Plane Conversations

In a May 12 USDOT press release DOT Secretary Ray LaHood announced the members of the  Future of Aviation Advisors Committee.

Quoting from the press release: The Future of Aviation Advisory Committee was formally established in March to provide information, advice, and recommendations to the Secretary on ensuring the competitiveness of the U.S. aviation industry and its capability to address the evolving transportation needs, challenges and opportunities of the U.S. and global economy.

“Aviation is essential to our nation’s economy and our ability to compete in international commerce,” Secretary LaHood said.  “This committee, which represents a broad cross-section of the aviation community, will begin the important conversation about how to ensure the industry remains vital and competitive.”

The committee will focus principally on five issue areas:  ensuring aviation safety, ensuring a world-class aviation workforce, balancing the industry’s competitiveness and viability, securing stable funding for aviation systems, and addressing environmental challenges and solutions.

The advisory committee grew out of a forum last November hosted by Secretary LaHood on the future of the U.S. aviation industry, during which he urged attendees to nominate potential committee members. The members selected represent airlines, airports, labor, manufacturers, environment, finance, academia, consumer interests, and general aviation stakeholders.  The committee will meet at least four times over the next year, after which it will issue its recommendations to the Secretary.

You can go to the link above to see the rest of the press release and get the full list of the names of the members to the committee. Here is the basic rundown of the committee members by who they represent:

• Academia: 2
• Airport Management: 3
• Government: 1
• Airlines: 4
• Airline Unions: 3
• Airline Manufacturers: 2
• Investment Banking / Analyst: 2
• Consultant Consumers Union: 1
• General Aviation Manufacturers: 1
• General Aviation Operators and Small Business: 0
• General Aviation Associations: 0

In the press release, they mention that general aviation stakeholders are represented. The only General Aviation Stakeholder I can find in this group is Jack Pelton, CEO of Cessna.

What about the rest of GA including any of the associations like AOPA with 500,000 members or NATA or NBAA, or any air charter company, or small aircaft maintenance company?

Airlines and their Unions get 7 committee members and if you add up the rest most are tied to or affiliated to the airlines. General Aviation which represents 1.3 million jobs in this country doesn’t seem to have much of a voice in this administration and their committee.

Rob Mark in his May 17 Jetwhine Blog post says it better than I could ever say it. We ought to be Mad as Hell and we should not take it anymore. Thanks, Rob, for bringing this to our attention.

What do you say about it?

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Do you agree or disagree with his position?

Congressman James Oberstar, Chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, offers an opposition viewpoint to the merger of Continental and United. His opinion is published in USA Today Op/ Ed section and can be found in its entirety at

 http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-05-14-editorial14_ST1_N.htm

While I agree with Congressman Oberstar on many issues relating to our industry, especially holding the FAA accountable and his support of General Aviation through the GA Caucus, I disagree with his position on the proposed merger.

The following is an excerpt of his piece in USA today:

This (the merger) is the very antithesis of the structure I voted for when Congress deregulated the industry in 1978. Deregulation promised robust competition and innovation — not market domination by a few powerful carriers.

Beyond encouraging future mergers, the proposed United-Continental merger itself presents problems. The two carriers’ networks overlap on 13 routes between some of America’s largest markets. The two carriers also compete in a number of international markets.

The Justice Department has already expressed its concerns over a reduction in competition between United and Continental. Last year, the two airlines applied for antitrust immunity to collaborate on international service. The department said granting immunity would reduce competition and raise fares in markets where United and Continental claim big shares. As a result, the Transportation Department removed several foreign markets from the immunity.

If antitrust immunity in these markets is unacceptable, how can we now accept a merger that would have the same effect of reducing competition on important domestic and international routes?

The Justice Department should demonstrate that same degree of caution now and put an end to this merger madness.

The problem with his position is that the airlines through this “robust competition” over the past 32 years have not offered better service and done very little to innovate. They have offered lower fares and consequently have been doomed to aggregated losses as an industry since deregulation.

