“Fly-world” next

Will T-Town belly up to aviation’s coming transformation?

This piece is part two of Pearcey’s essay on the future of aviation in Tulsa.

In December, in the debut issue of The Tulsa Voice, I wrote about the path ahead for Tulsa’s job-rich but problematic aviation sector. Its workforce is skilled, but vulnerable.
Readers will recall that the U.S. Justice Department briefly forestalled a critical merger that, had it been stopped altogether, would've left thousands of local American Airlines workers and hundreds of contractors in the lurch.

Even with the apparent stability spawned by the now-approved American Airlines/US Airways join-up, middle-run turbulence and some employment spin-downs are expected to be part of the local and national commercial airline landscape.

But Tulsa business mavens, our political leadership, our engineering and aviation technology community, and our academics are hardly helpless in the face of these impending changes.

The question is one of will, intentionality, and energy. Can—will—our leadership and Tulsa’s aviation union respond in imaginative ways to build a future for its aviation sector? Innovation is needed on the following fronts:

No pilot.

Pilotless airliners – yeah, I know, it sounds crazy. But then, largely automated prostate or heart surgery sounded crazy, too, but it’s already in play. Evidence suggests that when supervised by exceptional physician teams, the results exceed typical outcomes. And don’t forget that commercial flights are already hugely automated.

Drone city.

Envision an almost fully automated package delivery system, managed by giant servers and “driven” to final destinations by flying drones and automated ground trucks. The Federal Aviation Administration intends to inaugurate sweeping new rules that will allow for extensive commercial use of drones and other remotely controlled flying bots next year. Drone technology has seen a feverish, accelerated rollout as a consequence of its ubiquitous use by our military. Jeff Bezos showed up on “60 Minutes” recently, barely able to contain himself as he talked about his plans to use fleets of small drones to reinvent delivery and logistics, mostly to benefit his own company, Amazon. In the days that followed, a passel of tech thinkers decided that Bezos might be off the mark. Some can’t see the broad, domestic adoption of these aerobots happening anytime within the next five years.

But tech mavens imagine that the developing world—isolated places without passable roads, adequate communications systems, or seaports—might offer the best early test sites for advanced drone delivery. Seeds for planting, cell phones, light pharmaceuticals, and other medical gear could finally be transported to tiny villages and map dots.
The Obama administration recently decided not to designate Oklahoma as one of six new test sites for a highly visible national drone seedbed/demonstration project. But we already have a federally certified corridor, managed by Oklahoma State University and a semiprivate consortium, that can be used for purposes ranging from defense and next-stage commercial to prototype drone test and early fly-off. So there is still a real chance that OSU/Oklahoma and a tiny cadre of automated flyer/drone ventures can help the state capture some of the early riches that will follow the 2015 release of commercial drones, announced some time ago by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Flying cars.

A line of inexpensive personal air vehicles—think Jetson cars—used for short/medium length trips and powered by an advanced automated pilot could be as familiar to most Americans as early as 15 years from now.

Sparking the path.

All these projects need local start-ups to produce key pieces and support pan-disciplinary development and prototyping efforts. This world will require logistics expertise and armies of trained engineering and material specialists—things Tulsa already has, in some measure, as a consequence of our long involvement in the aerospace sector. And we have the Helmerich Research Center at the OSU campus in downtown Tulsa, still not utilized fully. It’s an asset—a $43-million, taxpayer-supported shop—that could help with the headwork.

One day, America will return to space, likely by way of private projects. Tulsa’s entrepreneurs need to find the track. We could join up with one or more of the private commercial space ventures, or spark a new one. Imagine, as Haden Planetarium chief and science celebrity Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson does, a Tulsa that takes full advantage of its deep aerospace legacy, its stout entrepreneurial heritage, and its broad, early participation in the American shuttle program. In late 2010, on a visit to Tulsa, Tyson suggested that it’s not only good sense that Green Country should try to find its way into the private-space industry, but likely to happen.