It wont be the roaring 20's rather the rigid ones.

Get prepared for the loss of freedom of travel

Restrictions coming our way in the 2020s

I would like to make five predictions for this decade. I will try to cover the areas I am passionate about - namely aviation, travel and technology. Let's get rid of the nasty one first. The others include one that will be a disappointment and some that should give us some hope. I hope you will see a common thread running through these thoughts.

Travel will no longer be unfettered and an expression of freedom. As our planet gets more crowded joy will be replaced by drudgery. How could this happen? Three reasons.
1. Political divisions will be enhanced as the world moves to a series of jockeying for position. The isolationism of the current US Administration will sadly pay off in the coming decade.
2. Emancipation of so many countries of wealth and maturity that feel they have just as much right to travel will result and fare greater masses wanting to see the major tourist sites. Venice, London etc.
3. Global Climate Change Acceleration. Call it what it is; human powered will start to get in the way of the freedom of travel.
One interesting side product will be the emergence of tourism focused on remote and quiet. Yes get-away-from-it-all will become a much sought-after niche product.

Startups and innovation will give way to SWEW. Software Everywhere. We will have very few forms of mega hit startups. So, think unicorns will go the way of Purple Squirrels. Machine Learning and AI will give way to Realtime Software Systems. IE Systems that provide capability for any activity to be automated and humans become less and less important to the management of technology.

Electric powered flight will become not just a reality but a norm. There will be 2 forms of this manifested in the next decade.
Product 1 - short haul autonomous controlled aircraft up to 50 passengers will replace the need for short haul hops on routs of less than 300 miles or 500 kilometers.
Product 2 - assisted mode electrically powered flight for all forms of aviation will become the norm. Allowing the migration away from pure fossil powered flight.

The end of the phone in your pocket. By the mid-decade we will have communicator systems that are driven by our biological presence with accuracy that is unthinkable today. The phone will cease to be the vehicle of choice for communication, replaced by Ambient Computing. Sensors all around us will detect and response. Leading to my last prediction...

Explicit interaction moves to implicit and assumed background systems. As someone who has been involved in innovation, startups and pushing the boundaries of technology for over 3 decades - I will see the last of the development of explicit behaviour on behalf of the consumer and the developers of today will become increasingly redundant.

And my prediction for myself? I hope that I will be able to teach and help those to will be the generation that powers these changes to do so for good.

Thank you for reading and may I wish you and your families all, a Happy New Year and a great decade ahead.

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Flight Shaming and Climate Change – Is this the right way?

We know that Climate Change is upon us. There are deniers and there are passionate people particularly GenZ who are currently not in the work force. On September we saw a huge outpouring where millions of people left classrooms (inspired by 16-year-old teenage protester Greta Thunberg) and work places to protest the current lack of progress by politicians. There has been an easy target – the airline industry. Estimates put the amount of contribution at between 2 and 2.5%. (Source Time) Not insignificant in the big picture scheme of things. There is some evidence that that there has been some evidence that Flight Shaming is having some impact.
Source Bloomberg (Sorry its behind a paywall).

For the purpose of this article I won’t go into the details of good or bad and the overall political battles over the topic – yet, you will have to read the preamble first. Other than I have seen with my own eyes the impact in multiple places. Singapore when the pollution index exceeded 400 (200 is considered high). Beijing where the air tastes like Charcoal. Alaska where the Permafrost is melting at an alarming rate and where towering white glaciers are now a shadow of their former selves. I personally travel more than 200,000 miles a year so that makes me a big contributor. I try every year to find ways to offset that by buying carbon offsets I have used Terrapass in the past but I do tend to shop around there are many providers.

Rather I would like to look at addressing what we can do – both in the short term and the long term to ameliorate the impact of accelerated global warming. 