The investors (stockholders) in the airlines have taken a beating and I have to wonder why anyone would ever buy stock in an airline in a long-term hold position. Robert Crandall, former CEO of American, says don’t buy stock in airlines, they are a bad deal. For the airline industry to survive something has to give on the profit (or lack thereof) problem 

It seems that the Congressman and many others in DC consider the airlines much like a utility that needs regulation to keep them from monopolizing markets and raising fares. That is contrary to the position of deregulation that should allow the market to work it out.

The other assumption that many are making, that I believe to be flawed in its logic, is that the consumer has no other choice, so we have to keep the airlines in check. Travel by airlines is not like a utility such as electrical power where we don’t have a choice. The traveling public can drive, take trains in some cases and also fly in private aircraft. Or they can choose not to travel it all. Our nation is blessed with a multi-faceted transportation system.  

I continue to believe that the airlines should be allowed to work this out in a free market way and let the traveling public determine the airlines success by choosing to or not to buy seats at whatever price the airlines think they can charge.

What do you think?

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There has been a lot of press lately about the airlines continuing to add fees for everything they can think of.

I don’t know what these guys are thinking when they do this.  

An article on CNN’s site quoting airline consultant Robert Mann, says the following about their thinking:

 Airline consultant Robert Mann of R.W. Mann & Co. expects the carry-on and possible toilet fee to remain firmly in the realm of the aggressive discount carriers, who capitalize on “an infinite demand for very low fares.”

“A lot of people will put up with a lot of inconvenience and crazy fees in order to think they got a low fare,” Mann said.

Can they not just figure out how to charge a price and make money to cover it? Are they trying to modify our traveling behavior through a pricing scheme?  

There is now proposed legislation requiring the airlines to disclose their add on fees to the customer in a way that you would really know what you are paying prior to travel.

So should we require McDonalds to tell you how much they are charging for the special sauce when you buy the Big Mac? Or can we be content that we either think the Big Mac is worth it at the price, or we don’t buy it.

Every time the airlines irritate the consumer with their pricing schemes or bad schedules or whatever the irritant of the day is, the government tries to legislate some way to make them behave.

Most of the airlines you fly on have their flight attendants thank you for choosing them.  It goes something like this: “Thanks for flying with us today; we know you have a choice and we are glad you chose us”.

Our friend Dan Robles who posts frequently on Plane Conversations writes the following about the airlines pricing schemes in a recent post on his site:

Steven Frishling (www.flyingwithfish.com) predicts that there will be a schism in the industry, some airlines will take on the race to the bottom with ancillary fees and others will realize that every angry customer is an opportunity to migrate to a superior travel experience.

Charging is obnoxious – every hit hurts. In fact, Expedia makes the majority of their fees off everything except airlines, why can’t airlines?

Steven suggests that the opposite of bundling – integrating hotels, taxis, sponsors, etc even using frequent flyer miles – is a the best way to improve the experience of flying.  Airlines should provide targeted portals, build sponsored content, attract sponsor revenue, supply hotlinks, etc. All of these are clever ways to derive revenue without alienating passengers.

All this “cost-saving” of ancillary pricing can quickly become a huge liability as competitors come along with comparable prices and superior service. Social media is proving to be an excellent tool for reaching out to passengers and understanding the needs. This allows them to package features smartly, unbundle fees in a way that adds value to the experience, not by squandering trust and respect at every opportunity.

Ultimately, the market will take care of this anti-social behavior of the airlines.  Maybe some airlines will succeed by attracting that “infinite demand for very low fares,” but I have to believe that most of us do not want the confusion, inconvenience and trickery of it all.  

We do have a choice as to who we fly with. We even have a choice to not fly at all. What about the choice to fly in a private aircraft?  Can we offer these consumers a better choice at a price they can live with?

If the airlines aren’t going to do what Steve Frishling suggests, then why don’t we?

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In recent posts I have talked about the need to bridge the price gap between travel using private aviation (corporate jets) and using air mass-transit ( the airlines) if private aviation is to expand its market.

