FREE FLIGHT: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

• Author: Ehrenhalt, Alan
• Position: Review

FREE FLIGHT From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel by James Fallows Public Affairs, $25.00

Little Wing

BACK IN THE 1950S, WHEN hardly anyone questioned the link between technology and utopia, popular magazines loved to speculate about the way ordinary human life would be lived a generation down the road--at the start of the 21st century. Life and Look and Colliers' all had a weakness for full-color illustrations of people being waited on by robots and popping little pills to immunize themselves against cancer.

But of all the futuristic '50s guesswork that went wrong, two examples in particular are revealing. One is the inability, even to imagine the changes that lay ahead in personal communication. The other is the wildly excessive predictions of change in transportation.

The futurists of the postwar years had a vague idea that something interesting would happen to telephones. They drew pictures of people walking down the street talking into tiny gadgets that resembled Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio. That has happened. But the same seers completely missed the boat on computers. Never in their wildest dreams did most '50s futurists imagine e-mail, or the Internet, or even the desktop personal computer.

When it came to travel, however, they erred in the other direction. A common assumption was that by 2001, many of us would be darting from home to work in tiny supersonic aircraft, or perhaps flying without aircraft at all, merely strapping on powerful battery packs and soaring from the back yard straight into the sky. Nobody envisioned the sad truth: an air transportation system strangled by delays and overcrowded airports, dependent on huge planes filled with uncomfortable passengers squeezed into narrow seats awaiting the delivery of pretzels.

How did this happen? Why was there no revolution in personal travel to match the one that occurred in personal communication? Is there any way such a revolution could still take place? Those are the questions James Fallows tries to answer in his intriguing new book, Free Flight.

Reduced to its essentials, Fallows' argument is that the transportation equivalent of the Internet Age was in fact possible--it's just that nobody tried very hard to bring it about. The manufacturers of private planes--the leaders of the general aviation industry--lost their sense of adventure altogether. Nothing new or interesting was brought to the market. The number of private planes in the air is declining, and most of...