First flight!

The first FlyMiwok flight – operated by New Vectors Aviation – took off this morning at 6:45AM; a round trip from Orange County to San Luis Obispo for a meeting and back in 4 hours – exactly the type of business trip we have been talking about for the past 3 1/2 years.

Without our service, the only other option for this customer would have been to drive for 6-7 hours the night before, stay at a hotel overnight and then make the 6-7 hour drive back the next day.

This is a very symbolic milestone for our company as we get ready for our soft-launch in August and full-launch in September. Since the end of last year we kept radio silence while we dealt with a number of challenges and made changes to our plan that we have had to put in place to ensure that we can launch and grow successfully in a tough and protracted period of economic uncertainty such as we’re experiencing at this time.

Long story short, the operator we worked with for about 2 years and who was supposed to be our launch operator, went out of business last December. At about the same time it became apparent that the outsourced software development team we had been working with would not deliver the technology we designed, so we had to terminate the relationship with them as well. Also around that time, we realized that this tough economic climate is going to be with us for a long period of time and thus we cannot rely on outside investment.

So starting in January of this year we had to make some tough changes. We found a new operator (New Vectors) who currently operates a jet charter business. We qualified them and have been working very closely with them to get them up to speed on the FlyMiwok system and business model. We are very excited about this operator: I have been impressed with their professionalism and business sense and I don’t think we could have found a better operation to launch with in Southern California.

We also took the technology development in-house and developed our booking and reservations system to a point where it is in production testing and will be launched publicly next month. We have also developed a call-center interface as well as an operator interface to allow the operator to manage flights and resources online.

Taking the recession into consideration, we adapted our business model to allow us to bootstrap the business while expecting lower demand, higher dead-head ratios, more volatile fuel prices, tight credit and greater marketing challenges.

There are obviously a lot of formidable challenges ahead, but we thought that with this first flight, and the first trickle of revenue for our company, we would let you be the first to know about this development and that you can expect a lot more exciting updates very soon.

Gad Barnea, CEO, FlyMiwok Inc.

Tagged as: Flight, FlyMiwok, News