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The small airplane is too dirty for an environmentally threatened world. Thats not the view from eco-activists, but from some of the leading lights in general aviation—the category encompassing small planes such as Cessnas flown by citizen pilots. At some point, some environmental group is going to figure out that small aircraft fly leaded fuel, said Mark Moore, NASAs personal air vehicle program manager, to a meeting of engineers, aviation advocates and a billionaire corporate titan with his own private jet. Their goal, however, is not to bury private aviation, but to remake it as the greenest form of personal transit.

Veteran Pilot Vern Raburn has a plan to save us from the nightmare that is modern air travel-the lines, the endless delays, the crowded cabins. His company, Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, is manufacturing the most inexpensive business jet ever: a six-seat bird called the Eclipse 500. Hailed as the nation´s first real air taxi, one that could shuttle customers between America´s 5,400 small (read: uncrowded) airports, the jet costs just $1.5 million.

The future of secure travel hinges on seamless, instant communication-and 24/7 autonomous surveillance. For a look at the technologies that will soon safeguard your travel plans, launch the photo gallery.

Can't decide where to spend your fortune on a trip out of Earth's atmosphere? Check out our Tourist's Guide to Space.

For years, the U.S. military has wanted a plane that could loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound. And then level it. But aircraft that excel at subsonic flight are inefficient at Mach speeds, and vice versa. The answer is Switchblade, an unmanned, shape-changing plane concept under development by Northrop Grumman.

Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, famed for the U-2 and Blackbird spy planes that flew higher than anything else in the world in their day, is trying for a different altitude record: an airplane that starts and ends its mission 150 feet underwater. The Cormorant, a stealthy, jet-powered, autonomous aircraft that could be outfitted with either short-range weapons or surveillance equipment, is designed to launch out of the Trident missile tubes in some of the U.S. Navy's gigantic Cold Warâ€era Ohio-class submarines.