Taking back the skies

Richard Kane, Chairman and CEO of Verijet, began his career in the telecommunications industry, where he helped figure out how to route 100 million calls per hour in real time. He is also an accomplished pilot, holding seven world aviation speed records. Verijet is the natural result of combining his expertise in handling massive amounts of data with his passion for flying.

It has been 25 years since Kane first began thinking about making private aviation accessible to more people. Given the number of pilots, airplanes and airports involved in private flight, he knew it would be difficult. The first thing he would have to do was change the way customers found and booked private flights.

For years, booking a private flight meant calling a private booking agent, whose personnel would haggle with operators and pilots and levy substantial upcharges. “They would charge between 7% and 20% for this, it would take hours to get a confirmation that you could fly, and you would be paying all of these intermediates,” says Kane.

So he set out to build an optimization engine that would do the work of a team of schedulers at the click of a button, thereby eliminating upcharges and making flights more affordable. He partnered with a private aviation company called JetBird, taking on its fleet as a starting point.

“We started out with 70 aircraft and about 1,000 customer bookings every 10 days,” says Kane. “For a carrier of that size, there can be 16 quintillion possible routing solutions. We have to figure out which plane gets which customer. And then which planes need maintenance, when. Which crew is going to fly each plane, how many hours the crew will have to sleep, how far their hotels are from the airport, how long their drive will be during traffic … The list goes on and on.”

At first, Kane tried to run his optimization engine solution on shared virtual machines with shared storage. “If you try to spin up a bunch of virtual machines, you lose minutes. I think it took four minutes for the thing to wake up and configure itself. We don’t have four minutes. We have 30 seconds. Our machines need to be running 24x7x365, and they need to be dedicated,” he says.

Kane’s search for alternatives led him to IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers, which delivered even more uptime and compute power than the optimization engine required. “With the IBM infrastructure,” he explains, “we can scale up and change nodes as though it’s a virtual machine, but it’s actually dedicated hardware.”

The switch to IBM also connected Kane with a team from the Startup with IBM program, which provides access to IBM’s security-rich and open hybrid cloud platform, along with unparalleled support and a developer ecosystem of technical architects and mentors. The program helped Kane build up the optimization engine and work toward the next phase of his plan: launching his own fleet of small, quiet, environmentally friendly, single-pilot airplanes called Vision Jets.

These futuristic vehicles offer innovative safety features such as the Cirrus Airplane Parachute System (CAPS) and the “Safe Return” button, which executes an emergency autopilot landing. Because these capabilities are so new, it took a few additional steps to get the Vision Jets approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“One of the tremendous benefits of working with IBM was that, not only did we get a 12-month ramp-up time, but it was another six months before we got the FAA to approve our operations,” says Kane. “IBM doubled down and gave us another six months, so we had 18 months to fine-tune the models, data mine our 44,000 flights and get ready for launch.”

He continues: “IBM gave us the chance to run in parallel and then experiment at a time when we couldn’t afford two parallel data centers. And we had personnel who I could ask for a new core or an upgrade, and it would just happen. The IBM team would just say, ‘OK, when do you want this?’ You have no idea how invaluable that is.”

Headquartered in Vero Beach, Florida, Verijet (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a new kind of airline. After years of developing a flight optimization engine for private carriers around the US, Verijet is now building up its own fleet of small, private planes with excellent safety and environmental ratings. After a successful launch in the southeastern US, Verijet plans to offer fast, affordable, point-to-point private flights to customers throughout the continental US.