Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel

The airline system has reached a nightmarish state, due to economics, technology, and now heightened security. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by filing all the seats and funneling traffic through a hub-and-spoke routing system. Virtually all of the technological innovation in airplanes in the last thirty years has been devoted to moving passengers more cheaply, and more safely, between major hubs. Each generation of new planes has been more reliable, and has carried more passengers on less fuel, than before. But what was left out of this equation was, of course, the comfort, convenience, and flexibility of the average traveler.
As James Fallows vividly explains, a technological answer to this logjam is under way at the moment, and Free Flight features the stories of three groups who are inventing and building the future of all air travel: NASA, Cirrus Design in Duluth, Minnesota, and Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These ventures should make it possible for more people to travel from the small airport that's closest to their home or office and fly direct to the small airport closest to where they really want to go. And this would be possible because of a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small planes that offer much of the speed, and as much as possible of the safety, of the big airlines, but at a fraction of the cost of today's corporate jets. The creation of those machines is happening now and Free Flight is the harbinger of a new age of travel.