Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 Conference Tackles Air Taxi
Concepts
Few approaches to
aero-problem solving are as unique as that which took
place in St. Petersburg, FL, this past weekend. Part
conference/workshop, part-aero incubator, and part techno-geek
mind-meld; several dozen aviation professionals gathered together
to talk about the acknowledged (and much hyped) paradigm shift that
is taking place in commercial aviation thanks to a new generation
of air taxi operators and air-taxi-suitable airplanes.
This was not your garden variety techno-gabfest… it is
the product of a novel organization that delights in seeking
out technological turning points and then allowing the movers and
shakers in that particular genre to beat them silly. Well-known
high-tech writer/business person/intellectual instigator Esther
Dyson is the cornerstone of Release 1.0's quarterly attempts to
examine the trends and changes in a number of disciplines and see
what might be done to influence, even define, their outcomes.
They delight in shaking things up this way, describing their
efforts thusly… "Every quarter, Release 1.0 hosts a live
event around a particular technology or emerging business model.
Unlike most other industry events, our events bring together all
the players that influence a particular market -
technology-industry executives, entrepreneurs, investors, service
providers, analysts and policymakers - for deep, meaningful
discussions about trends and opportunities. Our goal is to
encourage more participation and action in order to improve
outcomes in some way, if only through a better informed, more
transparent marketplace. We're not talking about forming industry
coalitions or founding new organizations; we are talking about
helping participants discover one another, form alliances, find
partners and exploit opportunities."
This is Dyson's second workshop outing into aviation and
aerospace -- the first having earned high-marks for creating unique
opportunities and insights into the burgeoning aerospace realities
of the 21st century while this most recent confab zeroed in on all
the fuss created around VLJs and the new Air-Taxi paradigm,
explaining that "The next big phase shift will come from a new
group of air-service players (mostly equipped with very light jets,
or VLJs) who will make latent demand visible to suppliers, using
online interfaces not to publish information but to collect user
travel requests and use them to schedule and price flights
dynamically. In other words, they are air taxis: They will use the
visibility of demand to create and define supply, in the form of
specific flights that would not otherwise have happened."
The Release 1.0 conference was filled with several dozen movers
and shakers… from the likes of Aircraft manufacturers Vern
Raburn, Alan Klapmeier and Rick Adam to NASA's Bruce Holmes, FAA's
Andrew Steinberg and all manner of aero-investors, inventors,
air-taxi operators, and business people. There were two critical
aspects to this endeavor… the formal seminar itself, and the
numerous small (but highly valued) social outings that put a number
of highly-involved people in close proximity to each other and
allowed them to meet, compare notes, learn and even talk deals. A
dinner event the night before the actual workshop started in the
intense heat of a late Florida afternoon, went on well into
the darker hours, with groups of experts and entrepreneurs huddled
together discussing the changes that were over-taking the aviation
world.
Esther (pictured below) takes a free-form approach to her
events. Wholly informal in directing these meetings, she emphasized
that the event was "a workshop, not a seminar." Dyson urged
attendee participation, questions, discussion and dialogue…
and then sat back (mostly) to watch the fur fly -- only breaking in
sporadically with a number of astute observations and questions
that tended to create major discussion points, thereafter, for much
of the day.
The first formal speaker at the Release 1.0 workshop was NASA's
irrepressible Bruce Holmes (below), a well-known aero-visionary who
described the topic of the day as the "creating (of) a new
industry". Bruce's short presentation was aptly entitled "One Year
Later... And The Years Ahead!"
He started with a description of his prior efforts in 1993-94,
with NASA's AGATE program and his writing of a paper called "Life
After Airlines," as all about one's personal command of time and
about personal freedom - even describing speed (via air travel) "as
the ability to command time."
Holmes set the agenda for the day by not only defining what it
was that everybody was talking about, but why such esoteric new
technologies were becoming the preferred means to revolutionize the
air taxi industry -- and the industries that depended upon it.
Holmes has been a more than effective advocate for aviation and
aerospace as a critical part of the NASA decision-making team, but
it's obvious that he has taken a personal stake in seeing this
vision come about. He related the story of a trip that he had taken
recently to give a number of speeches, explaining that the trip
would have taken 15 hours by car, or three days by scheduled
airlines -- but by utilizing a small regional air taxi service, he
wound up requiring only a few hours to travel about for his
business. He not only marveled at the efficiency of the system that
he used, but was quite complementary of the fact that the pilot he
flew with was not only a positive role model for his profession,
but turned into a provocative spokesman for small air taxi
benefits.
The first panel session of the day followed Holmes with Pogo
Air's Cameron Burr, Linear Air's Bill Herp, DayJet's Ed Iaccobucci,
and OneSky's Greg Johnson. Their discussion of "The Pure And The
Practical: Air Taxis And Similar Things," got into the nitty gritty
of the economics of biz-jet/air-taxi operations, the changes this
industry is now facing, and how the new VLJ revolution was readying
to replace a dated business model that was aging rapidly.
Bill Herp's highly-touted Linear Air operates a number of Cessna
Caravans in an air taxi operation between NY and Boston, and has
quiate a number of Eclipse 500s on order. As one of the operators
in the group with a real-world air taxi operation that
was already gaining ground in preparation for their VLJ advent a
few months hence, Herp's real-world knowledge and optimism was a
convincing indication that a successful model could be built for
the new air taxi paradigm.
Each of the speakers was hesitant to describe their companies as
air taxi operators and distanced themselves aggressively from
previous air taxi definitions… Ed Iaccobucci described his
upcoming DayJet phenomenon not as an air taxi system, but as a
"time arbitrage agent." While OneSky's Greg Johnson
labeled his operation as "agents of the consumer," Pogo's
Cameron Burr also set his plans off from elder models of business
travel with an added note that the previous wunderkind of the
business aviation set, the long touted fractional jet model, "has
seen its best days."
To Be Continued...