Future flight

Most Indian newspapers barely noticed the centenary last week of powered flight. There was the odd report, or a photograph of the re-make of the Wright brothers' plane. Some did an extra pictorial feature, but no one looked ahead at what the next century (or even the next quarter century) of air travel might bring.

This might be because the planes that airlines use have not increased their speeds for the last half a century. So, as far as the passenger experience is concerned, a flight three decades ago was pretty much the same as a flight today, except for personal movie screens and quieter interiors.

From the airlines' point of view, planes have become more fuel-efficient and safer, but for them too it has been a story of incremental change.

In contrast, military aircraft have seen more radical innovations: stealth planes, for instance, and planes without a vertical fin and which achieve level flight by using over 100 times the computer code as the rocket that took man to the moon. We've also seen the birth of unmanned flight, and its increasing importance since it has the potential to change warfare. And finally, we've seen one space tourist, who could be the precursor to a whole industry if private experiments in rocket design succeed.

The more exciting story, though, lies in the accounts of how research being done today will change the civilian flying experience more dramatically than anything since pressurised cabins and jet planes. Some airlines will soon be offering Internet connectivity throughout the flight, so that your time in the air becomes an opportunity to clear your mail.

And Airbus will roll out in a few months the first fully double-decker aircraft, with the capacity to fly over 800 people. We are also seeing the advent of aircraft with much greater range, so that you could fly from Delhi to New York in about 15 hours, non-stop -- which means you could board in Delhi after dinner, and be in New York for breakfast. But these, it seems, are just for starters.

What lie further in the future are planes that will fly at the speed of rockets, or about 10 times the speed of sound, and take you anywhere on the planet in less than four hours. This will become possible with what are called scramjets, which draw oxygen from the air during flight, thereby reducing the fuel load to be carried.

Also being worked on are aircraft that will be a combination of helicopter and aeroplane: tiltrotor engines tilt downward for vertical take-off and then swing forward for the rest of the flight. These planes will make take-off and landing possible from city centres, thereby avoiding the long ride to airports and possibly halving the total travel time.

A third direction of research focuses on super-sized cargo planes that will fly barely 20 feet above water in order to cut drag and save fuel; they will be possibly 10 times the size of a Boeing 747, and fly at half its speed, becoming what someone called a flying ship.

But the real revolution will lie in the concept of air taxis: planes that are much cheaper than today's executive jets and which go where you want to go, rather than the other way round. These are small aircraft that will dispense with the need for air traffic control, and navigate by using GPS (global positioning satellite) systems and a broadband, wireless Internet in the sky.

With such aircraft, passengers can use a point-to-point, on-demand air service that by-passes the whole business of large, crowded airports with their hub-and-spoke connections that waste both time and money.

Many of these changes will become inevitable as passenger air traffic trebles over the next quarter century, and as the more fuel efficient planes that are being developed make air travel still cheaper. Which is not to say that all the projects will succeed.

For instance, there is as yet no breakthrough in developing the light-weight composites that can withstand the heat generated by hypersonic travel.

Nevertheless, it seems pretty certain that air travel will eventually get faster, safer and cheaper, and challenge today's standard business model that has forced many airline companies off the runway. All this is being envisioned in just 100 years of Orville Wright being in the air for all of 12 seconds.

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