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All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

nytimes.com

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#41
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But of course they are, or more general the web of DHS/TSA/FAA/etc. regulations is the reason why commercial air travel has not advanced in door-to-door speed. Without the regulations you could imagine an airport that pre-screened travellers. You roll up to the curb, get valet parked, and your bags checked, and then you get on the flight. You'd build the entire airport around this rapid on/off experience. You could h…

Pre-screening is not only legal, it has just been expanded to the general public.

You can't run an airline that is free to exclude any passenger at will. TSA pre-check is based on the fallacious inference that rich frequent flyers and terrorists are a distinct set. Saudi royal-funded operatives may well be more likely to be frequent flyers than the general population.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#43
great place for the dhs to blow shit up and give the tsa reason to fuck around. i hear they're policing highways already. about time for these assholes to expand to europe. it's more likely i get struck by lightning but i'm so afraid of terrorists! come grope me!

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that might change in the near future if telepresence with large, 4K screens showing life-sized, full body representations of people became commonplace. It seems like a lot of the necessity of in-person conferences and meetings is still things like realistic eye contact and subtle body language cues.

No, lower profit margins will kill it. With current enterprise software pricing you can afford lots of flights as part of the sales process. With SAAS type models you can't.

There will always be software that is worth the equivalent of millions of dollars (at least for the foreseeable future).

Maybe you can build a SAAS equivalent to SAP that puts it out of business... but companies will want a HumanBrainSimulatron (R) or a perfect weather forecaster or whatever the next complex software is, which will still be multimillion dollars' worth.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#45
If they could find a way to drop the monthly cost of this to around $500, this could potentially make working in the Bay Area more viable for a lot of people.

If you could shave $500 off your monthly rent or mortgage by living in a coastal CA city and just flying in to work in Silicon Valley or SF, I think a lot more people would be willing to sign up. The service would essentially pay for itself.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-screening is not only legal, it has just been expanded to the general public.

You can't run an airline that is free to exclude any passenger at will. TSA pre-check is based on the fallacious inference that rich frequent flyers and terrorists are a distinct set. Saudi royal-funded operatives may well be more likely to be frequent flyers than the general population.

It's more that if you didn't flag them the first N times you're rather unlikely to flag them in the future. The screening isn't perfect but screening these people more won't help.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#48

If they could find a way to drop the monthly cost of this to around $500, this could potentially make working in the Bay Area more viable for a lot of people. If you could shave $500 off your monthly rent or mortgage by living in a coastal CA city and just flying in to work in Silicon Valley or SF, I think a lot more people would be willing to sign up. The service would essentially pay for itself.

I am on the waiting list, depending on limits and schedule of the service I will be using this about three or four times a week to do a daily commute between my condo in Los Angeles and eBay in San Jose. It works out to about what I would pay for a Bay area shared room but I get to come home each evening and see my cats and dog. And my wife.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#49

If they could find a way to drop the monthly cost of this to around $500, this could potentially make working in the Bay Area more viable for a lot of people. If you could shave $500 off your monthly rent or mortgage by living in a coastal CA city and just flying in to work in Silicon Valley or SF, I think a lot more people would be willing to sign up. The service would essentially pay for itself.

Daily commuters are exactly the kind of person that will make this airline cease to exist, because the service could no longer pay for itself.

Re: All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast

#50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't objectively agree with the latter point, but rdl is correct about the former. It takes high altitudes for tubofans to come into their element in the efficiency gradient, and short routes don't really stay in that area of altitude long enough to give them an advantage. Turboprops are more efficient at lower altitudes, which is perfect for short hop flights -- where you're spending half of the time climbing/des…

They're clearly objectively better in a lot of ways; you could just argue that they're not net-better overall, since there are also advantages to twins. Single is undeniably cheaper to buy/operate. Since you never push off without both engines good, there's no way a twin would have higher dispatch rate than a single (since there are ~twice as many parts to deadline your aircraft). You may still value "has extra engin…

I wonder if twin-engined aircraft are less better maintained for the reasons you mentioned. Since you only have one engine to 'push off' with on a single, you better make damn sure it's in good working order.
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