An airplane in every garage - includes related articles on airplane designs and technology

Chief Executive, The, August 15, 1999 by Stephan Wilkinson

Well, not quite. But a consortium of corporate competitors, working with NASA, is fueling a technological revolution that may turn today's private plane into tomorrow's mass transit.

"Lightplane technology" is an oxymoron. We private pilots fly behind largely handmade engines subject to all the woes of inattentive assembly and widely varying quality control. Our air-cooled Lycomings and Continentals have the sophistication of 1950s Harley-Davidsons and are sparked by magnetos, the design of which can be traced directly back to 1920s farm tractors. The 1999 Cessna Skyhawk - still the world's most popular lightplane - was initially introduced in 1957, and the Mercedes-Benz of singles, the Raytheon Bonanza, first flew (albeit in a far simpler form) in 1945. The fast Italian two-seater that I own was designed in 1955, is often described as "the Ferrari of airplanes," and yet is made of wood. Even the highest of tech in the typical cockpit - enormously expensive GPS receivers with moving-map displays - have five times the cost and one-fifth the capability of satellite-navigation receivers in luxury cars.

That might be about to change, driven by NASA, a $250 million government and industry investment commitment, and new entrepreneurism among a handful of tiny companies with big dreams. No longer are the radical advances coming only from Beech, Cessna, and Piper - the Big Three lightplane airframe manufacturers - but from Cirrus Design, Stoddard-Hamilton, and Lancair, one-time makers of do-it-yourself experimental airplane kits for hobbyists. Electronics aren't only the purview of the big radio-maker Bendix/King (a division of AlliedSignal Aerospace) but of comparative newcomers Amav, Avidyne, NavRadio, and II Morrow. And sprinkled throughout the AGATE-partners list are small companies with such names as Advanced Creations, Airborne Research Associates, Aurora Flight Sciences, Innovative Dynamics, and Optimal Solutions.

For decades, general aviation (as all noncommercial, nonmilitary flying is officially categorized) has been hampered by the expense and time required to get a pilot's license and the instrument rating required for flight in less-than-ideal weather. Then there's the complexity of operating and navigating any high-performance lightplane, and the dangers posed by bad weather, mechanical problems, and inevitable pilot carelessness. Because of their lack of true utility, few new airplanes have ever been sold - only 17,800 including everything from cropdusters to bizjets in 1978, the industry's record year, down to an annual pace of a piddling 1,300 piston-engine lightplanes today.

No wonder no major manufacturer has bothered to invest in and modernize the personal lightplane in any significant way. To make matters worse, the popularity of product-liability lawsuits against general-aviation manufacturers in the 1970s and '80s cost the industry $3 billion in defense - and judgments - that might otherwise have been spent on R&D.

NASA, however, intends to turn private planes into a mass-transit system, making them as easy to operate as automobiles but four times as fast, and achieving economies of scale that will make airplanes if not cheap, at least affordable. Their goal is to quadruple travel speeds for 25 percent of the country's suburban and rural regions by 2007 and provide that capability to more than 90 percent of those communities by 2023.

"What will make an airplane of the future more usable by average people is the revolution in digital bandwidth, satellite navigation, and datalink wireless communications," insists NASA's Bruce J. Holmes, manager of its Advanced General Aviation Transportation Experiment, or AGATE - an industry/government consortium that is creating the concepts, systems, and hard ware to make this possible. The list of companies who have signed on runs from such industrial giants as Teledyne and Textron, B.F. Goodrich and Raytheon, to tiny Arnav Systems (75 employees) and even smaller Stoddard-Hamilton Aircraft (35).

"Pilots today do those chores that humans do worst," Holmes points out. "They sort information, compile it, and integrate it into differential decision-making. All those data-processing steps are what makes flying challenging, rewarding, and romantic - but for a very limited market."

A key component of AGATE's program is the development of workable "highways in the sky" - not the invisible electronic, zig-zag, beacon-to-beacon airways that constitute today's routes but a constantly changing, visible flightpath determined by information continually data-linked to the airplane.

Today, before a flight, a good cross-country pilot collects weather information, much of which is already hours old, plans a route on paper and declares it to air traffic control, communicates verbally with ATC while en route, and continually checks his or her charts and navigation radios to ensure that obstacles, terrain, or restricted airspace won't be a problem. "You have to be an amateur meteorologist today to be a safe pilot," Holmes avers.