7 Flights Into the Future

"I'm not sure I believe that, Burt," Boeing's Muellner replies. "I don't think UAVs, at this point in their gestation, have accident rates that are any worse than they were at the same point in the growth of manned aircraft."


Rutan isn't swayed. "It's very easy to write the equations for an L-1011 to come down and make a landing," he says, "but it's not so easy to write the equations that work every time when you have a gusting crosswind, and that decide, 'Hey, this doesn't feel right, I'm going to go around instead of continue the landing.' Here's the big problem: You put billions into an unmanned program and the first time one crashes into the Rose Bowl, you're out of business.


"Are you comfortable," Rutan asks Muellner, "flying an airliner that's unpiloted with today's level of technology?"


"I would with the level of technology that's available," Mueller replies, "not necessarily what's being bought and put in airplanes today. But the technology is here today."

WILL THE U.S. LOSE ITS AVIATION EDGE?



A hundred years after the invention of an epochal technology, one associated as much as any other with values of freedom, the magnificence of engineering and the power of invention, the airplane's future is clouded. "However much all of us here are in love with aviation," says Airbus's Brown, "the airplane itself is widely perceived as an unfriendly, socially irresponsible, inefficient plaything for the rich, and heaven and earth should be moved to tax airplane operations out of existence, block new runway development, stop demand for air travel from growing."


Meanwhile, the large network of small airports that will be essential to an air taxi system is endangered. Battles are lost to developers, local governments and residents. Airports close. "The perception," says NASA's Moore, "is that these small aircraft have no benefit to them, so of course they want to get rid of them. They're noisy, they're bad neighbors. So until people see a positive purpose for these aircraft, they're going to regulate them right out of existence."


Even more worrisome, everyone agrees, is this: A hundred years after the Wright brothers, the romance has gone out of aviation. The sense of adventure that persisted from the Wright era to the Right Stuff era also drove the senior roundtable members—the Rutans and MacCreadys and Muellners—in their careers. But these men are not sure brilliant young engineers even consider going into aerospace anymore. "Unless we find some way to create excitement, to get the youth thinking about this domain," says Muellner, "I think some of these predictions we have made may [be wrong] simply because there won't be the necessary skill sets to execute them." Diamandis: "The people who put us on the Moon were in their mid-20s! The same thing happened with the Internet. Everybody went to the coolest jobs around. They went where the vision was, where they could create it for themselves."


As a much younger man, Burt Rutan flew across the country to experience the 747 when it debuted almost 35 years ago. It's not clear that any airplane in development now would get him to make a similar flight today. There is, however, an airport that he would fly far to experience, truly the oddest concept advanced at the roundtable: a plan to eliminate land-hogging runways by building vertical structures to act as catcher-launchers for small aircraft.


Rutan shares back-of-envelope sketches and rough calculations: "You have this circle, and you fly into it at above the stall speed. You decelerate in about 280 feet, which is comfortable—it's not abrupt, it's kind of fun. That [deceleration] energy goes into this facility and is then used to launch the next guy. And you can go out from any angle, unless the winds are strong and then you go vertically. You don't slow down to decelerate on a runway and then taxi and find a terminal: You go in at flight speed and two and one-half seconds later you're stopped."


In other words, a carrier-style landing and launch for the air taxi traveler of 2053. Rutan insists how much fun it would be—this from a man who ran test-pilot programs.


It's a good way to end a day of prediction among these clear-eyed types—with a little of the old-style futurism,
a reminder that flying has always been about engineering in the service of something dreamy, something fantastic. Something that, on December 17, 1903, on a sandy beach in North Carolina, actually happened.