In five years, you could be taking an air taxi from one small airport to the next.

Spring 2003 Issue of the CATALYST

Gravity is a wall that humans do not love. So they vault it in dreams. Leonardo daVinci drew pictures of people-powered planes whose moveable wings would have required titanic strength to flap. Glenn Curtiss designed the world's first flying car, a three-winger, in 1917. Charles Zimmer invented a one-person flying platform featured in the September 1956 issue of True magazine.

The latest fantasies of making flight a more intimate experience than you'll find on a jumbo jet are air taxis with space for four to six folks. And it's not Joe Screwloose doing the dreaming. James Fallows, once editor for the Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News and World Report, in the book Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Aviation , makes a case for small, high-technology planes. Within five years, he said, people could be flagging down air taxis at the local airport.

The economics are starting to get there. In 2001, one company announced development of a six-seat jet that costs only $850, 000 - less than a third of the next cheapest jet on the market. With its range of about 1, 300 miles, it'd be good for a trip from, say, Kansas City to Reno.

But increased small-plane traffic will also require raising the I.Q. of small airports, said David Downing, University of Kansas professor of aerospace engineering. To make a small airport that's smart enough to handle more traffic in all kinds of weather requires that these airports have the electronic capabilities of the big commercial hubs, but at a lower cost. To that end, Downing's research focuses, in part, on the computer software and hardware necessary to make autopiloted landings economical for small facilities. If he succeeds, his technology would allow landings that require little of pilots, who'd be helped along by automated, unmanned ground stations.

NASA's driving the small-airport, small-plane research. Its $69 million, five-year initiative has groups nationwide scrambling to come up with assorted technology that will let tiny craft touch down at airports lacking towers and radar, even in foul weather.

David Downing, University of Kansas Professor of Aerospace Engineering

At KU, the Kansas Flight Test Center, headed by Downing, is leading the research. The center is a player in the North Carolina-Upper Great Plains research team, one of four that NASA is funding.

What's NASA's incentive? The current rent "hub-and-spoke" system of large airports is almost saturated, said Downing, and that's troubling given that the Federal Aviation Administration expects air traffic to double by 2010.

"Currently, we have about 500 airports that all the airlines go to," Downing said. "Ten times that number are not being used because they can't guarantee you'll be able to arrive. If you could land at those - reliably- you wouldn't have to drive for hours after you got to an airport.

"NASA's goal is to have direct air travel between smaller population centers that is four times faster than traveling the same distance by car. " Norton , Kansas, could have the same contact with the outside world as Kansas City."

One worrisome question: Would these air taxis be as easy to drive as cars? If so, should we start worrying about terrorists targeting nuclear facilities? How about outbreaks of sky rage?

Downing said the concept of plane drivers, rather than pilots, is a long way off: "First we do air cargo and taxis with pilots. Then we switch to unmanned vehicles to do cargo delivery. That's where we gain confidence that you don't need to be a pilot to fly one of these. It's evolutionary."

Small is Not Beautiful

Little airports present plenty of challenges to retrofitters who want them to bear more traffic. Many are ill-equipped for landings in bad weather. Because approaches to airports in cloudy conditions must, for safety reasons, be long and low-angled, more land adjacent to the airport must be purchased, a costly endeavor.

Downing's research group is addressing these issues. It's harnessing off-the-shelf hardware and custom-designed software, he said, to make guidance equipment both for ground installations and cockpits.

The technology would enable planes approaching airports to find their way to "highways in the sky" - trajectories generated on the ground and sent to the aircraft. The pilot could then choose to follow the path manually or have the onboard autopilot fly the paths automatically. In either case, when he runway is visible the pilot would manually land the plane.

If his group succeeds, the technology will also allow pilots to maintain safe separation from other planes by providing them with information and advisories.

Another piece of research undertaken by the flight test center addresses the land-acquisition issue.

"Our system, if it is successful, will permit stepper approaches so that airports won't have to purchase extra land," he said. "That's an enormous advantage."

Meanwhile, Downing said, researchers elsewhere in the country are focusing on other issues. At Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, for example, one of the projects has to do with synthetic vision. Such "vision" operates on a database so that a pilot making a descent through clouds could see fixed features of the terrain on a display screen in the cockpit - though anything transient, such as a cow or a car not in the database, wouldn't be visible.

In the future, Downing said, the Kansas Flight Test Canter will work with the Information Telecommunication Technology Center on still another part of the puzzle - plane-to-plane digital-signal communication. Today, most small planes depend on the control tower for information about the position of other aircraft. The digital signaling research is aimed at letting planes find out more directly where other planes are.

Kansas has about 140 airports, Downing said. He estimates that for less than $300,000, all the runways at any one of those airports could be instrumented with the equipment that the flight test center is working on. The current cost of today's small airport is $1.5 million per runway.

"I've estimated that if we could instrument all the airports in Kansas with our system, the cost would be equivalent to the addition of 20 miles of interstate highway - and this is a one-time investment."

"This is very economically feasible - if we can get the technology to work."

The Small Aircraft Debate

There's a lot of dreamer in Downing. Like most aerospace engineers, he caught the flying bug early.

"When I was in Sixth grade, I said I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer," he said, "and at the time I didn't even know what that meant."

You should realize, though, that scooting between cities like Liberal and Salina in an air taxi isn't everybody's dream. A 2002 report titled Future Flight, published by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, did not support NASA's vision of a small aircraft transport system.

The report's authors said that users would be too few:

"The expectation that large numbers of people will use advanced small aircraft to fly between airports in small, nonmetropolitan communities runs counter to longstanding travel patterns and demographic and economic trends."

Au contraire, said Downing.

"Nobody does business at the Kansas City or Atlanta airport," he said. "There's always an extra connection at both ends. With our system, you can leave from where you want and then arrive close to where you want to be."

Like any revolutionary idea, he said, the small aircraft transportation dream has the potential to create markets where none exists today.

In arguing for a small plane transportation system, NASA is assuming there'll be a "Third Migration Wave" in the United States. The first wave, from 1850 to the early 1900s involved a movement of U.S. citizen from farm city. The second, from 1900 to 1960, was from city to suburbs.

The third wave NASA anticipates is migration from suburbs to rural areas. Communications advancements - fax, net, cell phones, voicemail, e-mail and so on - are making that movement possible.

"If you want to live in Dodge, it'll be easier to do that if there are air taxi's to get you places where you need to do business," Downing said.

A dreamer? Downing certainly is, at least where flight is concerned. I questioned him about the flying cars and platforms I'd run across as I researched human fantasies of flight.

Yes, he said, some people are, even today, talking about going from cul-de-sac to cul-de-sac using helicopters as vehicles.

The twist here is that through Downing is a bit of a fantasist when it comes to aircraft, he is a traditionalist about communication.

I said, "Won't telecommunications make physical movement through space less and less necessary-whether by car, air taxi or otherwise?"

He said, "There are people who think you don't need that face-to-face contact. I don't believe that. Who you know is very, very important, and being in physical proximity to those people is important."

Very down to Earth, wouldn't you say?

How Donors Help
The Kansas Flight Test Center received a boost this year from Walter and Jayne Garrison of Rose Tree, Pa. Among other things, the Garrison's financial support will help the Department of Aerospace Engineering renovate, furnish and equip the upper floor of the department's hangar at the Lawrence Municipal Airport, remodel the building's facade and purchase a new flight test aircraft.

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of the CATALYST: Change through KU Endowment, published by the KU Endowment. Copied by permission.

Kansas University Endowment
PO Box 928
Lawrence, KS 66044-0928
785-832-7400
www.kuendowment.org