FLOAT Shuttle's Urban Aviation Manifesto

FLOAT’s Vision and Mission Begins with a Human Longing…

Before the Jetsons made us imagine a different way of traveling... 

 Before the Wright Brothers paved the way for an entire industry around air travel... 

Before Leonardo di Vinci created the inspiration for what would become the modern aircraft...

 Even before Daedalus became the first pilot…

People have always looked to the sky and yearned to fly.

Humankind has had the technological capability to fly for over a century... So why isn’t flying yet a part of the daily routine for everyone? 

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Our Statement of Intent

A. It is our aim to make flying accessible to everyone, to make flying part of everyone’s daily experience. And thereby help advance civilization’s progress through aviation.

We believe flying as a daily means of travel should be accessible to everyone, that with our modern technology and capabilities that we should all be able to utilize and experience flight in our normal course of life. And realize our shared yearning more fully on an everyday basis.

B. We start by utilizing aviation to tackle one of the challenges of modern life, traffic congestion - by flying over all traffic.

We believe that flying can be utilized to conquer one of the scourges of the modern world – traffic. More and more, in urban centers the thing that separates people is not distance, but traffic.

C. We want to help make aviation and transportation more ecologically sustainable and environmentally friendly.

We believe that air travel over traffic can be more environmentally friendly than automobiles today, and that new technologies currently being developed can also make aviation ecologically sustainable. And that we can create the use-case and demand to encourage those technologies to be developed and brought to market.

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Our Plan of Action

1) Fly Over Traffic. 

Traffic is killing us. It is causing untold amounts of physical and mental-health damage to commuters. It is killing the productivity of our workforce. It is restricting the growth of our fastest growth companies. It is separating family and loved ones who are spending hours a day on the road instead of at the breakfast table, an afterschool sports game, around the dinner table, or even the little one’s story-time before bed. It is also killing our environment.

Ironically, flying has long been recognized as an obvious solution to urban gridlock. Yet the innovation of an enterprise that makes this a reality has not yet been widely deployed or sustainably achieved. In order to be successful, an enterprise would have to be designed for daily commuters, be able to work with existing infrastructure and aircraft, compensate for the current pilot shortage, and still be committed to environmental sustainability. That is the challenge we have set out to conquer, to create a widely deployed and widely accessible enterprise that will allow everyone to “Fly Over All Traffic”.

1a) Super Commuters First, All Commuters Next

One of the things I remember about The Jetsons isn’t just their flying car, but the family (including Astro the dog), their relationships, and their interactions together. All of this is an important part of what we imagine. Our goal is to give commuters hours back in their lives everyday to be more productive, to be less stressed, to have greater mental and physical well-being, and to be more present for family and for life. 

We will launch our effort focused on those who need this solution the most, the 10 Million super commuters (people who are traveling 90 minutes or more to get from home to work), and more specifically the 750,000 super commuters in Southern California, where traffic has been ranked as the worst in the world 7 years running. 

The super-commuter is becoming the new norm, especially in major metropolitans that are currently experiencing a housing shortage crisis. Coupled with the lower cost of real estate further outside of city centers, people are commuting further distances and longer hours in order to find affordable housing.  

We believe that creating a service that solves the problem for super commuters will also create the network, the framework, and the capacity necessary to build an aviation service that will benefit all urban travelers, especially as new urban aviation technology begins to come to market.

1b) Utilizing Existing Infrastructure - Revitalizing General Aviation Airports

The proliferation of general aviation, municipal, and small airports began in the 1930’s, just a few short decades after the Wright Brothers’ initial Kitty Hawk flight. Ironically, it was after the increased popularity of jet travel in the 1960’s (the Boeing 747 was introduced in 1969) that general aviation airports began to decline from the 1970’s until now. Ever since, we have become more and more dependent on freeways and automobile travel for inter-city travel and commuting from the suburbs into urban centers. It’s as if we lost our longing to fly and relegated it to only long-distance inter-state and inter-continental travel.

