Focus 580; Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel

In this part of focus 580 will be speaking with James Fallows he is the Atlantic Monthly and national correspondent he's worked for the magazine now for more than 20 years. He's the author of a number of books and we'll be talking this morning about his latest which is titled free flight. The subtitle from airline hell to a new age of travel public affairs at the publisher on the book it is in part about his own love of flying. Not as a passenger but as a pilot. But it's also takes a look at what's going on nowadays in the field of general aviation as part of an effort to build planes that are better safer so that in future perhaps more people could fly themselves or use as an option a kind of smaller plane smaller than a big airliner that might just be able to operate it kind of as an air taxi to have schedule and would offer schedules that would be more flexible would get people where they're going sooner would be more comfortable and would be competitive in

terms of price with the major airlines all of that. Explore in this book and as we talk with our guest James Fallows questions are certainly welcome. All we ask of people is that they just try to be brief so that we can get in as many folks as possible but anybody is welcome to call here in Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us around Illinois Indiana any place that signal travel you can use the toll free line it will pay for the call that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 again 3 3 3 W I L L and toll free 800 1:58 W while Mr. Felos. Hello nice to talk to you. We appreciate you giving us some of your time. So how long have you been flying now. Oh a little more than four years so hardly any time at all. So what was it that was a something that had always been. In an interest or something you just thought you'd like to try or how did you know how did you get any of the two. One way I knew the difference between me and most of the people I write about in the book is that all of them had

always had an intense interest in learning to fly. I think every single person who founded one of the companies I describe around one of the government programs I got a flying license it as a teenager wanted to go into their offices they have you know pictures of airplanes in the walls little models on the desks. I was not in that category I had so always been somewhat interested when I met a friend who I found out knew how to fly airplanes I was always in a sort of perking up when I heard that and so about I guess about five years ago when I had for the first time in my journalistic career a steady office job where I had the weekends off I decided well this was time to go out and give this a try. How many do you know how many licensed private pilots. There are nine states now. I do in fact know that it's just under seven hundred thousand something like 600 75000 or roughly one quarter of one percent of the population not a mainstream activity. Well one of the things that you you really talk about in the book is the potential for if we had if perhaps the public perception about safety improved in fact we

make the plane safer and also cost is an issue because right now too to own a plane certainly would be expensive. There are number of things that might have to happen but does what is anybody's guess about if we could make all those things happen then. How much maybe within you know say a generation. We get more young people involved in it. How could the number of private pilots grow. Well I think that generation is exactly the right way to think about this because if you're talking say in the next five or 10 years the sorts of even the most ambitious people think that the main the main change the pilot population will be making things relatively easier so that people with some interest like me would find it safe and simple learn how to fly. And also this air taxi model might evolve. The real change over a generation might be if people who are children now grow up thinking that small airplane travel is both a practical a safe and a sort of an affordable alternative for them when they're going from place to place and if that were so the people of Nassau who are doing a lot of the

strategizing about this think that that that piloting could become you know if not as widespread as people driving. Car or something more like it was 1940s and 50s we had. It was seen as a more mainstream activity than now. One of the issues that you explore is why it is that that it's not seen as a mainstream activity and in fact there are now seem to be coming out of a really down period for general aviation. There seem to be it seems to be their props seem to be a number of if you ask the question why there seem to be a number of answers none of them perhaps complete all of them coming together. And you know maybe there are some other things that are hard to put your finger on about all getting to this issue well why is it that perhaps more people aren't flying there on airplanes right and if I had to sort of isolate the big three that they they would be number one. Since a year since roughly one thousand sixty years there's been fundamentally no improvement in small airplane technology and in everything else you know cars are

enormously better than they were 900 sixties. Computers are obviously better TVs are better but airplanes have not gotten better until very recently so there's a kind of technical stagnation that that surrounds it. Second there's the whole question of safety. The reality of small planes is they've been less safe than driving and less certainly less safe in big planes and the perception is even worse than that because the perception is that if you get him you just die and we can talk about that later. The third change I think is that compared again to since the 1980s airlines have gotten a lot better and I mean they've gotten better in terms of of price and while they have certain congestion problems now they are generally more affordable than they were in the 1980s and so those three things together mean that say in the 60s when salesman or businesspeople or professionals might find small plane travel a realistic way to get from you know Springfield to Wichita or Springfield to Reno or whatever the alternatives in the technical stagnation have made it seem less attractive.

