Dear Fellow-Pilots,
Thank you very much to everybody who earlier helped with my research survey on flight-sharing. Now as promised I am coming back with the findings. The work included a lot more than just the survey (including, but not limited to CAA interview) and resulted in a 200-page document and 45,000+ words. The idea of the research was to do with the strong division of opinions on flight-sharing and what could be done to change that. As a possible solution, buddy-flying flight-sharing was considered.
Fortunately and unfortunately, there is a big chunk of work which I cannot share for various reasons (e.g. limitations on data sharing), whereas some bits are simply not very relevant and interesting for aviators. So, I have spent quite a bit of time creating a much shorter version specifically to share with pilots. Due to the cut-downs, it is still far from perfect in terms of structure, formatting and flow, as otherwise, it would take forever… So it is not a paper, but rather a document with a bunch of findings, however, I hope it communicates the main aspects well.
It is still a fairly long file, which nobody will probably read in full, so contents will hopefully help direct you to the key areas of interest. Ultra-short summary of key findings which I personally find important is below:
- Many pilots like the idea of flight-sharing, but even among interested, very few do it. (pp. 14-16 )
- Less experienced pilots and renters are most positive about the idea of flight-sharing. (pp. 13-14)
- Reviews mechanisms on flight-sharing platforms are not very useful. (pp. 6-7)
- Wingly is far from being profitable and good chance it won’t be for a long time. (pp. 30-32 )
- Some practices of flight-sharing platforms that might seem in the grey area, mostly not perceived as such by regulators, however, some cancellation policies do raise questions (pp. 10-11; pp. 24-26, p. 36 )
- Company and sharing passion appears as important as sharing the costs with the former even leading by a few per cent. (p.16)
- Pilots flight-sharing with other pilots could be better than flight-sharing with passengers, due to not dealing with complete strangers and flying last minute being common among pilots. (p.21; p. 23)
- I also managed to approach an existing platform and launch functionality with them that facilitates finding flying-buddies for pilots among members of same flying clubs (pp. 77-79) + demo video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO3zOfuyNuE&t=5s.
If there are any specific questions, I might be able to answer so please let me know. Thank you very much once again! I really enjoyed working on this project and hopefully, some of you will find it interesting.
Kind regards,
Alex
The PDF is available via the link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kmhtdc2xse07sme/Research%20Finidngs%20to%20Share.pdf?dl=0
