To some entrepreneurs, the problems with the aviation industries signal many insurmountable obstacles. At Social Flights these challenges portend an extraordinary opportunity for a new business method to bring efficiency, order, social value while eliminating artificial barriers.
Social Flights value proposition is very strong for travel ranging from 200-1000 miles between smaller airports. Social Flights can deploy quickly in response to specialized market needs, environmental condition, opportunities, or events. Social flights adapts the mission of the aircraft to meet the opportunities presented to the market.
Conversely, commercial aviation struggles dearly in this segment because they try to get the market to meet the pre-ordained mission of the aircraft. The entire air transportation system would be best served if commercial aviation concentrated on the long haul/high volume “migration” service. There is no reason why private aviation cannot perform the job that gridlocks commercial aviation. This would make both industries more efficient.
Commercial Aviation’s Race to Nowhere
The Deregulation Act of 1978 in the Commercial Aviation system led to the development of the Hub and Spoke system whereas commercial carriers would fly people from small locations into a one or more large “Hub” cities where they would transfer on to the next destination – usually another hub, or on to the final destination.
Deregulation undermined point-to-point service regardless of market demand, ignoring social objectives of the passengers, having no regard for the final destination of the passengers, and blowing off the “time-value” of their passengers. Recently, the ever expanding security layer has reached the point of personal privacy invasion. With the age of the Internet, sites such as Travelocity and Expedia diluted the “service class” market segmentation of the airlines in favor of the “price class” segmentation of airlines. These forces caused the commercial airline experience to become a deceptive, deeply invasive, and physically strenuous experience.
Private Aviation’s starvation diet
Meanwhile, the private aviation sector has fallen under the thumb of listing agents who tie up the industry behind the gilded walls of Charter Brokerage Houses. FAA regulation hampers the ability to attract passengers on a per-seat basis, which gives private operators a hugely limited marketing position. Brokers took over to mark-up the price of chartered flights far beyond the reaches of a mainstream market.
For these reasons, the private aviation sector has had difficulty organizing itself into a self-sustaining cooperative, until now. In Fact, the smaller the airplane and the more widely distributed the airports, the simpler and more efficient the whole social system can become.
Social Flights changes the Game by Changing the Mission.
