FREE FLIGHT: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel - Review

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2001 by Alan Ehrenhalt

I don't know. I've never flown a plane myself. I don't want to get caught laughing at the Wright brothers. But Fallows never quite makes it clear just how the new air transportation system would work. If millions of ordinary individuals were piloting their own planes, wouldn't things get a little crowded up there? If, on the other hand, salvation is to be based on the new fleet of small, but highly sophisticated, commercial jets, each one carrying a load of eight or 10 passengers nonstop from, say, Sioux Falls to Cedar Rapids, avoiding the delay and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system? I can see the appeal of a system like this. But in a deregulated environment, could anyone keep the price down and still make money running it? That seems to me a fairly important uncertainty.

Fallows isn't arguing that the new generation of small planes will ever be practical for flying commercial passengers coast to coast. That will continue to be the role of the jumbo jets and their modestly enhanced successors. It's the shorter routes, in his view, that need the new system: Seattle to Portland, Washington to Philadelphia, Lake Tahoe to San Francisco. Those are all a couple of hundred miles or so. The Cirrus could cover any of them in barely an hour, door to door.

Whatever the complications, it's an appealing idea. And it may well be that, two decades from now, the small plane revival will be part of our lives, just as small computers became part of life in the 1990s. I hope that it happens, and that in the year 2021, traveling from Washington to Philadelphia by air will be a lot easier than it is now. But even if I'm around, I don't think I'll be doing it. I'll be on the train, watching the abandoned factories roll by. And if I'm not mistaken, getting there will be just about as fast.

ALAN EHRENHALT is the editor of GOVERNING magazine.