Southerners say that when you die, you might go to heaven or you might go to hell, but either way, you’ll probably fly through Atlanta. Tom DeRita just wants to get from West Palm Beach to Tallahassee, Fla. But the lobbyist describes that experience, with its connecting flights of puddle jumpers, as “pure hell.” And driving takes seven hours. So DeRita hops a DayJet—a small, lightweight plane that comes when it’s called.
DayJet has been operating an air taxi service in the southeastern United States since October 2007. It’s more cab company than airline: there are no set-in-stone schedules. Instead, DayJet dispatches its Eclipse 500 Very Light Jets when and where travelers need them. A DayJet member provides a tentative itinerary—for instance, DeRita calls on a Tuesday saying he needs to be in Tallahassee the next day. DayJet responds with a window of several hours in which a jet will be available. The more the passenger is willing to pay, the narrower the window (as short as an hour). DeRita’s flight costs $404 and promises him a Wednesday morning departure.
Every evening, computer algorithms develop a schedule for the next day in which the company’s 28 jets end up where they need to be at the lowest cost. The system then sends every passenger an actual departure time. DeRita’s plane is scheduled to take off from North Palm Beach County Airport at 9:54 a.m. The BMW-designed cabin is cozy—the jet accommodates a maximum of three passengers and two pilots. But DeRita is comfortable. “And I’m not a small guy,” he adds. The plane stops along the way to pick up another passenger in Naples and gets to Tallahassee at 12:30.
The key to DayJet’s viability is in the complex algorithms running through the company’s computers, and those algorithms come from the minds of Bruce Sawhill, ’79, PhD ’85, and Jim Herriot, ’70, senior scientists in DayJet’s advanced technology group. They met in 1998 while researching complexity science at the Bios Group in New Mexico, and have collaborated ever since. Herriot calls complexity science “the Rosetta Stone that connects the worlds of subjectivity and objectivity.” The discipline studies complicated systems with highly variable components—Herriot and Sawhill have used it to study the stock market, for instance—and allows the simulation of cost-prohibitive or logistically impossible experiments through advanced computer modeling.
At DayJet, Sawhill and Herriot developed a computer model of the American traveling public to establish how—or whether—its business model could succeed. Sawhill calls the model “a digital terrarium” and compares DayJet to an insect dropped in—the point is to watch through the glass and see how the new addition changes the system. After several years, and millions of simulated hours, the verdict came that the new insect seemed to adapt well indeed.
The modeling didn’t end once the jets took to the skies, but, rather, continues to be the cornerstone of the company’s business plan. DayJet is, Sawhill says, “a computer company that flies planes on the side.” Every possibility, from day-to-day flight times and fuel loads to new destinations and expansion plans, is heavily analyzed by the company’s software long before anyone makes decisions.
DayJet recently began service to its 45th city, and about 1,000 people are registered for its membership-based service. Gerald Bernstein, MS ’78, of the Stanford Transportation Group, an aviation consulting firm based in San Francisco, says the company will continue to succeed in its niche market. It allows travelers to fly short, regional, low-volume trips that in the past would have been “awkward,” meaning daylong drives or flights through hubs. But, he says, “If you’re west of the Mississippi, don’t watch for [DayJet] on a street corner near you anytime soon.” Economic and geographic constraints probably will restrict the company to the densely populated East.
Its customers may point to the convenient flying experience, but DayJet’s business significance is broader. “This will be one of the first companies ever to have modeled itself before the business starts,” Herriot says. “It is the quintessential 21st-century company.”