For a moment we'll get to this. The story that you tell in the book about the effort to design and build a better small plane but maybe we need to step back a little and talk about why it is that in commercial air travel we have the system that we have it's certainly the case. We know that complaints by people who fly in this country are at an all time high. And anybody who's flown knows exactly why they know how bad the experience can be. And at the same time I guess one of the things we have to acknowledge is that one of big changes between now and you know several decades ago is that a lot of people fly now and the reason that they fly is that that they can that is that you can afford to fly this on one of the big changes has been it used to be something that you had to got to be a rich person to do that is to you. To take a plane on vacation or go visit your relatives or or go to Europe whatever. No it's just not that way anymore. But the downside is all this other stuff.

Exactly and I think we can look on airline deregulation as something that worked but works both in positive and negative ways and negative ways were not really forseen when it was in the late in the late years of Jimmy Carter's administration now almost 25 years ago I think was actually 1978 to 23 years ago that that airline the airline prices and scheduling were quite thoroughly deregulated before that as many of your listeners are probably too young to remember. There were airline fares were higher than they are now but there are a whole lot more non-stops you could go from Little Rock nonstop to Seattle or Little Rock nonstop to to New York I don't know where you go nonstop from Springfield but I'm sure that there were such flights. And with that change airlines were allowed to compete on price and on schedule. Over those 23 years the average price per mile per person has gone down about 30 percent. But the reason the airlines have been able to do that is essentially converting themselves into much more ruthlessly efficient economic enterprises to keep prices low they have to keep big planes full and to keep them full they can't go afford to go from Springfield to Seattle they have to go to

Springfield O'Hare than O'Hare to Atlanta and Atlanta to Savannah or whatever that's that's when they have to do. So it's it's worked in terms of keeping down fares it's also it's avoided what people thought would be the main problem which is safety. You know airlines are still extremely safe. The main difficulty has been the more traffic rises the more it's congested in these very small number of very very overwhelmed airports O'Hare being the main local example. And so the system doesn't scale in technical terms the more traffic there is the more congestion and ripple effect happen so we have low prices but we have a clotted system. And the argument you're making in this book is that if if we made it possible for more people who wanted to to fly themselves or if we also made it possible for someone to actually have a company that was flying small planes small jets that could handle you know on the. How many 5 10

15 passengers that who could actually have the kind of flexibility so people could go when they want where they want in a more direct sort of way and offer that be able to offer that service at a competitive price. So your argument is if if both of those things could happen and of course we can talk about what it would take to set up the conditions for that to happen but your argument is if those things could happen then we could take some of the burden off of the large commercial airlines and perhaps provide a service that people would be happier with and do it with smaller planes. Exactly. And I think here's an analogy that I have found useful in thinking about this. When you have a city that's convicts that's on an island they're connected by bridges that city is always prone to traffic jams. San Francisco Manhattan the parts of D.C. that are split by bridges when you have only a small number of pathways and all the traffic has to cross if anything goes wrong everybody is held up. Whereas a city that doesn't is not split by water if one road is blocked you can go down another number of other road you can go up 17th Street and take the other

way across. Something similar could be true of air travel there are roughly 5000 airports across the country that are suitable for most except the very largest planes. And but but about two thirds of all traffic goes through 30 airports because. The current economic structure so is there a way to use smaller airports more. It would be more like car travel a sense of going at your schedule from point to point here's one other example. Yesterday for reasons too strange to explain I had to go from Duluth Minnesota to Grand Forks North Dakota. And there is simply the only way you that's about two two hundred fifty two hundred eighty miles. It's a long way to drive. The only way you can go there commercially is going from Duluth to Minneapolis then Minneapolis to Grand Forks which takes even longer than driving. I was able to fly a small plane that distance from point to point to a little more than an hour to do that so making it possible to go from one non hub city to another non hub city directly is part of what this system might mean.

