Here's an idea that seems a bit wild and scary at first, but it's doable today and has broad benefits: Small aircraft that don't have landing gear, but instead land and take off from robotic "can't miss" platforms pulled by cables on short airfields.

UPDATE: Some updated ideas and a link to a funded research project looking at similar ideas.

For every small aircraft purchaser, a big decision is whether to get retractable landing gear. They are very expensive, and create a risk of failure, but your plane will fly a lot faster and be more fuel efficient if you get them. What if we could leave the landing gear on the ground?

Imagine a wheeled platform on the runway with robotic control and a variety of systems to perfectly track an approaching aircraft. Pulled by cables, it can accelerate at several "g"s forward and back and left and right. As the aircraft approaches it tracks it and the cockpit display indicates positive lock. If the plane veers left, it veers left. If the plane speeds up it speeds up. Pretty much no matter what the pilot or winds do (other than missing the runway entirely) the plane can't miss landing on it. It's spring loaded so even if the landing is a bit hard the shock is cushioned. Done right, it's just like having fancy shock absorbing landing gear.

Just back from some time on the road, which always prompts me to think of ways to improve travel.

First, and most simply: Every hotel room comes with a small foldable stand on which to put your suitcase. The problem is they all come with exactly one of these. In some rooms there is space on the tables or dresser for another bag, but often there is not. Doing solo business travel I have just one bag, but all couples, and many solo wanderers have more than one, and so you end up putting bags on the floor. It's quite annoying, since these stands can hardly be very expensive -- folding cloth and metal chairs can be had for $10 in most stores. I've only tried once or twice to ask housekeeping for another, and been surprised to learn they don't keep spares. Frankly, I think it would be cheaper to just put 2 in every room than waste staff time delivering extras, but either would work. And the hotel often knows if a room is booked for 2 rather than one in advance. If you have a bellman take up your bags, not only does the bellman see how many bags you have but it's a sure thing you have several. Every bell station should have some extra racks and throw what is needed on the luggage cart.

Next, I think it would be interesting to see car rental companies develop cars just for road trips. They are the largest buyers of cars (and often owned by car companies) so custom cars are not out of the question. SUVs and some minivans contain many of the features of a road trip car, but they are often 3 times as expensive when reserved in advance, and 1.5x to 2x more expensive in gasoline usage. What features might a road trip car have?

Everybody knows about the Jet Blue attendant who flew off the handle when he got hit in the head by a bag and had fights with passengers over stored carry-ons. And we know airlines are starting to charge higher fees for checked bags (and even carry-ons) which netted them over $700 million last year. This pushes more people to want to use carry-on bags, which we already wanted to save time, and that means more waits at security and more waits getting on and off flights.

I admit to being a heavy user of carry-on bags. For one thing I usually have lots of camera equipment with me which is too fragile to check unless I have bulky foam cases. Which they then might lose, and which means getting to the airport around 20 to 30 minutes earlier and leaving it 15 minutes later with several more bags. (And perversely, paying more on some airlines.)

The system is getting stretched. I've often thought about one useful solution, which would be standardized carry-on bag racks with rails. The standard sized bags would quickly slick in and click-lock in place. No doors even (except for aesthetics) and no fussing with overhead bags, or rearranging. Perhaps some small unstructured place on top or between for coats and purses and laptop bags but mostly they would go under the seat, or in the seat pocket. (Currently they are not permitted in the seat pockets but these could be strengthened and given a closure so the computer can't fly out in a crash.)

Add to this a system of official gate-check racks. These racks would be there at the gate or in the jetway. If need be they would be mounted in a special elevator or forklift so that they can be quickly and reasonably gently inserted and removed in the cargo hold. These racks would include some rails for standardized bags (especially on puddle-jumper planes which can't have as many overhead rails) and some amorphous sections with strong cargo netting. They would have shock absorbers to reduce shocks when they are put on the plane or taken out. You would place your items in these racks yourself -- in parallel with other passengers, in a wide space where doing so is not blocking others -- and the goal would be that you could put semi-fragile items, including things like cameras and laptops into the racks with full confidence. To help with this, we could have a camera on the wing which feeds the seatback screens so that passengers could watch this module as it is loaded and unloaded. This would do a lot to ensure that it is treated with care in a way that checked luggage often is not.

