OpenAirplane

» see openairplane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Renting an airplane in the United States means a checkout with an instructor at every place you rent from, every time, no matter how many hours sit in your logbook. It takes an afternoon, and you pay for the aircraft and the instructor both. OpenAirplane's single idea was to make a pilot do that once. You flew a Universal Pilot Checkout in a given make and model at a member operator, and from then on you could rent that same model at any other member operator without repeating it. The procedure was modeled on the Civil Air Patrol's, and pilots who already held the Civil Air Patrol approval were in without flying anything.

There is no version of this that I could have used. General aviation in Turkey is small and expensive, and renting is not the everyday habit it is in America. The flying in my own work is UAVs, which involves no counter and nowhere to park. This was an American problem solved in an American way, and the fix only makes sense in a country with thousands of little airfields and a habit of renting from whichever one you happen to be standing next to.

Rod Rakic and Adam Fast founded the company in Chicago in 2012 and launched the service on 17 June 2013 with operators in six cities. Cessna had endorsed it the previous November. By September 2014 the network had passed seventy-one locations, and at Sun 'n Fun that spring the company announced that privately owned aircraft could be rented out through it too. In October 2014 Cirrus agreed that pilots who finished its factory training could skip the OpenAirplane checkout on the same model for six months.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the insurance was the product ~

Software was never the obstacle here. The reason a flight school makes you do its own checkout is that its insurer makes it, and no marketplace can wave that away with a booking form. OpenAirplane's actual achievement was getting Starr Aviation to write a policy around a standardized checkout performed somewhere else, and then another one that covered an owner lending out a personal aircraft at a cost close to a normal group rental policy. Everything a pilot saw on the website rested on those two underwriting decisions.

~ why it stopped ~

AVweb broke the news on 19 December 2019. Rakic's explanation was blunt and had nothing to do with the mechanics of the product: the idea collected praise and even super fans, and too few of those people actually went flying. What he said they had learned the hard way was that it is tough to get pilots off the couch and into the cockpit. A rental network only earns when airplanes move.

~ contact ground, point niner ~

The site is still there, pared down to one screen under the title "OpenAirplane is shutdown." Underneath the old tagline about renting an airplane being as easy as renting a car, the page says the company shut down on December 29th, 2019, and offers a link to Rakic's write-up of what they learned, filed under a name that is the radio call you make when you are done flying and want off the runway. Most of the record, Wikipedia included, puts the closure on 23 December, taken from the week the press got hold of it. The company's own page has outlasted every one of those stories and gives a date six days later.

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