OpenAirplane is no more

[StevieTimes]

We Tried To Make Aviation More Valuable For Everyone
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Thank you.
OpenAirplane is shutting down. We’ll be suspending reservations via OpenAirplane.com and FlyOtto.com on Monday, December 23rd, 2019. Our team will continue to man our support channels through December 29th. Thank you for flying with us. It’s been a fantastic adventure.

From the beginning, we designed OpenAirplane to be failsafe. This timing will give us time to process payments, and provide for the orderly shutdown of the platform. We’ve always done our best to ensure vendors got paid before we did. We built that into our system from day one. We’re taking care to protect everyone’s data, just as we have since we started back in 2012.

We hope we leave the aviation world maybe just a little bit better than we found it.

You can find more of our story, plus a bit about what we learned along the way here:

Contact Ground, Point Niner

Tailwinds,

~ The Crew @ OpenAirplane



Got questions? Our Operations Support portal will be available until Sunday, December 29th. You can drop us a line at crew@OpenAirplane.com or call our operations support line at (888) 998-1721 until then.

 

[zaitcev]

It's a big bummer in theory, but in practice I never even got around to getting my universal checkout. It was simpler to buy my own airplane (although significantly more expensive).

I guess not enough people wanted to fly while on vacation. Or they didn't want to fly hard enough. I wanted, and the traditional FBOs would never let me do it. I know it was possible in the 1990s, but I started flying too late and now I will never have that experience. So, this is why I became interested in OpenAirplane. But I only became interested and didn't act upon it.

 

[Caramon13]

For me, there was nothing nearby. My home field is KSRQ and they only had planes at fields an hour or more north or south of me. KPIE, KCLW and KAPF (2 hours south).

Never got checked out and there was never any inventory so, signed up and then forgot about it. Too bad for them.

 

[eventualpilot]

The flight school where I trained for my PPL was associated with Open Airplane for a while. After getting my PPL I did the universal checkout in a 172. About 6 months later I was in Florida on vacation and rented a 172 from Tampa Bay Aviation at KCLW via OpenAirplane. Staff at Tampa Bay Aviation was very helpful, showed me where the plane was, gave me some basic info about the airport and I was on my way. Put 5 hours on the Hobbs flying from KCLW to KMKY to KCDK for lunch and then back to KCLW. Still my favorite flight in the 5.5 years since got my PPL.

In the 2 or so years that the flight school was a member of OpenAirplane they had maybe 5 universal checkouts and a similar number of renters visiting the area. At the time (2014-2016) OpenAirplane took 10 or 15%, so the flight school raised the prices on OpenAirplane by that amount. The school also had a 135 operation and utilized the FlyOtto service, which resulted in about 10 bookings.

 

[MarkH]

I really like the idea of OpenAirplane, especially wanting to travel and fly.

But I never even got around to a 'universal checkout' for them, although it was on my list.

 

[Clip4]

I never belied this service would make a go of it.

 

[steingar]

Thanks to the OP for trying an outside the box idea. We'll need lots of them if we're going to reverse the decline in general aviation. Sorry it didn't work out, most don't.

 

[dmspilot]

Nice idea in theory but just never became popular. One flight school I worked at was an early adopter, in two years only one or two customers used it.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Thanks to the OP for trying an outside the box idea. We'll need lots of them if we're going to reverse the decline in general aviation. Sorry it didn't work out, most don't.

The OP wasn't the one trying it, just passing along the communication. Rod Rakic was the main guy behind OpenAirplane and FlyOtto.

I'm sad this didn't work out. I'm glad Rod stuck his neck out there and did it. He did manage to convince many FBOs to work with him. I know it wasn't easy, and without a larger corporation it had to have been hard to get more locations. Small company means limited personnel and travel budgets, which makes it hard to sign up new FBOs. There are really no big chains of aircraft-renting FBOs or flight schools, so it's a one-at-a-time deal, which is difficult.