Fly Me to the Moon? No, but the Next Best Thing

July 10, 2005 Fly Me to the Moon? No, but the Next Best Thing

By JAMES FALLOWS

AS Americans cope with summer congestion on the highway, at the toll booth and, of course, at the airport, here is a report on ways that information technology may ease the headache of getting from here to there.

Bill Gates got his start as a software merchant by addressing this very problem, collaborating with high school friends on a system to decide the best placement and timing of traffic lights. Computerized tools like E-ZPass at toll booths and real-time Internet updates about the least-crowded routes reflect a similar desire to make more efficient use of roads - particularly since the number of miles driven by Americans has doubled in the last 30 years while road building has effectively stopped.

Air travel, meanwhile, has been repeatedly transformed by information technology. First came "yield management," the computer-generated array of special fares and conditions that made travel confusing but kept planes full. Then, the Orbitz/Travelocity phenomenon, which makes it easy for customers to find lower fares and thus was the beginning of the end for yield management and high-cost airlines. The third change was the rise of Southwest and other low-cost airlines, which rely on computers (and nonunion labor) to hold down fares.

Recently, there have been inklings of a fourth application of information technology to air travel - one that could ease some of the unpleasantness and inconvenience created by the previous three.

Six years ago in this newspaper, I wrote about an attempt by NASA to stimulate private development of new air-travel alternatives, in much the same way that Darpa, the Pentagon's research agency, had stimulated the development of semiconductors and the Internet. Last month, at an exposition in Danville, Va., I saw where the work had led.

NASA's goal was never a Jetsons-style fantasy of a helicopter for every household. Instead, an influential NASA careerist named Bruce J. Holmes, with the strong support of Daniel S. Goldin, NASA's administrator from early 1992 to late 2001, hoped to broaden the number of people who could enjoy one of the perquisites of being rich: having an airplane take you exactly where you want to go when you want to go there, without changing planes along the way or making reservations three weeks in advance. Doing so meant solving three problems simultaneously. One was encouraging the development of wholly new airplanes - propeller-driven aircraft that were safer and more comfortable than current models, and jet-powered planes that were much cheaper than their predecessors. Progress toward this end is well under way, and companies that are making the new planes - like Cirrus Aviation, Adam Aircraft, Eclipse Aviation and Lancair - have been highly publicized and have had strong sales.

The next, less obvious, challenge was to update many of the nation's 5,000 small airports, so that more airplanes could use them more safely, even in difficult weather. This is the key to avoiding the bottlenecks at the dozen biggest hub airports, and at Danville many private companies showed their technical solutions. One company, for instance, offered a video gamelike "artificial vision" that would let a pilot "see" a runway and all surrounding obstacles for a safe landing even in dense fog.

Finally, air traffic control systems need significant modernization to handle more planes at a wider variety of destinations.

Mr. Holmes, the NASA official, estimates that private companies have invested $3 billion to $4 billion of their own capital in products to meet all three challenges, in response to a total of $250 million in research grants from NASA over the last decade. Most of those companies didn't exist before the NASA initiative. (Money for this NASA effort, as for Darpa, has been significantly cut in the latest federal budget.)

Yet the excitement at the conference seemed to be for two new companies that had combined the advances in aircraft, airports and air traffic to introduce "on demand" air travel services. SATSair, based in Danville, Va., and Greenville, S.C., uses Cirrus SR22 airplanes. These are propeller driven and have only four seats, but they are spacious and luxurious inside and have a parachute - built into the airframe - that can bring the whole craft down safely if something goes wrong.

(Of the more than 2,000 planes Cirrus has produced, six have saved their passengers through such deployments - including one late last month just north of New York City, after an experienced pilot blacked out with a medical problem. "We totally underestimated the importance of the parachute," especially for people who have not flown before, said Steve Hanvey, president of SATSair.)

The company will meet customers at any airport within its service areas, which cover parts of nine states between Georgia and Pennsylvania, and take up to three people directly to any destination the airplane can reach. The price is $395 per flying hour (in one flying hour, the plane can cover about 220 miles), with extra charges for destinations outside a service area.

Other Cirrus-based air taxi companies have opened recently in the Midwest and Plains states. Mr. Hanvey says he plans to announce a significant expansion soon. The other on-demand company, DayJet, also expects to draw customers from those who now make long drives because of the cost and delays involved in airline travel beyond major hubs. It has ordered 239 new Eclipse 500 jet planes, the six-passenger jets that cost $1.3 million, about one-third the cost of comparable existing planes. And it has taken an option on 70 more. If they start to arrive as expected early next year, DayJet plans to go into operation by next summer, and it will apply a totally new model of an air-travel business.

I have spent hours listening to DayJet's chief executive, Edward E. Iacobucci, explain the business model. Essentially it would allow a customer to get an instant electronic bid on a trip of the customer's own design. Via computer, you say where and when you want to go and - crucially - how flexible you are about departure and arrival times. In a few seconds, the company gives you a firm price. If you can leave anytime from 9 a.m. to noon, for example, it will be cheaper than if you have to leave at 11.

If you accept the price, the technical magic begins. The real competitive edge of the company, according to Mr. Iacobucci, who founded the computer networking company Citrix before starting DayJet last year, is a set of algorithms more complex than any used outside hedge fund management. They match large numbers of passengers with an infinite number of routes against hundreds of pilots and planes.

"People thought yield management was complex, but it's almost unfair even to make the comparison," Mr. Iacobucci said. "That was managing fixed routes and fixed connections. This is all about deconstructing and reconstructing the operations plan on a second-by-second basis."

Good for him, if he can make it work. And good for all of us, if there are more choices about avoiding jams.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. E-mail: