Will It Fly?

摘要

Last June, airport managers, scientists, and marketers gathered at Easton Airport in Maryland, near the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, for a preview of NASA's Small Aircraft Transportation System―SATS. Over the course of 90 minutes, as the air conditioning sputtered, nearly half of the attendees took turns at the podium while the rest listened. "I'd call it an intelligent pilot in a box," says Kyle Snider, whose company, Applied Systems Intelligence, says that its electronic copilot can monitor adverse weather and airspace boundaries. "A flight bag on steroids" says ARINC Inc. about its eFlightDeck, a portable electronic hand-held that replaces nearly every scrap of flight management paper carried by commercial pilots in bulky briefcases.