Air travel in ten years -- the Freakonomic future
The Freakonomics blog reached out to a bunch of economists, travel execs and thinkers to imagine what US air travel will look like in ten years. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the future of high-end air-travel is Ninja Air. The night before your flight, a highly trained ninja sneaks into your bedroom, blowdarts you, packs your suitcase, shrinkwraps you and sticks a routing tag on you. You are shipped, unconscious and stacked like cordwood, to your destination. Another ninja carries you (and your bags) off the plane and checks you into your hotel. Then he (or she) unpacks your suitcase, peels the shrinkwrap off you, tucks you into bed and climbs out onto the window ledge. Silently he (or she) blowdarts you again with the antidote, slipping silently off the ledge and down the side of the hotel, as you yawn and stretch, refreshed and in a new city, with no recollection of any intervening travel.
That's my theory. Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, opines, in part:
The solution requires the following: 1) to charge all aircraft for the delays caused by their takeoffs and landings, as well as the delays caused by their use of airspace near airports; to increase the number of runways at congested airports; 2) to introduce technological aids that would facilitate additional operations on parallel runways and reduce the separation between aircraft when they take off and when they land; and 3) to implement a satellite-based air traffic control system that, among other things, would give pilots the freedom to choose the most efficient routing, altitude, and speed of their flights.LinkBy using the price mechanism to reduce peak-period demand for runway and airspace capacity, by expanding runway capacity at the most congested airports, and by adopting new technologies to enable more aircraft to use available runway and airspace capacity, air travel delays would be substantially reduced. In the process, competition would flourish, and the nation's exceptional air safety record would get even better.
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I like the Ninja idea, but we also need a Ninja Itinerary Agent who orders the ticket beforehand, and a Ninja Temp who takes care of all the shit you need to do before leaving (pay bills, complete deadlines, etc.), and a Ninja Houseboy who takes care of your house while you're gone (water plants, walk dog, etc.), and finally, a Ninja Personal Assistant who gathers up all your receipts and faxes them off to whoever is supposed to pay for the whole thing.
Get all that, then sign me up!
I think Ninja Air should start looking for investors... I'm all for it.
@#2: When money suddenly disappears from your account, you will know that Ninja Air has chosen you as an investor.
Richard Branson (in the article) claims the future is "next generation, low fare, point-to-point carriers". The limit of this process is ... personal aircars. You heard it here first! (Actually, second, there's a chapter about it in Nanofuture.)
Ninja Air, ha ha.
the problem with airlines is the aeroplanes: the future of airline travel is trains domestically and superjumbos overseas. tracks have no raoming problems, can deliver signal inside a tunnel, you can stand up and walk, they dont fly thru the air, and the boarding speed scales with the number of passengers, unlike an airline, where the delay scales linearly w/passenger count (a number the airlines always want to increase).
iffa you wanna crossa the sea, you canna take-a a boat, a reconditioned nuclear powered aircraft carrier ought to be able to make the rounds in a reasonable time for most people. christ, you could load the train cars right into one of those mammas. if not, superjumbo it or buy your own fucking gv.
What really needs to happen is for airports to add another ramp for each gate: One for the front of the plane and another for the back. Loading and unloading would be more than twice as fast (no more waiting for that guy who waits until everyone in front is off the plane before blocking the aisle and starting to get ready to go.). Less fuel would be wasted idling at the gate as well.
That and maybe some sort of hybrid engine that took waste heat from the jets to power plane on the ground or something....
You are shipped, unconscious and stacked like cordwood, to your destination
No, no, they're talking about in the future.
I have less a problem with the flights as I do with the process AROUND the flights.
Let's look at the times for my typical West Coast jaunt between my current home in Oakland and Seattle, where my daughter and old friends live:
Drive to Oakland Airport - 30 minutes
Offsite parking shuttle to airport - 20 minutes
Checkin - 15 minutes (on a good day)
Security Check - 30 minutes (often much worse)
Flight - 1 hour, 30 minutes
Shuttle to Rental Car lot - 20 minutes
If we just add that up, for an hour and a half flight, it is 3 hours and 20 minutes of actual time. This is assuming that security doesn't take an hour or more to get through, which it does at times.
This also leaves out that you need to get to the airport in time to check-in at least an hour before your flight. Since security and check-in times are a complete unknown, I and may other people show up at least two hours before a flight in each direction, adding four hours to the total time.
I've often felt, when considering a flight to Los Angeles from the Bay Area, that I would just about break even by simply driving for six hours if I could know I wouldn't hit horrible traffic on the way.
my whole problem is that I"m 6ft4. Seats are too low, to narrow and too close together. My knees hit the seat in front of me even when the person in front has their seat in the upright position.
