Your assumptions about Air Taxis leave out a major gating factor: the dilapidated state of our Air Traffic Control System. Without massive investment, the system will be unable to cope with the volume that the Air Taxi concept promises. Read Richard Aboulafia (among others) ((I’d link to his articles directly but his site seems to be down at the moment)) for the sobering reality of Air Taxis.

I remember reading about a company called “Eclipse Aviation” (http://www.eclipseaviation.com/index.html) which was building a small, cheap to operate, light jet which they hoped would create and “air taxi” market. The belief was that operating costs for jets meant that an air taxi service wouldn’t be viable with traditional aircraft but a new aircraft with different economics could change the game. I seem to remember the aircraft also being notable for using “comoditiy” hardware and operating systems in it Avionics.

Just looking at their web site, it looks like their aircraft achieved FAA Airworthiness certification last year and the first one has now been delivered to its new owner.

Jim.

Not all modes of transportation are equally efficient in their use of energy, so significantly increased energy prices will certainly not apply across the board. Also, some forms of transportation are more flexible in the type of energy used – rail systems can be run on electricity, for example, even if/when petroleum is so expensive as to be impractical for transportation to business meetings.

In other words, what you think about the future of energy pricing and availability should influence the kinds of investments you make in transportation systems.

Maybe because that issue applies across the board to all modes of transportation.

Exactly. Aggregate system throughput.

“Today’s glass cockpits and advanced powerplants are a direct outgrowth of that NASA program”

I read in the Fallows book — or maybe elsewhere, I’m not sure — that NASA’s former administrator Dan Goldin was a major force behind the air taxi movement. Reportedly he spent years clocking his end-to-end time on trips and found that for distances less than — I seem to recall 300 miles? — driving was quicker.

Since the biggest drivers of bizjet acquisition are executive efficiency and bragging rights (no bets as to which buys more airplanes), there’s already heavy pressure to make ‘em fast. And, indeed, Cessna’s Citation X already outruns the airliners (Mach 0.92, or 525 knots, at 43,000 feet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_X#Key_performance_figures). Don’t expect much improvement there, especially since that whole cube-of-speed power equation is a real MPG killer. However, I think you’re right to expect a higher proportion of direct flights once demand ramps up.

Personally I believe the biggest wins will lie not in speed enroute, but in reduced ground-transport time (as you note), less wait-time in airports, and many, many fewer flights canceled or delayed due to congestion. Hub-and-spoke grew from big operators’ economies of scale, and it’s crushing the hub airports. The system is so overloaded that a line of thunderstorms in northern Illinois can completely derange air travel across the whole country, just because so many birds have to touch down at ORD in a given day to make the current system work.

Imagine if the Internet, instead of arising in parallel all over, had been centrally engineered by, say, AT&T, who decided that all packets, even the ones on LANs, had to travel through one of four routers in San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and New York. You’d get a lot of PhD theses out of the resulting congestion and chaotic behavior, but not much reliable bandwidth.

This becomes even more important when you consider the proportion of business trips shorter than your NH-to-CO odyssey. If I want to travel 200 miles between the state capitals of Wisconsin and Illinois, I’d be insane to include a stop at O’Hare. But unless I take my own plane, I’ve no other choice.

Whoops, revealed my true colors there. Yes, I aviate, and so I have a serious hatchet to sharpen when it comes to “reactivating” those small airports, which are closing at a scary rate. Once they’re strip malls and McMansions, they won’t ever be airports again, and if people like Fallows and Dyson are right, we’re going to need them.

I’m reasonably hopeful that we will. Charter flights are already up, driven mostly by business people angry with having their time frittered away by delays and near-strip searches. (If you come fly with me sometime, Jon, I won’t make you take your shoes off. Promise. And that’s perfectly appropriate to security: A six-passenger taxi just doesn’t make much of a terrorist target, let alone my four-seat Cessna spam can! So we can confidently expect that security delays for airliners will continue to dwarf those for general aviation. 30 minutes may be overstating the case.)

I recall being interviewed at the Oshkosh airshow by a couple of NASA personnel well over a decade ago; they were trying to identify crucial enabling technologies to revitalize the air transportation system from the bottom up. And it worked: Today’s glass cockpits and advanced powerplants are a direct outgrowth of that NASA program, and the new airplanes bearing them actually are more efficient and safer than, say, my 32-year-old Cessna. We’ve also come a long way from airplanes calling in position reports to controllers moving “shrimp boat” markers around on a table; radar and centralized control are becoming passe as GPS- and datalink-enabled, distributed traffic control is on the horizon (see, for example, the Capstone program in Alaska).

Wow. Progress, happening in my lifetime.