People Behind Uber Want to Do the Same Thing for Private Planes With BlackJet
BlackJet launches today a way to book seats on other people's private jets. — If it sounds like the black-car service Uber for planes, that's exactly what it is. The company comes from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp …
Context & Ripple Effects
BlackJet arrives at a moment when Uber's playbook is proving exportable. Within the past year Uber closed a $32 million round led by Menlo Ventures with Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs participating, pushed into new markets like Toronto and Los Angeles in early 2012, and ran its one-day ice cream delivery stunt across seven cities in July — evidence the company treats its app-and-dispatch model as a template, not just a car service.
Now co-founder Garrett Camp is applying that template one tier up the market: booking individual seats on other people's private jets rather than chartering whole aircraft. The launch drew same-day pickup from at least eight outlets including TechCrunch, CNET, VentureBeat and The Verge, an unusually broad footprint for a consumer launch and a sign the 'Uber for X' framing already carries investor and press currency.
First-order effects
- Private jet owners and operators gain a marketplace to monetize otherwise-empty seats, while affluent travelers get per-seat pricing on flights that previously required buying out an entire charter.
Second-order effects
- Charter brokers and fractional-jet sellers face a cheaper per-seat alternative competing for the same customer, and other founders get validation to clone the on-demand dispatch model into adjacent premium transport categories.
Third-order effects
- If per-seat sharing holds up economically in private aviation — where filling seats against fixed aircraft costs is far harder than matching idle cars — asset-heavy operators could shift toward marketplace distribution; if it does not, the category becomes a caution case for how far the Uber template stretches beyond dense urban ground transport.
The trend: The on-demand marketplace model validated by Uber's rapid funding and city-by-city expansion in 2011–2012 is being transplanted into progressively higher-cost transportation verticals, starting with private aviation.