The gap can be incrementally closed if the costs of flying in private aircraft can be reduced with lower operating costs using new generation aircraft, utilizing aircraft more efficiently and selling seats on the aircraft instead of buying the whole aircraft for a charter flight.

In a March 4, 2010, Popular Mechanic online article by Glen Harlan Reynolds has the following headline about the new HondaJet:

Can Honda Bring Corporate-Style Jet Travel to the Masses?

Included below are excerpts from the article which is well worth the time to read in its entirety.

Private jet travel is convenient, luxurious and, of course, very expensive. The Honda Jet represents an effort at changing that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices

So my column for the magazine in a couple of months is on new approaches to air travel. In the course of writing it, I spent a day with the pilots, engineers and designers of an aircraft that’s meant to bring about just that sort of new approach: the HondaJet, a fast, comparatively cheap five-passenger Very Light Jet that Honda hopes will not only appeal to the usual run of corporate-jet purchasers, but that will also promote an entirely new way of flying, one that’s capable of bridging the gap between cheap-but-unreliable commercial jet travel and swanky-but-expensive corporate jet travel. What I saw makes me think that the Honda folks just may be onto something.

This is no secret, of course, to the people who travel by private jet now. But private jet travel is very expensive, which is why it is the domain of CEOs, celebrities and the like. The HondaJet represents an effort at changing all of that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices.  (Fully loaded, Fujino says, the cost per seat on the HondaJet should be roughly comparable to a first-class commercial ticket). To keep costs down, the Honda folks have put a lot of thought into ways to make the plane as small and inexpensive as possible, without sacrificing comfort or speed. .

Overall, the HondaJet has a sleekness and a friendly, pleasing personality that reminds me of an iPhone, or some other cleverly designed bit of consumer hardware. You just want to like it.

What about the environment, though? Won’t all these small jets zipping around be worse for emissions than a few big ones? The answer seems to be no. Based on fuel consumption, speed and range, the HondaJet seems to be just about exactly as efficient per seat-mile as the ubiquitous Canadair CRJ-200 regional jet. But that probably understates things, because if I were flying from Knoxville to, say, Washington, D.C., I’d be traveling a straight-line distance of 353 nautical miles, while if I took a commercial flight, I’d probably be going by way of Atlanta for a distance of 605 nautical miles. (I’d also have a travel time of about an hour on the HondaJet, rather than something like 4 hours traveling via Atlanta.) So while the precise environmental impact of replacing hub-and-spoke commercial travel with direct-flight travel on the HondaJet is open to dispute, it seems unlikely that there will be much impact.

Honda hopes that the plane will sell not only to the usual run of jet customers, but to air-taxi services, and, in fact, Fujino, who makes a point of calling the HondaJet an Advanced Light Jet rather than a Very Light Jet, tells me that they expect this to be a case of the product driving the market. Although other efforts to build an on-demand air-taxi market at low cost have stalled with the current economic downturn, those efforts faced financial and technological problems that Honda expects to avoid, and by the time the HondaJets are rolling off the line at full speed, there’s a good chance that the economy will have recovered. So the air-taxi model—where you got to a website, enter your destination, and have a small jet swoop down to pick you up, possibly at a small business airport rather than a big one where parking and security hassles are greater—may well have a chance.

I certainly would like to see something like that happen. I fly coach myself; I’ll occasionally spring for an upgrade to first class when the airline offers me a deal, but when I do take the upgrade I’m usually underwhelmed. To me, the problem with air travel as it exists now isn’t a lack of free drinks, but a lack of convenient scheduling, and the risk of delays caused by missed connections.

If Honda gets it right they will certainly be part of the solution. I hope they do and I look forward to seeing them flying next year.

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The following are excerpts from a March 9 Chicago Tribune article by Jon Hilkevitch.  

Passengers on U.S. airlines will pay relatively small increases in airfares over the next 20 years, but they should expect more flights crowding the nation’s busiest airports, including O’Hare International, the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday.

