People Express Airlines: This name might sound familiar. People Express began operations on April 30

If not that leaves last week s revelation that Avatar Airlines (aka Family Airlines) is going to make a renewed attempt to get back into the domestic aviation business . It joins the growing cast of players attempting to squeeze in this year, including American West Jet, Eastern, and others.
online travel agency website for sale The recent string of start-ups opened up a discussion of other attempts here in the US. We ll take a look at  three that are trying really, really hard to get underway, along with others online travel agency website for sale that have gone before, online travel agency website for sale and finally the tough challenges many airline start ups face.
California Pacific Airlines:  In 2009, California Pacific Airlines (CP Air) was founded by 89-year old Ted Vallas. online travel agency website for sale He proposed starting a new airline in Carlsbad, California based out of Palomar Airport.
CP Air would provide nonstop jet service to seven cities in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico from its base in San Diego s northern county, Carlsbad. CP Air would have a strong fleet of Embaer RJ 170s. There would be no change fees, and the first checked online travel agency website for sale bag would be free.
Mr. Vallas online travel agency website for sale planned to begin operations in late 2011. However, the start date had to be pushed back to 2012, due to delays in obtaining approval from the FAA. Meanwhile, the DOT issued CP Air an interstate certificate in August 2011. This certificate would allow it to fly passengers and mail intra California.
In July 2012, CP Air took delivery of its first Embraer 170 aircraft. After taking delivery, it quickly began phase two and three of the FAA s certification process, only to be hit by repeated online travel agency website for sale delays and stone walls.
More than a year later, the FAA told CP Air that it would be sometime in 2014 before the agency would review the final application. Consequently, all employees have been furloughed, and CP Air s CEO, John Selvaggio, has returned to his home in Florida. CP Air s Embraer has been leased to save on rent. The Twitter feed and website appear to have not been updated since April 2013.
People Express Airlines: This name might sound familiar. People Express began operations on April 30, 1981. While it started by flying a fleet of Boeing 737s from Newark along the east coast of the United States, it progressed to flying non-stop flights from Newark to London s Gatwick Airport with a leased Boeing 747 by 1983. Four years later, it was integrated into Continental after it went on a spending spree.
Almost two decades online travel agency website for sale later, enter Michael Morisi, an official online travel agency website for sale at the original People Express Airlines. Morisi has been on a mission since 2011 to revive the company. The new People Express, founded in 2012, says it will revive the iconic brand of the 1980 s and restore the concepts of Respect, Value, and Excitement to the air travel experience.
The carrier, should it ever get off the ground, online travel agency website for sale plans to operate to niche markets in the eastern United States from its base Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport. It also hopes to fill the void that Air Tran Airways left last year by building a focus city at Pittsburgh International Airport. To boot, it plans to charge about 40% less than the typical fares.
The company says it is ready to begin operations very soon. However, it jumped the gun a little back in 2010 when it was fined by the United States Department of Transportation. Turns out you cannot advertise in connection with selling memberships to a frequent flier club that doesn t exist per se. Whoops.
Still, operations are expected online travel agency website for sale to begin later this year. In hopes to speed up the process, they acquired XTRA Airways, which has scheduled and flag authority from the DOT and FAA. These guys might actually have a shot.
Eastern Air Lines: online travel agency website for sale Eastern might also sound familiar. Why? Because it already existed for well over half of a century, operating in the US from 1926 until 1991. At its height in the  1960s and early 1970s the company operated a formidable domestic and international operation, primarily centered around the US East Coast. It was famous for its Boston-DC-NYC shuttles, pioneered the A300 in the US, and It wound up dying a slow, painful online travel agency website for sale death through the mid to late 1980s, eventually leading online travel agency website for sale to a dramatic online travel agency website for sale shutdown on January 19, 1991.
Fast forward to late January 2014, when Eastern Air Lines Group filed an application with the DOT to start service. Despite going out of its way  to state that it had no connection to the original airline, the group bought the Eastern logo and name in 2009.  Much like the first iteration, the airline would be based in Miami, and would fly Airbus A320 aircraft. Unlike the first, it would start off its second lease on life as a charter carrier before eventually moving into scheduled operations at a later date. It hopes to be underway by late 2014.
