Bob Fry
May 4th 08, 04:23 AM
Shamelessly ripped from The Atlantic. A great article about
alternative air travel. See if you still think NASA or the FAA had
much to do with this company's success...
May 2008 Atlantic Monthly
Taxis in the Sky
by James Fallows
True, a cover story I wrote for this magazine seven years ago,
contending that the era of tiny, convenient, and relatively affordable
jet airplanes was at hand, won an Article of the Year award from an
aviation lobbying group. But it would be fair to describe the broader
reaction as: Oh, sure! ("Freedom of the Skies," June 2001, was
excerpted from my book Free Flight.) New and more fuel-efficient jet
engines; new, quieter, and more comfortable small airplanes; new and
more-automated ways of routing aircraft around bad weather and away
from congested areas--these and other innovations, I wrote, might make
a new kind of air travel more practical for more people. This wouldn't
mean personal aviation in the Jetsons sense--a plane in every garage,
people zooming around at will. But it might provide business travelers
with something that until then only the truly rich had enjoyed: a fast
and personalized alternative to the ever less delightful experience of
travel on commercial airlines.
Most readers thought that personal airplanes, like personal yachts,
would always be the playthings of the very rich. The familiar (and
aptly named) Airbus or Boeing aircraft would have to do, as would
impenetrable modern fare structures and the grind of big-airport
congestion. It obviously didn't help that three months later, the use
of passenger airplanes as terrorist tools put aviation in general
under new limits and scrutiny. Allow new routes and possibilities for
air travel? Ha! Everything air-related was destined to be more
controlled.
And as if this change in circumstance weren't enough: a year after my
article and book appeared, the company that had made the boldest
promises about its ability to deliver a small, cheap jet--Eclipse
Aviation, of Albuquerque, the very company I had featured in my
story--revealed the humiliating news that the radically light and
efficient new engine around which it had designed the airplane was
just not going to work. Eclipse put plans for its vaunted new EA500
jet on hold until it could figure out a replacement engine.
Because of problems like these--and more--the aviation establishment has
also been highly skeptical that light-jet air taxis could ever pay
their way. The prominent analyst Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group,
in suburban Washington, has argued that the potential market is so
small, and the costs and risks so large, that the air-taxi concept is
mainly hype and wishful thinking.
Certainly, the vision might turn out to be a mirage. Given the rocky
history of most air-travel companies, that may be the most likely
result. Still: early this year, on a visit home from China, I stepped
inside one of those very same EA500 airplanes and took a 40-minute
flight at more than 350 miles per hour. The plane took off from Boca
Raton, Florida, which has a small airport but no commercial airline
flights. It landed about 160 miles north in Florida at Lakeland, a
sizable inland city with a large runway-and-terminal complex but no
commercial flights. If I'd been driving, the trip would have taken
about four hours. If I'd booked this seat on the plane (it was a free
demo flight), I would have spent about $275--a tiny fraction of normal
business-jet costs, and about $50 less than a US Airways shuttle
between Washington and New York, which covers about the same distance.
Two pilots sat in the front of the airplane, whose interior is the
size of an unusually roomy SUV's. After the plane had climbed above
10,000 feet, one of them turned around and offered to chat and answer
questions. I sat in the second row, in one of two leather bucket seats
with as much legroom as domestic airlines offer in first class and
plenty of room for working on a laptop or with an open briefcase. In
the other seat was Bruce Holmes, a retired NASA official who had spent
much of his career developing plans and promoting support for a "Small
Aircraft Transportation System," which he imagined as a modern aerial
complement to the interstate highways. There was space for one more
passenger, in a seat behind us that had less legroom but as much as
normal airline economy class. The plane is designed for shortish
business trips rather than long hauls with a lot of cargo, but it
allows up to 40 pounds of baggage per passenger.
