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Comment by n_ermosh | Hacker News Reader

You're definitely right that the cross continental trip is a big and common one. however, 90% of long distance trips are made by car in the US with a median trip distance of about 200 miles. If we can make flying as easy as driving, the ability to make that trip in half to a third of the time, we believe that's a big win and incentive for a lot of people. There are 19,000 small airports in the US and 300M people live within 15 miles of at least one. So we totally think it's reasonable for that medium distance trip to be done by GA airplane rather than car.

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I've found my GA flying to really be about trips that you _wouldn't have made otherwise_, but the biggest barrier is cost. I've done little adventure trips with my wife that were super fun and without a PPL we wouldn't have done the equivalent. But when it comes to boring stuff it's just too expensive to justify flying so the trips don't happen (since I have to rent).

My suspicion is that the middle of the Venn diagram between "can afford a $500K aircraft" and "doesn't fly GA because they're not going to stay proficient enough to be safe" is vanishingly small. The doctors who fly their Cirrus once a year think they're Maverick so they don't care about the safety features. The guys who fly every chance they get aren't the ones stall spinning on base to final.

Cost is definitely a barrier and our long term goal is the get down to a plane that costs <$100k. getting there is incremental, this is just our first product to start wedging our way into the market.

I guess I don't see a whole lot of value in spending thousands and thousands of dollars for a few short trips. I think that the underserved market is the well to do person that doesn't live near a major hub international airport like Ohio or Nebraska or Iowa and they want to be able to fly direct on their schedule and they can't just head to the airport and fly direct wherever they want for a few hundred dollars instead of having to bounce through a hub and being at the mercy of the airlines schedule.

But I think the main reason why people don't do that who can't afford a multi-million dollar private jet is that if you take a compass circle and draw it around your location with the range of your average GA aircraft anywhere that's not on the east or west coast you get 4 or 5 cities that you aren't likely to travel to anyways. America is just too big a place for these types of aircraft.

Plus, while there may be all these airports that you are mentioning, can you really count on getting fuel to take you back at these minor airports or the FBOs to service outside a much shorter list of airports? That cuts the range away even more.

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