While these three carriers have been in the news most recently, they are far from the only ones to try nostalgia-based or otherwise half-baked business proposals. Chief among them in the nostalgia category is Pan Am, the ultra iconic airline that died in 1991. While other brands may have had a go or two after death, Pan Am has been resurrected in name a total of six times in subsequent years. As you probably could have guessed, all have failed, though an iteration led by Boston-Maine Airways had a respectable run from 2004 to 2008 operating Pan Am Clipper Connection flights from New England to points south.
Of course this year alone we already have one contender for the half-baked business proposal category: online travel agency website for sale Florida Air Express. The carrier, clearly playing on a desire to emulate Southwest s intra-state operations, aimed to operate intra-Florida routes with Boeing 737-400s online travel agency website for sale beginning in March 2014 and came close to pulling it off. It wound up fizzling fast as it struggled to attract capital and gate space. It finally imploded in fantastic fashion not long ago after having already sold tickets that it later cancelled via the CEO s wife s personal email account.
Contenders in recent years past include the ever-classy online travel agency website for sale Hooters online travel agency website for sale Air, Smintair, and Pet Airways in 2013. In fairness the first and last in that list both flew for awhile, though neither made it very long. Hooters Air focused on, well, exactly what you d expect it to, and even had a several year run until its hot pants turned to cold engines in 2006. Pet Airways offered flights for pets; yes pets. Really enough said, there. It went belly up and not in the good way a cat does when it want to be petted in 2013.
Smintair, for its part, was to offer flights from Germany to Japan featuring an all premium cabin, and the ability to smoke cigars as long and often as you wished. Despite good intentions, it could never quite light up investors, and has yet to get off the ground after nearly ten years since the idea was hatched in 2004. This idea was doomed on a few levels, chief among them the terrible success rate of all-premium airlines .
Even still, it isn t an easy path to success for start-ups. In the last three to four years, the environment for start-up carriers in the US has undergone a paradigm shift. The roughly 30 year period between deregulation and the global financial crisis of 2008-9 was littered with startups. Many like Braniff II, Legend Airlines, and Midway Airlines, collapsed under their own weight. But others, like AirTran aka Valujet, America West (not to be confused with American West / Ryan International), and JetBlue, survived either via merger, or as standalone carriers. But since Virgin America in 2007, not a single start-up carrier has lived to see the light of day. What has changed?
Part of the answer online travel agency website for sale is regulatory hurdles. Commercial aviation today in the United States is extremely regulated, even relative to where it was five years ago. One need look no further online travel agency website for sale than the recent change in crew rest rules via the FAR Part 117 regulations to see how difficult the operating environment has become for airlines.
While there are beneficial and adverse impacts from the increased regulation, and the relative weight of the two is debatable, the one undeniable effect is that it creates further barriers to entry. Every regulation has a cost associated online travel agency website for sale with it, both directly (it costs more money to hire the personnel or to perform more rigorous maintenance) online travel agency website for sale and indirectly (during the startup process, you are required to provide the FAA with documentation detailing precisely how you will live up to and fulfill those regulations. And the required documentation is endless. There are hundreds of thousands of pages worth of operating manuals, safety manuals, training manuals, and the like. If even one page of that is incorrect, the process gets torpedoed by the FAA and on come the delays.
online travel agency website for sale Regulatory challenges tie into a broader problem, however, which is that the capital requirements to successfully launch a start-up are higher. It costs a lot more to operate a new plane today than it did 10 or 15 years ago. Some of that is induced by regulations, online travel agency website for sale but it’s also tied to the high cost of fuel, and to the fact that rapid emerging online travel agency website for sale market growth has constricted the supply of used aircraft that startups typically use to keep costs low. Add in a stagnating air travel market, and the capital required to meet FAA funding requirements (this is part of what did California Pacific in amongst other factors), launch the business, and run it at a loss for the first year or so until the business model matures, is much higher. Finding someone online travel agency website for sale willing to invest that much in the volatile airline industry is another barrier to entry.
But it would be remiss not to mention the culpability of the airlines themselves. No startup succeeds without a viable business model. Despite the charms of Ohio State University, Columbus was probably not the best hub for a carrier high frequency services (we re looking at you, Skybus). Nostalgia for the 1980s, in the case of Eastern or People Express, is not a viable business model either. Yes the barriers to entry are higher, online travel agency website for sale but at the end of the day, the failure of each start-up is on the airline itself.
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