The flight was operated by the DayJet company, the most successful and
fastest-growing of several companies that are racing to put Holmes's
vision into practice. Others include SATSAir and ImagineAir, which
operate in the Southeast using propeller-driven Cirrus SR-22
airplanes, with four seats and a parachute that can bring the whole
airplane down safely in an emergency. Linear Air, another new air-taxi
company, serves cities in the Northeast with Cessna turboprops and
Eclipse jets. At the beginning of last year, DayJet, which is based in
Boca Raton, had 70 employees but no airplanes or paying
customers. Last September, it carried its first paying customer on its
first "on demand" flight (from Boca Raton to Tallahassee), meaning the
customer--and not an airline schedule--specified when he wanted to leave
and arrive. By the time I visited, this February, it was operating 28
Eclipse airplanes, serving 45 cities in Florida and the Southeast, and
employing 270 people. By the end of this year, DayJet expects to be
flying 100 airplanes, serving 100 destinations, and employing 800
people. Of the 350 customers who had used its service within the first
three months, 40 percent had booked a repeat flight.
"We're not looking for people with straight aviation experience," the
company's CFO, John Staten, told me when discussing its hiring
plans. "We're looking for people who have been through the experience
of hypergrowth." Like the company's founder and CEO, Ed Iacobucci,
Staten and most of its other executives are veterans not of the
aviation business but of software or Internet tech-world start-ups
that went from concepts to multibillion-dollar businesses within a few
years. "It's one thing to hear about that process, but until you've
lived it, it's hard to understand how challenging it can be simply to
manage the growth," Staten said.
How could a brand-new company in the chronically troubled aviation
business have come so quickly to the point where its main challenge is
growing too fast? And this through a period when security concerns of
all sorts have risen, fuel prices have soared, environmental doubts
about aviation have intensified, and airports and airways have become
more congested by the day--and the economy of the company's home area,
in southern Florida, has been through a real-estate crash?
The answer involves an odd assemblage of talents and disciplines that
includes American computer scientists who call their specialty "ant
farming"; Russian mathe*matical prodigies who made their way from
Minsk and Moscow to Florida, via Jerusalem; Internet-business
pioneers; and, yes, pilots and maintenance experts and dispatchers,
including many refugees or retirees from the troubled airlines. Plus
Bruce Holmes himself, who joined the company a year ago, after NASA
radically cut back its airplane-related activities to shift its
resources to space exploration.
DayJet's success to date has also depended on the confluence of
several technologies that all matured at once. Indeed, the most
startling aspect of its story is the insistence from top to bottom
that at heart, it is not an aviation company at all. "You could think
of us as really a software company," Jim Herriott, one of the ant
farmers, told me. What he meant was that the Internet has become an
unimaginably refined and powerful tool for routing packets of data
from place to place. "We are about developing an Internet for
stuff"--the stuff in this case being passengers in seats.
Iacobucci CEO ED IOCOBUCCI shows off some of the formulas DayJet's
"ant farmers" have devised to keep planes and people moving.
Ed Iacobucci, now in his early 50s, grew up outside Atlanta and
studied computer science at Georgia Tech. He rose quickly within IBM
and by the late 1980s was directing a joint Microsoft-IBM project to
develop a new computer operating system called OS/2. It was
technically elegant, but tensions between the two companies broke up
the project and doomed the product. IBM soldiered on with its own,
unpopular version of OS/2 for another decade (Microsoft applied its
part of the work to Windows 95 and Windows NT), but Iacobucci quit in
1988 to start a new company, Citrix, that would work on similar
software. Over the next decade, Citrix enjoyed its own hypergrowth,
with Iacobucci as chairman. Several executives now at DayJet, and the
Russian mathematicians, worked with him there. As he prospered,
Iacobucci bought a Learjet for business travel. Then, in the tech
collapse of 2000, Citrix's share price fell by 50 percent in a
week. Iacobucci stepped down as chairman.
