The Third Wave of Aeronautics: On-Demand Mobility

Aviation has experienced one hundred years of dynamic growth and change, resulting in the current air transportation system dominated by commercial airliners in a hub and spoke infrastructure. The first fifty years of aviation was a very chaotic, rapid evolutionary process involving disruptive technologies that required frequent adaptation. The second fifty years produced a stable evolutionary optimization of services based on achieving an objective function of decreased costs. In the third wave of aeronautics over the next fifty years, there is the potential for aviation to transform itself into a more robust, scalable, adaptive, secure, safe, affordable, convenient, efficient, and environmentally fare and friendly system. However, such a global optimization requires not only the ability to perform analyses of larger system of system impacts, but also the ability to consider new value propositions that involve different infrastructures and business models than those currently entrenched in the U.S. aerospace industry. While many hurdles exist, including technology, regulation, and perception; the third wave of aeronautics has the potential to mirror other on-demand market revolutions that have taken place over the past thirty years.