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This paper summarizes several years of research which considered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's assertion that the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) will be an economical alternative to automobile and airline travel, when considering the value of travelers' time. Performance was studied in the corporate aviation environment, using NASA's metric for cost effectiveness. Cost, cost effectiveness, and the sensitivity of cost effectiveness to key independent variables were examined. Analyses shed favorable light on NASA's premise.

This paper presents results of research which considered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) assertion that the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) will be an economical alternative to automobile and airline travel, when considering the economic value of a traveler's time, within a range of mid-length trips. To simulate a likely near-term niche for SATS, performance was studied in the corporate aviation environment, using NASA's metric for overall transportation performance. Travel$ense software was used to examine the costs of traveling on two hypothetical SATS aircraft versus automobile costs and airline fares, net the cost of travelers' time, traveling among a sample of 53 city pairs in the continental United States.

In January of 2000 the first author delivered a Life Cycle Cost study [1] to NASA that modeled SATS in relatively “broad strokes,” guided by general technological forecasts, and theory based on the historical records of emerging industrial paradigms. The report was summarized in an SAE technical paper [2.] Since the delivery of the January 2000 report, the model has been continuously evolving in an independent University setting. This paper is part of an ongoing series of papers and presentations [3,] and reports interim results of a study that compared the Life Cycle Cost characteristics of three aircraft operating in an air taxi environment. The major conclusions point to the business necessity of properly aligning technology, asset utilization, operating capacity (scale,) and market share. Implications are presented.