Esther Dyson’s Flight School

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I’ve just finished writing to all the speakers and signed-up participants for this year’s Flight School, announcing its cancellation. Please stand by for Flight School 2009!

It’s incredibly frustrating to do this, but we (Imaginova and I) just weren’t signing up a critical mass of participants, despite a great speaker list. You can build a great product without customers, and you can (and should!) invest in real estate around airports in a downturn like the current one, but you can’t run a good meeting without a quorum. So, we decided to stop pushing on a string.

Despite a strong speaker line-up and Imaginova’s broad market outreach, interest in Flight School seemed to be waning rather than building as the overall economy slides into a funk. That frustrates me. Personally, I have just upped my investments in XCOR Aerospace, ICON Aircraft, Airship Ventures and (pending) Space Adventures. And I have some more good news coming that I can’t announce yet….

I love this marketplace and the people in it, and we aren’t going away even though Flight School is taking a break this year. I’ll be continuing to post here; send me your news and opinions.

And meanwhile, if you haven’t already, please join our Facebook group to keep the conversation going.

“Someone from the private sector needs to raise their hand to make NextGen happen,” says Bruce Holmes.  He believes this so fervently that he recently left NASA (where he was  Chief Strategist at Langley Research Center as well as director for strategy development at the U.S. Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) in DC), to take up a job as DayJet’s resident guru/hand-raiser.  (Unfortunately, Bruce can’t join us at Flight School, but he sat down with me recently to give me some background for a discussion I’ll be leading on the Florida NextGen initiative.)

 
NextGen is the long awaited, still amorphous “next generation” of aviation technology that should enable so-called free flight, where aircraft can manage their own flight paths and avoid one another without constant oversight from centralized, human-operated air traffic control stations.   It’s controversial, in some quarters at least, because it reduces the need for human controllers – even though they are currently overworked and in short supply. (For example, see this call for caution.)

The benefits include less congestion of air and airports, greater safety, shorter flying times, and of course less need for fuel, resulting in cleaner and cheaper flight..  

 
At DayJet , trying to prove a new business model to a skeptical investor community (the customers seem to be believers), every gallon counts.  And every thousand feet flying too low or every minute vectoring around another plane unnecessarily costs lots of gallons.  So Bruce Holmes’ longtime passion has real business meaning for DayJet.  These same issues  have relatively smaller, but still vital consequences for the established airlines, but  DayJet, with its shorter routes and its attempt to create a new market, will experience relative benefits several times those of the airlines if the technology and rule changes work out.

 
“But we’re not raising our hand alone,” says Holmes.  DayJet is working with partners including Naverus, ITT and   universities and airports throughout Florida.  DayJet has the aircraft and routes; Naverus supplies the RNPs (for Required Navigation Performance, or designated routes); ITT supplies the ADS-B (for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) equipment that enables the planes to detect and avoid one another; the airports supply local facilities; and the FAA supplies permission (and oversight). The universities will model and simulate the airspace and environmental footprints for before-and-after benefits evaluations.  Also involved is the Personal Air Transportation Alliance (PATA),  whose members include operators of on-demand fleets of technologically advanced aircraft, including very light jets (VLJs).  Members of PATA include North American Jet, Linear Air and POGO Jet.  (Both Ken Ross of North American Jet and Bill Herp of Linear Air, as well as Ed Iacobucci of DayJet, will be speaking at Flight School.)   

Holmes has been leading this charge for many years, fostering a variety of private-public partnerships from his perch at NASA; now he’s on the other side with more freedom to be aggressive.  Still, he cautions, things take time.  The current order of business – for the next few months – is to work out a Memorandum of Agreement  with the FAA for a demonstration.  And that’s just the beginning: The RNPs take time to be generated, and the aircraft need to be outfitted with ADS-B technology  and a new generation of digital radios.

 “We call it a demo,” says Holmes, but actually it’s an implementation.  “You can’t really demo it without just doing it.”   

