The Promise of PAVs and the Reality of our Disappearing Airports

To accelerate innovation in general aviation the way the Ansari X-Prize led to a flurry of aerospace start up companies, NASA has set aside $2 million dollars for a Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) competition called the PAV Challenge.

The competition intends to promote a new class of general aviation airplanes that are easy and inexpensive to fly and maintain, STOL capable so that they can take off and land at small, short field airports located close to our homes and final destinations, and quiet enough so that the people living next to these airports don’t mind them at all.

The first competition was held this past August and officiated by the Comparative Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) foundation. The total prize money was a somewhat unexciting $250,000 and, with the exception of David and Dianne Anders’s ultra quiet RV-4, so were the airplanes (a Cessna 172 won Best Handling). The overall winner was a carbon fiber, 2 place airplane called a Pipistrel Virus which has got to be the worst airplane name ever (“Oh no, he’s infected with the Pipistrel Virus. Run!”). Supposedly it's pronounced “Veerus”.

Still, mighty oaks from little acorns grow and there’s enough money left for at least 7 more competitions.

All I've got to say is they better hurry up.

While it is true that the U.S. has more airports than any other country - 5,400 public use airports (nearly four times more than second-place Brazil) according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) - it is also true that airports are disappearing from urban and suburban areas at an alarming rate, sometimes overnight (I’m looking at you Chicago).

How fast? According to General Aviation News (www.generalaviationnews.com) the U.S. had almost 7,000 public use airports in 1973. They've been disappearing at a rate of almost one a week for over thirty years.

Need some more convincing, just go over to the U.S. Airport Finder on Airport-Data.com (here). In the two drop down fields on the right select ‘Airport’ for ‘Facility Type’ and ‘All’ for ‘Facility Use’, scroll down to the bottom, and enter the city and state of your favorite metropolitan area.

You should notice that inside the loop of most cities there are few if any airports. Of course, Airport Finder will only show the airports that are still there and not the airports that were there and are now sitting underneath someone’s condo. If you really want to depress yourself and have a good cry don’t rent The Iron Giant, go check out the Abandoned and Little Known Airfields website. It chronicles the destruction of general aviation airports across the United States. One of them is Houston Gulf (A.K.A. Spaceland) where my dad learned to fly. It went underneath the bulldozers in 2003.

One bright spot though, if you go back to the Airport Finder and select ‘Heliport’ for ‘Facility Type’, you see that most metropolitan areas still have quite a few heliports.

It looks to me like for PAVs to succeed they're going to have to be VTOL capable, not just STOL.

P.S. Interested in helping save our airports? You can learn more at General Aviation News.