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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is a way to connect with people who have private jets and wouldn't mind picking up a passenger on the way at a price? That might be able to lower the price point for private travel if people are willing to do that. This depends on whether the ones having private jets are even willing to have the hassle of random people joining their flights.

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For charter flights things along those lines already exist. For example hopping a ride on empty leg repositioning routes.

For truly private jet flights it can be trickier. Many truly private jets operate as private flight operations under part 91 of the FAA’s rules. That has a lot less red tape for a private operator but means they truly need to be a private operator and can’t pickup others for hire.

Several startups have tried to get around the above via legal loopholes via ‘Uber for airplanes’ models and got shot down by the FAA.

“Shot down by the FAA” is a great tabloid headline. :)

People with private jets typically have them for privacy and flexibility. Taking strangers as passengers is defeating those purposes.

However for small planes (Cessna etc.) pilots have to reach their flight hours and for financing that take passengers. Sometimes just for scenic round-trips. Sometimes over longer distances. Examples for sites arranging this (German examples) are https://flyt.club/ https://www.mitflugzentrale.de/ or international https://www.wingly.io/

Most of the safety advantages of flying over driving are in the extra training required for commercial operation.

Non-commercial corporate aviation flying twin jets also has an excellent safety record.

Such flights tend to have the same highly trained pilots as commercial flights.

What I see happening here (Switzerland) is that pilots, who have issues reaching their mandatory minimum flying hours, are flexible and willing to take on passengers for cost price.

That's not really Uber for planes, but it gets you places in a way that is often much more expensive otherwise.

This is rarely worth it. There are multiple companies that have tried this and it really comes down to you either being able to afford private jet travel or not.

If you can't, you'll find that you're really just buying into hype more than actual productive travel. All of the arrangements will have strict conditions on passengers, luggage, arrival/departure times and many trips will only be 1-way so you're left finding your own way back, and that might be from small regional airport somewhere.

https://flyxo.com is a recent merger of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOJET and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetSmarter

I imagine the issue you run into there is that at that point you are providing a paid service, which triggers different regulatory/insurance requirements. Just like you can't pick up paid passengers in your own private car when just driving somewhere, other than getting some money for petrol.

Shared rides for aircraft, what could go wrong [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_English_Channel_Piper_PA-...

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