I guess you know one of the the very first questions that comes to my mind is this. In talking about and reading about this issue of what's wrong with air travel today some people argue that part of the problem. Is the air traffic control system that it just can't handle the volume of traffic and know if we're really talking about actually increasing the number of planes that would be in the sky at any one time this sounds to me like an air traffic control nightmare. Yes and No. And let me just just give two or three different responses certainly it is true that the current air traffic system control system while run by very competent people for whom I have very high regard is technologically way backwards. For example the main communication system that you have for you know getting clearances and they say climb or turn to century like CB radios. If any one person is talking no one else can talk and there might be you know 30 pilots listening on one frequency to the same controllers so when any one of them talks the rest have to have to be quiet so. And there are other technical difficulties and the

FAA is now proposing improving that having more digital data transmission et cetera so the system now is backwards and part of moving towards a system with a much greater number of airports in use would involve sort of re conceiving the air traffic control system. But the reason why I would at least argue it would not be as sort of. As profound a difficulty as many people might think. Is it really if you fly around the only parts of the era now that are crowded at all. Are there routes into major airports. You know when I was flying for example yesterday between Duluth and Grand Forks I did not see a single other airplane except landing pad to Grand Forks and once I was flying last month from San Francisco to do two to the Midwest and hours can pass and what you don't see any other airplane to the congestion is around the big airports a recone section of air traffic control using some kind of more computerized system would certainly be necessary but precisely because the traffic would be

dispersed to more places rather than concentrated. The control should actually be easier than it is now. I should introduce Again our guest with his part of focus we're speaking with James Fallows. He is national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He's worked for the magazine for more than 20 years now and written about many different subjects and he's the author of several books books that deal with the relationship between the United States and the countries of East Asia. He's written about the American news media. He's written about defense issues. He's a regular commentator for National Public Radio and the most recent book The one we're talking about here this morning is titled free flight and it's published by Public Affairs. Questions are welcome. We have somebody ready to go here to talk with others are certainly welcome to call if you're in Champaign Urbana here where we are 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 call or here to start us off is in momentum and that is. Why number four.

Hello. Good morning. Yeah yeah. I've enjoyed Mr. Fellowes work in the Atlantic for a long time now. Glad to speak with him. I'm wondering if what Mr. Felos take is on the personal aircraft situation that I've been following in various hobby magazines for a long time Popular Mechanics Popular Science revive years they have a new new article it seems on these personal little fan jets and I wonder if if if he sees that as some kind of reality in our in our future. Thanks for your question and your nice nice comments. I guess the short answer is I don't really know I follow some of the same publications and and you know there are people who are designing their cars and I just was the Oshkosh air show last weekend in Wisconsin and you see every sort of oddball contraption the personal jet pack personal heel counters and things like that. I guess what struck me is that is that that.

Fertile culture of people tinkering away and building airplanes and coming up with with inventions 99 percent of which are probably never going to to to reach the market. That's the one that's the same culture that is producing a lot of the ideas that actually may have some market market effect. And it's intriguing at Oshkosh where you have more than 100000 people coming to look at the displays. You see this sort of seamless transition between the really strange Aub ball culture and the people who have moved from oddball in this to actually bringing thing things to market so I don't know whether the personal air car will work but I've come to respect the culture that it represents. Thank you. All right thanks for the call to Terre Haute for another color here line one will go there in Terre Haute ly want but yeah. Oh yeah. Kind of a related question is do you have any idea what percentage of passengers going through O'Hare.