During the good times, his wife, Nancy, had started an air-charter
business called Wingedfoot. It was a "traditional" charter
business--that is, multimillion-dollar aircraft hired for very high
fees by corporations or tycoons. By that time, Iacobucci was following
the same aviation-world chatter I was, about the coming of small
jets. The difference between a writer and an entrepreneur is this: the
only thing I could figure out to do was write a book about it; by
January 2002, Iacobucci and his wife had raised several million
dollars from friends, family, and tech-industry investors to start
work on a new air-taxi company. (They raised some $16 million from
investors, in two rounds, from 2001 through 2006; then another $50
million in early 2007; then $140 million in debt financing, to buy
airplanes, about a year ago.) They code-named the company Jetson
Systems, which they wisely changed to DayJet when they announced their
plans in 2003.
Here are some of the essential reasons that the new business was not
as outlandish as the original name might have made it seem.
First, the airplanes. Eclipse, founded by another software-industry
veteran who had worked with Iacobucci named Vern Raburn, promised to
deliver fast, small jets for about $1 million apiece--versus five to 10
times that much for Gulfstreams, Falcons, Learjets, etc.--and to build
them with advanced, Toyota-style lean-manufacturing techniques that
would make them dramatically more reliable than current
versions. Their efficient engines would also make them cheaper to
operate, bringing the overall cost per mile of jet travel to a small
fraction of the private-jet level. The price of an Eclipse has risen
to about $1.5 million, but it is still much cheaper than alternative
jets.
Next, the airports. Although unnoticed by most travelers, the United
States is studded with airports, at least 3,500 of which have runways
large enough to allow small, Eclipse-style jets to take off and
land. The real value of these airports is that most of them stand
nearly empty and could handle many more airplanes carrying people to
and from the suburbs, office developments, factories, or recreation
sites nearby. Most were built during an aviation boom that ended 50
years ago, and have barely been modernized since then. Bruce Holmes's
efforts at NASA included exploring ways to make them all usable, even
in bad weather--especially with safer, modern GPS-based landing
systems.
And finally, the airlines. Despite the temporary dip in air travel
after 9/11, compared with 2000, airlines now serve fewer cities, with
less-frequent flights and often with smaller airplanes--but carry more
people overall. And although a larger share of flights go through
overcrowded hubs such as O'Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Atlanta, those
airports rarely add new runways. This has the same effect as trying to
force more cars onto a given road: all of them slow down. Once in the
sky, jets are as fast as ever, but cascading delays mean that the
overall door-to-door speed of U.S. airline travel has been slowing
down.
Iacobucci and his colleagues were sufficiently convinced of these
advantages to keep raising money and laying plans, even as the
air-travel industry reeled after 9/11. By early 2002, a team of
30--many of them from Citrix or other Internet companies--was working in
Boca Raton. On Thanksgiving weekend of 2002, their own shock came:
Vern Raburn announced that the Eclipse airplane would have to be
redesigned because its ultralight new jet engine, adapted from the
military's cruise-missile program, was not passing performance tests.
Eventually this crisis passed, when Pratt & Whitney Canada agreed to
create a new engine for Eclipse that was only slightly heavier than
the original design. But the delay lasted more than two
years. (Eclipse has survived other crises, the gravest of which was a
cash-flow emergency that threatened to put the company into bankruptcy
late last year. A European consortium called ETIRC put more than $100
million into the company, in exchange for an agreement to open an
Eclipse jet factory in Russia.) Eclipse still faces serious financial
challenges, but aviation analysts I spoke with said that even if the
company went bust, the airplane itself is attractive and proven enough
that some other company would likely buy the rights to make and sell
the plane.
But the engine problem changed everything for DayJet. By that time, it
had agreed to buy as many as 300 Eclipse jets, and it expected to put
them into service and start its business in 2004. "Suddenly we had a
27-month 'insertion' in the schedule," John Staten told me. The
company couldn't make its first dollar until it got its first plane,
and meanwhile it had a staff to pay. Members of the DayJet team fanned
out to inspect small jets then being developed--by Honda, Cessna,
Embraer, and others--and decided that it made the most sense to stick
with Eclipse and wait. In retrospect, the two-plus years of forced
gestation may have been a godsend to the company.
Here we come to the members of the DayJet team I was most surprised to
find at its headquarters, and the ones who, according to Ed Iacobucci,
are the real secrets to its success. These are the ant farmers and the
Russians.
