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Why Drive When You Can Fly?

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By BILLY TOWNSEND, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2007

LAKELAND - It's a grueling routine for Central Florida business travelers: Drive the five hours from Lakeland to Tallahassee, spend the night, conduct your business and then endure a bleary-eyed return trip home, or worse, another night away from loved ones.

DayJet has a proposition to make it easier.

The start-up regional airline is launching in Lakeland and four other Florida cities this week. It aims to lure business travelers off the roads with a quick, flexible service that varies in price from $1 per mile to $4 per mile, depending on how flexible a passenger can be about departure and arrival times.

'Our competition is the car,' said E.J. Wojtowicz, DayJet's sales manager. 'We're replacing the long-haul drive.'

The company's top management, and at least four of its fleet of 12 Eclipse VLJ aircraft, made the trip to Lakeland Linder Regional Airport on Thursday.

DayJet will make history with its three-passenger, two-pilot planes and the cutting edge reservation and scheduling computer system built to fill them, executives claim. They bill DayJet as the world's first 'per seat, on demand' jet service.

For now, the company is operating within a network of 'dayports' in Lakeland, Gainesville, Pensacola, Tallahassee and Boca Raton. But executives hope to expand to 20 Florida cities and 28 aircraft by the end of the year. The Southeast and beyond, served by hundreds of aircraft, would follow.

But don't expect to see dayports in Tampa, Orlando or Atlanta any time soon, if ever.

'We are forever going to be the air carrier that gets you between Lakeland, Gainesville, Savannah, Albany, Birmingham,' and other midsized cities, said Ed Iacobucci, DayJet president and chief executive officer.

Automated Schedule Is Flexible

Here's how the DayJet process works.

Through a Web portal, located at www.dayjet.com, a customer would pick a date. He or she would then tell the reservation software necessary arrival and departure times. If those times are flexible and provide DayJet with wider scheduling options, the price drops based on an algorithm built into the system.

If the times aren't flexible, the price rises.

At 6 p.m. each evening, the scheduling system 'gelatinizes' into an outline of the next day's trips, said Bruce Holmes, a former NASA employee, who is the company's chief systems strategist. That 6 p.m. blueprint can be modified. Passengers can secure flights up to two hours before their needed departure, depending on availability, Holmes said.

The entire system is automated and paperless, Iacobucci said. The only time a human would get involved in scheduling is if DayJet had to break a commitment to a passenger, he said.

Once on board, it's no frills. One company spokeswoman described the interior of a VLJ as similar to a flying minivan. Passengers are allowed a single piece of carry-on luggage along with a laptop and briefcase. There is no in-flight food or beverage service or bathroom.

'Go before you go,' joked Wojtowicz.

Although flight is the company's business, its success will hinge on what Iacobucci called 'time arbitrage.' What the company is really selling, he said, is time. Customers for whom time is terribly important will pay for more of it, with the sophisticated scheduling system seeking to maximize the value of time.

DayJet doesn't need a huge passenger load to thrive, Iacobucci said. Dayports that generate 30 trips per day will do well. He doesn't want any cities to do more than 50 or 60 per day because of the risk of turning customers away. If that begins to happen, DayJet will look to add another dayport nearby, Iacobucci said.

DayJet is using a membership model, recruiting businesses and preapproving travelers in a way that it says eases the security process and maximizes check-in efficiency.

Developers Are High-Tech Heavy Hitters

Iacobucci and Holmes have deep resumes.

Iacobucci, a former software developer for IBM, founded the software firm Citrix in 1991. He specialized in building computer operating systems.

Published reports indicate he tapped computer scientists at Georgia Tech, his alma mater, to help develop the management system needed to make DayJet work.

Holmes is the former associate director for airspace and vehicle systems research at NASA's Airspace Programs Office at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. He led development of research strategies with NASA Langley's technology programs for future aircraft and the future National Airspace System.

A high-tech ethic pervades the company's descriptions of itself.

That's one of the reasons Iacobucci thinks DayJet will disprove skeptics, who point to the historic difficulty of making money in aviation.

This week's launch is five years in the making and cost $20 million in research. The company, which is still private, has ample financing through private equity firms and individuals.

'There are always skeptics,' Iacobucci said. 'That's what makes it fun.'

Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at wtownsend@tampatrib.com or (863) 284-1409.

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