Steve Corneliussen Jr., Daily Press

Government research leaders are engineering a free-market revolution in aeronautics, reports nationally prominent journalist James Fallows. His new book, "Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel," looks forward to safe, technologically advanced small planes unclogging America's saturated hub airports by opening multitudes of direct new routes.

This national vision has special significance for Hampton Roads. It originated at NASA Langley Research Center and potentially involves other local science and technology as well.

Oddly, unlike most commerce and technology in the Internet age, air travel has been growing steadily less user-friendly. Airliners still fly fast and safely, but actual doorstep-to- destination times have risen. In 2001, America's perpetually congested air-travel system delays, squeezes, hassles and frustrates its customers.

So the adjective "free" in the title "Free Flight" does double duty as an imperative verb. With today's thousands of underused nonhub airports hosting tomorrow's armadas of innovative small planes, the envisioned aeronautical techno- revolution would free aviation to serve many more people -- more widely, more frequently and more conveniently.

Fallows, a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, represents The Atlantic Monthly as its national correspondent. So his book represents a big publicity boost for the work of NASA Langley.

Langley engineer Bruce Holmes and his colleagues, including NASA administrator Dan Goldin, are instigating the envisioned revolution.

They promote new technologies, new thinking, and new partnerships among NASA, other federal agencies, airplane companies, engine and electronics manufacturers and research universities. Their efforts, now over a decade old, underscore Langley's historic stature as America's aeronautical treasure.

Consider a comparison. The envisioned NASA-stimulated free-market revolution would bring to travel what the computer revolution brings to communication: a practical expansion of individual freedom.

Publicly funded researchers have contributed steadily to computers, semiconductors, integrated circuits, computer graphics, supercomputers and optical fibers. They also invented the Internet. The Internet's power was multiplied by physicists at Europe's huge publicly funded accelerator laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland -- a cousin of our Jefferson Lab. Needing a new way to share data, they invented the World Wide Web.

The rest is history. Free-market entrepreneurs transformed computers and the Internet still further, expanding access to information and providing more ways to communicate.

To complete the comparison: That kind of practical enhancement of personal freedom would also result from the envisioned revolution in small- plane air travel. And the air-travel revolution too would result from mixtures of government and commercial efforts and from the convergence of initially separate technologies.

Holmes talks about an "Airborne Internet," for example. It would incorporate advances in computing power and miniaturization. The system would give pilots easier access to more information for safe flying. A "highway in the sky" screen would use data from Global Positioning System satellites to run a movie-style display for the pilot. Even at night or in clouds, the display would depict the terrain below, updating the picture moment by moment.

Physicists invented the astonishingly precise atomic clocks at the heart of the Global Positioning System. They were seeking answers to fundamental scientific questions. The GPS itself followed. Now even golfers use it. Everything in an "Airborne Internet" would similarly illustrate how one science serves another, and how technologies that begin separately end up being combined.

A new generation of small airplanes would also build on advances in industrial techniques. Airplane manufacturers are already copying the latest automobile-manufacturing practices, just as it happened in World War II. This time, though, they can also copy improvements in automobile passenger comfort. Most importantly, small advances are adding up for better engines, especially compact jet engines.

The new small planes have also begun to adopt recent aerodynamics advances from NASA Langley. The wing cuff, for example -- an abrupt discontinuity in the wing's front edge -- helps prevent dangerous stalls leading to spins. And ultra- smooth wing surfaces, attained with today's advanced materials, make "laminar-flow" performance possible, if such wings are precisely designed for increased speed and fuel efficiency.

So both the Internet revolution and the just-beginning air-travel revolution illustrate the useful combining of public research with free enterprise, as well as the useful mixing of originally separate technologies.

You can link all of that to a pair of Jeffersonian propositions: Some science merits public funding and every science is auxiliary to every other.

As it happens, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility itself nicely illustrates the importance of those propositions for Hampton Roads -- and for the prospective air-travel revolution.

The Southeastern Universities Research Association runs Jefferson Lab mainly with U.S. Department of Energy funding, but with other public support as well, including from Virginia and Newport News. University researchers from across the country and around the world use the lab's huge electron accelerator to conduct fundamental research in nuclear physics.

In turn, the superconducting technology animating the accelerator now also drives the world's most powerful tunable laser, Jefferson Lab's free-electron laser. "Tunable" means varying the laser light's color. That's important. When it comes to putting light to work, Mother Nature can be quite particular about precise colors.

The free-electron laser is being upgraded to provide more colors and more power. And another superconducting machine, this one producing scientifically useful X-rays, will be commissioned as well.

Aeronautics-related applications are already known or being defined for these new sources of useful light. For example, transforming the metal airplane into the plastic airplane means advancing the technology of strong, lightweight materials similar to the fiberglass in boats. Researchers at Jefferson Lab are already pioneering studies of these advanced materials.

Experiments on the fabrication of carbon nanotubes, with their astonishing strength and resilience, have also been conducted. Besides improving existing types of aircraft components, nanotubes could lead to entirely new approaches, such as flexible, single-piece wings without hinged control surfaces.

For the "Airborne Internet," scientifically useful light at Jefferson Lab allows study of the physics of advanced electronic and photonic materials -- the components of future advances in aviation electronics and communication.

Users of industrial turbines have shown strong interest in using light to impart special characteristics to turbine-blade surfaces. Since jet engines also use turbine technology, an accelerating interest in small, efficient jet engines might accelerate interest in metal-surface processing research at Jefferson Lab.

At several points in "Free Flight," Fallows mentions the puzzling absence of national attention to NASA's contributions to modern aeronautics. That's a bit ironic for Hampton Roads, the source of energetic efforts to promote Langley in Washington and nationwide.

But much the same observation can be made about light sources, including Jefferson Lab's. They too represent a revolution. Using energy for work is nothing new. Transforming energy into light in exotic new ways, to do new kinds of work -- that's new.

Not new, though, is the motivation for all of this techno-activity: improving technology through science, and in turn, improving life through technology. Every year, Hampton Roads finds more opportunities to contribute in that process. Now, with a great boost from James Fallows, NASA Langley has introduced one more. It's a big one.

AUTHOR TO VISIT HAMPTON ROADS

James Fallows, author of "Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel," will appear publicly in Hampton Roads.

• At 7 p.m. Thursday, Fallows will present a free public lecture in Jefferson Lab's CEBAF Center auditorium, 12000 Jefferson Ave., Newport News. Barnes and Noble will be present for a book signing afterward, with copies at 10 percent off. Jefferson Lab sponsors author lectures and book signings as a nonprofit contribution to public discussion of science and technology. For information, call 269-7689.

• On Sunday, Sept. 23, Fallows will appear alongside NASA Langley's Bruce Holmes on Channel 13's "On the Record," moderated by Joel Rubin.