Air Travelers Heaven

Welcome!

I wrote Air Travelers Heaven for air travelers who are looking for a better way to fly. I know that most of them would prefer to travel on a private jet instead of a crowded, uncomfortable airliner. And that they want more reliability, civility and comfort in their air-travel experiences.

Private-jet travel is the perfect solution for frequent business travelers. But, the problem has been making private-jet travel affordable for the majority of business travelers. Air Travelers Heaven lays out the blueprint for a shared-private-jet solution that reduces the cost of private-jet travel to typical airline business-class fares. And it gives you a glimpse into the experiences such a solution offers.

      Capt. Dave

 

Contents

Chapter 1:  Pre-Flight Briefing

Chapter 2:  Aerial Odyssey

Chapter 3:  The Connection

Chapter 4:  Hidden Risks

Chapter 5:  False Security

Chapter 6:  Air Travelers’ Heaven

Chapter 7:  The Power

Chapter 8:  The Vision

Chapter 9:  Halfway to Anywhere

Chapter 10:  Arrival

Chapter 11:  Real Security

Chapter 12:  AirChicago’s Authentic Brand Story

Chapter 13:  My Air Traveler Story

 

Chapter 1: Pre-Flight Briefing

“Man must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.”

      ~ Socrates

 

Welcome aboard.  This is your captain speaking—literally.  I was a pilot for United Airlines for over 22 years (1968 to 1990).  I’ve been an air traveler even longer.  If we define air traveler as “one who travels by air for their business and personal needs either as a passenger or as a pilot”, then I began my journey as an air traveler in 1958 (at the age of 11) when I took my first flying lesson.  My first airline flight as a passenger occurred in 1965 when I was 18.  I’ve been an inveterate air traveler my whole life.

When I started my airline career in 1968, air travel was still a much-anticipated, exciting, enjoyable, efficient and valuable experience.  And it got better virtually every year—newer, faster, more-efficient and more-comfortable airplanes; with more destinations made accessible by the rapidly growing fleets of jet airliners.  And, advances in technology and aviation-human-factors research were swiftly making air travel much safer than in the past.

Back then, the collective vision for the industry’s future was literally “out of this world”.  I can recall going to the theater to watch the newly released movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” while I was attending the United Airlines University of the Air as a new-hire United pilot.  In the movie, there was a scene depicting the arrival of an aerospaceliner at a low-earth-orbit space station where it’s passengers connected to a shuttle to the Moon.

Emblazoned on the fuselage of the aerospaceliner was the Pan American Airlines logo and livery.  The scene triggered in me a dream of being the captain of one of those marvelous air-and-space craft.  After all, the movie was set in 2001 and my age-60-mandatory-retirement date was 2007.  And I know that I wasn’t the only young airline pilot who was thinking this way.

During my first decade in the airline industry, the refrain of every industry leader was “higher, faster, farther”.  In fact, this had been the industry mantra from the days of the Wright Brothers until 1978 when the Airline Deregulation Act was imposed on the industry.

However, by the early-1980s, the mantra of the new breed of industry leaders that Wall Street installed in the executive suites of all the major airlines was “cheap, cheaper, cheapest”.  It is still their mantra today.  That thinking has resulted in an inefficient, hard-to-access, uncomfortable, less-safe-than-it-could-be, inconvenient, time-wasting, frustrating, demeaning and unenjoyable air travel experience that resembles the inter-city-bus operations of old.

Today, it is virtually impossible to make a one-day business trip on the airlines unless you want to get up at three in the morning, spend less than four hours at your destination and return home after the kids are in bed.  And now it is almost impossible to reach mid-size and smaller cities without going through an airline hub with their inherent delays and uncertainties.  There’s a reason why we call the folks that travel on the airlines regularly “road warriors”.

During my 22 years at United Airlines, I spent an inordinate amount of my time traveling on the airlines.  If I wasn’t flying trips as a pilot, I was traveling via airline on other company business or jetting off to destinations around the world as a tourist.  I experienced airline travel several days a week on average, both before and after deregulation.  I can unequivocally state that for the most part I genuinely enjoyed airline travel from the 1960s through the late 1970s.  However, once airline deregulation took effect in the early 1980s the airline-travel experience started to deteriorate rapidly.

One of the major causes of my, and many others’, disillusionment with airline travel was that shortly after deregulation, all of the major airlines exchanged their reliable, stable “network” route systems for the “hub-and-spoke” systems that characterize the industry today.  With the old network systems, you could fly directly (non-stop) from most major and mid-size cities in the U.S. to the other cities in those networks without having to go through a hub airport.  As the saying goes today, “You can’t go to Hell without making a connection in ATL.”  And today, it’s getting increasingly difficult to get to and from mid-size-and-small cities from the hubs because the major airlines are cutting back on the flights that they purchase from the regional airlines for service between their hubs and those cities.

After the introduction of airline deregulation, door-to-door travel times started increasing instead of decreasing for the first time in recorded human history.  This was due, in my humble opinion, primarily to the widespread adoption of the hub-and-spoke airline system.  Hub-and-spoke systems virtually ensure a plethora of “down-line delays” as airplanes that are delayed early in the day cause ripple-effect delays in the system for the remainder of the day.  These delays are frustrating and sometimes infuriating for modern road warriors.

