The principle revolves around the enormous extra time required to take the
plane. Trains go from city center to city center, and so about the only time
you spend on a train trip is time actually riding on the train. Airplanes, on
the other hand, have a built-in delay of two hours or so at both ends of the
trip, irrespective of time in the air.

Agree. (This is the same problem, BTW, that is addressed by private
aircraft. It's the reason we can easily beat the airlines to Florida
from Iowa, even though I'm only flying at 160 mph.)

This is also the main idea behind the "new" "Air Taxi Service", which
is really nothing more than providing the same service our parents and
grand-parents enjoyed for decades, using smaller, more efficient
aircraft.

When I was a boy, people in Iowa City routinely flew United and Ozark
Air Lines to anywhere in the country. This was possible because the
US Air Mail paid the airlines to fly mail to hundreds of smaller
airports, like Iowa City -- and the passengers were literally just
gravy. (They broke even whether they carried passengers or not.)

When the postal service was forced by Congress to get more efficient
in 1972 (by then, we'd ****ed all of our wealth away on Viet Nam and
the Great Society), the airlines could no long justify flying their
big, fuel-inefficient, union-operated Martin 404s into places like
Iowa City -- and most of the country was left without decent airline
service.

Vern Raburn's EclipseJet was supposed to be the answer to this
problem. So far, I've seen little progress along those lines -- but
the confluence of "hub" airport overcrowding along with an FAA in
"crisis" seems to be shoving the system in a direction away from the
status quo.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"