My first career was as a Naval Officer. I went through the NRTOC program in college and after graduating attended Navy flight school in the Floriday panhandle. I earned my wings as a Naval Aviator, but family issues ended my career prematurely, before I got to do anything outside of a training environment. I still hold a commercial pilot’s license (for both single-engine fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft), though as it’s been more than sixteen years since I’ve logged any flight hours (and fourteen since I was at the controls of any aircraft at all), I’m not exactly current.
I haven’t flown commercial as a passenger in nearly a decade. Some of that is the cost, but most of it is the environmental damage caused by air travel. I know that, mile for mile, being a solo passenger in a modern airliner is technically more efficient than driving the same distance. But the pollution is still created, as air travel allows you to travel distances that would be impractical by car (i.e., it may be more efficient per-mile, but you’re still producing a huge amount of pollution when you travel by air, because you’re traveling more miles). Plus, as a family of six, it’s way more efficient, even mile for mile, to travel in our minivan, which gets around 30mpg on the highway.
I was thrilled to read about a company in upstate New York and Vermont that’s developed an experimental battery-powered plane. It’ll likely be decades before it’s available for regular commercial aviation, and honestly, high-speed rail is a far superior replacement for much of the travel our society currently does by air (which is why the rest of the developed world travels that way), but as the article points out, there are some very useful applications for the new technology. I think upstate New York is a fantastic place to explore those applications. The Adirondacks are sparsely populated but are surrounded by a number of small cities. Being able to connect those cities (or given the vertical takeoff and landing version, being able to fly into even the small towns of the Adirondacks themselves) with sustainable air travel could be useful. It could also be really cool to have air travel in the Adirondack Park itself that doesn’t disturb the quiet.
For me though, reading about this created a feeling of hope and relief. It’s hard to describe how powerful and visceral the feeling was, to be honest. I think if I were podcasting this instead of blogging, I’d be choked up. Flying gets into your bones, and walking away from it is still probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. (For comparison, imagine being a violinist, attending conservatory and winning an audition to play with the Cleveland symphony, but before you can start, circumstances require that you stop playing the violin entirely; or imagine playing D1 basketball in college, being signed by an NBA team, and then walking away from the sport altogether after a week of preseason practice.)
I’d largely given up hope of being able to fly again. While it’s realistically now within my financial means, even a Cessna 172 creates a lot of pollution (and uses leaded gas), and it wasn’t something I felt I could ethically do. The article made no mention of the cost of the aircraft (I have to imagine they run into the millions at the moment—pricy for a five seat single-engine aircraft), so it’ll be a while before it’s within my grasp, but just knowing it’s on the horizon is a bit overwhelming.