Many airline pundits claim that the hub-and-spoke system, and the airline-managers’ mantra of “cheap, cheaper, cheapest”, have driven the cost of airline tickets down.  This may be true in some cases in an absolute sense, but I believe the overall cost of airline travel for the American public has increased dramatically due to the lost productivity of our most-productive citizens.  Not to mention the significantly increased stress levels and decreased quality of life that modern airline travel is inflicting on the traveling public.  And now, with airline consolidation, fares are rising dramatically.

When I took an early retirement from United in 1990, one of the major factors in my decision to leave a profession that I loved with 17 years left to go to retirement was my belief that these trends, along with the decreasing compensation and quality of life of an airline pilot, would only get worse.  I think history has shown that I wasn’t far off on that prediction.

After I left United, my personal and professional lives still required me to frequently travel via airline.  So, I continued to directly experience the deterioration of airline travel for another decade.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, airline-passenger traffic continued to increase at a robust rate, but ground-side-infrastructure capacity didn’t.  Then, in 2000, I had a “trip from Hell” on the airlines that caused me to pledge to never set foot on an airliner again.

The pledge was the result of extreme frustration with the demeaning treatment I received from airline customer-service personal and the extensive delay and overbooking of a flight I was on.  I’ll admit that, like most people, I probably would have backed off that declaration soon enough.  However, shortly after that experience, I started to write my first book “False Security:  The Real Story About Airline Safety”.

“False Security” had been brewing in my mind since shortly after airline deregulation took effect.  One of the results of “cheap, cheaper, cheapest” thinking was a constant fraying of the safety net that the industry had been developing over the prior eight decades.  This was characterized by reduced training for pilots, increased workloads and “more-efficient” (read less-stringent) maintenance practices.

From the early 1980s on, vastly increased stress levels have been imposed on airline pilots by airline management through increased work schedules, progressively lower pay and an intense propaganda campaign to make airline pilots feel that they aren’t worth what they are being paid and they are in fact lucky to have a job.  Add to that the personal and economic stresses created by the uncertain professional future now faced by U.S. airline pilots, and you have a potent brew that can have significant long-term negative effects on even the strongest-minded individuals.  It is literally a scientific fact that increased stress levels cause people to make more mistakes, become careless, self-medicate with drugs and alcohol and even commit suicide.  These are not things I want the pilots of my flight to be susceptible to.

By the time “False Security” was published in 2003, my commitment to avoid airline travel had become firm.  In fact, I have not set foot on an airliner since I made that original pledge in 2000—over seventeen years ago and counting.

However, my desire to travel by air did not diminish after 2000.  Fortunately, I had private-air-travel available to me.  Over the years, I’ve owned at least eight airplanes that I’ve used for my personal transportation and recreation.  I’ve also run corporate and charter flight departments where I had corporate aircraft available to me.  Until recently, these alternatives have eased what otherwise would have been a major restriction to the free-roaming lifestyle I have enjoyed throughout my life and that I intend to keep on enjoying.

In the late 2000s, I started researching and writing my second book “A Personal Flyer’s Guide to More Enjoyable Flying”.  It was published in 2013.  In the book, I describe the kind of personal-flying organization I would like to have available to me.  It is one where the relatively high costs of personal flying are reduced by tapping into the new trend of “Collaborative Consumption”.  Uber, Airbnb and SmartYacht are examples of contemporary collaborative-consumption business models.  “A Personal Flyer’s Guide” also describes how to set up and run a flight-support organization with industry-leading operational, service and safety standards.

As I was working on rounding up enough like-minded pilots who want to fly the way I define “flying right” in “A Personal Flyer’s Guide”, old age crept up on me.  With advancing years, my overly abused body has deteriorated.  This has required me to jump through more and more hoops to qualify for the FAA Medical Certificate that is currently required to fly the kinds of aircraft that are suitable for personal travel.

Although my overall health is good enough for me to get through those hoops, I’m having age-related problems with my vision.  The problem is such that I wouldn’t be “flying right” if I ignored it and continued to pilot airplanes.  So, I decided not to renew my medical certificate (required every year).  That left me with the problem of how to “move about the country”.

To solve that problem, about two years ago I decided to dust off and implement a business plan that I had been refining since shortly after airline deregulation.  That business plan is what we now call “AirChicago”.  At its core are the concepts of “collaborative consumption” and “flying right”.

In this book, you will discover the “whys” and “hows” of my plan to create the kind of air-transportation platform that will allow me to travel with the style, comfort, convenience and safety that I want, and that I know virtually every road warrior wants.  And most importantly, at an affordable cost.  As like-minded air travelers join with me to create this new, innovative air-travel system, I’ll once again be able to “move about the country” the way I want to.

Here’s our flightplan for this book.  Chapters 2 through 11 are a fictionalized story that is based on an amalgam of actual airline-industry events and facts.  The story will take you to “Air Travelers Hell” (with a connection in ATL) and then deliver you unto “Air Travelers Heaven”.  I have used the fictional-story format in the hopes of entertaining you while you receive a detailed education on the realities of modern airline travel.  And the story provides you with a better vision for the future of air travel.

Chapter 12 gives you an insider’s look into how I, and a dedicated crew of professionals, are currently engaged in making the vision a reality.  And finally, Chapter 13 presents my bona fides for those readers who wish to dive more deeply into my aviation-industry background.  It even includes a few of my favorite “war stories”.

So, fasten your seatbelt, keep your eyes open and enjoy your flight.

      Capt. Dave

Air Travelers Heaven

Publisher:  The Aerospace Trust Press

Copyright 2017

ISBN:  0-9726991-3-9

Available in eBook and paperback