A moment of irony happened to me the other day, I have been a little out of the loop on Aviation news as of late so it was odd when out of nowhere I had a thought that said something along the lines of "General Aviation is going to be the wave of the future, the Airlines are living in the past."
It's something I have thought about before, but this thought inspired me to look at AV Web again, which I haven't checked in a few months, and ironically enough on the front page there was a story about how Airbus is patenting a new seat design that will allow for more seats on an airliner at the expense of passenger comfort.
The article states: "Recognizing that modern airline passengers will endure almost any indignity in return for cheap fares, the design calls for seats that look like old-style, wide bicycle saddles mounted on a thick, horizontal bar."
Yes that's right, if the TSA groping wasn't enough to make you stop flying airliners forever, now you get to have the pleasure of sitting on an uncomfortable seat just so the plane can pack in more people into an increasingly more unpleasant environment.
I honestly think this will push it too far for a lot of people and if Airbus starts implementing these seats they will find out that most people will be unwilling to suffer yet another indignity just for a cheaper ticket.
The reality has become that Airlines are now the least pleasant, most uncomfortable, most degrading method of travel, with the only advantage over their competition being speed on delivery. All the glamor of flying on the airliners is gone, and I think people are starting to gauge whether or not it's really worth the time gain to travel by air.
Realistically though, people don't want to lose the speed advantages of flying which opens the door for new opportunities and new markets, in fact there have already been inroads made in this sector.
Cirrus came out with it's idea of Flying 2.0 where passengers would book flights on small GA (General Aviation) aircraft instead of big passenger jets. NASA also came out with its idea for a Small Aircraft Transportation System back in the 80s which bore fruit in the 2011 Green Flight Challenge producing small electric aircraft that got 400 passenger miles to the gallon.
Engineers have made big improvements in the safety of GA aircraft with the introduction of glass cockpits, GPS systems and ballistic parachutes, this makes GA flying arguably as safe, if not safer, then Commercial Aviation.
There are also big improvements in diesel aviation with companies producing new lightweight engines with nearly twice the fuel efficiency of non-diesel airplanes.
Also there have been more and more flying car designs coming out in recent history, and other personal flying vehicles like the E-volo that are just on the tip of mass production.
Evolutionary ideas like the Synergy Aircraft show that small airplanes will very shortly be vastly less expensive to fly, costing the same as it costs to operate a car in the future.This not only means far cheaper fares but less pollution as well.
Designs like the Icon A5 are able to achieve what the FAA refers to as "Stall Resistances" a milestone for General Aviation and aircraft safety.
The list goes on and on of innovation and new ideas coming to the GA field. Not least of them, ideas like the Solarship that's also a hybrid airship. Overall it seems like the pace of innovation in GA is far surpassing Commercial Aviation.
With all these new designs and ideas going into GA, and with airliners stuck in thinking about how they can sacrifice personal comfort for their bottom line, it seems clear that a paradigm shift is on the horizon.
Airliners may become too bulky and too expensive to operate over the lightweight sleek designs in General Aviation's future.
I'm not suggesting that airlines will not evolve as well in the future, in fact, it seems like we are just on the cusp of building the worlds first real space plane, which if adapted to commercial aviation could mean airplane trips from New York to Sydney in less then 3 hours. Nevermind it can also go to space.
However, what I see in the future is a world filled with all sorts of different flying machines, kinda like looking at all the different types of bacteria a Petri dish. And just like bacteria they will all be competing with each other to be the best at their respective niches.
Helicopters and airliners will need to evolve just as fast to keep pace or they will simply become obsolete.
As such, when we look at the state of airline travel today, it could be we are really seeing the end of an era. They may well become an old fashion way to travel, and all the hardships we are putting up with today will be seen as the last dying breaths of the airliners as the globule leader in air travel.
Maybe those visionaries that saw the future where everyone had a flying car are not too far off from reality, with the variation of ideas and flying machines that are coming to the future, it would seem a new future is dawning on General Aviation, as the sun is setting on the airliners.
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