CLOUD COMMUTE

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CLOUD COMMUTE
Lofty Goals: Float Shuttle Co-founder Arnel Guiang at Brackett Field in La Verne.

Carpools and vanpools have long been ways for workers to escape the dreaded daily solo long-distance commute. Now one local startup is looking to add “flypools” to this picture.

Diamond Bar-based Float Shuttle is set to unveil plans next week to start a commuter flight service between several of the region’s smaller general aviation airports. Passengers would pay monthly subscription fees ranging from $1,250 to $2,000 to reserve a seat every weekday morning and evening on a Cessna Caravan aircraft. Flights would average 50 to 100 miles and take between 20 and 30 minutes each way, much less than the 90 minutes to two hours it would take to make the commute on land via mass transit or passenger vehicle. The service is expected to begin later this spring.

Arnel Guiang, one of the founders of Float Shuttle, said the service is targeting “super-commuters” with one-way trips to and from work that exceed 50 miles. This is the demographic that could benefit the most from the time savings that short-haul air travel can bring, he said.

“We’re bringing a vanpool subscription service to the air as a ‘flypool,’ Guiang said, noting that Float is an acronym for “Fly Over All Traffic.”

Float Shuttle, which was formed last year, plans to start small with four or five 9-seat Caravan aircraft made by Cessna, which is owned by Textron Aviation Inc. of Wichita, Kan. That would provide seats for roughly 40 subscribing passengers; Guiang said the company has a list of “several hundred” people who have expressed interest in becoming subscribing passengers.

Initial plans call for Santa Monica Airport and Hawthorne Municipal Airport to serve as the workplace destination air fields, with commute flights likely to originate in places such as Brackett Field Airport in La Verne.

Guiang said the company plans to raise most of its initial capital by signing up dozens of people from its initial interest base to monthly subscriptions; the company would only start air shuttle service once enough subscriptions are secured.

In a further effort to keep startup costs at a minimum, Guiang and the company’s other co-founder, Tom Hsieh, have partnered with Rob McKinney, president of Kona, Hawaii-based Mokulele Airlines, which will supply the initial planes for the Float Shuttle service. McKinney has been brought on board as another of Float’s co-founders.

While Mokulele Airlines’ main business is within the Hawaiian Islands, the airline has one routes within Southern California, from LAX to El Centro in the Imperial Valley. McKinney said the airline has four or five planes it plans to use to expand service in Southern California under the Float Shuttle banner.

Unique niche

Float Shuttle’s subscription service for commuter flights wholly within Southern California is unique, according to Edward Story, a local general aviation activist who sits on the boards of the California Pilots Association and the Santa Monica Airport Association.

Story noted that Santa Monica-based Surf Airlines Inc., which started operation in 2013, also offers a monthly subscription service. But its focus is on longer flights, mostly from Southern California to cities in Northern California. And one of its target markets is different: business executives, such as owners of Silicon Beach startups, traveling to the offices of Bay Area venture capital firms and vice-versa.

There are also several air taxi services that are in various stages of development, including Uber Elevate, which is being developed by San Francisco-based Uber Technologies Inc. Unlike the consistent “flypool” that Float Shuttle is planning, air taxi services are similar to their ground counterparts in that they are intended for somewhat more spontaneous and single-use travel arrangements.

One air taxi service that did briefly launch last summer in Los Angeles was Skyryde Inc. (covered in the May 11, 2018, issue of the Business Journal). But founder JB Adkins said last week that operations ceased after two months for several reasons, including the need to obtain an operating license from the Federal Aviation Administration. (Float Shuttle plans to use Mokulele Airlines’ FAA operating license.)

Adkins said Skyryde is now retooling itself as a membership service for flight commuters that will offer flights only on helicopters, not the fixed-wing Cessna aircraft it initially used. Passengers would pay $350 per month for the privilege of being able to reserve seats on the helicopters and then would pay anywhere from $30 to $50 per flight on top of that.

“We’re going to focus exclusively on the very short-haul flights of up to 50 miles,” Adkins said, with the longest flight being from downtown to Irvine.

For daily commuters, the total cost of using Skyryde would be similar to the cost of Float Shuttle, even though the typical flight on Float would cover about twice the distance.

Employer help

But Float’s subscription cost of roughly $1,500 per month would still be beyond the reach of most employees who face one-way commutes longer than 50 miles, according to Story. For passengers to stick with the service, they would need financial help from their employers.

Bryant Kwon, who lives in Fullerton and works as a director of product development in the Burbank office of Roseland, N.J.-based payroll service Automatic Data Processing Inc., is one of those on Float’s list of people interested in signing up for the shuttle service. Kwon said in an email that he commutes to work using either Amtrak or Metrolink to Union Station and then hopping onto the Metro Gold Line to Pasadena. The trip takes about two hours door to door though the length can vary because of trains running late or missed connections. ADP offers the incentive to make the monthly pass cost for Metrolink or Amtrak tax deductible.

Kwon wrote he believes a Float air shuttle would cut up to 45 minutes off his one-way commute.

“Having the ability to shave possibly 30 to 45 minutes every day each way on my commute would be significant enough for me to consider the proposed subscription fee,” he wrote. 

But Kwon said he is uncertain whether the air shuttle service could be added to ADP’s approved list of transit incentives for its employees, and that could ultimately weigh against choosing the air shuttle option.

Story said that, in some instances, companies would be more than willing to offer the financial assistance.

“Say you’re a Silicon Beach executive looking to hire an MIT grad, but that grad is balking at the high housing costs here and is considering other offers from tech hubs in Austin (Texas) or other places with cheaper housing,” Story said. “To sweeten the pot, that executive could steer the candidate towards less expensive housing in the Inland Empire and then offer to cover all or most of the cost of Float Shuttle fares, so that candidate doesn’t face commutes of two hours each way.”

That’s why Guiang said Float Shuttle has been reaching out to large local companies – including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in Hawthorne – to explore whether they would consider adding the air shuttle service to their lists of transit incentive packages for employees.

Employees at SpaceX are among those who would benefit the most from Float’s service because the company is a 10-minute walk from the Hawthorne Airport terminal buildings, and thus, employees would not face another potential hurdle that many of Float’s users would confront: arrangements for the “last-mile” transport from the local airports to their workplaces.

SpaceX spokeswoman Eva Behrend said the company as a policy declines to comment on unsolicited proposals that come in.

McKinney said one option to close that last mile would be recently unveiled monthly passes from rideshare operators such as Uber; those passes offer fares at a considerable discount from single-use rates.

But Story said a better solution in many instances would be for the employer to run a van to the local airport, much like car service shops run vans to take their customers to their workplaces.

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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