Originally Posted by
Cloudnine
Wheels up is more slanted towards on demand club with a lower rate per hour than charter IIRC. Dynamic will operate under 135 commuter 9 or less like surf air as a scheduled air carrier. The difference with surf air is they own and staff the planes (pc-12) they use for the club. the advantage to the PC12 is it burns 60% of what the king air burns at practically the same TAS and payload, the aircraft makes the model possible. A 1900 with only 9 seats seems too wasteful to sustain. It will be interesting to see what unfolds.
True about the lower operating costs, but you can probably pick-up older B200s and 1900Ds for relatively cheap on the used market these days. I assume there will be a cost associated with standardizing the B200 cockpits as well since there are so many with different cockpits these days (traditional analog, basic EFIS, G1000, etc.). Maybe Great Lakes will sell them some idle 1900Ds.
No doubt the founder of Beacon probably has a lot more private equity money behind him for this venture after the initial success of Surfair.