For the short term it is going to be hard to address the overall demand for air travel. We have (mostly) a supply side market with airlines averaging in excess of 80% load factors.  The constraints are that when we examine these factors we see that scarce airports and popular routes skew the numbers and we see that LON-NYC is the world’s most prized revenue route generating over $1.2 Billion in revenue on just the JFK-LHR segment. Yet that is dominated by very few players. Constraints of slots and airline mergers have put up the price of a ticket. Heathrow airport is the world’s most expensive per passenger with $168 (2018) generated in airport charges and fees. At Air Black Box we developed an algorithm to find alternative routings based on rules. One of the rules we planned for but so far, no takers is a value for avoiding congested airports. We believe that bringing in Smart Routings (sm) will ultimate benefit the industry by freeing up capacity that is currently locked in legacy constraints and actually biased against these possibilities. The actual increase of emissions if a plane is empty or full – is fairly marginal. Like many forms of public conveyance, when the plane has to go, it has to go!

For the long term, I firmly believe we are making short term bad decisions. The example is Heathrow’s 3^rd runway. There is an assumption that adding the 3^rd runway will result in 50% increase in capacity at the airport. That cannot happen. Even replumbing the taxi ways and making them more efficient will not permit that to occur. Theoretical maybe. A massive change project at Chicago O’Hare that started in 2015 resulted in significant amounts of improvement from an inefficient system to a far more elegant solution. Here is a detailed review. Source Cranky Flyer Capacity can be constrained in different ways. When Seattle (my home port) added a 3^rd runway it only envisaged that 2 would be in operation at any one time. Indeed, the airport’s plan is to only grow by 2-3% a year for the next few years and probably longer because like the vast majority of the top 100 airports worldwide they are slot constrained. That adds up to 432,000 aircraft movements per year. In contrast Amsterdam with its 7 runways has 550,000 movements authorized per year. Frankly in my view we need to stop thinking of adding runways. Further we know there is only so much capacity that can be opened up through “adjustments”. 

So, I would like to advocate a different path. Airports plan in the 10-15-year time frame. 5 years ago, we could not have envisaged that commercial drone (more appropriately non-fossil fuel powered passenger) operations could be possible. Today we know better. The Europeans are far more challenges with conflicting requirements of UAV, Military and commercial. Overlay the more densely packed land space and you can see that this is tough. Thus, I am advocating a different approach. Let's abandon the use of long runways for short haul traffic. Let’s leave that for the big long-haul aircraft. In place let’s look at more efficient use of concrete with short haul 500-mile 100-seater craft-based systems. The result of this will be a significant throughput of aircraft movements. This is not without its challenges. All forms of mass transit are full of conflicts of competing requirements.

So back to the political issue. We need bold central government policies. I am advocating therefore a simple manifesto.

1. Development of new technologies. Proceeds would come from the credits and taxes would be funneled into better technologies.
2. Development of new alternative transport methods. Massive new projects such as LHR’s 3^rd Runway would be challenged if alternatives are made available.
3. A Universal Carbon Metric System. Transparency of publication of league tables and metrics at the level of all flights. The creation of a CTN – Carbon Travel Number that would allow consumers to compare different trips and know what they have to offset in order to ensure funding for carbon reducing technologies.
4. Carbon tradeable credits but not only at the airline level but also at the airport and individual level. Thus, someone who has acquired credits they can reduce the cost of their travels. A universal set of exchanges and a standard set of values. Airlines and Airports can decide also to participate so some airports could actually reduce their carbon taxes significantly by developing better solutions and be granted tax credits/incentives to better utilize their real estate.
5. A tax system from the federal level would need to be implemented. Inefficient use of runway assets with (for example) smaller aircraft would be penalized but this would be set by the government through a high taxation scale based on the footprint and scarcity value.

We need to be bold to reverse the harmful effects of human intervention. We need a new fundamental approach to the problems of aviation induced carbon generated global warming. Aviation is one of the most heavily regulated markets on the planet. If we can demonstrate this leadership now – then let’s show what we can do. Are you with me? Then you can be proud to fly smart.

Thanks for reading. 

(Photo a screen grab from CNN) 

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