(No) Fear of Flying

James Fallows

Public Affairs

$25

Sometime in the late 1990s, an extraordinary thing happened to the transportation business: The average overall speed of travel actually started to go down. No one knows for sure, but the consensus seems to be that it was the first time that had happened since the invention of the automobile.

To entrepreneurs, that kind of logic-defying setback to progress represents a huge opportunity. In Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel, James Fallows tracks the efforts of two upstart aircraft manufacturers to invent small planes that would allow people to avoid delay-plagued airports and the airlines that use them. The odds for these startups are long, as they always are for companies attempting to bust up an oligopoly like the aircraft businesses'. But Fallows believes in these companies, and he has the advantage of writing for disgruntled readers who are rooting for someone -- anyone -- to rescue them from the bottlenecks at O'Hare.

How bad is it out there? According to Fallows, more than 80% of airline traffic departs or lands at the busiest 1% of airports. In the meantime, smaller airports have very little traffic, and that's what gives the dreamers in Fallows's book hope. If aircraft companies can produce planes that are fast, comfortable, cheap, and safe, the aircraft could serve as the fleet for air-taxi services based at those airports.

According to Fallows, there is a web of related reasons why these planes don't already exist. First, Cessna and other manufacturers slowed their research and development efforts in the 1980s -- and eventually halted new production altogether -- because of the cost of lawsuits resulting from plane crashes. In the meantime, airfares were on the decline thanks to deregulation, so people who had become pilots merely to save money on travel were no longer interested in buying their own planes.

By the 1990s, the sorry state of the small planes available didn't provide much incentive for the aspiring pilots who could turn into customers for the manufacturers. "The machines were so cruddy," Fallows writes, recalling his astonishment when he surveyed the airfield as he arrived for his first lesson. Essentially, he says, the available planes were like American cars in the 1970s. Cirrus Design Corp. and Eclipse Aviation Corp., the two companies that Fallows profiles, want to give pilots the same kinds of choices that auto buyers had in the 1970s when foreign automakers entered the market with superior products.

To Fallows, the saga of these two companies is more about the new world of technology generally than it is about avionics in particular, and he's well positioned to make that judgment. Not only is he a pilot himself, but he's also coming off a stint at Microsoft, where he helped the company build new features into Word. Throughout the book, he comes up with useful high-tech analogies that help place Cirrus and Eclipse's efforts into context.

Cirrus's first small plane , which has been on the market for two years, tries to do what Apple did for personal computers. From the distinctive teardrop shape to the comfortable auto-like interior, Cirrus's first plane is iMac-like in its attention to design. From a user-interface perspective, Cirrus is to the old Cessna or Piper planes as the Apple operating system was to Microsoft's DOS. The idea is to take away all the old knobs and dials, and provide an intuitive, digital readout that gives pilots a better sense of where they are and where they're headed.

Fallows spills a lot of ink tracking the ups and downs of Cirrus's quest and profiling the brothers who started the company, and it's a charming tale. Right now, however, the company's planes aren't fast enough or advanced enough to serve as the backbone of a national air-taxi system. The company has set its sights on the enthusiast market, but the number of people who pilot their own planes isn't likely to get much larger anytime soon. Cirrus planes start at about $200,000, and learning to fly takes too much time to attract all but the most passionate aviation nuts. Sadly, we're still a long way from traveling like the Jetsons.

As a business story about a potentially disruptive technology, Eclipse is a far more important tale. The company aims to create a small jet , seating five or six people, that wealthy individuals, corporations, and air-taxi services could use. The question Fallows asks -- and it cuts to heart of the innovation problem in the small-plane business -- is this: Why can't Moore's Law apply to the airplane business too?