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Because it’s an on-demand service there can be no schedules, otherwise the strict FAA Rule 121 regulations apply, so each trip is negotiated individually with the customer at the time of the request. The three main factors that determine the price are – how early are you willing to leave, how tight is your departure window and are you willing to stopover and share your flight? The tighter your time constraints, the more expensive the seat becomes. But even so, prices are expected to be only a little more than a full fare scheduled trip, which is way below the $4000 an hour it usually costs to hire a conventional air limousine. The company is banking on the fact that when the cost of a hotel for an overnight stay is factored into the fare calculation, a Dayjet trip will still turn out cheaper for short regional journeys than driving or taking alternative land transportation.

Dayjet is planning to launch the first customer flight in mid 2006, but before then work is continuing on refining the systems and operational capabilities that will make the whole thing work. The company will select suitable customers in the target regions –  personnel from small and medium sized companies with an immediate need for short range flexible travel – and encourage them to sign up to the service launch. They will then be given access to a Web portal or an integrated section on the Dayjet intranet from where they can request flights as necessary.

The company will start services with six planes, ramp up to sixteen by the 2nd quarter of operation, 65 planes by the end of the first year and be running an ambitious total of 300 aircraft within 24 months. The first routes have yet to be decided, but the plan is to select a range of secondary airport destinations in various regions. So, for example, in the twelve states of the Midwest there might be 40 – 50 destinations to choose from.

Iacobucci anticipates that the company will only be looking to secure 2 to 3% of the total traffic of a region, in order to avoid being swamped by demand. So for many impractical journeys there will be no allocation of seats and the customer will have to revert to traditional transport options. While this initially may seem to go against the whole concept of mass market on-demand, reading between the lines, it’s clear that the Dayjet team have lofty ambitions to make this new form of transport as big a revolution in travel as the introduction of the rental car network. They are banking on the fact that the use of this kind of super automated technology will let them grow the business fast enough to meet whatever market demands the future holds.

“Aviation hasn’t really changed much in 100 years, but DayJet will be completely different from the ground up,” Iacobucci explains, “Everything will be digital, from workflow management to databases, everything will be scanned in and utilised in digital form. We’re using embedded technology to build a service which literally could not exist without these sophisticated software systems. If you’re still using a manual system you can’t really scale to more than 120 aircraft in each scheduling class.”

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