Now a conference about the upcoming revolution in air travel…

Back on December 19th I posted “Get Ready for a Revolution in Air Travel” and I discover today — reading Esther Dyson’s site called “Release 1.0” — that there is an offshoot of her famous PC Forum event called “Flight School.”

In the description Esther opines: “…the premise (is) that the aerospace industry is about to undergo changes as dramatic as the transitions from mainframes to PCs and from the science/R&D/military Internet to today’s vibrant, commercial, vulgar World Wide Web. And like Net entrepreneurs, those in the new world of flight will meet resistance from the old guard: Read legacy airlines for mainframes and discount carriers for the minis. Air taxis will be to the aviation old guard what PCs are to mainframes. And space tourism will appall the purists of old just as e-commerce annoys the scientists.”

The early part of the last century found transportation dependent businesses locating near railroad track sidings so as to be able to receive materials and ship goods from one point to their point. Then the acceleration of the trucking industry enabled point-to-multipoint shipping and receiving — for all but the largest and heaviest goods — thus enabling these same types of businesses to locate anywhere. (Of course, it didn’t hurt that midway through that century an interstate highway system achieved critical mass).

Just like the shift from trains to trucking or the ongoing struggle of the use of personal automobiles vs. relatively point-to-point mass transit, multipoint-to-multipoint air taxi’s will clearly match pent-up-demand for flexible long distance travel and shipping with an dynamic infrastructure. As I said in my earlier blog post, air taxi’s will function somewhat like a packet switching internet network vs. a point-to-point circuit switching network like the plain old telephone system…and we all know what’s happening with THAT system as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) kills it!