Last week, on my trip to Berlin, I managed to drop my passport. I don't know where -- it might have been in the bathroom of Brussels airport trying to change clothes in a tiny room after a long red-eye, or it might have been when Brussels Air made me gate check a bag requiring a big rearrangement of items, or somewhere else. But two days later, arriving at a Pension in Berlin I discovered it was missing, and a lot of calling around revealed nobody had turned it in.

In today's document hungry world this can be a major calamity. I actually have a pretty pleasant story to report, though there were indeed lots of hassles. But it turned out I had prepared for this moment in a number of ways, and you may want to do the same.

The upshot was that I applied for a passport on Wednesday, got it on Thursday, flew on Friday and again on Monday and got my permanent passport that same Monday -- remarkable efficiency for a ministry with a reputation for long bureaucracy.

After concluding it was lost, I called the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. Once you declare the passport lost, it is immediately canceled, even if you find it again, so you want to be sure that it's gone. The Embassy was just a couple of U-bahn stops away, so I ventured there. I keep all my documents in my computer, and the security guy was shocked I had brought it. He put all that gear in a locker, and even confiscated my phone -- more on that later.

Since I'm on the road (Washington DC right now, then Berlin on Monday for a few days and then Toronto for the weekend of the 11th) I will lament on the problem I have noted before in travel power. We have to carry so many chargers. I have also found it's a pain to take them all out and put them back in again.

I recently stayed at the home of a friend up in Vancouver. She had some electrical wiring problems, and since I know wiring, I helped her with them as well as some computer networking issues. Very kindly she said that made me a houseguest from heaven (as opposed to the houseguests from hell we have all heard about.) I was able to leave her place better than I found it. Well, mostly.

This immediately triggered a business idea in my mind which seems like it would be cool but is, alas, probably illegal. The idea would be a service where people with guestrooms, or even temporarily vacant homes, would provide free room (and board) to qualified tradespeople who want to have a cheap vacation. Electricians, handypeople, plumbers, computer wizards, housepainters, au pairs, gardeners and even housecleaners and organizers, would stay in your house, and leave it having done some reapirs or cleanup. In some cases, like cleanup, pool maintenance and yard sweeping, the people need not be skilled professionals, they could be just about anybody.

Obviously there would need to be a lot of logistics to work out. A reliable reputation system would be needed if you're going to trust your house to such strangers, particularly if trusting the watching of your children. You would need to know both that they are able to do the work and not about to rob you. You would want to know if they will keep the relationship a business one or expect a more friendly experience, like couch surfing.

In addition, the homeowners would need reputations of their own. Because, for a skilled tradesperson, a night of room and board is only worth a modest amount of work. You can't give somebody a room and expect them to work the whole day on your project -- or even much more than an hour. Perhaps if a whole house is given over, with rooms for the person and a whole family, more work could be expected. The homeowner may not be good at estimating the amount of work needed, and come away disappointed when told that the guest spent 2 hours on the problem and decided it was a much bigger problem.

Trading lodging for services is an ancient tradition, particularly on farms. In childcare, the "au pair" concept has institutionalized it and made it legal.

But alas, legality is the rub. The tax man will insist that both parties are making income and want to tax it, as barter is taxable. The local contractor licencing agency will insist that work be done only by locally licenced contractors, to local codes, possibly with permits and inspections. And immigration officials will insist that foreign tourists are illegally working. And there would be the odd civil disputes. An unions might tell members not to take work even from remote members of cousin unions.

The civil disputes could be kept to a minimum by making the jobs short and a good deal for the guests, since for the homeowners, the guest room was typically doing nothing anyway -- thus the success of couch surfing -- and making slightly more food is no big deal. But the other legal risks would probably make it illegal for a company to get in the middle of all this. At least in the company's home country. A company based in some small nation might not be subject to remote laws.

I love online check-in, and printing your boarding pass at home to avoid doing anything but going to the gate at the airport. Airlines are even starting to do something I asked for many years ago and sending a boarding pass to the cell phone that can be held up to a screen for check-in.

But if they can't do that, I want them to let me to print my boarding pass long before my flight. In particular, to print my return boarding pass when I print my outgoing one. That's because I have a printer at home but often don't have one on the road.