Travelers hoping to stretch out across an empty seat next to them will likely be out of luck. And, sorry, the small regional jets that are so unpopular among a significant segment of passengers are here to stay, although the commuter airlines will begin retiring their 50-seat jets in favor of somewhat larger aircraft.

The FAA now says it will take until 2023 to hit the 1 billion mark, indicating modest annual growth from the 704 million passengers carried in 2009 by U.S. airlines, on both domestic and international flights. Total passengers will rise to 1.21 billion by 2030, the agency said.

Coming off 2009, when U.S. airlines lost $8.1 billion, the total number of commercial flights is forecast to decrease 2.7 percent this year, the FAA said.  Flight volumes will then grow at an average annual rate of 1.5 percent by 2030, the FAA said.

Jetliners, which are nearly full on most flights today as the carriers try to prop up airfares, will stay that way, leveling out at 82 percent of all seats occupied on flights over the next 20 years, the FAA said.

While most passengers will continue to fly on the big, mainline airlines, that segment of the industry will grow the slowest over the forecast period, officials said. The biggest percentage gains will occur on international flights, followed by regional commuter airlines that operate smaller aircraft. Those regional airlines bucked the negative industry trend by turning a profit in 2009, FAA officials noted.

Twenty-nine large hub airports, including O’Hare and Midway, are projected to handle the bulk of the increased flights, growing at an average of 3 percent a year in landings and takeoffs through 2030, the FAA said.  It means that to prevent aviation gridlock, the FAA must complete its ambitious transformation of the nation’s air-traffic system, dubbed NextGen, to a satellite-based system that replaces the current ground-based radar.

So what does all of this mean for Private/ Business Aviation?

The airlines are going to crowd more people on aircraft by constraining supply in an effort to raise prices; they are going to use more regional airliners; they are going to focus more on the 29 major airports in the U.S., and focus more on international flights.  This looks like mass transit to me.

None of these trends provide better solutions for business travelers in small and mid size markets.

What it does spell is more delays, crowded flights, less tolerance on bad weather days at crowded hubs (I am feeling that right now sitting at ATL on a busy travel day and bad weather).

In all of this I see opportunity like never before for the general aviation and business aviation sectors to step up to fill the voids and ease the pain.  There are 5500 airports and the airlines are going to focus growth on the top 29? They only fly to around 500 airports in total so that leaves a lot of room for private aviation to provide point-to-point solutions between the rest of the nation’s airports.  

Air travel is supposed to be about time efficiency and if the FAA is correct in their forecast, the time to travel by air mass-transit is going to slow down even more, which widens the gap in time gained by flying private and helps close the gap in costs when you value your time.

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4 in a 4 part Series:

In the previous posts in this series, we discussed the gaps in Price and Time between Private Aviation and Air Mass Transit travel.  This time we are going to look at the gap in customer experience.

It is easy to measure price in terms of actual dollars and in terms of the value of our time, which we can use as an offset of the price gap. The more difficult gap to measure is the difference in the experience of the two forms of travel. To date, I am not sure if anyone has been able to accurately quantify the difference in the traveler’s experience. The ability to measure the traveler’s experience on either a private aircraft or an airline and compare that to the alternate experience, would give us a more meaningful comparison between the two.  That comparison could then be quantified and translated into a monetary measurement, which would go towards offsetting the price gap.  I believe that offset would be a valuable tool in selling private aviation services.

Here is what we know for sure!

Those who have experienced private aviation as a form of travel often justify the high price by speaking of the better experience as opposed to traveling by air mass-transit.  Call it the Hassle Factor of the airlines: the anti-social behavior of the passengers we share space with in an airliner, the rude treatment we sometimes receive, the lack of control over where we go and how we have to get there, the uncomfortable feeling of being compressed into a space that is measured in inches of seat pitch, the food served (or mostly not served) on the planes, the baggage abuse (bags don’t have feelings but I don’t like my stuff being abused) and on and on……

You get the point.

Stack that against the experience of private aviation.