 Base case

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, based in Daytona Beach, FL, will be managing  the project.  Starting in May or June, its researchers will assemble baseline data:  Where do DayJet’s planes fly now?  How far do they fly to get from point A to point B, and how high? Later on, that will enable them to determine the impact of the NextGen technology (normalizing for weather, of course). Florida Institute of Technology, from its campus in Melbourne, FL, will oversee the analysis of the footprint benefits in terms of energy, carbon, and noise that accrue to the new airspace operations.

Holmes is working on the assumption that the effects will be significant over time.  “There are 130 airports in seven [southeast] states of interest to us; 55 of them have no control towers. In those airports during bad weather, a plane can’t land until the one ahead of it has landed, and the pilot has gotten out and called the ATC from a land line or cell phone.  And in others, by contrast, there can be enough of a mix of other general aviation and occasional airline traffic to benefit from NextGen capabilities even at airports that are not the main focus of the JPDO and FAA.” In either situation,   NextGen will allow the planes to fly more directly, at higher, more cost-effective altitudes, and to land more quickly.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, one issue raised is cost.  The costs of these systems are the subject of intense debate in both the general aviation and airline community (with the airline industry estimating $1 million per aircraft and the general aviation industry estimating costs at little more than $10,000 per aircraft).   But both the cost and the benefit estimates are probably way off, says Holmes:  “Trying to estimate the cost based on the last generation of radios is like trying to figure the price of the third generation iPhone based on the price of the first bag phones  - AKA ‘bricks’ - we used in cars in the 1990’s.”

All this has already been demonstrated on a small scale, for what it’s worth, by Alaska Airlines, by general aviation operators in Alaska and by carriers such as Qantas in other parts of the world.  And the ability of airplanes to space and merge by themselves without ground radar was demonstrated in June 2005 at the SATS Demonstration in Danville, VA.   But perhaps most tellingly, Alaska Airlines  now uses RNP wherever it can. Nonetheless, the Florida experience is likely to attract more attention.   Even in these days of globalization, the airline establishment considers Alaska remote.  

[Disclosure/context: I’m an investor in Xcor, the company that announced its Lynx rocket-powered, two-person vehicle last week.]

Last month I was invited to give the outsider’s perspective at XCOR’s press conference announcing the Lynx, which was fully covered elsewhere, including the Wall Street Journal and WIRED. Here’s what I said (slightly cleaned up):

When I was growing up, I fully expected to go to the moon. For one thing, my father had helped develop a nuclear-powered rocket, though it never got above 1000 feet. But I didn’t feel personally involved. The people working in space were a priesthood, either scientists like my father, or engineers and bureaucrats lost in large enterprises and government agencies. The ones with the most imagination ended up writing science fiction, like the father of two XCOR employees, Jerry Pournelle.

So I moved on to the world of personal computers and the Internet. The PC disrupted the old priesthood of computing, driving the price of computers by orders of magnitude down to where any fool – or entrepreneur or designer – could have his own. The Internet was even more disruptive – once it became private and commercial; it gave anyone who wanted a voice, for better or worse.

The same sort of thing now is happening with space: The Lynx is small and cheap enough that a private, venture-funded company can build it…and a surprisingly large number of people will be able to afford to fly in it. The one thing that is different is that the space marketplace is not transparent. Partly because many of the bigger start-up players are privately funded by billionaires who don’t need outside funding, and partly for other, less scrutable reasons, most new-space companies are intensely secretive.

That’s weird, because you could steal all XCOR’s plans (for one example), but you still could not build its rocket engines. That takes a combination of craft, engineering, testing…and black magic. (Plus a few patents, to be sure, many of them the work of Jeff Greason himself.)

So it made me especially happy to introduce Greason at a public announcement. Yes, there’s a fine line between openness and self-promotion; XCOR has perhaps erred a little on the side of excessive modesty. But last week, it came out engines blazing, with specifics, numbers and promises to which it will be held accountable. Flight tests should begin in 2010, Greason said. As for actual flights…”We’ll start flying when the tests are done.” Nothing is more sacred than safety.

