NASA Shares Its Vision for a New Form of Air Travel

Airlines tend to rely on hubs, hubs tend to get congested, but you can't just toss a lot of planes in the air, send them any which way, and hope they somehow stay untangled and safe. Nor can you fully staff and equip every remote airport. So:

...The Small Aircraft Transportation System is a vision for a new kind of air travel that will complement the congested airline system. It is a partnership among NASA, the FAA and NCAM, which represents at least six state research groups.

Technologies being developed now will allow new classes of aircraft, including very light jets and other advanced small planes, to use neighborhood airports to fly people from place to place. Families will be able to go to their community airport and take a plane to grandma's neighborhood airport 600 miles away without having to deal with changing planes at a major hub....

The SATS project is developing technologies to show pilots their location, identify hazardous terrain, visualize the weather outside and locate other air traffic and airports.

Later this year in Danville [Virginia], the team will demonstrate that planes can land safely in bad weather at minimally equipped small airports with these new technologies. They will also show how these new displays will improve single pilot performance and how these improvements and capabilities will help small aircraft fit seamlessly into the national airspace system.

"During the three days, June fifth, sixth and seventh, planes will fly in and out of Danville Regional Airport," added Hefner. "They plan to beam the pictures of what the pilots are seeing to giant screens on the ground, so spectators can get an idea what's happening just like being a co-pilot."

Somehow this reminds me of the popular science magazines of my youth, which promised we'd all be flying atomic-powered helicopters to work by now. Except, of course, when we were driving our amphibious cars across the harbor to catch the latest 3-D movie.

Let's just say I'm skeptical that it will wind up as rosy as the NASA write-up envisions. I still would like for this to work to some degree. (Full disclosure: I live near one of those "minimally equipped small airports" that's supposed to benefit from all this.)