One of the world's favourite (and sometimes least favourite) topics is the issue of terrorism and security. On one side, there are those who feel the risk of terrorism justifies significant sacrifices of money, convenience and civil rights to provide enough security to counter it. That side includes both those who honestly come by that opinion, and those who simply want more security and feel terrorism is the excuse to use to get it.

On the other side, critics point out a number of counter arguments, most of them with merit, including:

• Much of what is done in the name of security doesn't actually enhance it, it just gives the appearance of doing so, and the appearance of security is what the public actually craves. This has been called "Security Theatre" by Bruce Schneier, who is a friend and advisor to the E.F.F.
• We often "fight the previous war," securing against the tactics of the most recent attack. The terrorists have already moved on to planning something else. They did planes, then trains, then subways, then buses, then nightclubs.
• Terrorists will attack where the target is weakest. Securing something just makes them attack something else. This has indeed been the case many times. Since everything can't be secured, most of our efforts are futile and expensive. If we do manage to secure everything they will attack the crowded lines at security.
• Terrorists are not out to kill random people they don't know. Rather, that is their tool to reach their real goal: sowing terror (for political, religious or personal goals.) When we react with fear -- particularly public fear -- to their actions, this is what they want, and indeed what they plan to achieve. Many of our reactions to them are just what they planned to happen.
• Profiling and identity checks seem smart at first, but careful analysis shows that they just give a more free pass to anybody the terrorists can recruit whose name is not yet on a list, making their job easier.
• The hard reality is, that frightening as terrorism is, in the grand scheme we are for more likely to face harm and death from other factors that we spend much less of our resources fighting. We could save far more people applying our resources in other ways. This is spelled out fairly well in this blog post.

Now Bruce's blog, which I link to above, is a good resource for material on the don't-panic viewpoint, and in fact he is sometimes consulted by the TSA and I suspect they read his blog, and even understand it. So why do we get such inane security efforts? Why are we willing to ruin ourselves, and make air travel such a burden, and strip ourselves of civil rights?

There is a mistake that both sides make, I think. The goal of counter-terrorism is not to stop the terrorists from attacking and killing people, not directly. The goal of counter-terrorism is to stop the terrorists from scaring people. Of course, killing people is frightening, so it is no wonder we conflate the two approaches.

On a recent trip on a plane equipped with personal inflight video screens for each seat, I decided to watch a movie quickly and then have a nap. So I started watching the movie right after settling into the seat, about 20 minutes before takeoff. I figured with that I would watch the 1:30 minute movie through the meal service and be ready for the nap about an hour into the flight. What I learned instead was a greater awareness of just how many announcements there are on a typical flight these days. That's because the in-flight system paused the video with each announcement and put it through my noise cancelling headphones.

The many announcements included:

• The routine ones about the process of takeoff. Door closing. Seatbelt sign on. Various blah-blah-blah
• The huge array of safety announcements and instructions I've seen literally hundreds of times.
• A very few useful announcements: Destination check, reasons for delay, updates on flight time.
• Some possibly useful announcements (cell phones off now, OK to use electronics now.)
• Ads: Join our frequent flyer program, get our frequent flyer card, shop from the duty free cart, buy meals, buy drinks (which did not even apply to those not in coach.)

The cacophony is getting worse, almost as bad as when you're sitting in the terminal with the endless announcements. They know people hate that in the terminals and offer the paid lounge with no announcements, but I've said they should just use cell phones instead and give us peace. On Japanese Shinkansen, they also offer a "quiet car" with no announcements -- it is up to you to set your own alarm to make sure you don't miss your stop if you want to sleep or relax. The trains are so on-time you can do this.

How about doing something like this, at least on a modern airplane where you have a personal screen for each seat?

I recently went to the DLD conference in Germany, briefly to Davos during the World Economic Forum and then drove around the Alps for a few days, including a visit to an old friend in Grenoble. I have some panoramic galleries of the Alps in Winter up already.

Each trip brings some new observations and notes.