To #8, I live a six-hour drive away from Atlanta. At one point, I had an assignment that required me to travel there on an almost weekly basis. Suffice to say, I live near a regional airport, so I am pretty much locked into using ASA, a crappy Delta partner with a 20% on-time rating (yes, they get away with being late 80% of the time). Even though the flight time is only an hour and a half, given the ontime percentage, it was generally faster to drive the six hours than to deal with the airport hassle.
I have become so disgusted with airline travel that if the destination is within 500 miles, I choose to drive.
What we need, are ZEPPELINS!
Of course we need zeppelins. And Tesla Coils. And pygmy mammoths!
i have run LONG commutes with a corp rez at one end for 4 days, 10hrs/day at unnnamed.com, then back home for a 1 day rest between drives. hard, disgusting drives. but to fly would have been a joke, cramped (as often mentioned), jostled and generally driven like cattle.
Zeppelins have the same problems aeroplanes do, delay scales linearly with cargo load. a trains boarding capacity increases 1-1 with its load as more cars are added, up to the limit on the length of the platform. AND you can choose to get in a shorter line.
wtf is wrong with spending your life in the currency of minutes days or hours instead of jamming it full of microseconds? is your life really so interesting that it matters? well, back to the ol rockin chair.
I have said for years that the future is this:
You show up at the airport. You are handed a dufflebag. You proceed into a small stall which locks behind you. You are now secure.
You change out of your clothes and into the bright orange jumpsuit that is in the dufflebag you were given. You place all your clothing and personal effects into the dufflebag. You then place the duffle back through a hole in the wall where it passes through an x-ray machine, by a drug sniffing dog, through a metal detector, and then finally through an explosive/chemical detector. It then goes into a metal case, which is locked, and then returned to you.
While your dufflebag is being processed, you have to submit your personal information. On the sleeve of the jumpsuit is a number. In fact, it is all over the jumpsuit, in one way or another. You key this number into a small keypad that is in the wall. Then you scan your fingerprints. Then you give them a sample of your hair. Then your saliva. Finally, a picture of your face is taken, and you scan your retina. You put your ticket into the wall, which is linked to your information you just gave.
By this time, your duffle has made it back to you and you key in the number that is on the case. The door is then unlocked, and you are allowed onto the concourse.
Since all your personal effects were placed in the dufflebag, which was then placed into the metal case--they are all the same size and shape and they can fit very efficiently into the belly of the plane. Loading them will take no time at all, as the metal cases stack very nicely.
As for your checked luggage, that is taken on a separate plane, which you brought up to the airport and sent off the night/day/weeks before. All of your luggage is placed in similar metal cases (larger, and you get up to three of them) which go through a similar process to your dufflebag, before being loaded onto the cargo plane. Again, because the cases are all the same they stack very efficiently and because the plane is only carrying bags it can carry a significant amount of luggage easily. You will receive a number, as well as the information being linked to your fingerprint scan for when you check in tomorrow.
When your flight arrives you will leave the plane and proceed to picking up your case with your dufflebag in it. You will then go through the same procedure, only in reverse. Your luggage will be ready and waiting for you to come and get it.
There. Done. Secure end to end. And the best part? No people to rely on to check you in and out. It's all up to you. take as long as you want in your changing room. You won't get out unless you give them all your information. Plus, if they do find something you are easy to detain. nobody else will see you, and cause a fuss.
Go ahead. Disprove me. I welcome all discussions of this at my email. spokeN.O.S.P.A.Mheadz@gmail dot com
It's only a matter of time before we have to strip down to our underwear to go through security.
Last winter going through Denver, passengers had to take off their sweaters or sweatshirts. I was in a t-shirt at the time, but if I was wearing a sweater I wouldn't have had on any undershirt. What then?
So I say, everyone strip down to your skivvies and then walk through the metal detector!
Winston is an idiot, like most people at Brookings.
He doesn't understand the problem, and his knee-jerk libertarian solution doesn't address it.
Take a minute to look at the political and geographic realities of building new runways. That's not the answer, and even if it magically WAS the answer, it's not going to happen. Not in the places that need the runways.
The problem is that the number of planes is increasing dramatically faster than the number of passengers. Every hub now operates hundreds of flights of "regional jets", small aircraft in hourly takeoff patterns, that clog the system. What used to be one Boeing 747s is now eight Bombardiers.
Air traffic control is not the bottleneck. The clusterfuck of taxiing jets on the tarmac, and competition for gates, and you have a system that starts to fail dramatically with even minor delays, that ripple across not just airports but entire continents. It is not at all unusual for small jets clogging up JFK to hold up entire Australian-bound 747s at LAX.
Al Billings's experiences are a huge part of the problem as well.
Patrick Smith at Ask the Pilot (Salon) explains this all much better than I do. Clifford Winston explains nothing.
Add another vote for reviving the country's passenger rail network. Another advantage is you can run the damn train right into downtown Destinationville, instead of having to slog in from some outlying airport. If we wanted to get really serious, get to work on some high-speed maglev jobbies.