And that's where SATS comes in. The Small Aircraft Transportation System—currently being developed by NASA, the FAA, Embry-Riddle, and nearly 60 other aviation-related companies, agencies, and universities comprising the Southeast SATSLab Consortium—could, if its proponents prevail, revolutionize the way we travel. By employing a new generation of inexpensive small business jets and an innovative computerized flight control network, air taxi companies would be able to provide direct service from and into any of the more than 5,000 public-use airports that pepper the national landscape but that have been unusable for commercial flights because they lack the staff and equipment necessary to handle heavy traffic, as well as takeoffs and landings in inclement weather.

Stackpoole paints a refreshingly brisk picture: Under the proposed new system, a passenger in Kansas City would simply log onto a taxi service's reservation system, and an airplane and pilot would be waiting at the local airport. The passenger tells the pilot he wants to fly to a distant suburb of Indianapolis, and he's on his way—cruising at 400 miles per hour and improving average door-to-door speed to 200 miles per hour. Such a system, which Stackpoole says would initially cost passengers about the same as a first-class fare, would take significant pressure off the airlines and could triple the capacity of the air traffic system. But most of all, SATS—which would also serve business flyers and private aircraft owners—could make flying an airplane as easy as cruising down the street in an SUV.

In short, SATS would create a virtual interstate highway system in the sky. The small, newly "smart" airports would be unstaffed and would lack the millions of dollars worth of electronics at major airports that permit foul-weather service: control towers, radar installations, and instrument landing systems. Instead they'd be equipped with less expensive but still remarkably sophisticated computer systems that would automatically plan the flight path. These systems would integrate real-time air traffic information, Global Positioning System navigation, collision-avoidance technology, and preprogrammed knowledge of each airport and surrounding terrain to provide pilots with all the information they need to take off and land at unstaffed airports without the aid of air traffic control or advanced instrument landing skills.

In the cockpit, the complex instruments pilots now rely on to keep their planes flying straight and level in nasty weather (altimeter, airspeed indicator, compass, and so on) will become obsolete. Instead, that information will be included graphically on two "synthetic vision screens" that, in addition to providing conventional instrument data, project the world outside in blue-sky perfection—no matter how socked-in the conditions are outside—and outline in yellow boxes the aerial skyway ahead. The pilot merely has to follow the yellow box road. Eventually, flying may not even be that hard. "The ultimate goal is to make it totally automated," says project spokesman Keith Henry of the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "Twenty to 25 years from now, you'll say 'Detroit' and the plane will take you there."

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

(back to SATS A.I. NEWS)

(Back to Airborne Internet)