• For the first time, I got a rental car which had a USB port in it, as I've been wanting for years. The USB port was really part of the radio, and if you plugged a USB stick in, it would play the music on it, but for me its main use was a handy charging port without the need for a 12v adapter. As I've said before, let's see this all the time, and let's put them in a few places -- up on the dashboard ledge to power a GPS, and for front and rear seats, and even the trunk. And have a plug so the computer can access the devices, or even data about the car.
• The huge network of tunnels in the alpine countries continues to amaze me, considering the staggering cost. Sadly, some seem to simply bypass towns that are pretty.
• I've had good luck on winter travel, but this trip reminded me why there are no crowds. The weather can curse you, and especially curse your photography, though the snow-covered landscapes are wonderful when you do get sun. Three trips to Lake Constance/Bodenzee now, and never any good weather!
• Davos was a trip. While there was a lot of security, it was far easier than say, flying in the USA. I was surprised how many people I knew at Davos. I was able to get a hotel in a village about 20 minutes away.

On to Part Two

I'll have many more observations about my recent trip to DLD, Davos and the Alps soon, but one thing I've decided I do want to find (or train) is a travel agent/helper who can assist well with unscheduled travel (ie. a road or railpass trip.)

With unscheduled travel, you don't know in the morning where you will end up that night. You only figure it out later in the day. Sometimes you just drive until it starts getting late and then you pick where you will end the night. It's hard (or expensive) to do this in high season but in low season you can always find a room, and I and many others like that sort of freedom.

So when you do pick where you want to end up you have a few options:

1. You can have a guidebook or database (such as AAA in the USA) and phone around places until you get something you like
2. You can hunt around for web access (better if you have a data plan on your phone) and use sites like TripAdvisor and the various booking search engines (like Kayak/Sidestep) to find a decent hotel at a good price.
3. You can just drive into town and look for Vacancy/Zimmer Frei signs and go in and ask the price.
4. You can find somebody to do this for you.

There are problems with all these approaches. Method 3 (especially using tripadivsor) helps you avoid turkey hotels and find the better values. However, the databases cover only a fraction of the hotels, and the online reservations systems also cover only a small fraction of hotels in an area. There will be better values out there. On the other hand, many hotels offer a better price through the internet than if you call them, or will charge even more if you just walk in.

Just back from a weeklong tour including speaking at Singularity Summit, teaching classes at Cushing Academy and a big Thanksgiving dinner (well, Thanksgiving is actually today but we had it earlier) and drive through fabulous fall colour in Muskoka.

I just decided to cancel my AAdvantage credit card for a 1% cashback card with no annual fee. Many people have the frequent flyer cards so let's consider the math on them. They typically come with a high annual fee (around $80) while other cards have no fee and other rewards.

Yesterday it was announced that "Clear" (Verified ID Pass) the special "bypass the line at security" card company, has shut its doors and its lines. They ran out of money and could not pay their debts. No surprise there, they were paying $300K/year rent for their space at SJC and only 11,000 members used that line.

As I explained earlier, something was fishy about the program. It required a detailed background check, with fingerprint and iris scan, but all it did was jump you to the front of the line -- which you get for flying in first class at many airports without any background check. Their plan, as I outline below, was to also let you use a fancy shoe and coat scanning machine from GE, so you would not have to take them off. However, the TSA was only going to allow those machines once it was verified they were just as secure as existing methods -- so again no need for the background check.

To learn more about the company, I attended a briefing they held a year ago for a contest they were holding: $500,000 to anybody who could come up with a system that sped up their lines at a low enough cost. I did have a system, but also wanted to learn more about how it all worked. I feel sorry for those who worked hard on the contest who presumably will not be paid.

The background check

I have a lot of peeves about airports, like almost everybody. One of them is the constant flow of public address announcements. They make it hard to read, work or concentrate for many people. Certainly it's hard to sleep. It's often even hard to have a phone call with the announcements in the background.

One solution to this is the premium airline lounges. These are announcement-free, but you must watch the screens regularly to track any changes. And of course they cost a lot of money, and may be far from your gate.

Some airlines have also improved things by putting up screens at the gates that list the status of standby passengers and people waiting for upgrades. This also saves them a lot of questions at the gate, which is good.

But it's not enough. Yet, even in a cheap restaurant, they often have a solution. They give you a special pager programmed to summon you when your table or food is ready. It vibrates (never beeps) and they are designed to stack on top of one another for recharging.

Airports could do a lot better. Yes, they could hand you an electronic pager instead of/in addition to a boarding pass. This could be used to signal you anywhere in the airport. It could have an active RFID to allow you to walk though an automatic gate onto the plane with no need for even a gate agent, depositing the pager as you board.

