Free Flight

The troubles of the airline system have become acute in the post-terrorist era. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by keeping planes full and funneling traffic through a centralized hub-and-spoke routing system. Virtually all of the technological innovation in airplanes in the last thirty years has been devoted to moving passengers more efficiently between major hubs. But what was left out of this equation was the convenience and flexibility of the average traveler. Now, because of heightened security, hours of waiting are tacked onto each trip. As James Fallows vividly explains, a technological revolution is under way that will relieve this problem. Free Flight features the stories of three groups who are inventing and building the future of all air travel: NASA, Cirrus Design in Duluth, Minnesota, and Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These ventures should make it possible for more people to travel the way corporate executives have for years: in small jet planes, from the airport that's closest to their home or office directly to the airport closest to where they really want to go. This will be possible because of a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small, radically inexpensive jet planes, as different from airliners as personal computers are from mainframes. And, as Fallows explains in a new preface, a system that avoids the congestion of the overloaded hub system will offer advantages in speed, convenience, and especially security in the new environment of air travel.

Fallows, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, explores future trends in commercial aviation technology that may make airline travel easier and quicker than the current hub system. He focuses on three separate groups of innovators who are developing a NASA small plane research program, a small airplane with a parachute for the entire plane, and an inexpensive jet plane for air taxi services. c. Book News Inc.

This report describes PLANAR, a data-reduction program for wind tunnel free-flight tests which utilizes data from a single plane. The program calculates moment, force and, in the case of a spinning model, Magnus coefficients. The program is written for an IBM 7090 computer operating under the IBSYS monitor. The mathematical formulation of the problem and the computer program are presented. The program description includes a FORTRAN listing and instructions for its use. (Author).