But that's not where they originated or next month. That's a good question I don't know the answer to it but but my guess would be most certainly. O'Hare I believe it usually rivals Atlanta as the busiest airport in the world. And neither Atlanta nor nor Chicago is the biggest city in the world. And so you know clearly they have that role as as as transit points. And the fact that as has overall air traffic increases the percentage that goes to these couple of Harrop couple of hub airports goes up more and more and more suggests that's more and more transit passengers that is people going to Chicago right. Well it's a good idea and very interesting program I work up in with a very good thank you thanks for the call and again the people who are listening if you have questions comments you're certainly welcome to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 here in Champaign Urbana toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. One of the things that you write about in the book is the fact that you know for for many years the small

plane market has been. And dominated by just a handful of companies. And if you look at the planes themselves with the exception of some changes in the instrumentation that they they really have changed very little. About the only thing that really has changed is that over the years they've just become more and more expensive so they're they're just asking more and more money for a plane that is essentially the same. How is that that is the reality of the small plane business. One big clearest way to establish that reality is to figure out some movie from the 1980s they have a lot of airplanes in it my two favorite examples are it's a mad mad mad mad world where one of the airplane chase scenes and The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen I think was Allie MacGraw with them and I would I think Steve McQueen and he was doing a lot of flying outside Boston and you realize that most things in this movie look dated but the airplanes don't the airplanes are just the same as the ones you would see at at some a local airport in the year 2001. Think there are Russia mon like.

Different explanations of how this came to be why it was the airplanes there were 18000 small airplanes sold in 1078 and only about 1000 sold per year a couple of years ago. The air by the traditional airplane manufacturers like Cessna and Piper and beach say that it was mainly a legal problem they were being sued for tort liability when people crashed and so they just decided to phase out of this business. The rationale that I think is more insightful or more impressive is that starting in the late 70s these companies realized that the money was in corporate jets. So they've actually been quite innovative when it comes to new corporate jets. The Cessna Citation the Gulf Streams the challengers these things are quite advanced and so they've addressed the top end of the market where things are you know the planes cost eight or ten million dollars and decided just to to let this slower and stagnate. There was a kind of vicious cycle the planes became older more expensive less attractive less

affair affective fewer people were inches of them in the market drove itself down it was sort of like the bad old days of Detroit in the in the 70s but different people have different explanations clearly was a downward spiral in small plane activity in the last 25 years. What was Faye Dunaway about. It made quite an impression on me when I was you know young man I thought well then in order to offer a a a new product something that would be a much better plan and a lot of ways the you you chart the experiences of a couple of guys who started a company Cirrus is called and it's located in is it in Duluth. It's in Duluth where I am at this month now where they have their plant. And these were a couple of Midwestern guys a couple of young guys who are a part of this community that you talk about these people that from the from the time of they were kids. They love planes they want to fly the kind of people who actually could build a kit plane

and put it together and make. Work what was it that got them into this idea that maybe they could produce a new a better small plane. Well you know they come from a very interesting Midwestern American Midwestern slash American tinkerer can do background. They're one of their uncles started on his own a boat company and built a lot of fiberglass boats and and their parents started from basically nothing a chain of nursing homes they build a sort of high end nursing home and they were able to sell them when the these Clapp Meyer brothers were in their early 20s which actually provided the initial capital for their employing company. But as far as I can tell the only thing these brothers Dale and Alan Clapp Meyer ever want to do was to make an airplane company. And so they went to college and as soon as the younger one had finished college they started this Kipling company in a barn in Baraboo Wisconsin and they discovered that they had some innovative kit planes that they got a lot of press for. But they realized that the market

of people who had you know more than $100000 to spend on the parts for a kit plane but also had a couple thousand hours of spare time to build them. That was a small market. Never be allowed both the money and the times they said let's build a so-called sort of flat fide airplane one that people don't have to build but it's a you know normal factory build their plane and for the last 10 years they have with the same zeal you find in the computer pioneers 25 years ago they put together a company now of 500 employees with 800 orders for their plane saying this is we just want to make a new plane that will change the way people think about smaller planes. And this is the s r 20. Yes the center s are 20 and now its big brother the Cirrus s r 22 which they hope are the first in a long line of planes they will build well for for the novice the person who really knows nothing about airplanes. They would look at one of these planes. What would make. This plane different from the piper or the Beechcraft or the planes that

