Mandatory equipment is already providing the technical side of the solution, but we don’t need to invoke smartplane ™ technology to address this concern. Just as one busy restaurant can only feed a certain number at a time, the present volume of aircraft manufacturing would take decades to put a few airplanes at every airport, let alone clutter the empty sky. But for other reasons, there really is not, nor will there be, “air traffic” in the sense people imagine, once we no longer need to concentrate everyone at huge airports.
Most people form their ideas about this topic without small aircraft experience, or with it in a very urban context, or perhaps from a bit of sci-fi movie magic. By the time a few thousand quiet small airplanes start to slowly repopulate empty community airfields one at a time, our perspective will have profoundly shifted away from sprawling airports that concentrate people and planes for “convenience.” Modern flight expands our habitat exponentially, diluting all traffic, and even the urban role in creating it.
Think about it: passengers from all over a five-million-acre region are first funneled to these packing centers (making traffic), then screened and made to wait, so that they can distribute from another such site upon landing into another five million acres of potential actual destination. Why not just come and go directly, to and from wherever? A hub airport hallway is bigger than a Synergy landing site, and can be (or already is) located anywhere.
Taking people directly to and from their closest airfields in a car-like modern airplane makes older concepts of “traffic” utterly disappear. It can be hard to see this at first because the confining 2-D ribbons of congestion on the ground paint a greatly distorted picture in our minds. Pilots escaping the traffic prison marvel at the truth, which is that one can fly all day yet never even see the occasional fellow aviator pointed out on his screen, many miles away. It’s a freedom we dare you to think about, for the good of humanity.
Try this, the next time you’re stuck in traffic wanting your own Synergy: imagine leveling every obstacle, bump, and building for a thousand miles in every direction. Now imagine it all paved as smooth as a tennis court, devoid of cars, and give yourself permission to drive anywhere you want on it, avoiding anything that even looks scary. Now imagine stacking each empty three-million-square-mile-patio you just made, like a parking garage five miles tall. Now…put every car and truck on a different level…and think about how quickly they’d make room for each other anyway, when not confined to a 12-foot wide lane. That’s the networked smart sky, AFTER companies make 100,000 airplanes a year for a thousand years, thereby finally catching up with auto numbers today.
Coruscant will never happen, it’s physically impossible. The earth is far too huge. Simulation studies reveal that even uncontrolled air traffic isn’t a problem, yet soon every aircraft will talk to each other. Our tech industries today are thrilled to provide a proven, pocket-sized solution that can easily handle even hypothetical levels of traffic. Comparatively speaking, autonomous airplanes are a cakewalk compared to self-driving cars. We’ve had fully capable autopilots for decades.
Synergy is working with a number of advanced initiatives for future on-board systems that will make operating your own smartplane ™ the most relaxing transportation experience you’ve ever had.
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