So, though I am no judge of the technology, I am confident judging the company by the nature of its approach and the quality of the team, especially its leader Greason. Before XCOR and a predecessor company, he worked at Intel for almost 10 years and developed the process technology that made the Pentium chip series possible.

The company’s approach is incremental: ONE: Build the rocket engines first, and the rest will be easy. XCOR started with the E-Z Rocket, the first privately developed high-performance aircraft, which has now flown 26 test flights. TWO: Get contracts to fund your development wherever you can (including DARPA, NASA and the Air Force), so that you can pace yourself. And THREE: Promise less than you know you can deliver, even as you look farther out.

The Lynx itself

Of course, the Lynx itself is tremendously exciting, and it comes at a good time, when the market of private space travel seems slightly stalled, though not for lack of demand. Rocketplane Kistler seems out of the running, and Virgin Galactic’s timing is still unclear. From Virgin’s point of view, of course, a second (or third or fourth) source of launch capacity is little but a blessing. The Lynx promises a different experience from what Virgin does: one person strapped in the co-pilot seat at 37 miles above the Earth vs. a family floating but tethered in a somewhat larger craft, almost twice as high, at twice the price per person. That just helps to validate the market. There will be time enough for fierce competition later on.

More interesting, XCOR promises Lynx 2 one of these days…

 Here’s another in our series of interviews with speakers at the upcoming Flight School.  

Investor John B. Higginbotham, now with SpaceVest,  grew up primarily in West Virginia during the Homer Hickam era, but with a little more parental approval than the famed “rocket boys”: His father was a ballistic missile engineer with the government during the Cold War build-up of the 50’s and early 60’s.  “But,” says Higginbotham now, “I had to slow down my rocket experiments after almost burning the house down.”  After getting his BS in civil engineering from Virginia Tech, he went to Harvard Business School where he participated in a NASA-sponsored case study on materials processing in space. 

Space jobs were scarce in 1979, so he joined Hewlett-Packard Company in the so-called “toy factory” division in Oregon to help bring HP’s new-fangled personal computer to market.  The business grew rapidly to more than $100 million in revenues in two years but, says Higginbotham, “I was still being called to the space business.”    

At that time the market for communications satellites was just opening up, following the US regulatory and privatization decisions that ended ComSat’s monopoly.  But the capital markets were reluctant to invest in businesses reliant on launch risks without insurance.  So he left HP to co-found a space insurance business in late 1981. 

So Higginbotham and co-founder Jim Barrett set to work building a capital base in their start-up insurance company Intec (International Technology Underwriters).  Since there was little experience from which to predict the results for launches and satellite operations, they had to build a company that was expert in communications satellites, launch vehicles  and aerospace practices rather than actuarial tables.  Soon they were recognized as leading experts in the field, turned to by  insurers, lenders and investors alike, as they  managed the dominant global insurance facility and covered billions of dollars of launch and satellites risks annually.  “We essentially underwrote the expansion of commercial satellite communications during the ‘80’s by financing the risks of doing business in space.  We even got Congress to pass legislation establishing liability conventions for all space operations in the United States,” says Higginbotham.  

In 1991, Higginbotham sold his interest in Intec (later sold to AXA and renamed AXASpace) and started SpaceVest to invest in space businesses privately.  In 1995, he expanded the firm’s investment operations by adding the first of what ended up as three institutional venture capital funds.  By 2005, when Higginbotham retired from active management of venture capital operations, the firm had more than $270 million under management with investments in over 50 companies.  The venture operation has since changed its name to RedShift Ventures, while Higginbotham continues to focus SpaceVest activities on strategic space-industry initiatives.  

“Businesses based on space operations continue to be challenging,” Higginbotham says, “because the market has to be there.  You can’t build a business without customers.  We made sure to invest in companies that had a clear market available for them.  Many of the emerging businesses today need to keep this focus.”

SpaceVest is today involved with various industrial partners and clients in a number of initiatives designed to bring new business models and market efficiencies to the industry.  One of them, Higginbotham says, may be ultimately make a material contribution by providing another solid customer base for today’s launch companies – or at least those that can actually offer reliable and  cost-effective spacecraft and launch services.