are those same planes that we see in the movies from the 1960s. Well a couple of things not build up to the one that is most dramatic to most passengers. One is if you look inside them they are nice inside the typical rental Cessna or beech craft you'll find at a small airport was built more than 25 years ago and it really looks it. It looks like a 25 year old monte go or gremlin inside the seats are all. It looks like a beat up vehicle and that the the Cirrus by contrast is tried to is modeled on nice modern automobiles of like a German or Japanese or American luxury car so it seems nice inside the suit and the end is very very spacious. If you sit in the pilot say you see there are fewer dials than a normal airplane and more big screens big moving map showing you where you're going like in in modern modern jets. If you look at the performance charge you find that look more streamlined and went much faster on the same amount of gas or power than previous planes. But the main thing that passengers would notice if they

read about it is the plane has a parachute for the entire airplane. If something happens there's a lever you can pull and this parachute comes out of the back and the whole airplane fall in comes to earth and they three point level level descent. And so for John Kennedy type situations it gives people a way out. So if we we look at those. Editions that you'd have to set aside to make general aviation may be more acceptable and more accessible to people. They are those things that make comfort certainly has is important but a plane that's easy to fly in a plane that's safe. The These guys you think have satisfied at least those those conditions pretty well. I think they have they have started down the market for people who have any interest in flying a plane themselves that they're the reason I spent so much time on them in the book is that they were the first people actually to have brought something new to market and in that rough way I would compare them to the Macintosh

designers of the computer world they said. There's a way to make these things simpler there's a way to make them more attractive there's a way to make them them more crashworthy And and so very dream would be if they can attract more people into actual flying the current one quarter of 1 percent might grow by some pilots might grow by some factor over time so they represent a way of making flying your own plane more attractive than it has been for 30 or 40 years. So what if you want to go out and buy a NASCAR 20 knew what it would cost you. It would cost you now I think one hundred seventy nine thousand dollars which is a lot of that's still a lot of distance. Saddam wanted money and the argument the rationale they make is that you can see that airplanes typically Unlike cars they become more valuable as time goes on so usually you can count on them having 20 or 25 years of usable life and so you can finance them like a house. So they're presenting this as an alternative to the vacation cottage an alternative to the giant RV something you can finance over over over 20 years they also realize that to have any kind of mass appeal that the price has to go down significantly you know

perhaps by a half but certainly by 40 percent as volume manufacturing comes in and how many of these planes have they they've now been producing planes for a couple of years made their first plane almost exactly two years ago. And then they were producing first one a month and then one a week. They're now doing one a day. Their plan is to be at two a day I think by the beginning of next year. They have delivered 200 they have orders for 800 plus. Have they been even you have to say on one level that certainly successful have they. Would they say that they've been successful in terms of just hardnosed numbers that financially have they been successful. They have not yet made a profit but they are about to close a a major financing deal which will allow them to get to the 2 or 3 a day production level. The whole drama of their life in the last two or three years had been raising money it's not been so much making the airplanes or selling the money selling airplanes but getting from capital to to expand the production lines and they

they to the best of my knowledge they will very soon announce a quite significant financing deal which allow them to get over the hump and when they are producing planes I II they claim that when they are producing an average of more than one a day you know more than like 1.5 or something pre-date and they will be profitable that level. So that's that's their claim. We have someone else to talk with this is a caller in Chicago. That's line number four. Hello. Yeah I have one one statement and then a question stating this about the regular airlines I find it I don't understand how people can say that flying these days is better than it was in the old days. It's to me it's. More expensive. I usually used to do my flying between Chicago and New York. Unless you service a seat some weeks in advance. A plane ride is extremely expensive whereas years ago you