Jim Herriott and Bruce Sawhill, computer scientists in their 40s, are
the ant farmers. They have worked together for 10 years--the first five
at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the past five at
DayJet. When we met, they had a comedy-team manner, with Herriott
playing the straight man, carefully explaining the principles, and
Sawhill the mad scientist, exclaiming about the elegance of the
underlying math. Their job has been to determine exactly how many
people might pay to use an air taxi, and where they would want to
go. Their answers have come through ant farming, which could less
colorfully be called inductive reasoning.
For instance, to predict how many Floridians would pay to fly from
Pensacola to Naples, they start not by gathering gross-travel or
population figures but by trying to simulate the decisions that
hundreds of thousands of individual travelers will make. Their
computer models resemble a much more complex version of an "artificial
life" computerized game like SimCity or SimLife--or, to explain the
nickname they gave themselves, programs that simulate the paths a
colony of ants will take across a floor as they discover and retrieve
pieces of food. This process is also known as "agent-based modeling."
The ants, or agents, in DayJet's model are the 500,000 people per day
in the seven southeastern states who take business trips of 100 miles
or more. Some 80 percent of these trips are now made by
car. Commercial airlines account for most of the rest, with trains,
buses, charter flights, etc. making up the remainder. (In the
Northeast, commercial airlines represent less of the total, and trains
more.)
Herriott and Sawhill have developed a model to simulate the individual
decisions that go into every one of these business trips. The model
starts with the likelihood that a person in any one city, let's say
Mobile, will want to go to another, say Savannah, on any given weekday
(for now, DayJet is a weekday-only service). These predictions are
based on average income in each city, business relations, and other
factors, and are constantly tuned to reflect real data. "It's like the
pull between two planetary bodies," Herriott said. "Almost a Newtonian
law!" (He was joking.)
The DayJet model factors in all relevant variables that could affect
the traveler's decision--something that is hard enough for a real
person in real time. It contains up-to-date listings of all flights
offered by all commercial airlines serving the region, and the prices
for short-term bookings and seven- or 14-day advance-purchase
fares. It has average highway-speed and congestion data for the routes
people would drive between any two cities, and real-world travel time
from different parts of a city to the nearest airport. It includes
lodging and restaurant costs, if a driving trip means an overnight
stay, and rental-car and gas rates.
Also, crucially, it tries to place some value on people's time. Time
value obviously varies: being three hours late for a wedding is
different from being three hours late for a meeting on a Thursday
afternoon. Because its target customers are business travelers earning
from $75,000 to several hundred thousand dollars a year, income levels
at which the time savings are worth the cost, the model uses salary to
approximate the business value of time. (People making even more, it
assumes, might use "normal" corporate jets.)
With this information and more plugged in, the ant farmers run the
model--over and over and over. While we watched on a big-screen map
projection from Herriott's computer, the whole possible range of trips
taken by one typical day's 500,000 business travelers whizzed by in a
few minutes: Miami-Atlanta, Key West-Jacksonville,
Savannah-Biloxi. The point was not to predict exactly which trips
travelers would take on any particular day but instead to see which
patterns of travel emerged and where there might be a market for air
taxis. In theory, DayJet could offer service from any airport to any
other airport within the plane's 650-mile nonstop range. But to
minimize the number of empty "deadhead" legs its planes might have to
fly back from remote locations and to maximize the number of paying
flights each plane could make per day, the company planned to start in
a concentrated area and then expand as it became sure there was more
demand.
For every simulated trip, the computer was comparing all the
alternatives--take the whole trip by car, take a train if there was
one, drive to the nearest major airport and take Delta or JetBlue--and
predicting whether a traveler would choose any of them over a possible
flight with DayJet. A counter continuously tallied how many trips
would be made using each option. For people taking one of the "trunk
routes," like Atlanta to Miami, the airlines were the obvious
choice. But enough people heading from one small place to another
created a market DayJet could tap.
