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“We are left with no choice but to shut down Flytenow”
- jordache 11y agodont' care... this doesn't affect the majority of population.. don't care.
- sssilver 11y agoWow I never knew such a thing existed. I wish I could sign up, this is amazing!
- gscott 11y agoRide sharing in aviation is perfectly legal, the FAA isn't interested in the commercialization of ride sharing in aviation. However there have been websites offering that for many years, none are popular. Whoever thought of suing the FAA for something that is already legal... probably listening to an investor who didn't want to invest unless if it was given the FAA seal of approval... http://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part61-113-FAR.shtml http://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part61-113-FAR.shtml Sec. 61.113(1)(c) This is a good article on this http://speednews.com/article/6966 http://speednews.com/article/6966 (2011) essentially two people have to be intending to go to the same destination, the passenger can only pay half the costs and the pilot has to pay the other half since he/she is going to the same destination anyway.
- jlgaddis 11y agoRead their older blog posts. It was 16 months ago that the FAA told them that, effectively, they couldn't operate under their model.
- FussyZeus 11y agoConsenting people, using private property in compliance with the law. Why exactly is this banned, other than it cutting into the pocketbooks of carriers?
- throwaway_xx9 11y agoIt's banned because the general public cannot assess the risk of private flights, and the flight is not under an AOC. The FAA maybe a lot of things, but they're 100% right about this.
- FussyZeus 11y agoWe can ban things because there's too much of a chance of things going wrong? It's travel via aircraft, I think John Q. Public can probably fairly well assess what might go wrong, and more to the point, it's none of the FFA's business. If I go on a plane and I die crashing into some guys house, we have legal frameworks in place to handle all of those events. Why do we need more on top?
- valarauca1 11y ago>We can ban things because there's too much of a chance of things going wrong? Yes. This is literally how public safety works.
- asift 11y agoEmpirically that isn't always the case. Often rent-seekers who stand to profit from various regulations have far more influence on public policy than "safety" does.
- FussyZeus 11y agoThen let's talk safety. Every pilot in the sky has spent thousands of dollars learning how to handle that craft, compared to most drivers have spent, what, $150, assuming they went for Driver's Ed. They then spent a magnitude more money on the plane, had it inspected so they could fly it, and will be piloting it in the atmosphere where they have a much greater chance of running into an angel than another aircraft en route to a planned destination that everyone within a thousand miles can look up. Compare that to Uber or hell, even driving your own car and tell me which is safer.
- seangrant 11y agoBack when I ran a consulting/web dev biz I had a client who came to me with an idea like this. I didn't like the sounds of it and didn't pursue it. Glad I didn't. There's a myriad of technical legal issues to go through. Uber ("rideshare") vs taxis are majorly different from Flytenow ("flightshare") vs commercial airlines. The FAA will never allow "flightsharing" on the commercialism that Uber is at. It's simply too dangerous.
- feld 11y agoI don't buy the "dangerous" argument at all. Show me the danger. edit: I'm referring to the danger of adding a passenger to an already scheduled flight by a private pilot, which is what I thought this flytenow service was about. (Assuming there's not a weight issue and someone isn't trying to intentionally crash the plane...)
- seangrant 11y agoYou don't see the danger in pilots running a commercial aviation business with a personal license? They're not like cars where you can willy around and if things go wrong usually it's at 30mph...
- SapphireSun 11y agoYea, when I was going through pilot training it took me a while to realize why it was so dangerous compared to cars. The biggest reason, in my opinion, is that in a car, you can stop and get out and you're ok. In a plane, you can't stop and get out, you're trapped. If you bail out, now you have an unguided missile. Private pilot licenses have much lower standards than commercial operations. Commercial has tighter maintenance and training requirements, and is consequently much more expensive to run. Until around the 1960s to 1970s, air travel was very very dangerous. People died quite regularly. It was the implementation of serious safety practices and regulations that changed the risk to be safer than riding in a car, and public perception. Since aviation makes the country go, and people have an innate fear of flying, the FFA is both concerned for the increased loss of human life and the loss of trust in flying that would translate to the commercial sector if this went through.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Animats 11y agoThey're shutting down. Good. They weren't "innovating". They were trying to run an air taxi service without meeting the pilot training requirements and aircraft equipment safety requirements for carrying passengers. Private pilots should not be carrying passengers for money - the accident rates at the low end of general aviation are too high. (Never go flying to a destination with someone who isn't IFR qualified. The weather can always change.) This was on YC a few days ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10769333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10769333
- jwise0 11y agoI assume that the reason why this is being downvoted is because people disagree with the "for money" premise. (I wish downvoters in this case would comment, rather than simply downvoting!) Flytenow was operating under the provision that allows a private pilot to take a "pro rata share" of costs from a passenger, for a genuine "common purpose". I think that Flytenow, by their advertising, probably failed the "common purpose" test, but more than that, it failed the duck test -- it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck. It looked like using a private pilot's license for commercial activity. As someone with a pilot pilot's license, I think the FAA and the judicial branch made the right call.
