
“We are left with no choice but to shut down Flytenow” - voska
http://blog.flytenow.com/the-beginning-of-the-end
======
Animats
They'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)

~~~
ProAm
> Never go flying to a destination with someone who isn't IFR qualified. The
> weather can always change.

This is an absurd statement.

~~~
jbeales
That's not an absurd statement. If you're trying to fly "to a destination" and
don't have an IFR-qualified pilot, and the weather changes, you'll be in IFR
conditions without someone who doesn't have the training to keep you in the
air in those conditions.

If your destination doesn't matter, or isn't set in stone, then a non-IFR
pilot is free to choose to fly somewhere else, where the weather is better, or
land at the closest airport.

For those who don't know: IFR means "Instrument Flight Rules" or flying by
instruments only. An IFR-qualified pilot is allowed to fly in conditions where
he/she cannot see out of the aircraft, such as at night or through low-
visibility weather.

~~~
ProAm
Proper planning and weather monitoring makes VFR perfectly acceptable, to say
never to fly anywhere without an IFR qualified pilot is absurd. It's akin to
saying jr. devs should never write code that will be run in production.

~~~
nrb
More like "Junior devs should not be shipping nonreviewed code into lifesaving
medical devices."

------
abduhl
_In 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
What do you mean by rent-seeking behavior?

~~~
feverishaaron
Companies 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.

~~~
asift
I know you're not OP and I understand this is the definition of rent-seeking
behavior, but your examples are empirically and theoretically invalid.
Landlords (renters of capital) and middlemen provide _huge_ benefits to
society.

Of course, this doesn't mean that it's impossible for a landlord it middleman
to be a rent-seeker, but they would need to pursue some type of artificial
benefit/restriction on others in order for this to be the case. This does
happen often, but I have no idea why OP would suggest rent-seeking is the
primary activity of sharing economy companies. One of Uber's greatest
accomplishments has been significantly weakening the rent-seeking taxi
industry.

~~~
feverishaaron
I should have clarified by "Landlords" and "Middlemen" I meant the groups that
lobby local governments to restrict zoning and growth, so they can retrieve
higher profits.

Uber is very much within the "virtuous cycle" – but they may also become rent
seekers via monopolization of private transportation.

------
gscott
Ride 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
Read their older blog posts. It was 16 months ago that the FAA told them that,
effectively, they couldn't operate under their model.

------
sssilver
Wow I never knew such a thing existed. I wish I could sign up, this is
amazing!

------
pj_mukh
Customary, 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.

~~~
jsprogrammer
I don't see the blanket ban...dozens of carriers operate in the US daily.

~~~
pj_mukh
Blanket ban on private pilots having paying passengers.

------
grizzles
What 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.

~~~
prostoalex
The 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.

------
seangrant
Back 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
I 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...)

~~~
johnpaulett
Fatal Accident Rate (Table 5 [1]):

    
    
      Commercial Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 0.022
      General Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 1.11
      Motor Vehicle: (per 100 million miles): 1.5
    

General Aviation (which Flytenow falls under) has a fatality rate 2 orders of
magnitude greater than commercial airlines (Delta, Southwest, Skywest, etc)

1:
[http://enhs.umn.edu/current/injuryprevent/aviation/magnitude...](http://enhs.umn.edu/current/injuryprevent/aviation/magnitude.html)

~~~
nostromo
You're misreporting that data.

From the same table the overall risk of death (Fatality Rate) is the same for
both forms of flying:

    
    
       Fatality Rate (Commercial Aviation): 1.9
    
       Fatality Rate (General Aviation): 1.91
    

The reason the "Fatal Accident Rate" is so different is because when a
jetliner crashes, dozens or hundreds of people die. So a single accident is
very deadly.

~~~
jacquesm
No, you're mis-interpreting the data. The commercial aviation record is as low
as it is _in spite of_ the large number of people on board. So the chances of
accidents in general aviation are many times higher for any given flight using
the one or the other mode.

In other words - and to make it really simple - if you are given the choice of
going with a commercial carrier or with a general aviation craft to the same
destination in a single flight then you would do wise to take the commercial
carrier.

~~~
nostromo
You're correct in the narrow sense (a commercial flight is less likely to
crash) but wrong on the big picture (a commercial flight is safer for
passengers).

Here's the thing: we don't care about the number of crashed airplanes, we care
about crashed people (the number of deaths). And the number of deaths is about
the same per passenger mile flown.

Passengers are no safer in either form of flying, according to this source.

~~~
apkostka
Why would we care about the number of crashed people? You said it yourself,
the number of deaths for commercial flight is higher because there are more
people on board. If I'm on a plane, I don't care about how likely I am to be
one of the people who died in airline crashes this year, I care about how
likely it is that this plane is going to crash.

