Esther Dyson’s Flight School

Last week I went to visit Stephan Hanvey, the CEO of SATSair. he’s one of the speakers at Flight School, and I wanted to learn about him and his business up close.

The first thing to understand about SATSair is that the model works. If you offer people reasonably priced “air cab” service ($595 an hour for up to three passengers) that lets them get their work done faster – or to do more work – they will take it. The service flies short hops, usually 100 up to 500 miles, throughout the Southeast.

Disclosure: I received about $300 worth of “air cab” service from SATSair, but it seemed like a reasonable way to sample the product. Next month, when I need to fly from Orlando to Sea Island – about 150 miles or 40 minutes as the crow or air cab flies, and probably about 4 or 5 hours by car – I will most likely use SATSair’s service and pay for it (or rather, charge the organization for which I am giving a speech).

My pilot was Dan Morgan, a friendly but not too chatty redhead who used to fly for a commercial roofing company. He showed up early, and I showed up early, so we arrived in Greenville (pronounced Greenvul) almost before we were supposed to have started the 20-minute flight (from Charlotte, NC).

Steve Hanvey co-founded SATSair in 2005, taking over a moribund charter company whose founder, Tim McConnell, is now happily running the revived company’s flight training and safety departments. McConnell is more of a pilot/operator, whereas Hanvey is a natural businessman. He has a sunny but disciplined nature that has enabled him to assemble an impressive team to run a modern airline in this corner of the country that looks like a gingko leaf: Florida is the stem, Atlanta is in the center, and the edge curves west from Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee, and then south through Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

The company’s business is a home-spun version of the sexy new air-taxi market. Hanvey calls it air-cab: no-frills but serviceable, available more or less on demand, in a single-engine, single-pilot Cirrus (which has a whole-plane parachute for safety).

Doubling from 26 planes

He won’t talk revenues, but the company’s fleet has grown from 15 last year to 26 currently, and he has 40 more on order with an option for an additional 50. It’s also still handling most bookings manually, even ones ordered over the Web, but is in the middle of figuring out how and with what software to get more automated. Dispatching likewise is manual, though there’s lots of modern software for tracking planes, positioning them and the like. As far as I can tell, the company still needs to get greater density to support its growth – but its great will support that greater density. Right now, its planes are averaging more than 1000 hours a year – not quite at the goal of 1400 per year, but way beyond the charter average of about 300.

But what I liked most about SATSair that it isn’t all about the planes. I’m afraid of sounding sappy, but the company exudes a kind of southern folksiness in its concern for its customers. Those are the stories that resonate.

The customers are primarily local business people – lawyers, consultants , land developers and the like. The company also has contracts with universities, who send professors out to visit various research projects and bigwigs out to visit donors. You can pay by the hour, says Hanvey, or you can buy 50-hour chunks at a discount. Many clients have gone in gingerly, and quickly moved up to the discount packages.

It’s nice to see that lawyers, for example, find it cost-effective, but a sizable number of SATSair’s clients say that the service has enabled them to expand their businesses. Instead of driving for up to five days per week to see clients, many SATSair customers find they can be home in less than two days. The other days can be spent catching up and making additional sales calls – or playing golf!

…because now it’s more than just business. The company began as a five-day-a-week operation, but now it flies on weekends as well. People who try it for work end up using it on shopping trips, golf outings…and yes, at least two blind dates so far.