There aren’t two more institutions more different than the Walt Disney Company and the US Directorate of National Intelligence…perhaps.   Eric Haseltine, who has worked at both of them, says, “You’d be astonished how similar intelligence and the media /entertainment businesses actually are. Both collect information, add value to it and then deliver it to consumers. The biggest problems confronting both businesses are similar: how to manage overwhelming amounts of data, how to keep information private and secure, and above all how to make consumer experience simple.”

He worked at Disney for 10 years, and more recently as chief technology officer of the DNI from June 2005 to June 2007.  Now he’s taken on another challenge – health care -s well asnd secure, and above all how to make consumer experiences simple.overwhelming amounts of data; how to keep information as well as media, sports and themed entertainment.  And he’ll be speaking at Flight School in June as well as the New Yorker’s conference in May.

By training, he is a neuroscientist; he wrote his PhD thesis at Indiana University about the sensory neurophysiology of the brains of snakes (boas and pythons) that “see” in the dark via heat sensors around their lips.

After a year as a post-doc in neuroanatomy at Vanderbilt Medical School, Haseltine  went to work for Hughes Aircraft Company as an industrial psychologist and designed advanced fighter cockpit displays and flight simulation systems.

Haseltine’s research in military flight simulation introduced him to the emerging field of virtual reality, and in 1992 he joined Walt Disney Imagineering to help found the Virtual Reality Studio, which he ended up running until his departure from Disney in 2002. By the time he left Disney, Haseltine was head of R&D for the entire corporation, including film, television, theme parks, internet and consumer products.

In the aftermath of 9/11, he joined the National Security Agency as Associate Director, in charge of  NSA Research and Development, where he directed a broad range of projects, specializing in counter-terrorism technology.

When Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2005, he was promoted to  become its first chief technology officer  (formally, Associate Director National Intelligence, reporting to the Director).  In his two years there, he oversaw all science and technology efforts within the United States technology community as well as fostering development innovative new technologies for counter-terrorism.

 Securing the elephant

“When the US was attacked on 9/11,” he says, “it was as if an elephant had been bitten by a virus-bearing mosquito.  But instead of developing a better immune system, we tried to grow bigger tusks and sharper ears.”    

Last year, he created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – an incubator for projects that couldn’t find a home elsewhere, especially within the establishment. Its name is no accident:  Using the word “activity” as opposed agency, says Haseltine, “made it faster and simpler to create the organization, inasmuch as specific words carry enormous weight in such situations. If we’d called it an ‘agency,’ for example, the finance people asserted  - rightly or wrongly -  that it would have had to have its own separate funding ‘program’ from Congress (also a term of art)…and its own Director, HR system, Finance officers and so on. It didn’t matter if all of this was actually true; all that mattered was that important staffers in ODNI thought it might be true…”   IARPA’s mission is to develop revolutionary technologies that are (perceived as) too  high-risk for any regular agency to pursue. IARPA also focuses on emerging opportunities in the “white spaces” of the intelligence community that do not fit the mission of any agency  and technologies that benefit multiple agencies.

Indeed, Haseltine believes the current situation provides a lot of opportunity for start-ups.  Crises have led to the birth of many new markets, he says.  They include UAVs, GPS, even the Internet itself, which was created in response to the Soviet threat.  He describes the recent success of UAVs, which were pretty much ignored by the armed services.  After all, they competed with existing methods and technology.  “If you’re a parent, you shouldn’t ask the permission of your first-born to have another child.”

 So DARPA  funded UAV’s as an experiment with an operational partner.  They were used in the field in Iraq; when the experiment was over, the operational partner in Iraq would not give them up.  Now the DOD is paying for them – and using them extensively. 

So, Haseltine asks, will the end of the Space Shuttle and the rise of China be the crises that enable private space travel?  

