Uber-Style Flight-Sharing Service Shot Down by U.S. Court
I&#x27;m of two minds on this one, but the mind that says &#x27;glad it&#x27;s being shut down&#x27; is winning.<p>I&#x27;m a private pilot &#x2F; IFR with around 250 hours of pilot-in-command time in single engine planes (I&#x27;m guessing that&#x27;s square in the middle of this company&#x27;s target pilot demographic). I have a full-time job and fly recreationally. On numerous occasions I&#x27;ve flown friends and relatives e.g. from Palo Alto to the LA area and asked them to split flight costs. Also, while I&#x27;ve never done this personally, it&#x27;s pretty common for pilots to seek out other pilots on message boards and the like to &quot;split time&quot; on some flight, where cost is split and both pilots can log some flight time.<p>So on the one hand, if this app were just an enhancement of that same basic pattern ... I&#x27;m flying to LA who wants to look down at I-5 traffic from 4500 feet ... then I would think it&#x27;s great.<p>The problem is that this service is clearly intended to be more than that. And when you start getting customers who don&#x27;t understand general aviation and have expectations that my Flyte(?) will run like an airline (or at least air taxi) when it <i>will not be</i>, you have a bad situation.<p>To give one concrete example, once after promising to take someone on a tour of the golden gate bridge area, dragging her to the airport, doing a pre-flight inspection, and taxiing all the way to the runway, I made a last minute decision to cancel after a new weather report freaked me out a bit. She understood, and we rescheduled. If the person next to me were not a close friend but in fact a &quot;paying customer&quot;, perhaps business person with a meeting that afternoon in LA, would I have felt pressured to fly into an unsafe situation? Probably! This is one of several scenarios where the service just seems like a <i>bad idea</i>, from both a pilot and passenger perspective.<p>I really hate being on the side of &#x27;regulators&#x27; in any dispute, but flying is meaningfully different from driving a car. General Aviation already has a reputational problem with sloppy, low-experience pilots putting themselves and their families in danger, and frankly I don&#x27;t think adding unwitting customers to the mix is going to help the situation at all.