- pc86 11y agoMost people I know at the intersection of GA and technology are mostly (or entirely) on board with the FAA in this case. The ones acting like this is a great injustice are either GA-only with little tech savvy (and didn't know what Flytenow was before a few days ago) or have no aviation experience and greatly underestimate the danger of GA and the need for clear distinctions between PPL, CPL, CFI, etc.
- ProAm 11y ago> Never go flying to a destination with someone who isn't IFR qualified. The weather can always change. This is an absurd statement.
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- mahouse 11y agobut muh muh freedom of market
- dang 11y agoPlease stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779967 and marked it off-topic.
- abduhl 11y agoIn the Opinion of the Court, Judge Pillard held that pilots sharing expenses on Flytenow were engaged in common carriage, making them the only common carriers (i.e., commercial airliners) in history to not seek a profit. Profit seeking is not a requirement to be considered a common carrier. The FAA and the Court are quite clear in that all that is required for a common carrier classification is "(1) a holding out of a willingness to (2) transport persons or property (3) from place to place (4) for compensation" and that all four are satisfied by Flytenow. Posting an itinerary to the website qualifies as holding out, the flight is transportation, the individuals go from place to place, and the cost sharing is compensation. Flytenow's response to this is just needling and attempting to spin. The current state of the law is extremely deferential to regulatory actions, at the expense of innovation. The Court relied on that regulatory deference, and the result is less choice for consumers, and less innovation in general aviation. This is true. And it's for good reason. Flying is dangerous and should not be subject to the race to the bottom and rent-seeking behavior that is the "sharing economy".
- asift 11y agoWhat do you mean by rent-seeking behavior?
- huac 11y agoattempting to profit (off others) when doing adding no value to society
- asift 11y agoYes, but how does that apply to the sharing economy? Uber has added immense value to my life and the lives of it's millions of satisfied customers.
- feverishaaron 11y agoCompanies that use their property – distribution networks, in this case – to profit from others without providing wealth creation back to society. AKA Landlords, Realtors®, Middlemen, Licensures etc.
- jlgaddis 11y agoDid Flytenow ever even "make it off the ground"? Was there ever a single flight? I'm not sure that there was.
- sbierwagen 11y agoCalled it 549 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923297
- draw_down 11y agoOhhh, that mean old grinch Mr. Government. Always telling entrepreneurs their dumb ideas are dumb.
- grizzles 11y agoWhat about in other countries? It's perplexing to me why the green lobby isn't up in arms about hostility to Uber et al. Services like Uberhop save energy, reduce traffic, pollution, cost. There are no downsides.
- agilebyte 11y ago"Green" is often linked to social causes. Uber is perceived as reducing/eroding the job stability of workers/employees by some. I could imagine this being part of the cause.
- prostoalex 11y agoThe competition here is not everyone flying their personal plane (with "sharing" introduced to maximize efficiency), it's commercial aviation, whose cost structure is already more efficient compared to general aviation. It's as if Uberhop was launched in a market that used predominantly city buses.
- pj_mukh 11y agoCustomary, I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but.. What part of there being a "transaction" makes the flight inherently unsafe? Does a "transaction" imply that the private pilot will be flying more to make money, therefore be less safe? If that's the case shouldn't there just be a limitation on the number of flights private pilots can do? Are private pilots not supposed to take passengers with them? If that's the case, maybe there can be additional safety/certification requirements imposed for private pilots (without requiring them needing to learn all the ins and outs of commercial 747 flights). A blanket ban just because there is money involved seems silly.
- jmilloy 11y agoOne additional note above is that having a less-flexible destination (due to the passenger) can cause the flight to be less safe.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI don't see the blanket ban...dozens of carriers operate in the US daily.
- pj_mukh 11y agoBlanket ban on private pilots having paying passengers.
- elmar 11y agoOther sites offering the same service for more than 5 years on USA that now have to shutdown: http://www.skypool.com/ http://www.skypool.com/ (Since 1999- 16 years) http://www.pilotsharetheride.com/ http://www.pilotsharetheride.com/