Trains, Planes, And Fewer Automobiles March 15, 2022 Russia’s atrocities deserve almost all our attention. But in the “On A Brighter Note” department . . . I took the Brightline yesterday! European-quality rail service from Miami to West Palm Beach. For $42: > A Brightline car picked me up at my door and drove me to the station; > The airy, modern first-class* lounge was filled with snacks; > The train arrived made it to West Palm in 67 minutes, 5 minutes early; > A waiting car took me to my destination. All that for $42. (And $42 again back home.) Later this year the line extends to Orlando. I assume the Brightline is losing money, but am told the real play here, for the financiers, was buying up land around the proposed stations, knowing it would become more valuable. Whatever — the Brightline is great and will take a lot of cars off the interstate. Green, green, green. As would be WheelTug. This overview of airport design may be of interest. “A number of things jumped out at me,” writes the CEO: Laguardia’s “useless corners” (at 4:15 in the video) and the problems with jet blast are highly relevant to WheelTug. We make those corner spaces potentially useable! And by eliminating jet blast risk around the terminal, we obviate the assumptions used in this video for how aircraft need to be pushed back. The bridges under which the aircraft taxi are to reduce the “chokepoint” problem that all the older airports have — that when a single airplane backs up, it blocks the ramp for all traffic in and out, and does so for 5-15 minutes. With WheelTug we can pirouette (Twirl) so close to the gate that the airplane is only in the taxiway when it is already moving forward toward the runway. This will make an enormous difference everywhere, even in the new LaGuardia, which, despite the redesign, is still constrained by gate and taxiway space, not by runway capacity. Or to put this even more starkly: The LaGuardia renovation cost $8 billion or so. But as far as we can see, all of the airside changes would have been solved — and then some — with merely adding WheelTug. They redesigned an entire airport because they did not have WheelTug. Which may help explain why WheelTug spends so much time talking to airports, which are always constrained by competing demands for space, throughput, customer happiness, reduced emissions, safety risks, etc. Airports are not our customers. And we have no easy way to monetize the benefits we will deliver to them. Yet the goodness will flow down — airport wins will deliver airline competitive advantages which will at least partially flow into WheelTug revenue. I don’t know whether this is fairly stated — or whether FAA certification and widespread adoption will come anytime soon, if ever. But with grandparent Borealis trading at less than a $30 million market cap, I continue to like our odds. *Hey: the ad revenue from this site has to go somewhere.