By Jeff Mattoon
Ed Iacobucci, president and CEO of DayJet, promises his service will be dynamic and spontaneous, with no published flight schedule.
In a worldwide Internet press conference on April 25, Edward Iacobucci, president and CEO of Jetson Systems, unveiled in great detail his plan to create the world’s first intelligent Internet-based air taxi service.
DayJet will link hundreds of company owned and operated very light jets to create a revolutionary new type of air travel service.
“DayJet is America’s first per-seat, on demand commercial operator,” says Iacobucci. “Our service will give regional business travelers something they desperately seek.”
The Web-based service will resemble Priceline.com, where air travelers name their price for available commercial flights. With Priceline, the Internet service displays in seconds all available flights for an asking price. The difference, according to Iacobucci, is that DayJet will allow the customer to name their travel time and the DayJet system will notify the customer almost immediately with the price of the flight.
For three years now, Iacobucci, co-founder of software maker Citrix Systems, and his staff of mathematicians, programmers, complexity scientists and demographers have worked diligently to create a scheduling model that will work. What they developed is a real-time scheduling and optimization software engine designed to give the business traveler what they want—a no frills, time efficient method of travel, promising to have them home from a business trip the same night without the hassles of traditional hub-based commercial air travel.
“We’ve nicknamed our system Astro,” says Iacobucci. “Today it’s operating simulated networks of hundreds of VLJs for thousands of customer reservations in dozens of cities offering millions of solutions per second.”
DayJet’s regional service will initially rely on a fleet of 239 Eclipse 500s.
Making all of this possible is the advent of the VLJ. Iacobucci is tossing his hat into the Eclipse Aviation ring with an order for 239 Eclipse 500s, with an option for 70 more. The order was placed in 2002, and DayJet expects to be in business shortly after the Eclipse’s expected March 2006 certification.
DayJet is the latest entrant into the new but yet-to-be-realized air-taxi industry promised by numerous upstart companies. POGO, headed up by Don Burr, the founder of failed People Express, and retired American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall, was the first to announce its plan to create a VLJ air-taxi service, using the Adam Aircraft A700. They’ve placed an initial order for 75 aircraft.
DayJet will offer service ostensibly no sooner than the second quarter of 2006, since Eclipse’s target certification date is March 31, 2006.
For more information, call 561-454-2655 or visit [http://www.dayjet.com].
L to R: Vern Raburn thanks Ed Iacobucci for his commitment to Eclipse Aviation.