What’s Next In The Airline Industry…

What is the future of the airline industry?

Henry Ford had the goal to put a car in every driveway in America. As he grew older and continued to improve his factories efficiency, he switched his aim to putting small planes in every driveway. Unfortunately, he never managed to make aviation widespread. In modern times companies are beginning to revisit this idea of common aviation. In this section of seeing what’s next Christensen offers two possible future shifts in the airline market.

            The first of these shifts is the idea of the Air taxi company. In the current aviation industry, you have two types of publicly available flights. The first is the hub-spoke model, which flies individuals from regional airports to more centralized ones before connecting with their main plane. The other type is the direct or point to point flight. As the name suggests, these flights would go directly from one airport to another. In this air taxi system, all short flights would become direct. The idea is to connect areas that are far enough apart to justify an expediated traveling system, but not far enough apart to have airports. This would be huge for travel within states and could potentially replace the need for regional airlines all together.  For this idea to work a series of smaller runways would need to be created. The target market of this project starting out would be smaller businesses that cannot afford their own corporate plane. This would allow them to check on multiple locations or manufacturing more often.

            The other option proposed is the creation of a smaller plane. This option would seek to follow in fords footsteps by making a plane into a common household means of transportation. The leading company in this space is Eclipse. They are working on a 6-person micro plane that would improve on fuel efficiency and be cheap enough for small businesses to buy outright. This could put them in a previously unoccupied segment of the market as airbus and Boeing are fighting for premium and high-end shares of the airplane manufacturing industry. The biggest issue with the progression of these plans is the lack of a comprehensive government evaluation and protocol for operation of an airplane recreationally. One can only imagine the chaos that would ensue if a fleet of recreational planes began to fly over places such as New York City or Washington DC. An interesting point brought up in the comments of one of the articles I read concerning this was the increase in America’s air force potential with residential planes in every driveway. It will be interesting to see how lower ends of the airline industry develop as technology improves in the years to come.