"We're not really going up against the airlines," Herriott
said. "Where there's good air service, we want to stay out of the
way. Our sweet spot is the trip of 300 or 400 miles where the air
travel is so complicated or inconvenient that you finally throw up
your hands and say, 'I'll just drive!' We can beat driving, especially
with time and lodging costs."
During the years of waiting for Eclipse, the ant farmers ran and
refined their models and DayJet refined its idea of where it would
start offering service. The analytic process underscored, for
instance, the importance of including Tallahassee in the list of
cities it would fly to and from. Like all state capitals, Tallahassee
generates lots of business travel--and like many others (Sacramento,
Springfield, Albany, Salem), it is in an out-of-the-way location with
bad and expensive airline connections.
DayJet noticed that a shift in airline policy was helping it. As
airlines "upgraded" the equipment they used for small
cities--sleek-looking 50-seat regional jets in place of clunky 13-seat
turboprops--many of them had to downgrade their service. This shift was
bad news for small cities in many ways. For instance, Lakeland, where
I went on my DayJet flight, had with federal and state funding built a
new $6.8 million terminal in 2002. The investment was based on the
assumption that a feeder airline would add Lakeland to its
schedule--probably Comair, a Delta subsidiary, which had served
Lakeland with small planes in the 1980s. In fact, no airlines came,
and the expensive terminal stood empty--until the first Dayjet flight
arrived last October. Cities that could keep small turboprops full
might generate too little traffic for larger regional jets, but plenty
to sustain an air-taxi business.
Herriott and Sawhill emphasized that the market for business travel
had a "long tail" pattern, much like book sales on Amazon. A few main
trunk routes, say New York-Miami, and the familiar handful of major
airports account for most commercial airline traffic, just as a few
Harry Potter-style blockbusters outsell anything else. But most
business trips are from one obscure destination to another, just as
books most people have never heard of together account for most Amazon
sales.
By the time DayJet got its first airplanes from Eclipse last year, it
had an idea of where it would find its initial market. By March, it
was serving 60 cities in the Southeast. Trips had to start, end, or
pass through one of 10 "DayPort" cities, as in the familiar airline
"hub and spoke" model. The difference is that the company is expanding
the number of these "hubs" every month, building toward a network that
won't cover every possible city pair but will cover a lot. By the end
of this year, DayJet expects to cover 100 cities in six states, 30 or
so of them hubs. Its map of planned expansion, pushing steadily
northward from Florida, reminded me of Cold War-era posters about the
potential spread of Communist influence.
While the ant farmers tried to determine where the company should
start its service, the mathematicians from Russia were devising the
software on which the company would run. In the end, they came up with
plans that, in their view, made DayJet conceptually closer to Google
or eBay than to existing airline companies. Before I explain what I
heard from Alex Khmelnitsky, a note: most of the time I spend
reporting, I spend listening to people describe what they do. It's the
payoff of the job--and through years of transcribing notes, I've
learned that the typical minute or two or 10 of conversation boils
down to a sentence or so of usable thought.
Not so with Alex! He and his colleague Eugene Taits worked for
Iacobucci at Citrix and joined DayJet in its early days; another
Russian veteran of Citrix, Oleg Kuzedub, joined DayJet
recently. During the hour I spent with Alex and Oleg (Taits was out of
town), Oleg said only a few words. But Alex more than made up--and I
have never listened so hard trying to comprehend.
To spare readers, not to mention myself, undue exertion, I'll simply
say that in the view of everyone I spoke with at the company, the
Russian-designed mathematical backbone of the company was its crucial
advantage over any competitors, and would mean the difference between
the company's making a profit and not.
