Getting the Parts Free, Charged for Refills What if future flight had a simple “return the old fuel container and get a new one” business model? Paul Eremenko, founder of California startup Universal Hydrogen, wants to try it out in a Dash 8 airliner equipped with two 2-megawatt motors supplied by MagniX. Poor analogy perhaps, but in his boyhood, your editor had a camera that was sold at the store complete with a roll of film already inside. All you had to do when you took all your pictures was send it by mail, with a check or money order, and a week later, you got the reloaded camera back with the prints and negatives of your pictures. This klunky, pre-digital plan carried over from Kodak’s version 100 years before. Today, with digital photography having supplanted those earlier, more tedious processes, we save on postage and wasted photos. Let’s face it – we all like rapid rewards and instant gratification. …
