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Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel Paperback – September 1, 2002
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2002
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.65 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101586481401
- ISBN-13978-1586481407
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About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : PublicAffairs (September 1, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1586481401
- ISBN-13 : 978-1586481407
- Item Weight : 13.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.65 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,760,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #600 in Air Travel Reference (Books)
- #4,977 in Aviation (Books)
- #101,401 in Politics & Government (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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In *Free Flight* Fallows reveals himself to be an enthusiastic promoter of general aviation. Fallows begins by helping readers unfamiliar with small airplanes understand a little bit about the strange world of private pilots and their buzzy little machines. He paints a clear picture of the world of aviation enthusiasts--and what it potentially has to offer to the general public.
The book is devoted primarily to the topic of research and development that has been going on since the early 90s aimed at making small airplanes safer and more accessible to the general population.
The book closely examines two new aircraft manufacturers at the forefront of these developments (Cirrus Design and Eclipse Aviation) as well as some of the visionaries within NASA and other government agencies who have been promoting a concept of safe, affordable travel between secondary airports that skirts the congestion and delays of today's hub-spoke airline system. Finally, Fallows chronicles a trip of his own in one of these advanced small airplanes.
Fallows skillfully avoids the worst of the aviation technical jargon, and brings the subject to life through portraits of some of the very interesting people at work in the field.
For all of his cheerleading for the future of accessible general aviation Fallows also gives a fairly realistic assessment of the risks to this vision, though he devotes far less ink to the negative side of his subject.
Whether you're an aviation enthusiast, private pilot, or just a frustrated airline passenger *Free Flight* has much to offer. Let's hope that the future is as bright as Fallows suggests it can be.
Overall, however, Free Flight is a period piece. It was published just before September 11, 2001 changed everything, not least the airlines and private aircraft. Moreover, one of the companies touted in the book as the harbinger of a new age of aviation innovation, Eclipse, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the 2008 financial crisis (the other, Cirrus, is still a going concern). Very few of the events predicted in the book have taken place and the whole work has the feel of a book written right before World War I about the new age of peace and prosperity that would come in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Free Flight is worth reading, but it needs to be updated to reflect new realities.




