(Photo | Courtesy of KinectAir)
“You get an incredible panoramic view from the windows of a small passenger aircraft flying past our gorgeous Oregonian towns, coastlines and Cascade mountain ranges. You also see how hard those places are to connect together by ground transportation. Incredibly for KinectAir, out of the ashes of the pandemic, all the ingredients to change how people access private air travel just lined up ahead of us as we set out to open the skies!” says Jonathan Evans, CEO of KinectAir.
Jonathan founded KinectAir to apply software to bring much-needed innovation to both the private air charter industry and aviation in general. Spotting the gap for a software-driven “operating system” to deliver a dynamic on-demand aircraft network booked simply using a smartphone, he argues it is more like requesting an Uber than booking a private jet. “Charter has long been a complex process that is heavy on concierges and brokers, requiring passengers to have scores of interactions per flight. With KinectAir we’ve opened up a transparent view to the available fleet within our operator partnerships for people to book instantly at fly.kinectair.com,” says Evans.
Private air travel has been enjoying a sustained increase in popularity in recent years. According to flight data analysts WingX, business jet flights in North America are up 13 percent since 2021, and up 18 percent since 2019. Meanwhile the elimination of commercial air travel routes has been severe. Regional airlines are in a vice between the international carriers absorbing their pilots and the lower demand for certain routes making flying larger aircraft unprofitable. According to the Regional Airlines Association, 324 (76 percent) of U.S. airports lost service with the average loss being 31 percent of their flights. However, the mid-sized and smaller, non-hub airports are the hardest hit, since regional airlines are prioritizing larger aircraft.
“We launched in May 2022 out of Bend, Oregon as we know this city epitomizes the challenges faced across the state. People want to live in such a beautiful place and remote working allows this today. The city has expanded rapidly to accommodate demand and is cultivating businesses that are booming, but the transport infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. When the local air services to Portland were cut from Redmond Airport in late 2021, this cemented our resolve to start operating here. We’re just getting started growing to three aircraft in just a few months: an eight-seat Pilatus PC12 and two four-seat Diamond DA 62s. We are booking these aircraft out to a higher and higher degree as the word gets out!”
As a result, the company has already converted hundreds of passengers in the Pacific Northwest with around 50 percent coming back as repeat bookings. With this success has come demand from businesses to leverage KinectAir’s point-to-point air travel solution to increase their own operating efficiency and manage their travel expenses and budgets heading into 2023.
“We are rapidly approaching an inflection point whereby the benefits of sub-regional private air travel are converging with the decreasing cost of operating those flights. For businesses, KinectAir is increasingly able to beat commercial air travel when you consider cost and billable hours spent traveling inefficiently. By offering businesses corporate accounts with bonus value on their pre-payments and access to our network of aircraft, we’re improving their outcomes and enabling our own growth,” said Evans.
As we all experience the delays and cancellations associated with flying commercial these days, most clients coming to KinectAir are seeking a trusted partner for their journeys. Casey Wyckoff of Portland-based LSW Architects shared his experience.
“Travelers need to trust their transportation partners and KinectAir is leveraging software to provide a guaranteed service and consistent experience that is lacking today. We travel frequently between Portland, Bend and Kalispell. Our team can get to their destination faster and more reliably with KinectAir than with any other form of travel. The time saving versus flying commercial and driving by car far outweighs the associated cost of taking the whole plane in today’s market. We love KinectAir because it saves hours of time per month to service our own growing client base doing what we love, not wasting time in airports or driving. I can envisage sending teams much further afield than I had previously considered.”
The company is starting to apply machine learning and AI to ensure planes are used most efficiently including not letting them fly empty whenever possible. As our fleet and customer base increase, we forecast that our flight prices will drop significantly — that’s the promise of the machine learning we’ve built into the software. In addition, new innovations by aircraft manufacturers, such as Epic and VoltAero, will drive more sustainable air travel that the industry deeply needs.
The ‘wow’ moment, according to Evans, comes when people understand the time they can save by using the hundreds of local community airports across the region. Routes to date have reached cities including Bend, Seattle, Sun Valley, Napa and other destinations throughout Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and California.
With the cost of flying commercial flights going up, the seeds for scaling this new approach have been sown and appear to be flourishing in the skies above Oregon.
To inquire about corporate accounts via KinectAir please contact Jennipher Smith at: jennipher@kinectair.com or call 360-903 1131.
KinectAir is partnered with FAA certified operators Direct2_Air and Precision LLC. KinectAir acts as charter broker in attaining air charter services for its clients. For more information please visit: kinectair.com.