can call up cycle 15 minutes to make up your mind a few hours before hand and running every train trip ticket would be maybe 50 60 dollars. Now it's somewhere in the range of on these days what with the price of gasoline gone up the price of tickets went up about 25 percent that's what. The cheapest round trip from Chicago to New York now somewhere around a hundred twenty five dollars. And that's only if you can. If you reserve in advance to three weeks or more otherwise. Have you by the throat in the street runs into hundreds of dollars. With respect to to general aviation. Have you considered what the cost would be as far as environmental concerns are in place things burn a lot of carbon fuel and all that sort of stuff. But those are two good questions on the first point. I exactly agree with you that what's changed in airline pricing is the cost of flexibility is much higher than it used to

be in the pre the regulation days if you bought a ticket an hour ahead of time a month ahead of time it was the same. Now if you buy at an hour ahead of time it can cost literally 10 times as much as if you buy it then the cheapest way you know many months ahead of time and the the larger there is. There have been extensive studies all of which have come to the same conclusion that the average fare these days when you take into account all the discounts are available the average fare is indeed lower than it used to be. The difficulty is that to get that lowest fare you need to be much more constrained and much less flexible and so. To the extent travel is supposed to make us more flexible. And that's what the rest of our modern life is about flexibility. The airlines are not serving us well you have to really pay to change your plan so. So that's part of it. I was not arguing the airlines are are at all perfect these days. I think they are extremely safe and I think their the average fare has gone down but the price of flexibility is high. The environmental consequences of general aviation are quite interesting and are

also something that NASA's studying extensively. There is one clear one way in which they are inferior to a 747 which is since the gasoline efficiency per person is by definition better with a bigger vehicle than a smaller one a 747 carrying 400 people will have fewer CO2 emissions per person and use less gas per person than a small plane carrying five or six people. The same is true in land transport. You know a bus is always more efficient than a car a railroad train is more efficient than a bus. But we recognize for land transportation we need some mixture of those things that there are some tradeoffs the flexibility that the cars cars give. And so the there also is a lot of wasted environmental effect of the big airline system. Of all the sort of gas and congested wasted as you try to get to these few big choke points there's a way in which many people at Mass argue that small planes could actually be an environmental plus. Yes which is if they allow people to live and work more

remotely without without paving all the distance between two places then that can be that can be a nice thing with an airplane you can get to some remote area without building a strip mall all the way there as you have to do for cars. One other environmental point everyone involved here recognizes that noise pollution needs to be driven down quite rapidly if small planes to be acceptable and one of the most interesting new innovations is a small jet engine that's much quieter than its predecessors. So that's my that's my omnibus reply. You don't have any numbers or anything to compare. Which sort. Well the small planes I was against say an automobile or. But you know fuel. Actually I can give you one of these series as our twenties we've been talking about gets about 20 or 21 miles per gallon and can carry up to four people so that's comparable with many automobiles now. So so it's if you were comparing If I were comparing the trip I made yesterday from Duluth to Grand Forks in a car versus a plane it would be. It was certainly there was it was

no worse environmental impact for me to go there by airplane that would have been to drive. OK fine we have about. 10 minutes left in this part of focus 580 Our guest is James Fallows national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and we're talking about his book free flight. It's just out now published by Public Affairs in bookstores now. As as are his others I'm sure questions welcome 3 3 3 W I L L toll free 800 2 2 2 5 0. We talked a little bit here about the the serious design corporation of Duluth and having produced a lot of people think there is a really a much better for a variety of reasons. Small plane. It is a prop plane it has propellers and there's still yet another need here a lot of people feel there is a need for a small plane that would be able to fly faster that would have a greater range and perhaps. This is the one that we would be thinking of as being a candidate for somebody who might want to operate an air taxi service.