~~~
nostromo
I understand it's not intuitive, but the statistics are clear: If you have 100
times more people on commercial flights, then the flights would have to be 100
times less likely to crash to have the same risk to each passenger.

Let's break this into two specific questions (assuming the source is correct):

1) How likely is it that a specific flight will crash?

Answer: it's more likely that a private flight will crash than a commercial
flight.

2) How likely is it that I will die on a private vs commercial flight?

Answer: your likelihood of dying is the roughly the same for both private and
commercial flights.

~~~
apkostka
I'm not sure you're reading the replies here. Nobody is arguing that your
likelihood of dying is significantly higher on a private flight. We're arguing
that the thing you should care about is whether the specific flight that you
are on will crash, which has a significantly higher likelihood in general
aviation.

~~~
nkurz
_Nobody is arguing that your likelihood of dying is significantly higher on a
private flight._

I might be wrong, but this is indeed what I am arguing, and I think 'jacquesm'
is saying the same. 'nostromo' says _your likelihood of dying is the roughly
the same for both private and commercial flights_ , and I don't think this is
true if the metric is getting from point A to point B without dying.

If my memory of previous research is correct, a passenger on a private plane
has approximately the same risk per mile travelled as a passenger on a
motorcycle[1], which is something much greater than the risk per passenger
mile of a normal automobile, which is in turn something significantly riskier
than traveling the same number of miles by a commercial jet.[2]

 _We 're arguing that the thing you should care about is whether the specific
flight that you are on will crash, which has a significantly higher likelihood
in general aviation._

Yes, each flight you take in a private plane is significantly more likely to
end in a crash than each flight you take on a commercial airline. Your chances
of being killed if the plane is involved in an accident are greater in a
private plane (fatalities per accident are greater on the commercial flight,
but risk to each passenger is lower). Therefore, your chances of dying per
flight taken are greater in private flight than in commercial aviation. Is
this the same as what you are saying?

[1] Edit: Found a seeming good source at
[http://www.nianet.org/ODM/presentations/Overview%20SVO%20Ken...](http://www.nianet.org/ODM/presentations/Overview%20SVO%20Ken%20Goodrich%20and%20Mark%20Moore.pdf),
page 8. Looks like I was slightly wrong to say that motorcycles and GA are
comparable risks. If we trust their estimates, motorcycles are about 2x more
dangerous per hour than GA, and 3x more dangerous per mile.

[2] I put the specific numbers from in my other comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781106)

------
sbierwagen
Called it 549 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923297)

------
jlgaddis
Did Flytenow ever even "make it off the ground"? Was there ever a single
flight? I'm not sure that there was.

------
elmar
Other 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/)

------
draw_down
Ohhh, that mean old grinch Mr. Government. Always telling entrepreneurs their
dumb ideas are dumb.

------
FussyZeus
Consenting 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
It'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.

~~~
sbuttgereit
The general public cannot assess the risk of riding in a Taxi, bus, uber, etc.
any better than taking a flight with a private pilot.

~~~
vkou
Near-100% of the public owns a driver's license. 100% of the public has logged
thousands of hours on the road, be it at the wheel, or in the passenger's
seat. If you feel like your life is in danger, you can always ask your driver
to stop, and let you out.

Near-100% of the public wouldn't have the first clue about what it takes to
fly a two-seater aircraft, how dangerous the conditions they are flying in
are, and most definitely can't ask the pilot to pull over half-way through the
flight.

Your claim is farcical.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Not a lot of of time to respond, but my first observations about your comment
are:

1) How many pilots are actually unlicensed? I suspect given the relative
difficulty of getting access to aircraft vs. cars that the more pilots in the
air are of greater competence than the average driver by a long shot.
Moreover, I'll bet that the examination standards for pilot licenses are
somewhat more rigorous than the average drivers license.

2) Have you failed to assess that the greatest likely danger in a road trip is
not the driver giving you a ride, but other drivers on the road? I use to
commute between LA and the Bay Area every week for a couple of years. I
guarantee you that not everyone you encounter is sane or competent to be on
the road. And yeah, in the middle of nowhere on I-5 (or better still, I-15
between LA and Los Vegas close to Death Valley) you can ask to get out of the
car if you are uncomfortable with the way the person is driving... but get out
in the middle of nowhere and then what?

The complexity of the driving environment and the relatively low barrier to
entry for cars don't make the risk assessment as simple as you would like to
believe.

Finally, unless you are a pilot (you may be) seems like you're merely a member
of that ignorant general public that can't make such assessments. If that's
the case, how can you possibly be in a position to make a judgement? Or are
you just better than everyone else and it's your paternalistic instincts
taking over?

EDIT: To be clear... I am not arguing that general aviation is safer than
driving (last I looked it's not). But I am arguing that the risk assessment
may not be a difficult as people here are making it out to be, especially in
light of the complexity of driving on the road.