In the U.S. there are around 5,200 airports available for public use. We believe this represents a tremendous amount of national investment in land, systems, and infrastructure over decades that is available to make flying more accessible to everyone. Publicly available airports represent a wealth of assets and potential in creating a (re)new(ed) transportation network to address modern transportation challenges, without laying new rail or digging tunnels. The “greenest” infrastructure to build is one that has already been built.

In Southern California there are over 40 general aviation airports scattered across urban, suburban, and rural areas. We see these as transportation nodes that can strategically connect places of commerce, clusters of employment, and residential developments together in a network of air routes to provide a new level of accessibility and convenience and spur additional levels of innovation and economic vitality.

We want to see regional and smaller airports begin to thrive again. As we work to bring commercial air travel back to these airports, we hope to see that stimulate local businesses and catalyze greater economic growth around each airport similar to the investments being poured into Transit Oriented Development around train and light rail stations.

The revitalization of general aviation airports as critical transportation hubs for urban transportation is as much a part of our vision as the transformation of commuters’ lives. The well-being, prosperity, and growth of general aviation airports will be crucial in supporting the next wave of regional and urban aviation. The renewed availability and regularity of air travel from airfields in our local communities can create a runway for our common longing to fly.

1c) Using Existing Aircraft

Leonardo da Vinci first drew detailed plans for human-powered flying vehicles around 1485. It was 418 years later that Kitty Hawk took flight. Since then, as the world of aviation has expanded, the technology and design of aircraft has continued to advance.

Today billions of dollars are being invested in the development of new exotic aircraft that promise to transform not just aviation but urban mobility as a whole. As these innovations continue to progress, we are getting closer to a future where daily flight becomes a possibility for everyone. This is part of the vision behind FLOAT so we eagerly anticipate the day when these new aircraft eventually achieve FAA certification and become commercially available, opening new opportunities in urban mobility.

In the meantime, we believe that existing proven aircraft can still have a transformative impact on urban transportation. What’s needed is a reliable, efficient, and comfortable aircraft that can be operated economically enough to be accessible to the largest amount of the population as possible while balancing the restrictions of airstrip size and capabilities of general aviation airports. That is why we are beginning our operations with the Cessna Grand Caravan, well known for its reliability and efficiency. It will seat our two pilots and up to nine passengers. It will enable us to fly people over traffic today, daily and at an accessible price point (comparable to the cost of owning and commuting in a car).

1d) Addressing the Pilot Shortage

In Greek mythology, Daedalus wanted to be able to fly, and when he succeeded, he became the first pilot. He had the wisdom and skill to be able to safely navigate the skies. The story was told centuries before flight became a reality, but Daedalus proved to be a prediction of the talented pilots that would come after him. Without these pilots, aviation could never have become a reality.

The aviation industry is grappling with a growing pilot shortage that is currently impacting regional airlines and will eventually impact major airlines as well. In the career path for commercial pilots there’s a gap between when a pilot obtains a commercial pilot’s license with 250 flight hours and the 1500 flight hours need to be an airline pilot. But the new commercial pilot with 250 flight hours might find their start in a FLOAT right-seat copilot’s seat. Being mentored by seasoned left-seat captains and gaining valuable experience flying multiple segments everyday, these copilots can advance and be promoted to the left-seat captain position. Eventually, they may move on to fly for a major airline, but hopefully only after they have mentored their own replacement and other new talent. We believe this process and talent development will not only be beneficial for FLOAT’s culture of learning and growth but will also benefit the aviation industry at large. 

What we know is that to meet our plan of hiring 500 new pilots over the next few years, we need to address the pilot shortage head-on and create a pipeline of new pilots for our enterprise to be successful. Which is why we’re working with institutions like Mt. San Antonio College, which has the largest two-year aviation school in California. FLOAT and Mt. San Antonio College are crafting an MOU to create a career pathway for not just pilots, but also for mechanics and other aviation personnel. 

Mt. San Antonio draws from among the brightest and most eager achievers from their diverse community. And if we are successful in creating an effective pipeline into the industry, not only will we make an impact on these communities, we may have an impact on the face of the aviation industry in just a number of years.

