This story forced us to harken back to other air charter/taxi declarations, like the use of the Adam A700 aircraft for this very initiative, whose schedule now may no longer coincide with Pogo's launch. But, Bob Crandall knows well that airplanes are interchangeable, but business models are not so intermodal and not cheap to screw up.

Air charter and air taxi war horses everywhere are still rolling their eyes a bit at Mr. Crandall and his investor friends. But fellow squirrels take note: This is a bad thing, and strangely a good thing.Why? You ask. How? You wonder. Simple: They got money. And when people with money start spending money on advertising, which we hope they will ;-) ... then smaller air carriers can ride the wave they create. Much of the fuss about Pogo is that they are using new and unproven technology (although Eclipse is working very hard to make the little plane rugged and high utilization optimized) and Mr. Crandall will be (once again) trying to make money with a large aviation endeavor. To his credit, he helped steer American Airlines (AMR) through some good times, but us cynical and jaded air charter jesters frequently point to the economic conditions that surround those who shine in the good times. What draws our inspiration is the renegade that shines when the chips are down. You'll find that those are not usually internally promoted corporate types, but typically people that are very good at hand to hand business matters with street sense from when they launched the company in the garage with duct tape and a 2nd mortgage.

When small independent carriers are already our clients and we have the tools to coalesce them into a fighting unit, it is hard to sit by and not take stock of what the region already has: The aircraft, in many cases, are already adequate - PC12s, Caravans and TBMs will swim circles around these smaller jets; The efficiency of independent operators has yet to be proven in air taxi, but is certainly well known in the "Yellow Cab" world; and lastly, the staying power of a large financial endeavor, by Crandall and friends, will certainly chip away at existing margins for air taxi firms, but the question is: Will they build a viable model in the end?

If they don't, the sad reality is that aviation becomes yet again mercy to the owner subsidy, whereby the public pays artificially reduced rates for services as the originators simply don't charge enough to make their businesses work.