And he also in the book you talk about a company in Mexico that is working on designing and building a planes not on the market yet it's called the eclipse. It is a jet plane will seat I think five yes people five up to five plus a pilot. And this might be the kind of plane that could that could fill that niche. Talk a little bit with us about the eclipse. The the the background factor here is that the main variable and making planes airplanes safe and comfortable and fast is the kind of engine they have and jet engines turbine engines when they came to airline travel starting in the early 1960s made a huge difference in comfort and safety and speed. They're safer partly because they're so much more reliable. It's just a turning turning rotor and it sails far less frequently than then does an internal combustion engine. They're safer also because they can take planes above or around most difficult weather situations and so

that they're just better. And the breakthrough that the Eclipse Aviation Company is trying to to bring to market is based on a radically small radically light radically less expensive jet turbine engine invented by a company called Williams International. This was first used for cruise missiles and for military cruise missiles and it was the engine that was small enough to make cruise missiles possible. Sam Williams who's now in his early 80s is the inventor of came up with his cruise missile engine and on the strength of two of these engines which together with a way about eight pounds apiece may produce more than 700 pounds of thrust with two of those engines eclipse is proposing and will test fly early next year a plane. It would be essentially a small corporate jet that cost about one tenth as much as existing corporate jets. And the idea is that with something that costs so much less than a Gulfstream and a citation than a challenger you could equip these air taxi operators so that if you want to be picked up in Champaign-Urbana and taken direct to Casper

Wyoming they could pick you up at a time of your convenience and take you straight there without going through Denver or O'Hare and for a fare like today's full fare coach fare. Is the thought that this would be something that would primarily if such a service existed it would be primarily of interest to and used by business travelers. I think the idea is that with other technical innovations including airline travel itself when it first came out it would it would necessarily start out at the upper end of the of the economic ladder but then expand with volume. The comparison again is the typical nice corporate jet cost a blood cost roughly 10 million dollars and so it's only a very rich person or a big corporation that can account for that. If you have a plane like the Eclipse which is going to be which they say they'll bring to market for eight hundred thirty seven thousand dollars. Still only a rich person would buy that. But a company could buy that you know for cost about one tenth of those of corporate jets. And the pricing model is if you had a

single person in this plane they could have carry five people. The fare would then clearly be more than it would be to take a normal airliner but if you had two people the fare for each of them would be comparable to a full fare coach now and it could be at their scheduled with convenience. And if you had three or four or five people or a family then the you know the cost be the same for the airplane so the cost per person would be much less than that that is commercially so. They have plans for doing this increasing volume which would bring down costs and having the same sort of spread to my that it would not ever compete on with the cheapest discount fares for the airlines but it's a compete sort of the most expensive 50 percent of the airline traffic. It's interesting you're talking about here at least two efforts and there may indeed be some other people who are trying to look at the feel of general aviation and build planes that are less expensive that are safer and so forth it seems that when you're looking at the people who are building the big planes it's definitely going

in the other direction. An Air Bus and is is I think also Boeing is there what they're looking at is building even commercial airlines are even bigger that would just be stunningly enormous because they somehow think that the key is being able to carry more people have a. Bigger plane. You know interestingly Airbus certainly is going in exactly the direction you say they have some some plane going to be named the the meth or the gargantuan or whatever they think will carry 600 people but Boeing has shied away from that Boeing's alternative model is a plane that will be faster that if it were like anything obese it would be more like the Concorde then like the gargantuan up it would have a sort of advanced flying wing type type shape. Now I don't know whether they actually will build this advanced flying wing but Boeing has been explicit in saying that for most markets the 747 is about as big as an airplane needs to be the number of markets where you need you can efficiently carry 600 people time and again and again and again they're saying is not that large.

I guess they're in. In Britain they're thinking about carrying enormous loads of English people to Majorca. I want to hammer you know something like that. Yeah we'll see how the mayor can feel about this when the Gargantua start landing. Well let's talk with someone here in Urbana one number one. Hello. Yeah. Two two quick things. One is recently I saw a picture in the paper of two general aviation two small airplanes private airplanes locked together and in Italy and they they apparently spiral down lock together to the ground and the pilot survived. And number one I was curious if you knew anything more detail about that. On that particular episode I don't know about I know some some similar things where there is something in Florida I think last year where a plane was descending on top of another one of the boats about to land

