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

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 them are 20 or even 30 years old. "It's as if," Fallows writes, "people considering rental cars had only the '57 Chevies of Havana to choose from" Thousands of small airports all over the country sit largely unused, while O'Hare, Hartsfield, and La Guardia flirt maddeningly with gridlock every summer.

That's the problem. What some will dispute is Fallows' solution: a whole new generation of technologically intelligent small planes, with control panels almost as simple as the desktop of a PC, and with safety features to which even the squeamish traveler will entrust his life.

Unknown to most of us, work on such planes has actually been underway for the past two decades. Fallows devotes much of his book to the saga of the Klapmeier brothers, Alan and Dale, whose Cirrus Corporation, in Duluth, Minnesota, has not only designed a radically new small plane, hut has started building it and delivering it to customers. The Klapmeiers' most advanced creations, the SR 20 and the SR 22, feature redesigned cockpits that compare to those of older planes roughly the way Windows relates to DOS: You don't have to remember what to do next, the computer tells you. Often it doesn't even bother telling you. It just does the work on its own. Most remarkable of all, each of the new Cirrus planes is equipped with a parachute strong enough to float the entire aircraft. When things really get sticky, the pilot just pulls a switch and the whole 20,000-pound contraption settles gently down to earth.

By the end of last year, the Klapmeiers already had taken orders for 700 of these planes. Fallows sees them, and others yet to be invented, as the answer to the commercial chaos of the American skies. "With nicer small planes like the Cirrus," Fallows writes, "it seems reasonable that more people would become enthusiasts ... mole civilians would welcome an alternative to the airlines. The equipment that can make the alternative a reality is in prospect."

Fallows also documents the creation of a different aircraft: the Eclipse 500, a general aviation jet which, he argues, will have an even greater role in ending airport gridlock. Born of a partnership between NASA planners and private-sector entrepreneurs, this new craft, still in the development stage, promises to be safer, easier to fly, and vastly less expensive than today's corporate jets. If the jet's performance matches its early hype, it could lead, Fallows predicts, to fleets of taxi-like jets that will pick you up at the nearest small airport, and drop you off at the small airport nearest your destination.

I don't know. I've never flown a plane myself. I don't want to get caught laughing at the Wright brothers. But Fallows never quite makes it clear just how the new air transportation system would work. If millions of ordinary individuals were piloting their own planes, wouldn't things get a little crowded up there? If, on the other hand, salvation is to be based on the new fleet of small, but highly sophisticated, commercial jets, each one carrying a load of eight or 10 passengers nonstop from, say, Sioux Falls to Cedar Rapids, avoiding the delay and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system? I can see the appeal of a system like this. But in a deregulated environment, could anyone keep the price down and still make money running it? That seems to me a fairly important uncertainty.

Fallows isn't arguing that the new generation of small planes will ever be practical for flying commercial passengers coast to coast. That will continue to be the role of the jumbo jets and their modestly enhanced successors. It's the shorter routes, in his view, that need the new system: Seattle to Portland, Washington to Philadelphia, Lake Tahoe to San Francisco. Those are all a couple of hundred miles or so. The Cirrus could cover any of them in barely an hour, door to door.

Whatever the complications, it's an appealing idea. And it may well be that, two decades from now, the small plane revival will be part of our lives, just as small computers became part of life in the 1990s. I hope that it happens, and that in the year 2021, traveling from Washington to Philadelphia by air will be a lot easier than it is now. But even if I'm around, I don't think I'll be doing it. I'll be on the train, watching the abandoned factories roll by. And if I'm not mistaken, getting there will be just about as fast.

ALAN EHRENHALT is the editor of GOVERNING magazine.