It’s time for the Uber of air travel
washingtonpost.com
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Not true at all. Landing fees are usually nominal, and FBO fees even for overnight rarely exceed ~$50, or less with the purchase of fuel.
If you want to "disrupt" the airline business, invent anti-gravity. Until you do that, all your clever business ideas aren't going to change the fact that air travel requires a fuckton of expensive fuel per passenger.
As with any startup, first ask "what is the need you're satisfying" - Need more affordable, more convenient fast travel from point A to point B.
"What will you do to solve that need?" (get creative, this is your specialty) Ex.1 - Offer people who purchased plane tickets but needed to cancel (and were not allowed to because of no-refund policy) a service to sell to others at the (presumably low b/c it was purchased early) price they bought it.
"How will your company make money?" Ex.1 - take 5% cut
"What kind of people will you need to hire..." -> this is getting more specific than necessary <-
While I would have doubts about that business model I just threw together in 5 minutes, my point real point is-- you guys are Hacker News. Some of the smartest people in the world. We could definitely figure out an Uber for airlines and disrupt that industry!
..unless someone is already working on this and is protecting their actual IP
As a whole if you're trying to start a company I'd say you must be able to answer two questions: 1. What is the need I am satisfying 2. Can this be profitable
For the kind of list you're talking about, the business model canvas is a great resource http://businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/bmc?_ga=1.20278319...
and then if you have more time on your hands, Peter Thiel (Founder of Paypal) led a really good class at Stanford on how to start a company, which is entirely transcribed in a blog by Blake Masters http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup <-This was the series that first got me really interested in startups, and is also indirectly how I discovered Hacker News. Definitely worth the read
Additionally, Sam Altman taught the class a few years later and recorded the whole thing on video. It's equally excellent http://startupclass.samaltman.com/
None of which exactly inspire confidence when it comes to something like operating aircraft.
Not to mention that under UBER you might be stuck in a legal limbo in which you can't sue the driver for damages in case of an accident without proving gross negligence while can be still sued by the 3rd party for being involved in the accident in the 1st place under the "joint adventure" precedent.
In the UK you need to have a PSV to legally carry paying passengers all of the UBER drivers i had didn't had it (it's a sticker on the car window with the license number).
https://www.gov.uk/psv-operator-licences/overview
In the US passengers can be sued for damages when being involved in car accidents and cannot sue the driver unless they are paying passengers (which UBER doesn't qualify since it is not a licensed transport service)
http://personal-injury.lawyers.com/auto-accidents/when-you-a...
Whats worse is that since the passenger solicited the trip they can be made as the "cause" of the accident in civil suits when there was no gross misconduct on the side of the driver.
There is no easy way to obtain insurance information about UBER drivers, and unlike taxis in which the token ("car") owner is also liable in a law suit you cannot sue the car's owner if it is other than the driver with UBER in such cases when the car doesn't have proper insurance or wasn't maintained properly.
On the other hand you can get the insurance information for any taxi easily e.g. from NYC. http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/industry/vehicle_insurance_...
The list can go on and on and on, UBER was playing it fast and loose with the law by pretty much ignoring it and shifting all of the responsibility on it's users and drivers.
The users don't know anything heck they don't even know that they might be breaking the law in certain places. The drivers well the drivers don't care UBER exploited places where getting a taxi license was expensive due to regulation as well as an economy in the toilet which presented them with a large user base needing additional income.
Public transportation is messy yes, but it's also heavily regulated and for a good reason because when it's not people can get hurt very quickly. GL getting a taxi license with a DUI under you belt or while being on the sexual offenders list, but you can still drive UBER....
The same way no one would use an UBER like service to get a doctor if they knew they could get a med-school dropout or some alcoholic that lost his practice due to malpractice suits however they are perfectly fine with getting into a car with a stranger at 2am knowing that unlike a registered car hire service or a taxi they weren't screened, it's not recorded in public records available to the local police and that they aren't covered by insurance and can be named in a law suit if anything happens during that trip.
Oh and this is without even getting into other things like UBER pissing over employment and taxation laws, doesn't verify that drivers do not work over the maximum amount of hours allowed by law, do mandated pit stops on long trips, maintain their cars etc...
My personal experience using UBER in London:
Driver hitting a cyclist and "contemplating" a hit and run.
Driver selling out weed out of his car.
Driver who was clearly working for at least 10-12 hours falling a sleep at the wheel.
Driver who was also working for just-eat or some other food delivery service carrying pizza and curry and asking me if i don't mind him stopping on the way.
Driver who had an open can of beer in the central console (didn't enter that ride).
