Your “Comparison Matrix of Ready and Emerging Innovative Transportation Technologies” is as if you had made an inventory of the various methods of locomotion living beings use to move from one place to the other… yet leaving out the birds!

Symptomatically, the third entry in the table is Dr. Bertelsen’s Turbine Arc Wing VTOL Airplane, called the Arcopter… Yet whereas the entry is headed “Aeromobile” the description reads: “A variety of air cushion vehicles under active development for land and water applications”…

No air applications there?… so what about Dr. Bertelsens Arcopter?

What a sad attempt to divert the attention of future-minded spirits looking for information on state-of-the art individual aeromobility based transport systems of the future.

However, looking at the web-site hosting this “comprehensive” comparison of future transportation technologies, i.e.

http://faculty.washington.edu

solves the enigma… it is an official site, and the US government is scared to death by the vision of masses of citizens volatilizing individually into the airspace, i.e. democratization of the airspace, i.e. massively popularized individual aeromobility, i.e. transfer of road traffic into the airspace.

Yet I leave you the benefit of doubt as to what your personal intent may be or not be… as you might just be a teacher, or otherwise in academic research, and therefore blind to “forthcoming reality”.

Here’s just a clue of what I’m talking about: at the end of the seventies the annual sales of General Aviation aircraft topped 20.000, only to drop to a mere 700 by the end of the nineties.

That’s indeed not 20 years of decline of public interest in GA aircraft!

That’s 20 years of ever more stringent government issued regulation to curb individual freedom of movement.

And here is why this huge legislative effort in an attempt to keep the private pilots community on the ground has been made:

Every time the US government wants to enforce its will on anybody anywhere in the world, it can play out its joker, i.e. the airforce’s supersonic fighter-bombers, to fully control any nation’s airspace.

The only antidote to this unmatchable instrument of power would be for the civil society to take possession of the global airspace with myriads of PA (Personal Aircraft)…

It will happen anyway, just by sheer momentum of technological advance, especially advance in avionics: just before Bush left office, he set a milestone in transportation history by giving green light to the implementation of ADS-B (Advanced Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast), the New Generation air traffic management system where the position and intent of an aircraft is no more determined by radar from the ground but by GPS and broadcast of the data to all other pilots’ glass cockpits so that every pilot has the same information on his LCD screen as the controllers on the ground.

Of course, Bush and his government have included the D (for dependent) in the acronym because they anticipate that ADS-B is virtually independent from the ground. Hence, to conjure this frightening perspective, the made the project to encompass over 700 ground-based control stations to cover all of North-America and Canada within the next three years… sheer waste of time and money

In an aviation magazine I recently read that line pilots start to get jealous of private pilots because of the sophistication of GA aircraft’s glass cockpits right down to some single-engine models…