AirPooler Could Be the Uber of Flying

There’s a lot of buzz around services like Uber,
Lyft, and Sidecar, which facilitate convenient, competitively
priced rides around cities. Given the state of the airline
industry—the cost of flying is
creeping up every year while the experience of flying gets
worse—it’s no surprise that someone figured out how to take the
ride-sharing business model from cars and adapt it to planes.

This week a service called Airpooler is launching on the East
Coast. Last week it got off the
ground on the West Coast.

AirPooler allows private pilots to post listings about upcoming
trips, requiring them to input important information about their
own credentials and experience and their plane’s weight limits.
“Most pilots listing flights on AirPooler fly small single-engine
piston airplanes that carry from 2 to 4 passengers,” explains AirPooler. For
passengers, requesting a ride is no harder than ordering a ticket
on a commercial flight, and one can even send questions to the
pilot beforehand.

The Daily Dot‘s Brendan O’Connor, incredulous, asks
why anyone would get on some stranger’s plane, calling it “an
insane idea.” He also insists that AirPooler is “a thing that the
world doesn’t need and 99 percent of it could never use!”

But the service regulates itself,
notes BetaBoston, by “only working with pilots
who are members of flying clubs like East Coast or Associated
Pilots,” which “have processes in place for vetting pilots, and
ensuring the airworthiness of the planes.”

Prices, meanwhile, are far from prohibitive. Right now, the
service lists a round-trip flight from Palo Alto, California to
Sacramento this weekend for under $180. A comparable
economy ticket from United Airlines with such short notice is

over $800.

Part of the reason tickets are so cheap is because the Federal
Aviation Administration prohibits private pilots from accepting
personal payment; they can only be reimbursed for “flight costs”
such as “fuel oil, certain airport costs or rental fees.” One
consequence of restricting profits, though, may be that pilots
aren’t able to expand operations and offer even more flights to
meet consumer demands.

Still, AirPooler’s take off is yet another example of the
sharing economy’s ability to disrupt the status-quo in surprisingly
simple ways.