Why am I in such a hurry to die?
Commercial airline travel is very, very safe. It’s because of pilot training and experience, rigorous aircraft maintenance, rigid air traffic control protocols, government agencies and trade organizations investing billions of dollars in research and product development and thousands of other reasons. Uber isn’t a transportation company, they’re an Internet startup. They don’t own anything, they employ a bunch of subcontractors. They have no mechanisms in place now to protect your safety in an electric car, now you’re going to jump on an Uber plane? They have no way of controlling on-time performance, no method for ensuring reliability, all they’ve done is create a logistics apps and all they do is connect strangers to other strangers. If just-in-time air travel was as easy as developing a website, the airline industry would have pounced eons ago. Beware of the internet startup guys that think they’re smarter than everyone else. It was nice knowing you.
Since I have money to burn, why don’t I just buy my own plane?
Uber gave helicopter rides to people going to Coachella, it was about $4,000 per person. They now say that when they start flying around in earnest there will be short routes that will cost about $20. Sounds like a pipe dream. Yes, buy your own plane, and while you’re at it just by a limousine and a driver … You deserve it.
Why do I think flying a plane is so easy?
So Uber’s gonna make its own planes because it’s so easy to do. Okay fine, but who’s gonna fly them? As it is, in the next twenty years, passenger and cargo airlines will need 637,000 new pilots, that’s eighty-seven a day or one every fifteen minutes! Pilots are retiring at record rates and there’s no formula for replacing them, and even if there was, why would they fly for Uber, the taxi cab company of the skies? I know, new pilots can just signup through the app! Ya, they can bring their own planes and land on downtown rooftops and make what? Twenty dollars a fare? Does this sound reasonable?
Programming a smartphone app, flying a plane … How different can they be?
That someone can equate deploying a few unemployed millennials driving their Prius to the liquor store and back to flying planes and landing them on buildings is lunacy. The example Uber gives is that a trip from LAX to the Staples Center would take ninety minutes by car. With the combination of Uber used cars and planes, they could cut that to thirty minutes. So to save an hour, and I guess you guys are all really in a big hurry, you wheel your bags from the LAX terminal to a point where some guy in a Miata is waiting. He drives to an undisclosed location where, on the roof, an Uber plane lands (yep, Uber’s gonna be building plane launch pads on fairly tall buildings near you). You walk up twenty flights of stairs, strap your bags to the wings, and the brother of the guy driving the Miata flies you a few miles and lands on another roof. You unhook your bags, go back down the stairs, walk a few blocks and get in another Uber car driven by an exchange student and she drops you off at Staples Center. No big deal! It was all so easy and relaxing and you saved forty minutes! I’ve heard dumber things but I don’t remember when.
Why don’t I just bungee cord jump like all the other thrillseekers?
Ya, why don’t you? Why don’t you just jump off of buildings in your flight suit? Ever been on a white-knuckle airline flight? Pretty scary shit and the pilot was an Air Force general in Vietnam. Now you’re in an airplane Uber bought from Ikea and a guy whose last job was at an AM/PM in Visalia is flying. It’s raining hard and the wind is blowing it sideways and you’re on a roof in downtown L.A. and you need to get to the Hollywood Bowl and you think the plane has an engine but it might be a glider and the windows are fogged up and you’re in a jumpseat and there’s no airflow and … go get ’em thrillseeker.