Uber’s Aerial Rideshare Project ‘Entering the Next Phase’
aviationtoday.com
aviationtoday.com
Presumably they will have to solve this problem for the aircraft, can't have those landing willy nilly in bike lanes and crosswalks.
That's Uber we're talking about. I don't think they giva a fuck as long as it's not bad for business.
I do believe, however, that they can't just apply their brand of "regulatory arbitrage" when it comes to airspace usage.
Around here you're dicking with federal regulators and the military. Not a bunch of city government yokels that you can strongarm into submission.
The regulatory hurdles and details like pilot and airline laws are no joke and easily an industry killer. But the FAA seems to actually being helpful to industry is really great and surprising.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2020/01/14/six-urban-air-mobil...
Note they list the 6 companies involved deep in the regulatory process, not just Uber, which include a Chinese one and various heavy transport vehicles.
If I wanted to walk from my starting point to a pickup location, get a ride, and walk some more from the drop off location to my destination, then I almost might as well take a bus.
Sure, it gets around traffic, but I'd bet that in a lot of cases, waiting in traffic takes less time than the additional walking. (The exception would be for longer trips.)
The only way I can see this working is if the experience/utility of this mode of transport is so vastly superior that everybody decides it is actually worth it to rebuild a city around it.
It's bizarre how people can get away with completely redefining words, especially when it's the cynical creation of a euphemism.
Under Part 91, even if you could get around the "common purpose" concern, the rules are such that no profit could realistically ever be made. (Insert snarky ride-sharing economics joke here.)
The FAA has shut down several operations who were tiptoeing around the rules. Having a single regulatory body that pays attention to this across the country makes it harder to make an end-run.
Start here: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/airline_certificat...
There are stricter pilot, airplane, and maintenance requirements than what Part 91 (private) is required to do.
The general philosophy seems to be "the less you know about the operation, the more oversight the FAA will provide". My family choosing to get into our airplane knows a lot more about the pilot and aircraft and risks than Jane buying an airline ticket or Joe tapping on an app for a ride. You don't have to be nearly as concerned about getting onto a Delta flight, because Delta is much more heavily regulated as they "hold out to the public" for scheduled air carrier operations.
In terms of what that means for an Uber-for-airplanes situation, there's no way in hell that I would put my pilot certificate at risk by signing up to run clearly illegal charters in my airplane. Even when some other pilots would volunteer to run that risk, the FAA would not have a hard time doing a targetted "ramp inspection" to verify compliance with applicable Federal Aviation Regulations. These ops have been pretty consistently shut down in the past and I don't see that as likely to change in the future. If I decided I wanted to go Part 135 (or Uber got an operating certificate to which I could add my airplane), the compliance burden will likely make it unattractive to me to sign up [because I already have a busy life and even if I were to fly for this entity, it would likely be less than 25 hours per year]. If Uber gets its own cert and runs its own fleet, they could get the compliance burden to be manageable (by running each airplane more hours annually) but then need a metric crap-ton of capital to buy the fleet.
I once talked to a guy who got a Part 135 certificate at a Class Bravo airport.
Him: "Yeah, I got the first 135 cert in 30 years at this airport."
Me: "How'd you do that?"
Him: "Oh, I work for the federal govt."
All you need to know is that the FAA considers all operators to be the "same level of safety", whether 91, 135 or 121. Since 121 means scheduled airline, you can do the math on how much that would cost and how much paperwork is involved.