The part of the system customers notice is DayJet's unusual way of
setting prices. When you want to travel, you go to its Web site,
dayjet.com. You can register, at no charge, and receive price quotes
for sample trips. If you'd actually like to travel, you and your
company must be approved as DayJet "members," which largely involves
submitting your name to the Transportation Security Administration for
security vetting. The concept here is similar to the "trusted
traveler" program the TSA is introducing for commercial air travel,
and to El Al's famed security. The emphasis is on knowing who is
traveling rather than on scrutinizing people each time they board a
plane. Once approved by the TSA, passengers won't have to be searched
before each flight. Like passengers on most of today's charter jets or
small private planes, they will simply walk into a terminal, identify
themselves with a driver's license or similar document, and go out to
the airplane. Even if the TSA insisted on formal screening for each
DayJet passenger, in practice that would mean only a small delay,
because no more than three passengers will board each DayJet
plane. Avoiding long security lines is one of many steps toward
in-and-out speed of the kind previously enjoyed only by corporate
moguls on private jets. Six minutes after Bruce Holmes and I got out
of the car at the Boca Raton airport, we were getting on the plane.
On the Web site, you say where you'd like to go--to Naples, from
Tallahassee--and when. Then comes the crucial part: specifying how
flexible you are about your travel plans. If the flight itself takes
just under two hours versus seven hours of driving (the site tells you
how long the flight will take), and you have exactly two hours in
which you'd like to travel, you say: "Can't leave till 2 p.m., must
arrive at 4 p.m." After only a few seconds, the system gives you a
quote, in this case DayJet's highest rate: $1,296. But if you are free
to travel any time that day as long as you get there by dinnertime,
you enter: "Could leave as early as 11 a.m. but must arrive by 6 p.m."
In that case, the system comes back with a quote about one-quarter as
high: $346. Airline fares for this route on Orbitz or Travelocity are
usually higher, and the trip always takes longer, because there are no
nonstops.
If you accept, the trip is booked--and the night before your trip, you
get an e-mail specifying your exact departure time, meaning you won't
have to devote your entire "travel window" to traveling. If the e-mail
says to get to the airport by 3 p.m., the plane will be there waiting
for you. All you do at the airport is show your ID at a counter and
walk onto the plane. If you have specified a wide-enough travel window
to get a lower price, there may be at most one intermediate stop to
drop off or pick up another passenger. Combining trips this way, in a
familiar SuperShuttle model, is the key to DayJet's per-seat,
on-demand service, which keeps prices well below what they would be
for chartering an entire plane.
In the few seconds it takes DayJet to price your trip, a system called
RTR (for "real-time routing") is figuring out how your request will
affect the placement of planes, pilots, and passengers for all other
flights that day, and exactly how much the company must charge to make
a profit on your flight. The mechanics of making all of this work are
what have made the Russians famous within the company--along with a
vast computing system called ASTRO, which runs round the clock,
constantly looking for more efficient* ways to combine planes, pilots,
and the time windows requested by passengers.
Between 6 and 7 p.m. each evening, the computers "gelatinize" the
assignments for the next day--make them firm enough to tell passengers
exactly when to show up at the airports, but still pliable enough that
pilots and planes might be reassigned if last-minute requests come
in. From the passenger's point of view, everything is truly set by
this point. (Passengers can change or cancel their flights until 6
p.m. the previous night, for a $100 fee. Between 6 p.m. and two hours
before flight time, the cancellation fee is 50 percent of the
fare. Within two hours of flight time, passengers who cancel must
forfeit the full fare.) But until an hour or two before each flight,
the company may not be sure which airplane, with which team of pilots
from which other destination, will be making the trip. These
last-minute assignments are left to ASTRO, which keeps track of the
unbelievably intricate technical, legal, and human variables required
to meet the promised schedule. (For instance: not simply which pilots
are due for rest time but also which pilots weigh how much, so that
two fat ones won't lead to an overloaded flight.)
I told Brad Noe, the vice president for software development, that the
only place I had seen something similar was in a logistics center
tracking the flow of electronic products from factories in China,
through U.S. air couriers, to delivery in the United States. "This is
a logistics company," he replied, "that happens to be moving people."
What is the resulting experience like, if you care mainly about
getting somewhere rather than marveling at the software? I am an
enthusiast, as just possibly might be clear. But objectively, this is
a comfortable and convenient way to travel.