I just visited DayJet to chat with Ed Iacobucci, who is going to be a speaker at Flight School this June. It was an enjoyable trip. (Disclosure:) I got a free sample, which made the case. I had just flown in from Germany, almost a 10-hour flight. My ride to the Opa-Locka general aviation airport (DayJet flies only from smaller airports) took about 35 minutes. My flight to Boca Raton, where DayJet is headquartered, took 20 minutes (and that was with an unusually long route because of ATC vectoring). My ride from the Boca Raton airport to my hotel took 5 minutes.

I was a good example of what DayJet expected and what is turning out to be true: The vast majority of its trips are replacing car trips, not air trips (either commercial or charter). Had I not been able to use DayJet, I would have taken a taxi.

 (Just for the record: Last year I took a 90-minute paid air-taxi trip on SATSair, from Orlando to St. Simon’s Island. That would normally be a 300-mile, four-to-five-hour drive, but for me, a non-driver, it would have been from $400 to $900 and five or six hours in coach via Atlanta or Charlotte, before TSA and waiting time, and to Savannah, still about an hour away from St. Simons Island by car. SATSair charged about $800, as I recall. DayJet currently quotes from $1338.89 (for a two-hour window)  to $500 (for a six-hour-window) for a one-way trip from Orlando to Savannah.  It serves Brunswick, which is much closer to Savannah, but it doesn’t serve the Brunswick-Orlando city pair.)

I won’t explain the whole concept here, but let’s just say it reminds me of Federal Express – even though its concept is precisely the opposite. Way back in the mid-70s when FedEx started, it created an entirely new concept. Packages don’t care where they go on the way to their destination, so FedEx would send them all through Memphis – no exceptions. Manhattan to Brooklyn – through Memphis. Even Manhattan to Manhattan – through Memphis. (Although that has changed since.) The idea was that the costs and glitches of complexity outweighed those of transportation, so it would create a reliable, routine service – one that revolutionized the courier-service industry and created the overnight-deliver business.

DayJet’s premise is the opposite. People do care where they go, and the costs of complexity are way down given today’s computer systems and software, so Iacobucci created a company where there is no routine: Every trip is an exception, scheduled for specific passengers… but by computers, not by people. It’s no surprise this comes from the man who created the Citrix operating system, which is basically software for allocating scarce computer resources in real-time. DayJet allocates scarce aircraft and crew resources in near-real-time. (You can find out more at www.DayJet.com.)

But just as the courier-service people didn’t quite understand the point of FedEx, so do today’s charter operators not understand the implications of DayJet.

New markets, new metrics

“We’ve had to create new performance indicators,” says Iacobucci. “Our load factor right now is about 1.5 [of 3 seats on a plane]. But our effective load factor is lower, because we often fly people extra miles to get them where they are going – and they pay for the originally requested mileage. On the other hand, the company does very well when it fills all three seats – and as it scales up that becomes easier and easier.” Another metric is “quality of load,” which is determined by the customers’ time windows: Did customers book within a broad time window, spending less money, or did they demand tighter scheduling (and receive it)?

For example, there are two flights, from A to B and from B to C. Both have two passengers, so the apparent load factor is 2/3. But there are three passengers, one going from A to B, one from B to C, and the third from A to C, so the *effective* load factor was 3 trips out of 6 available, or ½. And the quality of load was even tougher to calculate, depending on the specifics of the customers’ time windows and the distances flown rather than the number of flight segments.…

Overall, Iacobucci says, the company is pretty much tracking expectations…after a late start last October mostly due to late delivery of the aircraft.

One specific surprise was that Tallahassee was so popular – a triumph of viral marketing among people in a community that revolves around the state government.

Training the customers

Another one is simply the time it takes for people to understand the service. (I remember the early FedEx commercials. First they explained the service. Then they focused on how even small businesses could use FedEx.) DayJet has the benefit of the Web, so that they can get price quotes for themselves and experience (even if a first they don’t understand) the trade-offs. For starters, you don’t get a discount for booking in advance: Since the schedules are fixed only the night before each day’s flights, being early doesn’t help. (Unlike most charter operators, DayJet owns its own aircraft, so it doesn’t have to allocate aircraft early or juggle them late in response to a private aircraft owner’s whims.)

