#sharedflight

Los Angeles (VNY)-> New York City (TEB) 4 seats available @ $5k. Depart Sunday July 12th on Falcon 2000LXEASy, free wifi, pet friendly.

Charter the whole plane Use intelijet to find the best plane for your trip. Travel on your time, from an airport close to home and fly directly to MVY. You can request an itinerary online or call and speak to a concierge for price and availability- 1-866-695-1312.

Find a seat Search intelijet.com for any available seats matching your travel time. These seats can be extras made available by folks already chartering a plane or seats on a SharedFlight. With SharedFlights, when the minimum number of seats are filled the flight is on. Prices per seat from New York’s HPN airport to Martha’s Vineyard MVY are available on a twin-engine King Air 200 starting at $599.00.

Start your own SharedFlight Have a different itinerary in mind? Start your own SharedFlight by building a trip on intelijet.com. Select your departure and destination airport, choose the plane and you’re ready to go. Promote the trip on Facebook or Twitter to have others join you, intelijet will do the same. 

Recently, we had a client request a trip from Montauk, NY to Boston, MA wait a few hours and return later that day. If you're not familiar with these airports, Montauk (MTP) is on the eastern tip of Long Island and has a 3200ft runway.

To travel from Montauk to Boston your options are:

Drive- round-trip travel time is over 10hrs and includes an expensive ferry ride.

Airline- not available, you could drive to NYC and fly from there, but that's probably more time consuming than driving directly to Boston.

Traditional charter- The cheapest charter flight available was almost $3000 in a Cirrus aircraft. 

It happened to be the case another client, a commercial flight student, training in a Cirrus out of Danbury, CT read our post about individual pilots sharing flights to offset costs and was interested in trying it. We offered the Montauk people a SharedFlight with the student and they accepted; the results couldn't have been better.

As a note- I have a relationship with the flight school where the airplane was rented, I joined the flight as the "safety/mentor/instructor pilot," and to meet both parties. I explained my experience included over 1000 hours of instruction given in Cirrus and I fly two private jets for a charter operator near New York City. The risks of the flight were low and very manageable. (You can read previous posts on Intelijet's position regarding individual pilots sharing flights)

Here's how everyone benefited:

The passengers- They flew on the exact model aircraft available for charter, but for a fraction of the price. Their share of the expenses was $744.88 and they received all the benefits of a private flight- the time savings, flying from an airport close to home, not served by airlines and with the safety of an experienced pilot monitoring. The flight from MTP to BOS took 40 minutes.

The student- He's building flight time towards his commercial pilot license. This requires hopping in the airplane and going somewhere, usually, by himself and to places within his comfort zone or where risk are low. In the flight training biz we refer this as "burning holes in the sky" as it's flying for the sake of flying; building those hours. At a rental cost of $265/hr for the Cirrus, piloting isn't a cheap pursuit.

Instead, the student did a live scenario based training event, put in a position to make decisions, manage risk and evaluate outcomes. Done correctly and the understanding a students receives is far greater than just doing maneuvers or flying without purpose.

This scenario would normally be outside of a commercial student's comfort zone (large, busy airport at BOS, pressure of carrying passengers) and expensive, but instead it's a wonderful example of an opportunity to broaden their experience with an instructor present. SBT is something the FAA endorses and promotes throughout the industry. (Read about scenario based training)

The flight school- The entire round-trip cost $1489.76, this included the airplane, fuel, oil and fees. With each person self-aggregating on Intelijet, an effective sharing price of $132.50/hr for 2 people in the Cirrus is awesome. You can see why flight sharing opportunities are a great way to increase flight school activity and airplane utilization. In fact everyone was so happy with the outcome another flight has been scheduled, together.

This was a great trip, I personally had a lot of fun, it was a fantastic example of the sharing economy empowering people and creating opportunities that previously weren't available.