Reinventing air travel by ‘planepooling’
It’s been said that in the southeastern United States, whether your soul is headed for Heaven or Hell, it will have to change planes in Charlotte or Atlanta. Thus is the notoriety of commercial aviation’s hub-and-spoke system.
Regional flights often require you to fly through a hub — and it’s often faster to just go by automobile — and make it easier to just stay home. This may change with what we call “planepooling,” and the idea’s time may be fast approaching.
Planepooling is like carpooling in the sky. Uber’s app has offered a service called UberPool (mostly suspended during COVID). You hit the cellphone app, a car arrives, perhaps with another passenger already in the car when you get in. Perhaps the driver picks another passenger up along the way and, eventually, drops you off where you’re headed. It takes a bit longer than a regular Uber, but sharing your ride and relenting a few minutes on speed lowers your fare. Now, let’s adapt this idea to flying.
In a recent paper and an accompanying brief, we describe the “Nashville-to-Asheville Problem”: Suppose you live in the suburbs of Nashville. You need to go to
Asheville, N.C., around 200 miles east of home, and have two options. First, you can fly via Atlanta — a six-hour, 20-minute trip, over four hours of which are spent in cars or airports. Plus, there’s the stress of worrying that you’ll miss one of your two flights.
Alternatively, you can drive to Asheville in four hours, 21 minutes — two hours fewer than flying. Of course, when driving, you can’t nap, read, work or play games as you can when flying. So, in 2021, the non-hub traveler must ask an odd question: “Should I drive, or do I have time to fly?”
Enter planepooling. In the late 1990s, aviation pioneers Burt Rutan and Bruce Holmes suggested shifting part of commercial aviation to small airplanes (6-to-10 seaters) flying in and out of the hundreds of underused small airports in America.
As with UberPool, our traveler taps his cellphone app, scheduling a plane to pick him up at the tiny Smyrna Airport near his home. Boarding is quick; the plane picks up passengers at two local airports in Tennessee and then flies on to Asheville. The trip takes almost exactly the time it would take to drive. The passenger never has to change planes and never worries about missed connections. If you luck out and catch a direct planepool from suburban Nashville to Asheville, the trip takes three hours less than a present-day flight.
When Rutan and Holmes proposed the idea, planepooling wasn’t feasible. Jet companies and charter plane companies have sold empty seats for years, but the process was largely manual, inconvenient and expensive. Things have changed. Ridesharing technologies and efficient new planes (some electric and climate-friendly) will make planepooling less expensive. There are more (and wealthier) potential passengers in smaller places because of outmigration from large cities and the rise of telecommuting.
COVID-19 accelerated these trends. The technology is still in progress, and policymakers must act to make planepooling economical. Existing federal aviation subsidy programs need reassessment, and local authorities should urge state and federal leaders to take a permissive view towards new aviation technologies.
Robert F. Graboyes is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Brent Skorup is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They wrote this for Inside Sources.com.