One of the signature aspects of the new incoming White House administration is its positive attitude toward bold new technology from the private sector, and the energy necessary to fuel it.  I’m referring to new types of airline aircraft: they are going to change in ways that will be as dramatic as the first flight at Kitty Hawk by the Wright brothers. 

Together with private business, Trump’s new government will create the right combination of policy and investment incentives, to allow our airline and space industry to fully advance into the 21st century at a much faster rate.

Although Trump is known as a real estate developer, his interest in aviation has been noteworthy throughout his business career.  His brother was an airline pilot, and Trump himself bought the original Eastern Airlines “shuttle” service in New York and then rebranded it as the Trump Shuttle.  It was a wonderful service, with upgraded amenities and smart joint marketing with his hotel and casino businesses, among other improvements. 

Like political parties, the airline industry didn’t really like “outsiders,” so he faced some challenges.  But it served consumers unusually well, and the concept is undergoing some serious reconsideration, using new types of aircraft, technology, and service.  The Trump Shuttle was the consumer’s best friend: all the seats were uniformly spacious, comfortable, and relaxing, and you could show up ten minutes before departure with a pass, like a commuter train, and walk on in comfort.

If only today’s airlines were like the Trump Shuttle.

They may be, because some new, highly overdue “upgrades” to new types of airplanes are around the corner.

The Biden administration had nothing but contempt for airline service, unless it could be used for political purposes, like hiring “diverse” pilots.  Biden’s head of DOT was a disaster, completely out of his league.  That will change as well. 

That Elon Musk is part of the mix of Trump-backers is important in this regard, because his relentless confidence in space flight has applications back here in regular passenger service.

Our next-generation airline aircraft will have two critical features that will set them apart from what we are used to: they will fly at supersonic speeds, with more comfort, and they will also utilize much higher altitudes that reach up to sub-orbital levels, where aircraft are not subject to atmospheric drag.  They are free to fly at very high “mach” numbers beyond the speed of sound. 

Some readers may recall Ronald Reagan’s famous “Orient Express” speech.  Like JFK, who set an ambitious goal for a manned mission to the moon, Reagan confidently described a futuristic hypersonic space plane that could travel from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo is a couple of hours. 

That ambition and vision got lost in all the wasteful airline fighting and government interference (or neglect) that focused on cheap seats and no frills, with airplanes still based on 1950s design.  The Biden team then came along, who saw airlines politically, as “carbon” emitters.  The Biden administration also quietly supported the Chinese C919 aircraft to replace Boeing — by actually undermining Boeing with help from China.  The C919 is a cheap copycat that makes airline service even worse and, in my view, questionable as to security.

The Trump administration may be able to reverse course on this trend of using old technology and outsourcing it to China.  Instead, the world’s greatest aviation industry, like so many others, is right here in the United States. 

Ironically, the Chinese are beating us in space exploration, and that has to be addressed as well.  Russia is also ahead — in both cases thanks to the misguided “green” ideologues in the Biden administration whose bizarre vision for the future was a primitive utopianism of deindustrialization, fewer people, and crude technology.

That ideology is about to change to one of advanced, transformational high technology, in a faster, smarter, more confident and more elegant vision of American economic growth.

Matthew G. Andersson is the founder and former CEO of Indigo Airlines, backed by the American Express Corporation and McKinsey and Company.  He is a jet command pilot and graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  He was an executive adviser in aerospace and defense with Booz Allen Hamilton and testified before the U.S. Senate on new aircraft in the national airspace system.  He is the author of The New Airline Code, concerning aviation economics and policy.  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.