I've always wanted somebody to take the idea of "leave when full" minibuses in the 3rd world and apply it to popular airline routes.
How cool would it be if there was an operator running flights from Los Angeles to San Fransisco using small commuter jets with no fixed schedule and plenty of planes. You'd just turn up, buy a ticket, make your way to the gate, and get on the plane. When it filled up it would taxi away and another one would fill its place.
Average wait time: less than 15 minutes. No more showing up at the airport 2 hours early.
Naturally, you'd have to charge a premium, but if you pick your routes correctly and target people with more money than time, you would clean up.
The only downside is that you couldn't do it from actual commercial airports like LAX and SFO because you'd never get a slot to take off. You'd need to use smaller airports such as Boeing Field in Seattle. It still seems pretty doable though.
There were "air shuttle" or "air bus" services, using small jets, on super high volume routes: SIN-KUL, DCA-JFK, Great Britain to Ireland. You'd buy a ticket, which was a right to fly on any flight, and then walk up to board and get on the next flight; they were frequent enough (every 30 minutes?) that it wasn't really an issue.
This only really works on very high volume routes, and the problem is your aircraft basically need to be dedicated to that route; a lot of the short flights otherwise (SFO-LAX for instance) are continuations of longer flights, which allow a carrier to for instance do a BKK-NRT-SFO-LAX flight and offer nonstop BKK-NRT (if they have 5th freedom), NRT-SFO, SFO-LAX, and direct BKK-LAX, BKK-SFO, BKK-LAX, NRT-LAX, using one aircraft (and probably 2 crews).
I think security screening is what killed the "air bus" market.
I routinely have my flights into SFO delayed hours in advance due to weather and traffic considerations. The ATC system doesn't seem like it's set up handle such an arrangement without major changes being made to the way flights are programmed. Just a guess.
You are more or less correct about the ATC system. You have to file IFR flight plans ahead of time because it takes time for the system to process your flight plan, grant you a clearance, and assign a release time. As the ATC system becomes increasingly saturated, this process takes longer and longer. The system has to plot out every flight and schedule departure times so that you don't get too many airplanes in the same general area at any given time. Even more importantly, they have to make sure that the airports don't get inundated with too many planes at once becuase they only have so many ruways and only one plane can use a runway at a time.
Commercial airports deal with that last problem by selling time slots for passenger flights, which are generally auctioned off at long intervals (e.g. anually), which is not compatible with a "leave when full" business model.
Most of the weekday traffic is business travelers, who have meetings scheduled and need to be guaranteed on the ground at a certain time. That would certainly work for a lot of leisure travel though.
Part of the reason why it's considered a sign of a civilized country if their trains run on time.
Actually, I think it would work a lot better for business travelers, since it optimizes for minimum wait time at the expense of, well, expense.
If you take a commercial flight today, you are guaranteed to be at the airport for 1-2 hours, and chances are you'll pad that out a bit if you're headed to an important meeting. If you billed your time at $300/hr, wouldn't you pay a little extra to know your car-to-air time would be less than half an hour?
And, assuming you still show up at the airport a bit early just in case, wouldn't you rather spend that extra time sipping a Starbucks downstairs from your client's office rather than waiting at the gate?
I'm not sure why you think your idea would shave off any time from the car-to-air sequence. If anything it would add time-
You still have to get a boarding pass, go through security, walk down the terminal to the gate. The only difference is, normally you can plan ahead and waste no time since you know when your plane will be taking off. With your new system, once you get to the gate the plane might be full so you have to wait another hour (and maybe even go to a new gate).
If you use the general aviation terminal there is no security or boarding passes. You just have to know the tail number of your airplane as a kind of password.
Yeah and I thought we were talking about commercial flights. I get it now
Even still I might rather get on the scheduled 6am flight and know (~90%) that I'll be in the city in time for the meeting than get an extra hour of sleep and potentially be late because there happened to be a rush that morning.
When you don't have guaranteed arrival times, like car commute, you end up leaving the house early anyway just "to beat rush hour" since you never know how long it's actually going to take. Versus guaranteed arrival times, like a commuter train, where you don't have to worry about that.
The key word there is "guaranteed". I'd much rather know that I'm going to spend 1-2 hours at the airport, than have no idea.
On a leave-when-full plane, you may be there for any length of time from 20 minutes (if you are one of the last to arrive), to maybe 2 hours (if you are one of the first to arrive), to maybe 4 hours (if you arrive just as the last one leaves, and there isn't another one arriving for a while).
Personally I'd rather know the exact time I'm going to be taking off, so I can turn up at the perfect time (when I fly, at least out of England where I know the airports well enough, I turn up, drop off baggage, drink a coffee while smoking a cigarette, go through security, and I sit down in my seat a couple of minutes before the plane moves away from the gate). As opposed to your system, where I turn up, get on the plane, then... wait for an unknown time until it fills up.
Actually, it'd be every 15 minutes to average a 7 minute wait.
And to find routes, simply look at Southwest's schedule between major airports. Or any commuter airline between New York and Chicago. If they're filling a 150 seat plane every 45 minutes, you could certainly fill a 20 seater in 15.
Slots at major airports are very expensive, and scheduled very carefully. You could only do this if you used minor airports, which would probably kill the convenience factor.
edit: Actually there probably are pairs of cities where it could be made to work by using small, low-traffic, convenient-to-the-city airports which can't handle large planes. But now your main problem is chicken-and-egg: until you have a lot of customers you can't possibly run a frequent service, and the customers won't be interested unless it's frequent. I suppose you could take off every twenty minutes regardless of passenger load, but in that case your operating costs are going to be enormous from day one.
Actually there probably are pairs of cities where it could be made to work by using small, low-traffic, convenient-to-the-city airports which can't handle large planes.
I think this was the intent -- fly out of Palwaukee, not O'Hare.
There's something sort of like that for Toronto City Airport (YTZ) to Ottawa (YOW). Porter flies out every hour and is just slightly more than a coach seat on the train. You can buy a fixed time ticket, or a flexible ticket for slightly more.
I've always wanted somebody to take the idea of "leave when full" minibuses in the 3rd world and apply it to popular airline routes.
Although it can result in shorter waits, it can also result in longer waits. I know people who've waited 8 hours for a cross country bus in the developing world cause the bus wouldn't leave till it was full.
that's an awesome, albeit impractical idea. I can just picture a surly captain chewing through a bag of rambutans he bought on the tarmac while he waits until there are enough people to make it worth his while to take off while his helper abruptly stops selling tickets and disappears into the nearest bar for half an hour.
Or he lands somewhere not on the schedule in the middle of the flight and a lady with her goat gets on and has a ticket for your seat, making you stand next to the toilet for the remainder of the flight.
I've always wanted somebody to take the idea of "leave when full" minibuses in the 3rd world and apply it to popular airline routes.
How cool would it be if there was an operator running flights from Los Angeles to San Fransisco using small commuter jets with no fixed schedule and plenty of planes. You'd just turn up, buy a ticket, make your way to the gate, and get on the plane. When it filled up it would taxi away and another one would fill its place.
Average wait time: less than 15 minutes. No more showing up at the airport 2 hours early.
Naturally, you'd have to charge a premium, but if you pick your routes correctly and target people with more money than time, you would clean up.
The only downside is that you couldn't do it from actual commercial airports like LAX and SFO because you'd never get a slot to take off. You'd need to use smaller airports such as Boeing Field in Seattle. It still seems pretty doable though.