2) Ecologically Sustainable Transportation

Years ago, when people dreamed of flying, they looked up and saw clear, blue skies. Today, those same skies are filled with smog and other signs of pollution. The number of cars on the road is only making this problem worse. Our goal is not only to make commuting better for people, but also for the planet.

The vision is simple and imperative: to re-invent aviation to be more accessible and environmentally sustainable. Imagine, net-zero impact air travel. The path to this reality will take a few steps. 

Step 1: Positive impact now. Even initially, FLOAT will already be more environmentally beneficial than commuting same distances by car. Calculating the carbon emissions of nine people flying 50 miles in a Cessna Caravan in 15 minutes, versus nine people driving 50 miles by car in traffic results in 4.4 tons of carbon emissions reductions per commuter using FLOAT instead of driving.

Step 2: Going electric (or alternative fuel). Newly announced electric and hydrogen-powered planes may take a decade to obtain FAA certification for commercial operation. And initially, electric planes may only have capacity for a flight duration of about thirty minutes (or less counting reserves), limiting broad commercial applicability. But FLOAT's average flight duration between Southern California's general aviation airports is around fifteen minutes. Additionally, FLOAT's short-duration flights and high frequency turnarounds benefit from one of the operational advantages of electric engines which do not suffer the wear-and-tear penalty for high engine cycles (starts and stops) that gas-turbine engines experience. Being the ideal mission for electric planes means that FLOAT going electric will help catalyze innovation for further electric aviation advancement by being among the initial consumers and beneficiaries of commercial electric aircraft. 

It’s at this point that we project being able to take another major step in our goal to make flying accessible to everyone. The operational cost advantages for going electric should be significant enough for us to take a bold step in discounting the price of our flights allowing even more people to take advantage of flying over traffic.

Step 3: In the future. One day, e-VTOL vehicles will have passed all required FAA certification and be available for commercial use. At some future point, those e-VTOLs may also be autonomously piloted. The wide deployment of e-VTOLs, both piloted and automated, is FLOAT's ultimate vision. 

Because of FLOAT's innovation and investment in a business that is already taking steps to move people from carbon-heavy stop-and-go traffic to consecutively more energy efficient steps along the sustainable air-space on-ramp, FLOAT will have the business model, the expertise, and the ridership ready to acquire and utilize those new vehicles as those technologies arrive. And we will put them to use to make flying accessible to everyone.

3) Steps to the Ultimate Vision - Making Flying Accessible to Everyone

We believe that the ability to fly can be transformative. It literally provides greater perspective. It shortens the separation between people and peoples. All of which inspires and stimulates greater innovation and connectivity. In short, we believe that we can be a part of civilization’s progress by making flying accessible to everyone. 

We are taking steps today to achieve the vision of making daily flight available to everyone: by starting with addressing the problem of traffic for super commuters, by utilizing existing infrastructure, by utilizing existing technology and existing aircraft, by addressing the resource availability of pilots, and by improving environmental impact. We are creating a roadmap to the day when daily flying will be accessible for everyone. We know that every step of this path will positively impact individuals, businesses, communities, and families - enabling both greater innovation and stronger relational connectivity. In short, steps that will continue to advance our civilization. 

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Help Us Create the Movement

Do you remember looking up at the sky and yearning to fly? Can you envision a transformation of commuter travel and urban aviation? Like me, have you asked yourself, “Why hasn’t anyone made a way for people to fly as a daily mode of transportation?”

Our vision isn’t that radical. It’s the logical progression of history and the extension of the trajectory of human aviation. It’s a renewal of our common longing matched with innovative but practical next steps. Isn’t it time that we took another step forward?

We can’t do this alone. We need people who see the vision to help us achieve it. We need partners, investors, champions, and customers. How can we work together to transform aviation and realize the dream we’ve all had since we first looked to the sky? 

We want your help. Visit our website and please get in touch with us. Thanks!