Instead, you can get a better price by stating a bigger time window: I want to leave after 10 and arrive before 3, vs. I want to leave at 10 and get there by 11. The flight for the first is priced on the assumption that the capacity can be shared with at least one other passenger, while the second in essence pays for the whole plane. (That of course will be adjusted over time, in response to demand, capacity, competition and other factors. But it’s the essence of the DayJet per-seat concept.) You can also pay extra to be guaranteed a nonstop flight. “Every constraint has a cost,” says Iacobucci. “And every loosening of a constraint [such as a broad time window] makes things cheaper.”

So people are beginning to learn how it works… And Iacobucci can watch that happening through his software, which has one of the greatest sets of data and visualizations I have ever seen. New customers’ initial queries are wide off the mark: They enter constraints that result in too-high prices or they look for low prices and find flights that don’t suit them. But over time, each customer tends to make fewer queries before booking, and the initial pricing is closer to what the customer ends up paying. And experienced customers don’t book in advance.

Perhaps the most interesting is the metric that indicates how people value their time – which was estimated in one NASA study at $34 an hour for a generic business traveler. You can determine that, of course, by how much extra people will pay to save an hour of time. (Of course, even for any one person that will vary over a day and across days…) DayJet’s customer base, of course, is hardly average – and we’re talking mostly about people spending their employers’ money, not their own. The day I was there I saw figures ranging from $12 an hour to $300…

And how is it trending? If people become more productive through DayJet, over time they may be willing to pay more for the service. And indeed, says Iacobucci, “We’re seeing that the estimated value of time is higher for repeat customers.”

In the last week, I have found two new speakers for Flight School, both in the “light” end of commercial aviation.

First, Miwok Airways. One thing I love about this market is that the CEO is often the pilot… just as in start-up software, the CEO gives the demos. In this case, Gad Barnea, the CEO and founder, gave me a demo flight – from the San Jose Jet Center to Monterey. His company, Miwok Airways, is still in stealth, so I can’t say much about it yet… but I’m pretty sure that by June 4 he’ll be able to talk. For now, he’s pretty cryptic: “Sustainable air-taxi market economics and business models. Tightly defined geographical services areas with a focus on flight densities, yield management and the technology to support it.” Whatever!

Barnea does know what he’s talking about. Like so many people in the biz, he comes out of the software start-up world, with a focus on the optimization/scheduling/scalability side of things. His companies (as founder, CEO or techy) include ZebraZone, a company specializing in high-availability solutions for mission-critical businesses, GigaSpaces, selling a software platform with a technical edge in scalability.

 
But he’s also an experienced commercial pilot, published aviation author and a former Israeli Air Force air traffic controller. And now he’s more interested in how to build both an optimized scheduling system and a business model that will work. For now, he’s based in California’s Bay Area. And as a pilot, he kept me feeling secure even over that bumpy bit where you head over the hills from San Jose towards Santa Cruz. You can see a photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/2296617656/

All service, all the time

JetAVIVA is taking a lower-hurdle approach, supplying services only at this point. “We were in the very-light jet space,” says co-founder and CEO Ben Marcus, “and so we decided to build a very-light management company.” Now 25 (true), they were both at Eclipse, Marcus as a salesman and flight test engineer and Sigari as a salesmen and a propulsion systems engineer They left Eclipse on good terms…and are filling a hole the larger company can’t effectively address (for now). Their original idea, back in March 2006, was to run a VLJ management company that offers an air-taxi service using lift provided by individual owner’s jets. This is the traditional charter model: An operator makes money on providing operating and management services, while the capital costs are borne by the individual owners. The owners earn a little money by leasing out their planes (though they get to discover the costs of maintenance, which often eat up any profits), and they get the depreciation tax benefits. And, of course, they get to say “my plane.”