Each pager could also know where it is in the airport. Thus a signal could go out about the start of boarding, and if your pager is not at the gate, it could tell the airline where you are. If you're in the security line, it might tell you to show the pager to somebody who can get you through faster (though of course if you make this a regular thing that has other downsides.)

Years ago I asked that they let me buy a SIM card in the airport arrivals area and now they often do. I also started a forum here on the best company to buy a prepaid SIM from in each country which has a fair bit of traffic.

Yesterday I took my first flight on Virgin America airways, on the IAD-SFO run. Virgin offered a tremendous price (about $130 one way) but it's worth examining how they have made use of technology on their planes. Mostly I usually end up on United, which is by far the largest carrier at SFO. Because of this, I fly enough on it to earn status, and that it turn provides a seat in their Economy Plus section which has more legroom, priority boarding and in theory, an empty middle if there are empty middles. This is 90% of the value of the status -- the other main value, ability to upgrade, is hard to actually make use of because business class is usually full. The extra legroom is surprisingly pleasant, even for a widebody individual like myself who would much prefer extra width if I had a choice.

Other than Economy Plus (and some very nice business class on some of the long-haul planes,) United is falling behind other airlines. It would be hard to recommend an ordinary coach seat. The one big amenity that more and more other airlines are providing is power in coach, in particular 115v AC power which is more flexible than the older 15vdc "Empower" system United uses in business class. The main downside of the 115v connections is they tend to be mounted under the seats, making them hard to get to. Air Canada has put them in the personal video panels. Virgin placed them under the seats but high and forward enough to be reached (if you knew what you were looking for) but also so close as to make wall-warts bump against your legs. Virgin also offered USB jacks down under the seats, also hard to get to. Even if you don't want to put 115v up higher, USB charging jacks are better placed in the video console/seatback I think.

American Airlines has a mix of DC and AC power, but still makes it available in coach. Continental has put EmPower on some planes in the front half of coach, but some newer planes have AC power all the way through coach.

What should be in a good hotel room?

Well, one thing that's easy to add to the list is a powered USB hub, with as many as 6 ports and a 3 amp power supply. Toss in some mini-USB cables (possibly just built into the hub) as they have become, for better or worse, the present-day universal charging standard. (At only 2.5 watts, USB is a bit anemic as charging standard, but it's what we have for now.) A mouse would be nice too, but is a security risk.

Alas, we can't have a keyboard on it, as nice as that would be, since that can't be trusted. It might have a keylogger put in it (even by the previous occupant of the room) to grab passwords.

Now this is a fairly cheap item (under $20) and like many other hotel items, it could also be available at the front desk, though it's so cheap I don't see a reason for that. While you could not be sure it would be there at every hotel, it would still be useful, since it can add to the charging you bring, and most laptops can be a charging station if you are willing to leave them on overnight. It's also useful as a hub. Indeed, have two, one on the desk, and one by the bed for cell phones.

We're almost ready to not need the hotel phone unless you are coming from overseas and pay ridiculous roaming charges. But they still need it to call you sometimes, and I don't want to have to hand over my mobile number at check-in.

Most hotel rooms now are getting a flat-screen HDTV. That's great, but rarely do they offer up the VGA port that many of these TVs have, or a cable to plug it in. I recommend a 1080p TV for each room, located in such a way that it can be an external monitor for my laptop. As such there should be a VGA cable connected or handy. The TV could also be connected to the USB hub, and use a video over USB protocol for devices that have USB out but not video out. (This usually needs a driver and has some limitations.)

Lots of people are doing it -- using their digital camera as a quick way to copy documents, not just for taking home, but to carry around. Rather than carry around a large travel guidebook (where most of the weight is devoted to hotels and restaurants in other towns) we normally just photograph the relevant pages for the area we will be exploring. We also do it even with portable items like guides and travel maps since we don't really want the paper. We also find ourselves regularly photographing maps of cities, facilities and transit systems found on walls.

Coach is cramped, but not everybody can afford business class. In addition, there are airlines that require fat people to purchase a second seat if they can't fit into one. Fortunately I am not in that department, but it seems there is an interesting alternative that might make sense for all -- selling half of a middle seat, for half price (or less) to somebody wanting more room in coach.