Not one single person I have spoken to in 28 years of being in this business has ever said to me, “I can hardly wait to go back to traveling on the airline since I can’t afford to travel in a private aircraft anymore.” Not one. Every aircraft owner, charter customer or private pilot / aircraft owner pilot cites the better experience of flying by private aircraft as the number one reason to close the price gap. They don’t know how to quantify it but they know what they know. How good would it be for our industry to develop a tool that measures the experience, quantifies it and then translates it into dollars?

As consumers, we purchase experience with our hard earned money every single day. We pay more for an iPhone than for a Blackberry because we like the experience. We ride in a luxury car rather than in a compact car because of the experience. Both serve the same purpose since we arrive at the same time regardless of the type car, but what a different experience to ride in a nice driving, luxury car as opposed to a compact.

If we can ever measure and quantify the experience and then communicate that measurement to the market we might be able to come a long way in bridging the price gap that has prevented the many from experiencing the joy of travel by a mode that the few have become accustomed and maybe even addicted to!

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Part 3 in a 4 part Series

There is a huge gap between the time it takes to get from origin to destination by Private Aviation and the time it takes on the Airlines. In some cases, even a small, single-engine, propeller aircraft can get you there quicker than the airlines. In all cases, a business jet aircraft can get you there quicker and here is why:

• Your schedule:  You start by setting your own schedule when you use private aviation. If it makes sense to leave at 7am, then you leave at 7am. You set the time of departure based on when you want to arrive on the other end. Have a meeting at 10am?  Then you set your departure time to arrive in time to make your 10 am meeting. Easy enough. No traveling the night before.
• Closer airports: With over 5500 airports in this country and only 500 of them having any commercial service at all you have an additional 5000 airports to choose from when you take a trip via private aircraft; so, in all cases you can get closer to your real destination. Instead of going into the large commercial airport closest to where you want to go, most of the time there is a smaller airport that saves a lot of driving once you get there. That also works on the departure end. In larger cities there are several airports located on different sides of town, allowing you to pick the one closest to your home or office and leave from there. If you live in a small town, then you no longer have that sometimes one to two-hour drive to a big city to catch an airline flight. In our home state of Tennessee, we have more than 80 airports; so, no matter where you live in our state, you are no more than 30 minutes from a public airport. Smaller airports are less congested, giving you the added benefit of less time holding in the air or on the ground due to busy airport traffic jams.
• Direct Flights: You always go direct with private aviation; so, you waste no time going though a hub airport with one to four-hour layovers and multiple boarding processes just to get to your destination.
• No standing around: Flying in private aircraft, you can show up between five and ten minutes prior to the departure time you set, park close to the private aviation terminal and, in some cases, pull up next to the aircraft to unload bags. You are greeted by the pilots and you board immediately. You can skip the time wasted riding the shuttle to the terminal from long-term or off airport parking, queuing up for baggage checks, security screening and then waiting at the gate for 45 minutes.  There is no way you can plan on getting to the gate just five minutes before scheduled departure – the air mass-transit’s Contract of Carriage forbids it.

When you compare the two methods of air travel, the savings of time by flying private aircraft can be hours per trip and, in many cases, even days.  When we get people to their meetings and back on the same day, they tell us that the airlines would have taken two days with a limited meeting schedule or three days if they wanted a full day of meetings.

Everyone has a value on their time and it is especially important to quantify that value when you think in terms of productivity in business. Those who charge directly for their time like accountants or lawyers can easily quantify their time and compare the options to see if they can gain productivity by using a more efficient means to travel. Most travelers don’t think about it because they assume that they don’t have an option. What if we gave them a tool to measure the productivity of alternate means of travel? Could that close the gap?

What is your time worth?

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2 in a 4 Part Series

In this discussion, we will focus on the gap of pricing between Private Aviation and Airline Travel. Is there a way for us to partially bridge the gap? And, if so, how much do we need to bridge it to make it worth the time savings and better experience?

A round-trip airline ticket from Nashville, Tennessee, to New York City (BNA to LGA) costs between $525 (with one stop) and $1100 (non-stop).  Expedia publishes a travel time of 3:45 for the one stop and 2:00 for the non-stop, a difference of an hour and 45 minutes.

