If you’re an avid jet-setter who lives for luxury travel experiences but still bound to a budget, you’ll welcome the arrival of a new Uber-style private aviation provider. Surprisingly, booking travel arrangements at the touch of a button or swipe of an app becomes less available the higher up the luxury scale you go. That’s one of the conundrums that KinectAir aims to solve.
If you’ve always dreamed of flying via private plane, but aren’t among the obscenely wealthy for whom money is no object—the sort who have a broker on speed dial and maintain a membership for thousands of dollars just to get a quote for a chartered flight—this is the service you’ve been waiting for.
KinectAir’s target consumers are regular people who want to dip their toes into the world of private planes. The Vancouver-based company was founded in 2019 for short-haul private air travel in the Pacific Northwest. But, starting this month, folks all over the U.S. can book “empty leg” repositioning flights at relatively affordable prices, with quick hops as low as $111 per person for a 48-minute flight.
“We want to change the way people think about short flights,” co-CEO Katie Buss, a former U.S. military pilot, told CNN. “People think it’s only for the Bill Gates and Elon Musk of the world. It’s by no means cheap, but it’s more accessible than most people think. Instead of just going to Delta, we want people to see what flying private would be like… It’s a totally different way of travel.”
The KinectAir app displayed on smartphones. (Photo Credit: KinectAir)
Buss said she hopes to “revolutionize” the private flight market similarly to the way Uber disrupted traditional taxi service and Airbnb shook up the hotel industry. KinectAir’s digital platform utilizes AI-backed software to comb through charter flight operators. “We’re letting the software do that sifting through the haystack to make it more accessible and give [customers] a better chance of putting together the trip you actually want,” co-CEO Ben Howard told CNN.
Better Than Flying Commercial?
Like Uber, Lyft or other ride-share services, most of KinectAir’s low-cost bookings are made on short notice—within 72 hours of departure, according to its Summer 2023 data. In terms of last-minute fares, some of the company’s advertised prices even beat flying Economy aboard commercial airlines.
“In many cases, last-minute flights are more expensive per seat on commercial, and that’s not even looking at first-class tickets,” said Howard. “In our case, you’ve got to fill the full aircraft, but if a family of four is flying last minute, this is a really good option. United might charge as much as a private flight.”
Flying private allows you to bypass the dreaded check-in, customer service and TSA security lines, too. Talk about an upgrade! And, while many competitors charge membership or transaction fees, or will bill clients after the fact for any additional fuel used above the estimate given, flying with KinectAir guarantees you’ll pay only the price you’ve been quoted.
“We understand statistically how likely [additional fuel costs] are to happen, have good weather models, know it’s less expensive to fly one way than the other—so KinectAir absorbs the variability,” said Howard. “We want to make private aviation work more like commercial.”
Interior of a KinectAir private aviation aircraft. (Photo Credit: KinectAir)
One of the ways the company keeps costs down is by using solely turbo-prop and piston-engine aircraft, which are both cheaper to operate than jets and burn less fuel, although they admittedly fly somewhat slower. Howard said the speed differential is less important on flights covering less than 500 miles. He asserted, “If you fly a jet to the same location, you’d be paying five times as much and get it done a few minutes faster.”
The main way KinectAir is keeping prices down and making private aviation less cost-prohibitive for the average American is by taking advantage of those “empty leg” flights. The term refers to instances where a private plane has just dropped off clients at their destination, and then must fly back to its origin or onward to the next destination with no passengers aboard.
A 2021 study by the environmental nonprofit Transport & Environment discovered that 40 percent of private flights are these types of “ghost flights”, traveling without any passengers as they reposition to their next pick-up location. Howard said that filling those empty leggers “is a way to make flights more efficient”, as is leveraging many of the country’s 5,000 underutilized public airports.
To find out if KinectAir has a private flight bound for your next destination, visit its Empty Leg Marketplace portal
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