Beware the shiny object

I just got back from the 2024 annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) meeting in Washington, DC. There was a lot of great information for all modes of transit presented by a wide range of industry experts from across the globe. Conversations, presentations, and poster sessions were so focused on advanced air mobility (AAM) that one could easily have concluded that there wasn't anything else to worry about in the aviation world. It was charging for eVTOLs. Vertiport siting. Air traffic management. Certification. Tremendous focus on this novel but a yet-to-be-established subset of the industry. I had to ask myself, and I have heard others asking, is this all focus warranted?

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx

Remember the early days of NEXTGEN? Of drones (UAS)? It was the talk of the town - academics aggressively sought out Federal funding to research the topics. Centers of Excellence were created. The FAA and NASA released report after report. These are only a few examples of things that have hogged the aviation limelight at one time or another.

It's a fact - aviation suffers from "shiny light syndrome."

Let's take a look at some recent excerpts of reports and other data to see a relevant example:

The goal is to enable people and goods to have the convenience of on-demand point-to-point travel, anywhere, anytime for both personal and business travel. The vision can be achieved by expanding... access to small community airports... and other currently under-utilized [facilities] throughout the United States. New and emerging concepts, technologies, and operational procedures need to be developed that will increase accessibility... [creating] significant economic opportunities and benefits. [The end result would be] affordable, safe, and reliable on-demand point-to-point air transportation.

Here some images from the document from which the above excerpt was pulled:

Does this look and sound familiar? Is this about AAM?

Nope. All of this is from a previous "shiny light": the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS), and the aircraft du jour was the very light jet (VLJ). What's the status of both today? Neither panned out as hyped back at the turn of the millennium. The reasons for failure are complex but can be best summarized as unrealistic and immoderate expectations. Let this be a warning to us all as aviation sits on the cusp of what could be a big shift in technologies and operations. I'm not trying to be Negative Nelly, but rather taking a rational look from a different perspective.

Here are a few more morsels of food for thought:

For the 20 years before 2013, there were 104 academic articles on SATS and VLJs.

In the last 10 years, there were only 18 on SATS.

Since 2000, there have been 883 academic articles on AAM and eVTOLs. Among these, 871 have been written in the past three years.

If we've heard it before, it warrants such caution.