Building airplanes fast enough and with enough range to make them practical long-distance transportation options wasn’t as tough a barrier as some of the others but only because the modes of transportation planes competed against set the bar so low. By the time large passenger jets came along, one could go coast to coast in the United States, a journey that would take several days in a train or an automobile, in mere hours. You better believe that the world beat a path to that mousetrap.
In terms of market appeal, small planes have been a much tougher sell. There are so many things that we pilots literally don’t care about (or at least are willing to put up with), like not being able to stand up and walk around or visit the facilities, not to mention the din of most of the planes we fly that is just about impossible to design out of them. I should say, at least until now, those things have been impossible to overcome. In time, perhaps, inventors will tame them all. Well, maybe not all of them.
