Forgetting the legality of the matter for a moment: Inexperienced pilots plus small planes plus the pressure of an implicit promise to fly at a certain <i>time</i> is a bad mix.<p>CPLs get extra training and experience that GAs don't that helps them say "I know you're paying lots of money and are very important and all that but we're not flying through that".<p>My gut instinct on services like this is that somebody is going to die. The FAA is making an ass of themselves in the tech community with the drone nonsense right now, but these rules are written on tombstones.
A couple of suggestions if the people behing Flytenow are reading this:<p>* Provide a link from your blog back to the main website, so if I start by reading this (or any other) blog post, it's easy for me to learn more.<p>* Let me see what's available before signing up! I'm curious, but not that curious about what you're offering.
It may be FAR compliant, it may not be. But, like Lyft drivers getting tickets, if shit goes down, you're going to pay the price, not Flytenow.<p>I'm not gonna sacrifice my certificate to find out. I'd rather spend those legal fees on a CPL.
It's interesting to read the linked letter from FAA counsel. The interpretation is that if the pilot was going to fly from A to B anyway, they can take passengers from A to B because the passengers and the pilot have a common purpose of getting from A to B. But if the pilot is only flying from A to B because the passengers want to do it, then the pilot has a different purpose than the passengers, and it's illegal. The pilot should also in theory have "business to conduct" at point B, rather than just flying there for the fun of it.<p>Applying that distinction to real life would be pretty messy though.<p>Letter (PDF): <a href="http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc/pol_adjudication/agc200/interpretations/data/interps/2011/haberkorn%20-%20(2011)%20legal%20interpretation.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc...</a>
I know the prevailing philosophy in the start-up world is that its better to ask forgiveness than ask permission...but legally I would take the conservative approach and suspend services to pilots with only a private license, and pending the FAA response only permit those with a commercial license?<p>Hell flytenow could even sponsor the cost of pilots getting their commercial, in exchange for exclusivity until the amount is reimbursed.
It's interesting to read this in light of discovering "What Colour are your bits?" [1]. I am not a pilot, but it seems that the FAA considers the "colour" of your flight to be a very important thing.<p>[1] <a href="http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23" rel="nofollow">http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23</a>
This will be good for beginner pilots to make some cash. I used to attend a flight school and knew some graduates making minimum wage as entry-level flight instructors, and there are stories abound of commercial pilots not doing much better (Google "LAX ghetto"). They're basically glorified bus drivers. By cutting out all the mega airport overhead (airlines pay the airport for facilities, terminal use, baggage handling, and of course the TSA) we could see a much greater proportion of airfare go straight to the pilot, traveling in this way.