You go to the airport, which, because it's small, is less congested
than ones you're used to. You walk to the DayJet counter, which
resembles a rental-car booth. There's probably no line, because
probably no one else is going at just this time. As you step up to the
counter, a trapdoor-like device measures your actual weight while the
attendant asks to weigh your bags. (On small airplanes this is
important, for instance in determining where to place the bags.) A
minute or two later, you walk out to the plane, and a minute or two
after you're seated, it taxis and takes off.
Decades ago, while working for Jimmy Carter, I was struck by one
underpublicized detail about Air Force One: practically as soon as the
president sat down, the plane started to move. It's not quite as fast
with these small jets, but eliminating the waste time of the airline
experience--the hour or two you must be at the airport before the plane
actually starts taxiing, the 10 to 15 minutes or more between taxi and
takeoff--makes a big difference in overall travel speed. It's the same
at the other end. Two minutes after the wheels touched the tarmac on
my DayJet flight to Lakeland, I was standing in the terminal.
The plane feels roomy rather than cramped inside, certainly compared
with a jammed airliner. The cabin is quiet enough that you can talk in
a normal voice--though by the end of my return trip, I noticed enough
of a whine to want to bring a noise-canceling headset the next time I
travel. (To be fair, I also wear these on airliners.) It was bumpy
going through a layer of clouds on descent, but those clouds would
have been bumpy in any airplane. And the view was great.
So what could be wrong with this model? The main obstacles to the
company's success, and to the whole industry's growth, are
several. I'll start with something that surprisingly is not a problem:
aerial congestion. America's aviation system is like a big, wide
freeway, with most cars jammed up at a few exits. The only crowded
parts of today's system--the runways and approach paths to the big hub
airports--are precisely the places air taxis plan never to go. The
DayJet planes fly at altitudes basically unused by other aircraft,
15,000 to 25,000 feet. (Very small planes fly lower than that;
airliners and corporate jets fly higher.) "What's the biggest airport
we'll ever go into?" Traver Gruen-Kennedy, the company's vice
president for strategic operations, said to me. "A place like Savannah
or Knoxville. Where the airlines are is where we don't want to be."
The worst news for passengers who live in areas plagued by congestion
is what it means for air-taxi expansion plans. As DayJet continues
adding a few more cities each month, it is considering whether to keep
expanding from its existing network--or to start up in another part of
the country, perhaps California or the Midwest. "I can tell you the
one part of the country we're not crazy about," John Staten
said. "That's the Northeast"--where everything is already congested,
and where railroads provide an option that doesn't exist elsewhere.
The environment? A more serious concern, since a plane carrying one to
three passengers obviously uses more fuel per person than one carrying
150, if all seats are full. Bruce Holmes's response is that most of
DayJet's customers would otherwise have driven, probably alone and in
a large car--and the new jets are designed to beat or match such trips
in fuel consumption and overall carbon output per passenger
mile. That's not saying much, of course, and the company is part of an
alliance to develop much more efficient engines, alternative fuel
sources, and other technologies known as "NextGen" to make flights
more efficient and less polluting. (Noise has not been a complaint so
far, since DayJet's engines are substantially quieter than those on
airlines or most business jets.) DayJet's business models assume that
oil will never be cheap again; its projections for costs and prices
are based on oil that costs between $90 and $120 per barrel.
And there are the other perils that can affect any start-up,
especially in a field with the life-and-death risks of aviation. Maybe
the Eclipse airplanes will prove to have some flaw. (In part for this
reason, DayJet has always intended to add other kinds of jets to its
fleet as they come on the market. The next promising one is from
Honda.) Maybe there will be a crash or a terrorist threat. Maybe as
the company triples its workforce within a year, it will have trouble
maintaining its can-do culture. Maybe something else will go wrong.
But that DayJet has come so far is startling. Or at least to
me. Having interviewed Bruce Holmes more than a decade ago about his
vision of an air-taxi jet fleet, I asked him as we got off the plane
what had surprised him.
"You know...nothing!" he said, after a pause, seeming surprised to
have come to that conclusion. "It's just what we foresaw."
--
Most people drive thru life with the parking brake on.
~ Lance Bradley
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