Free flight

the long version

"The airline system has reached a nightmarish state, due to a combination of economics and technology. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by filling 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 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. There's the NASA administrator who long ago anticipated airline gridlock and began agitating for another system; there are the two Klapmeier brothers of Cirrus Design in Duluth, Minnesota, who created the first genuinely new small airplane in more than twenty-five years, complete with parachute for the entire plane; and there is Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which uses technologies first applied on cruise missiles to develop "cheap" jet planes for "air taxi" services that take you exactly where you want to go, when you want to go there."--Jacket.