[extropy-chat] Bill Gates investing in more efficient aircraft

[Hal Finney]

BillK forwards:
> <http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/0,39024649,39128998,00.htm>
>
> Gates buys into $400m aircraft start-up       March 24 2005
>
> The Albuquerque, New Mexico-based company is working on the Eclipse
> 500, a six-seater that can fly at a maximum speed of 375 knots.
> Designed for flights of about 300 miles to 600 miles, the plane, which
> will sell for $1.3m, will likely be used by companies promoting
> on-demand flight services.

An article in Business Week this month,
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050325_1861_tc119.htm>,
talks about the move of Silicon Valley technologists into commercial
aviation.  Last week, technology guru Esther Dyson had a special
seminar called Flight School immediately after her PC Forum conference,
<http://www.pcforum2005.com/pcforum/flight.cfm>.  She writes:

"A number of IT people have already wandered into the air: Vern Raburn,
formerly of Microsoft, Lotus and Symantec, now runs Eclipse Aviation. Jeff
Bezos has Blue Origin, his mysterious rocket company. Elon Musk,
co-founder of Paypal, is behind SpaceX, and Adeo Ressi of Game Trust is
Chairman of the Strategic Planning Committee for X Prize, a $10-million
prize awarded to SpaceShipOne for being the first private company to
launch individuals into space on a reusable vehicle. And then there's
a host of PC-industry angel investors (me among them) in Zero-Gravity,
the weightless flight company."

BTW that Zero Gravity thing sounds like fun, www.nogravity.com .
It's $3750 for the commercial version of NASA's "vomit comet" (oddly
enough they don't use that phrase on their web site).  You get several
periods of about 30 seconds of weightlessness as the plane flies in a
series of parabolic arcs.  They did it on The Apprentice last year and
one of the characters got really sick.  Still it would be something to
try at least once in life.

The BW analogy draws an interesting analogy between tech and aviation:

> Dyson borrowed an in-vogue phrase, the "long tail," that's being used
> to describe the success of niche products on sites such as eBay (EBAY)
> and Amazon. The "long tail" refers to the huge backlog of products
> that follow the top-sellers at the head. Taken together, they can be
> even more profitable than the most in-demand offerings. "It's exactly
> the same paradigm" in aviation today, says Iacobucci. "We think this
> is like the birth of networking -- a new way of doing things that's an
> incredible value proposition for businesses."
>
> Iacobucci thinks these new products and services will allow people to
> make money on the long tail of aviation -- that is, the myriad small
> trips that either require many hours of driving or cost thousands
> of dollars to make by air charter. Right now there are few passenger
> flights between the more than 5,000 local airports around the country
> because the aircraft, traffic control, and scheduling technologies don't
> allow economical flights. "We'll steal lots and lots of car traffic,"
> says onetime People Express founder Donald Burr, now CEO of upcoming
> air taxi service Pogo Jet in Stratford, Conn. "It's all about letting
> people have something they didn't have before."

I've seen this "long tail" mentioned quite a bit recently.  If you graph
items from some set by popularity, you often get what is called a Zipf
distribution (first Google hit, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html>).
A relative few items are very popular and then it falls off fast.  If the
set is large you have an enormous number of low-popularity items which
are often under-served by the market.  Amazon's success is said to be
due to serving this segment by virtue of its huge catalog.

The theory in aviation is that we are about to see a world of air taxis
and nextgen private planes letting people fly on relatively local trips
that they would currently spend hours driving.  James Fallows' book Free
Flight advanced this concept, talking about Eclipse jets and also the
hot new Cirrus private planes, pinup models for private pilots,
<http://www.cirrusdesign.com>.

I'm not sure this idea will work, all the analyses I've seen show it to
be really expensive.  They have to assume there is a huge underserved
market of millionaires who are willing to pay a thousand dollars for a two
hour flight instead of driving five hours.  And it depends crucially on
small local airports, most of which aren't really set up for significant
levels of commercial passenger flights.  But it will be interesting to
see if it happens.

Hal