The troubles of the airline system have become acute in the post-terrorist era. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by keeping planes full and funneling traffic through a centralized 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 efficiently between major hubs. But what was left out of this equation was the convenience and flexibility of the average traveler. Now, because of heightened security, hours of waiting are tacked onto each trip. As James Fallows vividly explains, a technological revolution is under way that will relieve this problem. 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 the way corporate executives have for years: in small jet planes, from the airport that's closest to their home or office directly to the airport closest to where they really want to go. This will be possible because of a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small, radically inexpensive jet planes, as different from airliners as personal computers are from mainframes. And, as Fallows explains in a new preface, a system that avoids the congestion of the overloaded hub system will offer advantages in speed, convenience, and especially security in the new environment of air travel.

So much has changed in the world of aviation in just the past few years. If you're interested in the future of aviation, this new edition of Future Flight: The Next Generation of Aircraft Technology is must reading. In this extensively updated volume, authors Bill Siuru and John D. Busick tackle changes in the world of aviation brought on by the end of the Cold War and rapid technological advances.

From an engineer and futurist, an impassioned account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future The science fiction of the 1960s promised us a future remade by technological innovation: we’d vacation in geodesic domes on Mars, have meaningful conversations with computers, and drop our children off at school in flying cars. Fast-forward 60 years, and we’re still stuck in traffic in gas-guzzling sedans and boarding the same types of planes we flew in over half a century ago. What happened to the future we were promised? In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer this deceptively simple question. What starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder. Drawing on years of original research and personal engineering experience, Where Is My Flying Car?, originally published in 2018, is an urgent, timely analysis of technological progress over the last 50 years and a bold vision for a better future.

Fallows, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, explores future trends in commercial aviation technology that may make airline travel easier and quicker than the current hub system. He focuses on three separate groups of innovators who are developing a NASA small plane research program, a small airplane with a parachute for the entire plane, and an inexpensive jet plane for air taxi services. c. Book News Inc.