Later this week the U.S. Supreme Court will review the Flytenow case, which is kind of extraordinary. Flytenow is one of several businesses launched to connect pilots with travelers going to the same destination who want to share expenses. The FAA determined that doing so the way that Flytenow promoted and delivered its services made it fall under the definition of “common carrier,” which would require that each Flytenow pilot member obtain a commercial operating certificate to hold out transportation services to the public.

Yet all that Flytenow and other similar companies did was connect pilots with passengers. It is perfectly legal for pilots and passengers to share flight expenses, as long as they are going to the same destination and not just for the purpose of transporting the passenger to that destination. In other words, the pilot has to be going there as well, not just because the passenger wants to go there. Pilots have been carrying passengers this way for years, and before the rise of the Internet presumably they connected with each other via bulletin boards, word of mouth or chance meetings at airports. 

The big difference for Flytenow is that it created a system that helps pilots and passengers connect much more easily. The FAA doesn’t like this arrangement, and in particular the mechanism under which Flytenow takes a cut of the shared expenses as its revenue. There seems to be a widespread fear in the aviation industry that letting regular people fly with (FAA-certified) pilots is somehow dangerous, and this is reflected in the extremely rigorous regulations that govern charter operations. 

That this issue is coming to a head (I’ll be surprised if the Supreme Court actually puts it on the docket) has a lot to do with the advent of ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft. Here was a highly regulated transportation system (taxicabs) completely upended by new Internet-generated companies that figured the rules somehow don’t apply to them. All they did was connect willing and non-regulated drivers with passengers who found it more convenient to tap out a ride request on a smartphone app than hail a taxicab. 

The taxi industry did its members a big disfavor, incidentally, by completely neglecting to notice the benefits of Internet hailing and also by creating a monopoly service that artificially limited the number of cabs that served growing populations. Uber and Lyft erupted at a perfect time, when cabs couldn’t keep up with demand because regulators limited their numbers and passengers in big cities eschewed car ownership, overloading the supply of cabs. There are far more people willing to put their car to quasi-commercial use than there are cabs, and Uber, Lyft and others have grown dramatically to fill an insatiable demand.

That the public is being moved around in unregulated vehicles driven by unregulated drivers somehow doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

So what about airplane ride-sharing? Is what Flytenow offered actually illegal or just worrisome to the FAA and the aviation industry because we all know that pilots not flying in professional operations or under an operating certificate have far more accidents?

It seems highly unlikely that actual ride-sharing—a la Uber or Lyft—could ever happen in aviation. I groan every time I see yet another marketer tout a client’s charter brokerage app as the “Uber of aviation,” because the regulatory environment is just too stringent, and no charter broker can legally arrange flights that are not flown by the holder of an air operator certificate. 

But if the Supreme Court does decide to take up the Flytenow case, it will be fascinating to see if that type of flight-sharing is deemed legal. The FAA appears to be trying to protect the general public from flying with any old pilot, but if the only difference is the way that pilots and passengers communicate, it’s hard to see that the FAA will be able to stop flight-sharing from happening.