If the engine conks out, the parachute can be opened to allow theentire craft to float down to a safe--if perhaps undignified--re-encounter withterra firma. Fallows plausibly posits the idea that such fail-safe propellerplanes--he calls them "Macintoshes of the air," after Apple Computer'scrash-resistant computers--will widen the appeal of flying. Tired of the hassleand delays of the hub-and-spoke system, many less-than-swashbucklingprofessionals and small-business owners will pluck up the courage to own theirown wings.
Of course, parachutes are a solution that calls to mind the danger of enginefailure. Not surprisingly, aeronautical engineers have long dreamed of a moreintellectually satisfying answer: a new breed of small planes powered by suitablycompact jet engines. Fallows reports that tiny jet engines, long considered anaviation oxymoron, are now a reality. And as small jet planes go intoservice--probably beginning in 2003--we can expect to see a major new industry inwhich professional pilots provide jet-powered air-taxi services to and from smallairports around the United States.
The new planes will be to today's commercial planes what Yellow Cabs are to acity's fleet of buses. Whereas the parachute-equipped propeller planes canaccommodate no more than three paying passengers, the smallest of the newmicrojets will accommodate five. And they will fly faster and farther thanpropeller planes. What's more, because they will be able to fly higher thanpropeller planes, they will be less vulnerable to severe weather, which, asFallows explains, is a frequent contributing factor in propeller-plane crashes.
Fallows takes us behind the scenes to share in the hopes andheartaches of two pioneering aircraft companies--one developingparachute-equipped propeller planes and the other cheap microjets.
Duluth-based Cirrus Design Corporation, the company developing theplane with the parachute, is already marketing a fully developed version of itsconcept. In an effort to cut the cost of its planes (which were launched with aselling price of a mere $150,000), Cirrus is pioneering the use of compositematerials instead of aluminum for the aircraft's shell--an advance that greatlyreduces manufacturing costs. Its planes also boast new "moving map" navigationaldisplays that show the pilot where he is and where he is headed. These devices,which are similar to those that are now increasingly used in cars, are keyed tothe Global Positioning System developed in the 1970s by NASA, the NationalAeronautics and Space Administration. They simplify the job for pilots.
One of Cirrus's main rivals is Eclipse Aviation, a corporation based inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, that is developing microjets. Whereas Cirrus has fromthe start suffered the normal lot of aviation innovators in being chronicallyunderfinanced, Eclipse is the industry's equivalent of a wealthy debutante.Staked by, among others, Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Eclipse isworking with advanced jet-engine technology originally developed for NASA. Thus,the Eclipse story is a classic example of a successful partnership between theprivate and the public sectors and as such is a reminder that even in thefiercely individualistic world of small-plane enthusiasts there is an importantrole for government. (NASA has spent about $180 million over the last decade orso on projects to stimulate various aspects of the small-plane revolution,according to Fallows.)
Eclipse's technology employs dozens of minor breakthroughs in a host ofdifferent engine parts--compressors, combustion chambers, control systems, and soon. One major advance is a new system for making an entire compressor from asingle, very precisely engineered piece of titanium. This contrasts withtraditional compressors, which may contain as many as several thousand parts,hundreds of which are separate fan blades. Among other advantages, the newone-piece compressors weigh less. And weight reduction is, of course, the HolyGrail in aerospace design.
Expressed in terms of the computer analogy Fallows favors, Eclipse and itsengine builder, Detroit-based Williams International, are doing for aeronauticalengineering roughly what Intel did for microprocessors. A key issue is "tipclearances"--the distance between the end of the spinning turbine blades and thecasing in which they are housed. By reducing tip clearances to ever more microscopic levels, engineers can harvest utterly disproportionate improvementsin engine efficiency. Williams has now reduced such clearances to previously undreamed-of levels.
