Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) first practical trial

Just when you thought it would never really happen....



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AVflash Volume 9, Issue 48b — November 27, 2003
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REASON TO GIVE THANKS
The long-awaited Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) gets its
first practical trial sometime in 2005 at the Danville Regional
Airport in Virginia. The system is designed to empower GA by giving
small aircraft and small airports the technology (like WAAS) to
provide safe, reliable point-to-point air travel, free from the more
typical "New York to Chicago to reach Dayton" routing imposed by
airline hubs. And free from the two-hour drive necessary to arrive at
that major airport on time. "These technologies could help planes
safely fly into underutilized rural and suburban airports, including
many airfields that don't have radar or air traffic control towers,"
said a NASA news release. About 93 percent of Americans live within 30
minutes of such an airport.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#186159

....AIR TAXIS AND DOOR-TO-DOOR FLYING...
The timeline works with the development and practical implementation
of new-generation mini-jets, most of which will be ready for delivery
not long after the test begins. Eclipse's 500, especially, is aimed
squarely at this kind of air-taxi type of service and much of its
order book is predicated on it. But even with little jets
crisscrossing the country to neighborhood airports, there's a much
loftier goal for SATS that takes out the middleman and returns flying
to the owner/operator. Ohio University is among various institutions
tapping academic brainpower to come up with the Popular Science dream
of door-to-door flight, with a compromise that eliminates some of the
practical impracticalities of such operations, like destroying the
neighbor's geraniums.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#186160