I don't use UBER anymore i use the black cab / car service hire apps depending on the time of day and the location they aren't considerably more expensive (less than 10% on average unless you'll take a very long ride) and they are all registered businesses with all the due diligence required.
The second part of that is only relevant in Alabama. The other 27 states that have or once had automobile guest statutes that prohibited passengers from suing their driver over negligence had, by 1996, either repealed them or limited them to cases where the passenger and driver were relatives.
Here's a good overview: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Guest+Statutes
For a nice look at the history of these laws, up to 1974, here's a nice Columbia Law Review article from 1974: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
I'm also not convinced that the risk of passengers being sued in an Uber-type situation is more than negligible. From what I've been able to find, passenger liability usually only happens in these circumstances:
• The passenger did something like provide alcoholic drinks to the driver before the trip, and then the driver's intoxication caused the accident.
• The passenger owns the car, and knew that the driver was incapable of operating safely, but went ahead and let him drive anyway.
• The passenger did something that reasonably directly led to the driver's negligence. A couple examples. (1) passenger tells the driver it is safe to back out of a driveway, and the driver relies on this rather than checking himself, and the passenger was wrong [1]. (2) 16-year old, at urging of similar aged friends, takes family's car for a ride in rainy weather. At urging of friends, drives faster and faster. Loses control at 100 mph and hits a tree. Driver and two passengers wearing seat belts survive, one passenger not wearing seat belt killed. Surviving passengers liable with driver for their role in in convincing driver to drive like an idiot.
I haven't come across an example where merely being a passenger in a car where the driver does something negligent subjected the passenger to liability.
[1] That's a scary one. I would expect most people as passengers have tried to help out a driver that way at sometime, often at the driver's request, without realizing that they may be opening themselves up to liability if they err.
For a while there were legally grey areas involving "fly share" websites. A recent-ish FAA ruling determined that this is not legally grey, it is not allowed. Period. Dot. Until that issue is resolved, Air-Uber is a head-in-the-clouds dream.
IMO the FAA is right to enforce a certain level of safety and competence in the skies. Most pilots agree with them. This is not like taxi medallions. The regulatory body actually does something useful rather than just protecting rent seekers. At the same time, I think there is a demand for fly-sharing. Perhaps the FAA could create a license in-between commercial and private that allows you to shuttle up to 4 people in a Cessna or similar aircraft.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/15/faa-bans-planesharing-start...
That isn't true and that is not at all what I said. You can be compensated legally. You just can't be over compensated. In other words, you are not allowed to make a profit on a private license.
Or, you could fly from Medford to Portland? My first search shows Alaska Airlines flies multiple daily flights between MFR and PDX.
Seeing as AirBnB hosts and Uber drivers have been found in violation of the law in some jurisdictions my question is relevant. Whereas when have you ever vetted a airline pilot before purchasing a commercial flight?
IMHO, I think we need more major airports. Right now it seems we're bounded by lack of access, here. Perhaps any disruption in this market needs to be done at local governments in how they determine land use for airports. I imagine it would be a special kind of torture to have to drive from, say, Anaheim or other parts of LA East of downtown, to LAX to catch a flight after a meeting. Don't know the total history of LA, but why isn't there a second major airport out that way ala JFK-LGA-EWR in New York?
A quick google search found this[1] document about en route flight operations and how flights travel across the country. Perhaps there's some work to be done in terms of developing some kind of fantasy air flight simulation game, aimed at optimizing how we move people around the country - if anything, just for fun. After reading through some of this, I'm even more convinced that "Uber for air travel" is not a wise idea considering how complicated all of this is and the safety risk involved.
One can wonder, is Atlanta such a major hub simply because they have so much land or is that really an optimal connection airport for so many major routes?
[1] http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/av...
Here's the page with the whole document: http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/av...
Edit: Grammar
Wait, is that true? My experience with Uber drivers is they all bought a new car to be Uber drivers, sometimes with a loan Uber helps them get.
Uber being some kind of "sharing" economy company seems a little dubious. They are really quite different than AirBnB, which really is based on a surplus of housing.
Uber is mostly just a taxi company, and their fleet is all pristine, new cards, which they make drivers get and maintain. And the drivers are only "not employees" according to a very fine line.
It's more like the "1099" economy than the "sharing" economy. Uber isn't leveraging a car surplus - they are capitalizing on a worker surplus. There are no beat up old jalopeys getting "shared" via Uber. There is no natural, organic market, among people with/without cars.
But it also shows that the more government regulation an industry has, the less competition we will see, because only huge corporations can survive.
Already happening. How does $2/hr sound to you? US airlines are sending more and more of their heavy maintenance to third-world countries. http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/crsreports/crsdocument...
Welcome to the global race to the bottom.