Flight sharing sites (general discussion) (merged)

Let me drop a spanner into the machine here but what % of people here would take up a passenger who they only just met on a website?

And I don’t mean some attractive female (we know GA is packed with those, don’t we) and you are a single guy and thus don’t need to get a permission from your OH to do it

I wouldn’t.

Unless somebody who I know and trust said to me “X is a perfectly nice guy/girl who I have known for Y years” the least I would do is have a casual chat with X over a cup of tea.

The most obvious reason is the effect on W&B and/or whether the person can even physically get inside the aircraft, and there are some other reasons.

Here in the UK at least, cost sharing seems to take place largely within the self fly hire (rental) scene and there seat sharing is thus basically equivalent to cost sharing so perhaps people might actually just fly with anybody who turns up, but otherwise doing it blindly is a bit like doing blind dates in internet dating (which digs out an exceedingly high % of bunny boilers ).

Being able to advertise seat sharing openly and freely should boost GA activity which is a great thing but I think the above does apply.

Blind dating and size of passenger are not the only issues with such sites. The general population is used to aviation being a form of transportation that takes you safely and reliably from A to B (unless there is a strike). They have no understanding of the limitations of light GA, whether being related to the capabilities of the aircraft, or the ratings of the pilot.

So there are expectations that the flight should be completed as advertised, which may create a pressure on the pilot to complete the flight even in marginal weather. That may turn against GA.

Then would you allow a total stranger to sit next to you in the front seat with access to flight controls not knowing how he/she will behave? For all you know it might be a loony who wants to crash into the friendly neighbourhood kindergarten. Not good for GA.

So I am somewhat ambivalent.

Peter wrote:

Let me drop a spanner into the machine here but what % of people here would take up a passenger who they only just met on a website?

I would have no problem with that. They way these “share economy” sites work is that you build yourself a history, both as the one offering a shared resource and as the one using shared resources. After every flight, the pilot rates the passenger and the passenger rates the pilot. This is how all those sites work, Airbnb, Uber, you name it. A very very powerful tool. I use Airbnb a lot and I could easily rob the apartments or destroy them. My reputation built by ratings of previous apartment owners give enough confidence that I won’t.

The most obvious reason is the effect on W&B and/or whether the person can even physically get inside the aircraft, and there are some other reasons.

That’s why a C182 yields higher fare prices than a TB20

After every flight, the pilot rates the passenger and the passenger rates the pilot. This is how all those sites work, Airbnb, Uber, you name it. A very very powerful tool. I use Airbnb a lot and I could easily rob the apartments or destroy them.

Not entirely because with Air B&B the customer gets “checked” by whoever has to be around to give him the keys.

Also the damage is limited to trashing the apartment. Same with a taxi service; obviously the driver will refuse to carry somebody obviously dangerous etc.

About half the time, the key is hidden somewhere and I don’t even get to meet the owner. If you have positive ratings, there is a lot of trust.

Same could go for a GA ride sharing platform. Chances are even that I know some of the pilots that have rated the passenger in the past.

Life is full of risk and the remote chance that a stranger passenger is going to kill me is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe it ends up like that case in Germany where a suicidal “introductory flight” passenger tried to crash the airplane. The pilot was ex special forces and the story ended with the passenger incapacitated

I don’t want to derail the thread but it is worth comparing like risk with like risk … what I find with Air B&B is that some of the time the “booking” is refused, and you aren’t given a reason. My booking for a rather nice apartment, maybe €800 (from memory, 4 people) for the Prague fly-in was refused. So presumably the vendor will look at whether he likes the look of you, or not. (That’s a negative of Air B&B – you can be left in a difficult situation, looking for an apartment in a great rush, when you thought you had a booking, and a hotel won’t do that). A total speculation might be that he would have realised I was Czech (from my name) and it is a fact that a lot of Czechs don’t like the Czechs who left in 1969 “to make money in the West” and are now coming back when they like to… so you can expect the same with flight bookings. Same on Ebay… with certain items I do delete bids from bidders with no history.

The slight issue is that the GA community can be pretty small and positively loves gossip and if you refuse bookings the word will get around.

Of course, as you say, once you have a good history then you are good to go.

Skyuber is another one that’s just come out.

However, it has been reported that some rental establishments are banning the use of it

I think this has come up here before but a search turns up nothing. Maybe it was the German-accented character

And here is another one

They are popping up fast!

Remind me of the old joke… put four private pilots on a desert island, and a year later they have set up

• four type specific groups
• two splinter groups
• four pilot forums, each with 20 members, all using nicknames

The problem I see here is that with the “technology threshold” for setting up yet another flight sharing website being pretty low (a server with PHP and a clever programmer for a week, to get a crude result) what will happen is what has happened with the airport data sites: most of them have almost nobody on them.

But I think the market is quite limited, to people who want to cost share and badly enough to be happy to fly with anybody who turns up. Most people I know (who cost share, and pretty well as a precondition of flying at all) prefer to ring around / email / sms / IM / facebook-post a number of their friends. Most people who have previously shared a plane with somebody know who they like to do a trip with again, or who they won’t fly with again.

Admittedly it is very difficult sometimes to find any passengers, cost sharing or not, so I guess for some it will be a plus. When my younger son was, ahem, younger, the ex demanded there is another pilot on board. It was however OK if this other pilot sat in the back! This went on for 8 years and I had a lot of hassle finding people, and in some cases paying for their hotel rooms, food, everything. I had a collection of phone numbers of various pilots and instructors.

And in much of Europe there is almost no GA activity so finding passengers may not be easy.

And, like the airport data sites, it may work in Germany, slightly better than elsewhere.