and the pilot on the bottom still flew them both down to a safe landing. Quite impressive now. Well the picture they had in paper showed the nose of both airplanes in the ground so I was really curious about the details of that anyway. The other question I was going to ask you is. Have they is it. Have they done anything in the way of making small planes safer in storms or do they pretty much like they used to be. They still have to fly around them. It still is the case if thunderstorms are the enemy even for four airliners and if you listen to air traffic control when you're flying especially on United you hear the airliners all the time talking about deviating around thunderstorms so that the one thing an even airliner cannot go over. So I think that thunderstorms are probably. For any foreseeable innovation and in small planes that's something that people want to avoid rather than than

withstand. But there are a lot of other Web weather safety innovations taking place of ways to reduce the icing danger. Wait to have much better information on where the storms actually are ways to get around hail etc. etc. but still a thunderstorm is something you want to avoid I speak as somebody who's who's unfortunately been in one or two on a plane but I would rather not do any more. Thanks. OK. Other questions welcome. Somebody goes real quick about five minutes three three three WRAL toll free 800 1:58 WLM. When when you look at crashes small plane crashes and what we're talking about not experimental craft. But certified planes there are those designs where the federal government had said yes this is OK. It's a safe plane you can feel OK about flying it when you take a look at crashes and you take a look at why what happened. What what are the leading causes. The overwhelming cause is whether in the broadest sense including up planes that get into I stilled storms and lose their ability to fly because the Wings

had the shape of the wing changes. There's a very very large category probably the largest single category of pilots who are not trained for instrument flight who get into circumstances where they can no longer see outside this is of course the milieu of the John Kennedy scenario. And as everybody who's been through this training knows but the general public may not believe if you can't see out if you can't see the ground to see the horizon you cannot tell up from down in an airplane unless you know how to use the instruments and that was that the John Kennedy problem so so. Whether losing orientation or running out of gas or maneuvering close to the ground these sorts of theoretically predictable and controllable factors are account for most small plane crashes as opposed to mechanical failure or other things which seem more like like act of God. That's why small plane pilots both study crash report so extensively and feel that they can keep flying because they think that the risk factors are more predictable than they are for large planes.

Then I guess the question Is it possible to design a plane that's more forgiving or more helpful. Or will try to get good pilots out of problems that they got themselves into. Yes and I hear you put it more crisply. I have yes with better weather information you can see where the problems are there with. There's a kind of new kind of wing a so-called wing cop on the serious plane which makes it much harder to stall the airplane which is a way that the pilots often get in trouble if they if they don't know what they're doing they can suddenly lose the ability to fly it's hard to do that with the Cirrus. The parachute is an extra important act of forgiveness. In the last 30 years automobiles have become much more crashworthy in their internal structure and they are the new airplanes are also much more crashworthy you get that if you do end up hitting the ground they're meant to protect the occupants much more than was the case 20 years ago. And there's a new thing that NASA's pushing a so-called highway in the sky display where essentially flying the plane is like doing a video game. You're watching a screen there's a number of boxes you're supposed to fly the plane through. And if you do that you get to where you're

supposed to go so. So lots of people on sort of parallel fronts are working to find ways to make this a more forgiving activity. You know I think it's interesting some of the reaction to the parachute that you talk about in the book to me as a layperson this sounds like a swell idea but apparently some pilots weren't real sure they thought in fact of what it would do what it would make you feel too comfortable and might indeed lead people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do because they would say well you know heck no matter what happens we've got. Parachutes it will be OK. There is a real sort of macho crusty ness saying well you know if you were good enough pilot you'd never need dat or I'd never to use used that that says he thing. And the answer to the Cirrus company gives that which I think is a good one is that this parachute is essentially like a military objections seats a military pilots are very skillful they are very tough guys but they recognize there are circumstances where they need to save their lives. By the same analogy their circumstances may or may arise and it's nice to have one more alternative. Well I appreciate you very much for giving us some of your time and talking with the book and we want to say thanks very

much. Thank you for your excellent questions I appreciate it. And our guest James Fallows He is national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the book if you would like to take a look at it. It's just out now recently it's titled free flight. The subtitle from airline held to a new age of travel published by Public Affairs.