THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997 TAG: 9701080337
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBBIE MESSINA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: 61 lines
Small personal aircraft that cost as much as a high-end luxury car and are as easy to operate as a personal computer may be on the market by 2001.
The airplanes could revolutionize personal and business travel and revitalize a slumping general aviation industry, say NASA Langley Research Center engineers who are working with private industry to develop the technology. The goal is to sell the planes for under $100,000.
Imagine commuting between South Hampton Roads and Washington for work every day. Or making several sales calls across the state and still getting home for dinner. Or jetting off to the mountains for an afternoon of skiing.
``We can make airplanes more available to more people than in the past,'' said Bruce J. Holmes, who manages NASA's General Aviation Program Office at Langley.
Since 1994, teams of engineers from the public and private sectors have labored to create cockpit equipment that will make airplanes safer, more affordable and more user-friendly.
About 75 private companies, universities and government agencies came together to form Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments consortium, of which Holmes is the director. The consortium has a budget of $350 million, half from industry and half from government sources.
NASA has committed 20 employees from Langley and $60 million to the project.
Some of the advances developed by AGATE could be available by next year. But the entirepackage will not be out for another five years.
The computerized cockpit package will include a communications system, weather displays, graphical flight-path guidance and a navigation system that uses moving maps. One of the most revolutionary elements is a ``Highways in the Sky'' system that will chart flight paths and communicate graphically via computer to other pilots in the sky as well as air traffic control on the ground.
Holmes predicts all of this can be manufactured and installed into an airplane more cheaply than the current technology, which has not been updated for about 40 years.
He said developing a single-engine, four-passenger airplane for under $100,000 is an ambitious but attainable goal. Today, that plane costs about $500,000.
``We're in an extremely rapidly expanding information age with plummeting prices,'' Holmes explained.
The NASA-led consortium was born out of an effort to stem the collapse of general aviation in the United States.
The number of private planes and charter aircraft produced in the United States has dipped dramatically from 18,000 in 1978 to 954 in 1993. In 1980, the United States had 20 small aircraft manufacturers while Europe had 10. Today, those numbers are reversed.
``We want to see the U.S. recapture the world leadership in general aviation products,'' Holmes said.
The slump can be blamed on a combination of factors, he said. Manufacturers spent about $3 billion over the last 15 years defending and paying liability claims and therefore have not spent money to update technology. At the same time, the demand for private airplanes has fallen as the number of pilots has dropped almost 20 percent since 1980.
A related initiative, General Aviation Team 2000 Inc., begins work this month to try to double the number of student pilots by 2000.