Utility

Some of you may have heard about SATS (http://sats.nasa.gov/) or read James Fellows book "Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel" .

For many trips that reality is here today. Private aircraft can beat commercial flights in many cases.
Let's look at a trip from Seattle, WA to Chico, CA my wife recently made.

The best one can do with commerical carriers is:
12:32 pm Depart Seattle (SEA)
4:54 pm Arrive Chico (CIC)
Duration: 4hr 22mn
This involves connecting with a shuttle flight in San Francisco, CA. The cost is actually pretty good at $377 round trip but when you add in showing up at the airport 90 minutes before departure for the obligatory strip search and waiting at the arrival end for 30 minutes for them to smash your luggage the total car to car time becomes almost 6 hours 22 minutes! Pretty much the whole day. She ruled out this visit because she didn't want to spend 2 days of travel for a 3 day visit.

Contrast this with the trip she actually took in our Meridian N46ME.
Leave Boeing Field (BFI), Seattle, WA at 10:00 AM.
Arrive Chico (CIC) at 12:30 PM (strong headwinds on the trip down, otherwise it would have been a 2 hour trip)
Show up for depature 5 minutes before 10 AM.
On arrival, pull the luggage out of the airplane and put it into the rental car (which has been pulled up to the airplane by the FBO) 5 minutes.
Total time from car to car: 2 hours, 40 minutes, a time savings of almost 4 hours and turns it into a very doable trip.
The downside of course is cost, but the bargain price is no bargain if the utility is zero because you couldn't make the trip due to the high travel time overhead.

Bottom line is that today for trips under 900 miles in length you can most likely beat the airlines time and oftentimes beat it by a lot. It is just going to get better and less expensive from this point forward. The airline dinosaurs will become smaller and less relavent to travel in the United States so the quicker they go out of business and stop sucking on the US Treasury (aka taxpayers like you and I) the better off we will all be.