For anyone who understands how deeply America's advanced manufacturingindustries--once the world standard--have been hollowed out by Japan and Germanyin recent years, Fallows's description of the high-security Williams factory isstirring stuff. "I felt I had been transported to some pre-1968,pre-riot-and-disruption version of America," he reports. "Perhaps this is the wayProject Apollo factories looked in the early sixties. Teamwork in an observable,mechanical sense, carried out by people who were continually solving newtechnical challenges."
Donning his pilot's cap, Fallows tells us that a plane's stall speed has major implications for his story. The lower a plane's stall speed, the more slowly itcan be flown in its final approach to an airport landing strip. Slower meanssafer, of course. More important for Fallows's story, the more slowly a plane cancome in, the shorter the necessary runway. Thus, although most jets cannot besafely landed on short runways, Eclipse's jet, with a stall speed of just 62knots, is comparable to a propeller plane. It can be landed on a runway as shortas 2,500 feet--which means that virtually all of America's 6,000-plus localairports can accommodate it, and with little if any need for investment in newinfrastructure.
Clearly, the economic rationale for extensive point-to-pointtravel by small jets is hard to fault. Viewed in the context of America's overalltransportation problems, however, the small-plane revolution will hardly be apanacea. For all the efforts of innovators like Cirrus and Eclipse, travel bysmall plane will likely remain comparatively expensive. Eclipse, for instance,estimates that jet-powered air-taxi services will typically charge some 25 to 50cents per mile above what the big airlines charge today for coach. On a 600-miletrip, that means an extra $150 to $300. Business-class passengers will certainlyreach for that, particularly when, as will often be the case, they get largereductions in door-to-door journey times. Citing Eclipse's estimates, Fallowssuggests that the air-taxi market might amount to 30 million trips a year withina decade. That would mean a fleet of no fewer than 35,000 small jets. But thesewould still account for no more than about 10 percent of all projected airlinetraffic.
This leaves an awful lot of ordinary folk who, for the sake of thecheapest fares, will continue to fly with the big airlines and battle their waythrough the hated hubs. For the moment, the chill that has fallen on air travelsince September 11 has taken some of the pressure off the system. But in thelonger term, something major will have to be done to make travel within the U.S.less stressful.
That something will have to be bigger than merely dealing with jets andairports. The key is to get different modes of travel to work better together(the almost total absence of rail links to airports, for instance, is aparticularly glaring example of America's chronic failure to view itstransportation infrastructure in its entirety).
In that sense, Jim Motavalli's book, in attempting a unified-field view oftransportation, is helpful. And when it comes to the transportation system'seffects on the environment, Motavalli is in full command of his material. (He isthe editor of E/The Environmental Magazine and fills his bibliography with works from the likes of Ray Suarez, Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins.)
In the great debate between the highway and rail lobbies, Motavalli standsstaunchly with the embattled rail buffs. He is also a strong proponent ofimproved city transit services. He has, he tells us, ridden trains in India,Japan, Brazil, and even North Africa. Although he claims not to be moved bynostalgia, he evidently makes an exception for railroads. He confesses, forinstance, to having made a reverential visit to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to seewhere the eponymous Choo Choo was headed. (He needn't have bothered. No passengertrains serve Chattanooga anymore and the station building has now beenredeveloped as a slightly bizarre hotel.)
Motavalli reports enthusiastically on recent developments in fast-traintechnology in Japan and France, noting, for instance, that one French trainrecently achieved a speed of 320 miles per hour. By comparison, even America'smost impressive fast-rail venture, the new 150-mile-an-hour Acela serviceconnecting Boston, New York City, and Washington, seems tame. In truth, mostAmerican fast-rail proposals in recent years have ended up in some Republicanstate governor's trash can. A particularly lamentable case in point is inFlorida, where Governor Jeb Bush has been busy playing Voldemort to the proposedhigh-speed Florida Overland Express (FOX).
In trying to build an efficient national transportation policy, someone,somewhere, should be assigned to watch the forest as well as the trees. What isneeded is a policy that serves people rather than interest groups. America'srecent transportation policy has been to have no policy. In different ways, bothFallows and Motavalli show us why laissez-faire has its limitations.
