"The airlines don't even bother to apologize for delays or cancellations anymore!" Farnborough-Aircraft.com's CEO Richard Noble, OBE, said at EBACE yesterday. Noble, who drove the Thrust 2 World Land Speed Record car, and masterminded its supersonic successor ThrustSSC, was explaining the concept behind the five-passenger, 325-knot Farnborough F.1 turboprop single that is currently being developed in England.

Noble's idea, which came to him while waiting "angry at the incompetence" for a delayed flight from Nice to London during a busy schedule, is for a network of Internet-booked, on-demand air taxis serving nearly 8,000 local airfields in the U.S. and Europe that have no airline connection. The proposed NASA/U.S. Government Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) is central to the concept's viability in North America, where Noble expects 90% of F1 business to be won.

But, turning to a recent UK government consultation document on the future of aviation, Noble notes that it devotes only eight of 300+ paragraphs to business and general aviation. "It poses a choice between growing conventional airports and air routes in line with expected growth in demand, or constraining growth in line with limitations of investment, environmental impact and infrastructure," he says.

"The absence of debate (in Europe) on alternative means of managing growth in air travel is concerning. The approach is fragmented across national governments," says Noble, "with no agreed development plan despite industry facing severe and growing congestion. Several European airports are expected to be at or beyond capacity within the next five years, and few are being developed to cope with the 50% increase in demand expected by 2010. In the 21st century we have to be a lot brighter than this!"

Using the F1 as its key, the system Noble proposes will offer "frictionless travel, point-to-point, on-demand, from zip code to zip code."

"The American vision is for 25% of communities to be served in this way within 25 years. In Europe we have an opportunity to pave the way and bring this much-needed service to customers that are demanding it far sooner," he says.

"We need a strategy that will protect the existing small airfield infrastructure as a crucial economic resource; release the Free Route concept proposed by Eurocontrol; and achieve a change to JAR-OPS to allow single-engine IFR operation across Europe. This is all relatively easy, and we can do it now!"