Business & Commercial Aviation - Jan 26, 2009
There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks with opinions about the reasons for the demise of DayJet, the Florida-based air taxi company that ceased operations in September 2008. But DayJet's business model - the company called it "per-seat, on-demand" - has come in for scrutiny in the aftermath, and if that business model is flawed, as some believe, there may be lessons to be gleaned for the industry. . . George Nemhauser is a professor at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at GEORGIA TECH and, together with professor Martin Savelsbergh and several Ph.D. students, forms the academic brain trust that spent four or five years developing DayJet's software. He says he's a believer in the PSOD model that DayJet used. "I think there's a need for something in between commercial and charter, which is so much more expensive, and this provides exactly that," he says. "Unfortunately the airplane didn't arrive at the right time, but I think the model makes total sense." Read more>>>