Personal Airline Exchange (PAX) is looking to transform the market for intracity air transportation using new electric and hybrid-electric aircraft for a per-seat, on-demand business model. The Los Angeles-based company aims to be ready to start operating Ampaire’s Electric EEL fixed-wing aircraft from 2022, by which time it expects the re-engined version of Cessna 337 Skymaster to have completed type certification.

PAX intends to establish a Part 135 operation by acquiring an existing operator that would be authorized to fly both on-demand and scheduled services. It plans to complete the acquisition of Alaska-based charter group Servant Air via an equity swap arrangement.

In June 2019, the company ordered 50 Electric EELs and signed for 50 more on option. It intends to operate the aircraft on routes of between 75 and 300 miles.

“Our whole focus is on addressing this gap of trips in major metropolitan areas,” said founder and CEO Mike Azzarello. “The average trip speed [in automobiles] is 35 mph and takes five hours that should have been two. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.”

Solving that problem has meant a change of plans for the company, which had intended to launch a rideshare program fairly similar to those that already exist for ground transportation. “We founded Personal Airline Exchange to be like Uber,” Azzarello said. “Not owning aircraft but connecting aircraft to passengers. The problem is it doesn’t work in an air carrier scenario.”

As with the wider urban air mobility (UAM) market, electric or hybrid-electric flight is crucial to making the math work at scale for PAX’s plans. Newly certified eVTOL aircraft and supporting ground infrastructure, and perhaps even autonomous flight, are part of the future. But the true key is data.

The current state of big data and machine learning could allow PAX to succeed where former attempts at floating-fleet on-demand charter operations—such as DayJet, which PAX chief technology officer Bruce Sawhill co-founded—could not.

PAX’s dynamic pricing model leverages route data to give each user a price for their seat(s). If the user is looking at a route that nobody else wants to fly, it might be a thousand dollars, because they’re personally paying for the entire flight to go. If they look at a trip that other users have already booked or the model predicts that PAX will be able to fill the flight, the price will be much lower.

According to Azzarello, PAX is considering $2 per mile as an achievable average cost—more than a typical single-passenger UberX car ride, but less than a taxi ride. Initially, this would be for flights in Jet A-powered aircraft and the price is expected to drop with the implementation of new technologies.

The goal is to allow users to book flights on the spot via an app if the offered price is agreeable, or to set an alert in case of a price drop. The process does require each trip to be completed a certain amount of days ahead of time. The booking interface may look like the Uber or Lyft apps, but Azzarello said booking for immediate flights wouldn’t be viable right now.

Since the data to inform that model is the lifeblood of PAX’s system, called JetSeat, the company is purchasing cell phone trip data for its launch region of southern California to get started. Then, as it can feed more information into the system from its own trips, the accuracy should improve, helping prices and margins.

The company’s goal is to maximize the portion of the revenue mix that JetSeat represents, but PAX will also offer scheduled flights for select routes with reliable passengers, though Azzarello said “we’re not trying to get to a realm where we’re flying scheduled routes and you’re trying to guess the hot routes.”

For high-ticket passengers, PAX can offer charter service. And the company is exploring the best way to execute what it calls “micro-schedules” around events to provide limited scheduled service when demand will be predictably high in hard-to-reach locales, such as the Coachella festival in Indio, California.

One thing PAX does not intend to do is use venture capital to operate at a loss. “We do want to be profitable,” Azzarello said. “There’s a lesson to be learned with Uber and Lyft going [for initial public offerings) and WeWork imploding. “It’s not a good bet that you can keep subsidizing below market rates.”

Azzarello said that, while PAX plans to grow and increase in scale, there’s no benefit to growing too fast. It has to make sure it can support the flights it promises, both in terms of financial viability and fleet availability. Otherwise, “we could be subsidizing flights to our bankruptcy,” he told FutureFlight.

PAX is also being pragmatic when it comes to technology. While Uber is pushing hard for the development and certification of enabling technologies that it needs before its operation can get off the ground, PAX aims to become a profitable company with existing infrastructure and gas-powered aircraft. As new technologies become ready, they’ll just improve things.

“Nothing happens on time,” Azzarello said. “We want electric propulsion, we want heliports. But if you’re betting on it happening by a certain time, then you’re probably going to lose that bet.”

While planning the future of its fleet, PAX has also spoken to eVTOL manufacturers such as Lilium, Joby, Vertical Aerospace and XTI. But Azzarello thinks the certification process might be more complicated—and therefore take longer—for the aircraft that are a bigger departure from the traditional plane or helicopter mold.

PAX aims to do a seed funding round for about $3 million this year, helping the company reach 12,000 flights by 2021, leveraging a small fleet for about $8 million in annual revenue. After spending the next two years quickly building out a scalable infrastructure—Azzarello is “fully aware that IP has the shelf-life of a banana,” he says.

The goal is to operate across the continental U.S., perhaps reaching Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean, in 2025. Each aircraft is estimated to produce $1 million in revenue per year, and PAX forecasts a need for a fleet one thousand-strong to cover 48 states.

That would let it flirt with the billion-dollar revenue mark if all goes well. One of the big reasons it might not is public acceptance.

“Not a lot of people are finding that flying electric is great. Overwhelmingly, people say ‘Nope, not in my lifetime,’” Azzarello said of what PAX has found in surveys. “To make it even worse, I’ve not found a single person outside of an eVTOL manufacturer or zealot who wants to fly (on) an aircraft without a pilot… The aviation passenger community is slow to change.”

Those things are all issues for the UAM community as a whole, and the fact that PAX plans to start flying Cirrus SR-22 piston aircraft out of traditional airports may help mitigate them.

The General Aviation Manufacturer Association and Uber are working on an automated process to gain flight clearance for flying through tubes of restricted airspace. “When Uber works on [an issue], that’s good for us,” Azzarello said. “Anything they do will become industry standard.”

While the rideshare giant is another entrant trying to capture the UAM market, Azzarello sees Uber as more complementary than competition. “If it’s under 50 miles, especially same-day, use your Uber app,” he said. “If it’s more than 75, pull up the JetSeat app by PAX.”

To that end, one attractive possibility for PAX is getting acquired by Uber or another company that wants to enter the market—perhaps Lyft or Airbnb. PAX has met with all three. It feels it could help Uber round out its portfolio, but Lyft may decide it wants to enter the air taxi competition. Both rideshare companies have application programming interfaces allowing their services to be embedded into the JetSeat app.