Esther Dyson’s Flight School

Check out Virgin Charter and meet the founder Scott Duffy (photo) at Flight School next week.

Virgin Charter (formerly Smart Charter) is going to shake up the air charter market in an interesting way, doing on a grand scale what a number of start-ups are doing in a smaller way. (This is distinct from “true” air taxis, where a single outfit controls and manages a fleet.) The big question is: Will prices or costs go down faster?

To quote from the press release:

Virgin Charter is a full-service marketplace that brings together buyers who want to book private air travel with safety-rated charter operators. Through Virgin Charter, sellers make their inventory available to a large customer base without changing the way they currently do business, and buyers search for available aircraft, negotiate pricing, purchase private air travel, and manage their entire trip online. Virgin Charter does not own or operate aircraft, and it does not act as a broker.

The Virgin Charter team is led by founder and CEO Scott Duffy, a seasoned Internet executive and private aviation veteran who served as a managing director for one of the largest charter brokers of private aircraft in the world. The team also includes technology and aviation executives from Google, Expedia, eBay and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Said Duffy, “Virgin Charter’s centralized marketplace will revolutionize private aviation by providing tremendous efficiencies to what has been a highly fragmented industry.”