Flying the same route in an eight-passenger private jet costs approximately $10,000.  That price is the same whether you fly by yourself or if you take seven friends or business associates with you. You save at least two hours of terminal time avoiding the airline and your experience will be better.

Most of us have difficulty justifying this price since we seldom need to take seven friends or business associates with us; so, the price per person is $10,000 or maybe, at best, $2500 if there are four of us going.  That’s often still a tough sell.

As I see it, there are only two ways to bridge the gap between the two modes of travel:

• Bring the total price of the private aircraft charter down relative to the mass-transit price
• Fill the aircraft with eight travelers

The first solution can work from both sides.  The gap shrinks if either airline fares go up or air charter prices go down.  If both things happen, the gap shrinks even more.   While I don’t believe the gap will ever be totally closed, every incremental movement works to the advantage of our industry, taking into account private air travel advantages in the other two gaps – passenger experience and time savings.

Private air travel can bring the price down when fleet utilization goes up. Many of the costs of traveling by private jet are fixed; so,  you can lower the overall operating costs with higher utilization, which allows you to spread the fixed costs over a wider base AND which allows the traveler to buy at a lower price point.

Private air travel can also bring the costs down by utilizing new technology aircraft that are more fuel efficient and cost less to maintain, thereby driving down the variable operating costs to deliver the service.

These two ways of driving down costs have been used by the airlines to deliver a consistent service at lower price points. Southwest and JetBlue are the best current examples of this in the US air mass-transit system.

That leaves us with the problem of filling the seats. How do we fill enough of the seats on private charter flights to drive the costs down for each person traveling? Can we solve this problem? Would travelers migrate to a private jet flight if they could buy the seat for $1250 round trip ($10,000 divided by eight) when they could pay $1100 on the airlines?

A 10% pricing gap put into the overall matrix of price, time, and experience is a game-changer.  With that narrow of a gap, those who are used to the airline experience, but who tolerate it only because there is no real alternative, are likely to move to private aviation. Those who are already used to the price of private aviation might not sacrifice aircraft exclusivity; but, realistically, they aren’t the ones walking the bridge we just made from air mass-transit to private aviation anyway.  While some of them make take advantage of the shared aircraft, they aren’t really our target market.  We want the passengers using air-mass transit only because they have no alternative.  We want the passengers who have given up flying altogether due to the negative experience and wasted time.  We want the passengers who are in search of the better mousetrap because we believe that private aviation is it.

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Part 1 in a 4 Part Series

There are three distinct gaps between flying by Private Aircraft and Air Mass-Transit:

• Price: In most cases, flying by private aircraft is more expensive than flying by airlines. The best way to understand it is to compare the price differences between taking a taxi or limousine and taking the bus or metro train. It is difficult to get the price gap to close when one form moves masses of people between points on a schedule and the other form moves a few or even only one person on-demand. How can the limo ever be as cheap as the bus?

• Efficiency of Time: In most cases, flying by private aircraft will be more time efficient since you set the destination airport and schedule, rather than flying on the route structure and schedule the air mass-transit service sets. Air mass-transit routes may not include the airport closest to your origin and/or destination and the flight paths may not even be the most direct routes between the two airports. The nature of mass transit requires the traveler to show up early at a terminal that may or may not be close to their true origin and then queue up to get through the systems of ticketing, boarding and security,  all adding time to the total travel. Private aircraft, for the most part, avoid all of these time killers. Measuring the time difference is easy enough for most of us and putting a value on our time should also be easy. Once our time value is quantified, we can measure the time gap and put a value on it. Quantifying that time gap in dollar terms helps close the price gap.

• Experience: The passenger experience gap existing between the two forms of travel is one which no one can yet precisely quantify, but is one that we know to be vast just from our own experiences. Those who use private air travel often talk about the experience and rationalize that the experience itself justifies the price gap. When those passengers cannot totally make the time-price gaps meet, they make the final closure based on the quality of the experience. Traveling in a private aircraft is as pleasant and social as taking a road trip with friends or family – or perhaps even more so. Traveling on the airlines is as pleasant and social as taking a road trip with the Griswolds – or perhaps even less so.

