Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Technology is here for a Jetsons generation

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 18:47:14 -0500

Posted on Mon, Dec. 08, 2003

Technology is here for a Jetsons generation
By Faye Flam

Inquirer Staff Writer

Pilotless personal planes. Behemoth airliners. Planes with seats in the wings.
That's what today's aviation engineers see when they look in their crystal
balls, so fasten your seat belts.
Progress in aviation has changed direction, said aviation historian Thomas
Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. No longer is it necessarily
about sleek, supersonic planes such as the Concorde, which died last month.

"From the 1960s and '70s, progress was redefined," Crouch said. "It used to be
higher, faster, farther. ... Then we reached a point where the economists talked
to the engineers."
The Concorde cut the usual eight-hour ride across the Atlantic to a little over
three. But the $9,000 round-trip tickets were too expensive for most people. And
the graceful gas guzzler was too loud for many in its flight path.

Now, instead of the Concorde, we have buy-your-own in-flight meals.
For a while, we'll see advances in the ability to cram yet more people into
planes. We'll see larger planes and planes with a "blended wing body," like a B2
bomber, so that people can fit in the wings as well as the fuselage, said Dennis
Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.
In the future, more people than ever will be flying; some experts predict that
air traffic will triple by 2025. To help handle all those travelers, the
European manufacturer Airbus Industrie will bring out a double-decker plane in
2006 that can carry 555 passengers.

Airbus is researching a bigger version that can carry 840, National Geographic
reported this month.
Other experts emphasize underused airspace. Skies may look crowded above
airports, but technological advances such as GPS and better computerized control
could allow dozens of smaller craft to take off and land between bigger ones,
experts say.

Most of the advances in commercial flight come as spin-offs from military
aviation. There, progress has also changed direction, said Crouch. For decades,
engineers were striving for ever-faster planes, but military masterminds have
begun to realize that stealth is as important as speed.

The state-of-the-art navigation and control will work its way from the military
sphere to the commercial world, say experts. Some predict that more of us will
fly into smaller airports nearer our destinations, as onboard navigation does
away with the need for sophisticated air-traffic control equipment found in
larger airports. Others say that in a few years we could be flying in something
like the V-22 Osprey, which can land like a helicopter, without a long runway.

Langley's Bushnell says the most dramatic changes in commercial flight will
emerge from the military's current emphasis on drones - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs). That's where the money and effort is going, he said, with the goal of
preventing human fliers from being killed or captured.
Private companies are already eyeing the technology as a way to deliver cargo,
Bushnell said. And the defense department, homeland security, the FAA and NASA
are working in Washington to find a way for UAVs to share airspace with
airliners.

Once the technology exists for small planes to drive themselves, he said,
individuals will buy them to commute to work or, eventually, to fly across the
country. Vehicles now envisioned would fly around 350 m.p.h. and travel 600 to
900 miles between fuel stops, much on the order of today's twin-engine private
planes but without the need for a skilled and trained pilot.

Thanks to advances in information technology, broadband satellites, global
positioning systems, and other technologies, he said, these flying vehicles will
be "human proof."
"This has been a recurrent dream for about 85 years," he said. "Every 10 or 15
years, it's looked at again, but now it's really ready." Air traffic control
problems still need to be ironed out, but experts say the technology is ready.

So it's just a matter of getting Washington to agree on an electronic
infrastructure to allow these flying cars to coexist with current air traffic,
Bushnell said.

Of course, he may be completely wrong.

Prognosticators have never been all that good at predicting the future of
technology and its uses.
Near the end of the 19th century, German gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal thought
flight would erase peoples' obsession with borders, said Luigi Martinelli, an
aerospace engineering professor at Princeton University.

Orville Wright had said he thought airplanes would lead to the end of war by
making war too intolerable. And the worst prediction of all may have come from
Wilbur Wright, who in a moment of discouragement in 1901 said man would not fly
for another 50 years.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/7441597.htm

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