But things turned out differently, and now JetAVIVA is mostly in the business of “accepting” planes on behalf of their new owners: It represents the client at closing, test flies the jet, and completes a pre-purchase inspection. Currently, JetAVIVA serves about 75 percent of Eclipse’s new individual customers. And instead of flying the planes for transportation revenue (a highly regulated business), they use the capacity they have access to for flying lessons. Most of Eclipse’s individual customers are amateur pilots who need experience flying an Eclipse. And given that not all its systems are ready (including FMS and a fully functioning autopilot), there’s a fair bit for a non-professional pilot to cope with. JetAVIVA offers its training in 10-, 25- and 45-hour blocks.

Their clients typically pay them for these services, and some of them give JetAVIVA control of their planes (for a management fee, of course) to cut their costs. “Most of these guys know whether they’ll need their planes more than seven days out, and they’re happy giving us control,” says co-founder and president Cyrus Sigari. That lets them pretty much covers the owners’ own operating costs – and it gives JetAVIVA predictable access to capacity.

And finally, jetAVIVA is a traditional middleman: The two founders have bought and sold more than 150 aircraft, of which more than 100 were VLJs including Eclipses and Mustangs.

I like this company and these guys. They probably have a better understanding of the private light-jet market than anyone around, and they are careful businessmen. Right now they have about 10 people and four Eclipses under management, and they are profitable. Where they go in the future is unclear, but they’re not taking any huge risks along the way…which seems to be the right flight path for now!

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We now have dates as well as a co-sponsor for Flight School 2008. It will take place in Boulder, Colorado, June 4 to 6 (Wednesday afternoon through Friday lunch). After the workshop, those who dare can  take a Zero-G flight together (separate registration required).

This year, courtesy of co-sponsor Imaginova, I’m expecting a few more people - which should give the discussions even more resonance after the fact. In particular, I’m looking for people who want to get together and build things - not just new companies, but new markets and new ways of doing things.

In particular, I’d like to bring in some people who can start solving the ATC problem - not by lobbying for permission in Washington, but by implementing new technology that works in secondary markets.

And I’d like us to talk more about those secondary markets: What are the opportunities in retail, in training, in online services, as well as in the operation of aircraft.    

On the space side, we’re looking for a few more intrepid investors.. Let me know of any prospects! The opportunities are there in tourism, in research, and yes, in sales to governments.

here’s a preliminary list of discussion sessions (along with talks by certain interesting figures). I’d welcome comments on appropriate participants, tweaks to the sessions or suggestions of new sessions.

• The air-traffic control challenge: Growing up around an old model
• Air taxis: What have we learned so far?
• Air-charter economics: Can they last?
• Safety, reliability and innovation
• Environmental issues: Facing the facts
• Finance: Where the money meets the clouds
• Insurance and legal issues
• Sizing the commercial space market
• The aftermarket: Hotels, tours and training

Our lead-off speakers will include. Same here: Suggestions are welcome (except no submissions from corporate speaker bureaus!):

• Eric Anderson, President and CEO of Space Adventures
• Peter Diamandis, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Zero-G Corporation
• Dan Gerrity, CEO of Naverus Corporation
• Eric Haseltine, Managing Partner of Haseltine Partners LLC (formerly with the Directorate of National Intelligence and Walt Disney Imagineering)
• John Higginbotham, Chairman of SpaceVest
• Ed Iacobucci, President and CEO of DayJet
• Vern Raburn, CEO of Eclipse Aviation
• Andrew Steinberg, Attorney-at-Law, Former Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Aviation and International Affairs and Chief Counsel of the Federal Aviation Administration

And we hope our participants will include:

You!

You can comment below, or e-mail me privately at edyson@boxbe.com.  (You’ll get a challenge, but if you put Flight School in your subject line I’ll fish the message out of the Boxbe waiting list even if you don’t take the challenge.)

 For the more formal information and registration info, go to….

http://www.aviation.com/flightschool

I’m busy thanking all the wonderful speakers, but here’s some press coverage:

• Leonard David on Lowell Wood’s talk on Terra-forming Mars: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070623_mars_terraform.html
• and on Flight School overall:
  http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/leonarddavid
• Declan McCullagh on Airship Ventures:
  http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6192579.html
• and of course lots of photos at:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/sets/72157594147036229/