hobbsyoyo
Deity
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2012
- Messages
- 26,575
You don't need a new landing strips; there are a ton of small utility airports all over the place. It's only as inefficient as the fuel makes it. More efficient fuels or power sources mean more efficient travel. At some point though, there is going to be a tipping point as the US leans more and more heavily on car transportation and highways where if a big enough chunck of people fly, you're actually being more efficient by relieving congestion on the roads and all of the fuel waste and localized pollution that comes with that.Sorry, man. I was too abrupt.
I had heard of a proposal for tiered short - length landing towers that could be embedded in cities. It was fanciful, though, in that it was proposing filling NYC skies sith a thousand-fold increase in air traffic, when we're already rubbing up against safety margins in the air tourism sector.
No, personal air transport is not very revolutionary, it's basically scaling up an existing inefficient mode.
And you can't discount the fact that an increase in personal air transportation can happen largely devoid of direct government intervention. If the market makes it possible, it's very likely to happen.
Personal air travel still has a pretty large giggle factor. Unless we find out how to pack micro-fusion reactors or similar magic in something the size of a car trunk, I doubt it will ever happen.
Do you think that the leaps we're taking in fuel sciences (hydgrogen fuel cells, polymer fuel cells, solar panels, etc) and power storage (batteries, etc) going on right now won't apply to airplanes as well?