Who’s-Who of this Year’s Exhibitors Continued from page 19 Since 2013, OpenAirplane has been rewriting the rental business model for pilots and owners by build- ing a digital platform and national aircraft rental network that pairs qualified pilots with aircraft own- ers seeking to bring in additional revenue. FlyOtto does the same for the business of booking charter flights under Part 135, particularly for operators with smaller and less expensive aircraft than typically cov- ered by charter brokers. The online/ mobile platform connects would-be charter customers with a network of operators making it easy to find, book, fly and pay for aircraft charter. “Joining NATA and attending the conference was really us introduc- ing ourselves to a completely new community and potential customer base,” says co-founder Rod Rakic. “Most of the people in that room hadn’t heard of OpenAirplane, and since it was our first time speak- ing publicly about FlyOtto we really needed to introduce ourselves.” Rakic and his co-founder Scott Murphy are pitching both services to NATA members as they seek to build out a national network of locations and aircraft avail- able for both rental and charter. “We like to say that OpenAirplane makes renting an airplane as easy as renting a car—that’s the service we launched in June 2013—primar- ily partnering with flight schools, flying clubs, and individual owners who wanted better utilization of their fleets. We now have 150 locations and over 350 aircraft in our network, with over 6,000 qualified pilots registered through our Universal Pilot Checkout,” Rakic says. “What we 20 kept hearing from our rental network was, ‘You’re doing a great job sending us pilots to rent our aircraft. What about sending us travelers to charter flights?’ In a lot of cases, the same airframe available for rental is also available for charter, and they kept asking us to help them in this other line of business. FlyOtto really flips the script on the legacy charter expe- rience for travelers and operators.” As his team began researching the charter market, Rakic found that many operators have entire classes of aircraft—mainly piston and turboprop powered planes—that tend to sit idle, largely falling outside the business model of most charter brokers. “What we learned was that while a lot of operators have a mixed fleet of aircraft, the charter brokers tend to be focused on the bigger, faster and more expensive equipment,” Rakic says. “They’re not incentivized to put charter customers in smaller, more cost-efficient airplanes, and so we kept hearing from the operators: ‘My jet flies all the time, but my perfectly good King Air just sits.’ We found that we could unlock a massive amount of latent demand for those smaller aircraft if we could figure it out, and what we discovered was that—for customers new to the charter experi- ence—it was actually the case that the smaller the airplane and the more cost-efficient the trip, the bigger the demand was. One of the things we realized was that for a lot of trips within 500 miles or so, a smaller plane could be as much as 25 to 50 percent more affordable, enough to open up entirely new market seg- ments. So we built a service from the ground up for a customer that is not One of the things we realized was that for a lot of trips within 500 miles or so, a smaller plane could be as much as 25 to 50 percent more affordable, enough to open up entirely new market segments. necessarily charter-savvy, so that we could redefine that category.” Rakic believes there is a huge potential market for new charter customers interested in spoke-to- spoke travel between the thousands of public use general aviation airports in the United States, customers who may not be able to afford to charter a jet—and may not have even consid- ered charters as a viable option—but could be served by smaller aircraft. “If everyone who could be fly- ing instead of driving was doing it, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as manic,” he jokes. “If you’re planning a trip where you’re going to spend 4 to 6 hours driving, you should consider FlyOtto instead. My job is to tell everyone that there are over 5,000 public use airports they could be using, not just the 300 or so com- mercial hubs they’re already aware of, and that in many cases flying between them can potentially save time and money when compared to either driving or flying commer- cially, and certainly when compared to chartering a larger aircraft. Not every charter customer needs or can afford a jet, it turns out. Sometimes they just need the equivalent of a black car sedan level of service, not a Hawker jet or a Citation.” Aviation Business Journal | 3rd Quarter 2016
