1. Air travel is always more expensive than travelling the same distance on the ground, if the alternatives are your own car, taxi, bus or rail.
   Fuel typically amounts to about 25% of operating costs of airlines.

2. Shorter trips by air are proportionately more expensive than longer trips.

3. You have to consider travel time, getting to and from the airport, maybe negotiating traffic snarls.

4. Standing in queues to check luggage, getting boarding cards and just idle waiting at the airport at departure takes time. Occasionally, it takes an awful lot of time. Waiting for your luggage and getting through customs at arrival is a tedious matter, too.

5. Aircraft exhausts pollute the upper layers of the atmosphere. They are not environmentally sound.

6. Air transport is not as reliable as ground transportation. Bad wheather might ground the flight, or prevent it from landing at its intended destination.

7. Airspace over most western countries is getting increasingly crowded. This means that it gets more common for every year that your flight misses its assigned time slot and has to wait for the next one. Aircrafts have to queue for take-off, and are increasingly caught in holding patterns when landing.

8. Overbooking might lead to you not getting away until the next day or so.

For the curious Airlines come and go. They frequently go into bankrupcy, or merge with other airlines. At the present (i.e. autumn of 2000) the 7 largest airlines are all American, which in a way shows where the heaviest air traffic is to be found. The 8 US airlines on the list below together transport 521.2 million passengers a year.

The Worldīs busiest airport used to be Chicagoīs OīHare. But in May, 2000, Hartsfield Airport at Atlanta, Georgia, topped the statistics with 7.2 million passengers.

Have you ever watched the night sky over Las Vegasī Airport on a friday night? You can behold a long, illuminated ribbon of aircrafts awaiting their turn to land. A beautiful sight, but very costly for airline operators and very time-consuming for passengers!

And air traffic is growing rapidly. The Worldīs airlines are expected to purchase about 16,000 new aircraft between the years 2000 and 2020, at a cost of US$ 1200 billion, altogether. Considering that some aircrafts will be discarded because of old age, there would still be a growth of about 700 new aircrafts in the sky every year. 2 more aircrafts every day! And the aircraft industry will spend another US$ 350 billion on increased aviation infrastructure. Thatīs an awful lot of money!

Air traffic is no small threat to the environment, as well. Exhaust fumes released at those altitudes where inter-continental flights travel might well influence the hothouse effect. Options to reduce climate impact include:

• less time in holding patterns
• improved routing
• removal of tax exemption
• taxes on emissions
• promote travel alternatives for short distances
• reduction of nitrogen content of aircraft fuel
• maybe penalties for part-filled low occupancy aircraft
• reduce the role of trade in world industrial production (which means that higher transport costs would result in decentralized production systems).

Itīs rather interesting to note that both regular air travel and FLYWAY® use the timeslot system to coordinate traffic. Only, beam systems on the ground can do so much more efficiently. Why is that? Well, the obvious reason is that aircrafts need so much space on all sides, for safety reasons. Also, they are confined to travel corridors, because they travel between airports, and these corridors cannot handle more traffic than can be handled by the airports at each end. In year 2002, the permitted vertical distance between aircrafts in Western European flight corridors will be reduced from 600 meters to 300 m. But airlines are actually trading timeslots between them; they are worth a lot of money!

The obvious solution to this would be to build more airports, since that would create more flight corridors, and to extend the capacity of the existing ones. And thatīs what is being done all over the world right now. But airports have difficulty keeping up with demand, as people travel more and more for every year.

The Real Challenge; MagLev!

Using MagLev, velocities of up to 500 kilometers per hour will be possible. Speeds over 400 km./hour, using ordinary trains, have already been tested in Japan. Using an independent maglev transit system with stations about 300 kilometers apart would give the airlines stiff competition for trips to the nearer airports and to locations within a 1000 km range. With such automatic MagLev cars going to destinations without airports, such a system would just take over; no checking in one-hour before departure, no reservations, no schedules or unsavory weather conditions to impede traffic.