How can we quantify all of the gaps between private or business aviation and air mass-transit so that we can accurately measure them?  Once we quantify and measure the gaps, how do we close them so that more travelers will be drawn to the superior mode of travel we have to offer?

Closing or shrinking the gaps will make it possible for more people to use private aviation as an alternative to airlines and, in some cases, even other forms of travel. Could it be that people who have chosen not to travel at all due to the negative experience and wasted time factors of mass-transit travel may choose to travel again?

Does this make sense?

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We are beginning a new decade with hopes of economic growth and concerns about the fragile state of the air transportation system all bundled up in a basket of cautious optimism.

In a recent USA Today article by by Rick Hampson,  he looks ahead for the next ten years with forecasts where we will be in different areas of life and includes airline travel (air mass-transit) in the mix. Interestingly, he does not give general aviation or business aviation a mention for this ten year forecast.

Here is what Rick Hampson says about air travel:

 •Chronic delays… again. The year 2020 could end up feeling like 2000, when delays plagued aviation. Delays already are common at the three major New York airports and often cascade across the nation. Looking ahead, there are few advanced plans for new runways or major airports and little hope for quick implementation of the government’s “next generation” air-traffic control system.

 •More non-stop destinations. New long-range aircraft — notably the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 XWB — will open routes that technically were impossible or commercially unprofitable. Airlines will fly to more medium-size overseas cities such as Osaka or Prague and make more overseas flights from U.S. hubs previously too small to support more than a few, such as Denver, Phoenix, Cleveland and Memphis.

•Space tourism. Outer space could join the list of destinations. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic promises to start commercial “suborbital” flights as soon as this year from the recently christened Spaceport America in New Mexico. By 2020, travelers with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare probably will be able to book a real flight to outer space.

 •The return of the turboprop. Airlines raced to replace unpopular turboprops with regional jets 10 years ago. But the regional jets never made the money some airlines expected, and their small storage bins and low headroom alienated many travelers. A new generation of advanced turboprop models —Bombardier’s Q-400 series, for example — offer a quieter, smoother ride than their predecessors. And their ability to land on shorter runways gives airlines flexibility at congested airports.

So based on the forecast where does that leave those of us in general aviation and business aviation in 10 years?

It is up to us to make our own future; so, let me propose the opportunities that this forecast (if true) presents to our side of air transportation.

With chronic delays, business travelers and high-end travelers (maybe even the regular tourists) will become increasingly frustrated with the inefficiency of the air mass-transit system. These travelers will be begging for solutions and they will find them. They will get back on trains, get in their cars and drive and they will look for other forms of air travel that don’t waste their time. They will look for solutions that are cost-effective and they will value their time more and more in a world that will pick up the pace as information flows faster and change happens at the speed of the internet.

The increase in non-stop international destinations is a bright spot for the airlines. We will be able to travel worldwide more efficiently and those of us who live in large and mid market metro areas will have more options for non-stop flights to the rest of the world. Could it be that the airlines are realizing that the only place they can be efficient is in long haul international flights? When an airliner is in the air for ten hours they can make up for the time lost at the terminal. On a one-hour domestic flight it may not be worth it to even fly on the airlines anymore.

With the return of the turboprop to air mass-transit (it never left in general aviation and in other places around the world), new airports will be opened up to air service. New solutions will serve the underserved markets.I predict that they will not all be mainline carriers or their commuter subsidiaries who have developed a terrible reputation in the small markets.

Nowhere in this list does Mr. Hampson mention the effect of social technology on travel! In the next few years, the market will wake up to the idea that they don’t have to put up with inefficient and anti-social (bad customer service) air travel offered in the air mass-transit system.

The market will realize that they can create their own solutions.

Will those of us who offer private air travel solutions today be ready to meet the market and give them what they want? If we don’t, then someone new will come along and figure it out! 

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