Trans-oceanic commercial travel -- Airships --
Hot Air.
I saw a detailed analysis of this once. Consider a geodesic sphere about 1 mile in diameter. The skin should be a flexible glass-like material that shares this property with ordinary glass: it reflects infrared light. This means that sunlight will heat the air within, making it less dense than the air outside. This sphere will float at altitudes between 8,000 and 28,000 feet, even though the entire structure will mass hundreds of thousands of tons!
On the interior of the sphere, where the "equator" would be, build a small "town" of buildings, homes, shops, restaurants and hotel rooms--extending all around the equator. This will house both the travelers and the residents who make their living maintaining the floating Bucky sphere (FBS). Also build a series of shelves that extend inward from the skin about 200 yards. This is where the helicopters will land and embark and disembark the travelers. (If you're metric, just translate 1 yard = 1 meter.)
At the bottom of the FBS, leave open a circular hole about 1/4 mile wide. This will not cause the FBS to fall, because hot air rises. At each destination, helicopters will ascend from the ground, enter the hole and land on the interior shelves and drop off their travelers. Then they would pick up those who are disembarking, take off and descend back through the hole and land on the ground.
Altitude control of the FBS would be via a series of electrically operated vents near the top (to drop the FBS); and via the photovoltaic panels that occupy 10% of the FBS surface. The PV panels can be temporarily swiveled to allow more sunlight in (to raise the FBS).
There is plenty of room on the FBS "equatorial shelf", as you have 3.14 linear miles of "equator" times 200 yards of width. This yields more than one million square yards of area. Even if 50% of this area was residential and commercial buildings , you would have plenty of room for the helicopters. This leaves room (and to spare) for 8 helicopter landing fields, each 400 yards by 150 yards.
The residential and commercial area of the equatorial shelf could be several stories tall, built just inside and against the outer skin. If we choose 3 stories, then we have about 1.6 million square yards of living space. If half of that was reserved for residents and passengers, 800,000 square yards would accomodate 8,000 people (at 100 square yards per person). This would reflect a resident population of about 4,000 -- sufficient for service trades in addition to the onboard maintainance necessary. The other 4,000 people would be the travelers.
The FBS would mostly travel with the jet streams, at speeds of less than 200 mph. It could descend out of the jet stream, bringing their relative speed down to local windspeed, transfer passengers by helicopter, then ascend back into the jet stream to continue its undending voyage. And unending it would be, for the FBS would never -- COULD never -- land. Once constructed and launched, it floats forever, until it crashes.
This would make intercontinental travel much slower, and you would have to begin and end your jaunts at cities near the jet stream. You would have to time your departure to the schedule of the FBS as it circles the globe. The FBS is powered entirely by solar energy and has no engines, no motive power of any kind.
But what a frakin adventure!!
Renewable fuels in piston engine planes? 
Airships? We don't need to fly anyway? I dunno. 
Whatcha think bink? 
semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling. ~ douglas r. hofstadter
Re: Future of Air-travel
That's why I included airships, but alas it does not look promising. Geodesic sphere maybe 
; stability of so massive a bag as required is a major hurdle with current designs. Some kinda gyro stabalization like Segue I suspect? Then there is the nasty fact Helium is a finite resource and Hydrogen is flammable. 
), and by all accounts the contrails are dampening the rate of global temperature rise. 
In my day....
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Re: Future of Air-travel
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