I visited Washington, D.C. over the weekend to attend my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party. Due to a soaking rain that was parked all the way up and down the East Coast, I decided to fly commercial rather than take the paint off the leading edges of the Cirrus’s wings. Flying on Delta gives one a lot more time to read the newspaper than flying the Cirrus. One interesting posting was from a New York Times article on the disappointing financial results of Warren Buffett’s NetJets fractional jet company. Buffett is a big advocate for aviation:
Mr. Buffett, as well-known for his frugality as he is for his wealth, has famously pooh-poohed expensive cars, fast boats, sprawling estates, gleaming baubles and other trappings of wealth in favor of much more modest accouterments — except for jets, which he has made no secret of adoring. Private jet travel, Mr. Buffett has said, is worth much more than a large home or a fancy car. Zipping about in jets, he said, can change the quality of your life.
The other article was the cover story of Saturday’s Washington Post: “D.C. Wants HIV Testing for All Residents 14 to 84”. The article points out that “D.C. has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country” and that the federal Center for Disease Control is encouraging routine HIV testing. This seems strange to those of us who were around in the 1980s. When HIV was first identified as the cause of AIDS, quite a few Americans put forward the idea of widespread testing and then various sorts of steps to quarantine those who were infected. These advocates for testing were attacked as hardhearted and the politically correct public health official approach to the problem was to behave as though everyone were infected and not test anyone, even those in high-risk groups. For some reason, the public health bureaucracy seems to have come full circle and now advocates the testing that they once opposed.
More correctly, some in the public health bureaucracy advocate compulsary HIV testing. So then you could have the War on HIV as well as the War on Drugs, and it would probably be as successful. Testing, I guess, 250 million Americans plus the several million illegal immigrants that you don’t know about anyway, isn’t easy, and then the whole process has to be repeated next year. All done by private contractors making big money out of it. Anyway, what do you do with the positives, lock them up ? How many people with HIV would just send someone else along that they knew was negative. Not to mention the possibility of having everyones DNA on file.
About the netjets, Buffett’s obviously in agreement with Mr. Greenspun about the ability of aviation to change people’s quality of life in profound ways. (I can’t find the article, but Philip pointed out that for the price of a beach house near an urban area, one could buy an entire beach in a remote area, a house, and an aircraft to get there and back at will, along with all the expenses) Buffet obviously is better at spotting trends than almost anyone, but I worry that no one will follow him. As Phillip has pointed out, there have been repeated attempts to get high-income people out of their cars and into aircraft (So called “Doctor Killer” aircraft in the 70-80’s, Robinson helicopters, etc.) All they’ve really managed to do is keep general aviation viable, there’s never been a mass adoption of airborne commuting. This post partially explains that, as people that need to actually get places on time, whether or not it’s raining, generally can’t fly themselves.
Every time I read an article about these “micro jets”, the article describes how they’re going to revolutionize air transport, and how people will use them as “air taxis”, sort of as short-to-medium-range spontaneous air charters. I’ve never really understood how this could be viable. NetJets already does something fairly similar (although perhaps less-expensive micro jets would be a boon for Netjets), there are air charter services run with all sorts of aircraft, and neither business model describes a particuarly a large industry. If people want air taxis so badly, why aren’t they piling into pressurized turbine singles (the best of which are nearly jetlike in their performance)?
I know a lot of rich, sucessful people are really exited about micro-jets (isn’t ballmer a backer?), but, in the end, I suspect microjets will just move to occupy the space currently occupied by pressurized turbine aircraft. (not that that would be a bad thing). Some seriously sucessful people thought that the Segway was going to change the world, too.