51–60 of 174 posts
I am completely against any "disruption" in the airline industry via safety arbitrage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they claim they were operating under Part 91 (non-commercial) rules since they didn't take money for the flights. Part 91 rules are less strict, in particular they don't require a commercial license. I'm not sure which jets they were flying, but most business jets have a two person crew requirement, and a student pilot would not meet the crew requirements. It doesn't sound like their short response completely cov…
Is “not taking money” good enough for part 91?
You can fly under part 91 rules commercially but there are restrictions on how you can operate. You can operate under part 91 rules non-commercially, like I do, and that basically means that my passengers can only pay for their fair share of the gas burned. I can't make any profit. If the trip only burns 20 gallons I can't ask them to pay to fill up my tanks (51 gallons). But I can let them buy me a hamburger, as long as that's something they would have done anyway if I didn't take them flying.
Every flight under part 135 is considered "commercial," meaning that pilots must have a commercial rating as well as numerous other requirements like extra maintenance, inspections, and record keeping. Even if there are no paying passengers, a flight might still be under part 135 rules, but I'm not sure about the specifics.
I believe it's legal (but I'm not a lawyer) for a plane that flies under part 135 rules one day to be operated under part 91 rules the next day. Imagine flying a chartered flight under part 135 rules to Los Angeles. While on the ramp, the 100-hour inspection comes due, but the plane is still current with it's annual inspection. The owner of the jet would still be allowed to use it under part 91 rules, but it would not be allowed to conduct another charter flight until it passed the 100-hour inspection.
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Not the person you are responding to, but as someone who probably feels the same way, I'm ok with someone disrupting my local taxi monopoly by having someone who is not certified driving the car that is taking me to the airport, because I can largely agree that most humans can drive a car. I'm much less ok with the person flying my airplane not being certified.
That seems backwards, given planes are 10x safer than cars
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It seems like TapJats is attempting to use "private flights" to skirt commercial flight regulations (and the safety requirements that tag along). If this turns out to be true, they should be crucified. Pilots without the required training will fly shotgun (and then low and behold, be required to assume control in a situation that requires it, exceeding their authority), pilots will scud run, or pilots will make other…
> It seems like TapJats is attempting to use "private flights" to skirt commercial flight regulations... Are you saying that it seems this way for their test flights? Or for their flights for paying customers?
> with aircraft that it was not authorized to use because they were not listed on its air carrier certificate. So much bureaucracy...
Operating aircraft isn't like web development where you can just push a buggy pile of JavaScript and fix it a few weeks later. We're talking about people's lives. This stuff has to work.
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That seems backwards, given planes are 10x safer than cars
Commercial flights, yes, and that’s because we certify and license the crap out of such things. And thus we circle back around to parent’s point. I don’t have a source at hand, but IIRC flying a private plane is one of the better and more reliable ways to get yourself hurt or killed.
People often say things like "Plane crashes are very rare" but they're (often unconsciously) conflating "Plane crash" with "Scheduled commercial aviation accident resulting in fatalities". _Plane crashes_ happen all the time, because people fly planes and people are idiots. They forget to put enough fuel in the plane, they don't check the engine works properly, they do maintenance and forget to put back important components... they lose track of where they are, they make bad decisions, they don't plan things properly in advance, they ignore warnings, it never ends.
Commercial aviation is safe _despite_ these problems, and one of the ways that's achieved is by having rules that everybody has to follow, and by incrementally improving those rules in the light of what is learned from both accidents (which are rare) and incidents short of accidents (reported anonymously to ASRS at NASA). Not following the rules to be "disruptive" will get people killed.
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The FAA can't stop you from being a business, since that's not their charter. They can stop you from conducting air flights in the USA. As an extreme thought experiment, the FAA could revoke Delta Airlines' authorization to fly, but Delta would continue to be a company- just without any way to make money.
Except that tapjets seems to work like Uber and Airbnb now, so they don't fly anything.
On a separate issue, but one I hope TapJets has considered, is helping jet owners maintain rules compliance. TapJets is going to start catching heat if they match up flights with private jets that don't meet part 135 charter requirements. The number of charter flights that TapJets matches is small enough that if the FAA wants to, they can send a representative to every single flight and ramp check the pilots and planes for compliance. If they start doing that the supply of flights on TapJets will go down because jet owners don't want to be grounded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the person you are responding to, but as someone who probably feels the same way, I'm ok with someone disrupting my local taxi monopoly by having someone who is not certified driving the car that is taking me to the airport, because I can largely agree that most humans can drive a car. I'm much less ok with the person flying my airplane not being certified.
That seems backwards, given planes are 10x safer than cars
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is “not taking money” good enough for part 91?
Not exactly, and the TapJets response doesn't fully lay out that they met all the requirements for Part 91 flying, but they mentioned non-paying passengers. You can fly under part 91 rules commercially but there are restrictions on how you can operate. You can operate under part 91 rules non-commercially, like I do, and that basically means that my passengers can only pay for their fair share of the gas burned. I can…
According to TapJets' response, these were unpaid test flights undertaken for friends and family during development of the app to test it. And it's a side of their business they don't engage in anymore, acting more as an Uber/Airbnb matching agent: https://www.tapjets.com/Home/Article/tapjets-answers-recent-...
>According to TapJets' response, these were unpaid test flights undertaken for friends and family during development of the app to test it That changes nothing, and makes it no less reckless. Airline regulations are written in blood.