News from Berkeley ITS, NewsBITS Winter 2005: MVP Air, a niche airline

The ITS Berkeley Online Magazine Winter 2005: Volume 1, Number 2

NEXTOR research team working with MVP Air MVP Air

NEXTOR Researchers Help in Creating a Niche Airline for Student Athletes
(NEXTOR's Anne Goodchild, Gautam Gupta, Mark Hansen and Scott Simcox.)

For years as he hurried through airline terminals across the country, pilot Jack Hareland couldn’t help noticing groups of college athletes—teams of basketball, soccer, volleyball, baseball players—waiting, sometimes for hours, for flights to games at other campuses or for flights home. Poor commercial airline connection schedules meant certain student athletes in the PAC 10—for instance those flying between Pullman, Washington , home of Washington State University, and University of Arizona in Tucson—might be gone for three days in order to play one game.

Hareland thought there must be a better way to get student athletes to and from games more efficiently and quickly so they could spend less time in terminals and more time in class. He realized that using smaller aircraft would eliminate the need to go through long security lines; a bus could drive the team right up to the airplane, which would save time. And if athletes could get to and from a game in one day it would eliminate hotel bills. But the logistics of providing enough flights to carry each school’s 20 or so teams —from baseball and basketball to water polo and wrestling—to all their games confounded him.

A Happy Coincidence

Then last November, Hareland happened to sit next to NEXTOR’s Scott Simcox on a commercial flight between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Simcox noticed Hareland’s flight bag and realized the two shared an interest in aviation. “We struck up a conversation, and the next thing I knew, Scott suggested I talk to some people at ITS,”said Hareland.

Simcox spoke to ITS Professor Mark Hansen who thought the problem might be an interesting challenge for students in his air transportation (CE 260) class. Gautam Gupta, a PhD student in the class, developed more than a passing interest and kept working on it long after the course finished. He was joined by another PhD student, Anne Goodchild, who has an interest in aviation logistics. “The students were just great. They understood the idea and the problems it presented right away,” Hareland recalls.

In fact, the problems were numerous and complex. The most easily solved was the choice of aircraft: Dornier 328 jets filled the bill for several reasons. They were comfortable, the price was right, they have an exemplary industry safety record, and they had room for 30 passengers: large enough to carry all PAC 10 teams except football, which requires significantly more seats. Yet the Dornier was small enough to be exempt from TSA security at airports, which meant a bus could pull up to the aircraft, unload the athletes and the plane could take off—a considerable time saver. (Aircraft carrying 30 passengers or less are exempt from certain security rules, although the airline will conduct security checks.)

The remaining problems were tougher to solve. In some cases, athletes flying between certain cities, such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area, could fly just as conveniently commercially. A small charter operation like the one Hareland envisioned would have a harder time competing on routes with numerous daily flights. And when USC plays UCLA, or Stanford plays Cal, teams travel by bus.

Team schedules were also an important part of the equation. Most games are played Thursday through Monday, and more heavily concentrated on the weekends. How many planes would be needed, and what would planes and pilots do during the middle of the week or the summer months when no games are scheduled?

"To make this a money-making enterprise, we needed to be efficient in how we scheduled the airplanes," explained Goodchild. “We don’t want to fly lots of empty planes. So if you’re just taking one team, say to Seattle, and then you wait to bring them back, that’s like chartering an aircraft. But you have to charge more because there are no efficiencies in your scheduling.”

"But," she continued, "if USC’s men’s basketball team is playing in Berkeley, and the Berkeley women are playing at USC—which is what happens with the basketball schedule—there are efficiencies already built in that allow you to shuttle the plane and have it full."

Another important variable was the amount of time students would need to wait between arriving at their destination and the start of the game, as well as the time spent waiting to leave after the game is over. After all, the big selling point Hareland wanted to make to college athletic departments was that his fledgling airline could save time for student athletes--time that could be better spent in class or studying. “Student athletes really want to be able to leave as soon as the game is over—especially if they lose,” added Gupta.

Most of the time savings will come from being able to deliver the team closer to the event and to bring the team home quickly after the game...

“Most of the time savings will come from being able to deliver the team closer to the event than with commercial travel, and being able to bring the team home quickly after the game. So, we needed to make sure students didn’t get there too far in advance, while recognizing one hour beforehand is not enough time to prepare.” explained Goodchild. “In addition, scheduling flexibility allows us to serve more demand. If a team requires we deliver them exactly at six p.m., we can’t serve as many teams as if they allow us to deliver them between three and six p.m. We needed to know how much that flexibility increased our efficiency.”

Balancing Cost, Fleet Size and Demand

Goodchild and Gupta took the PAC 10 schedule off the Internet and put the information into a database. Then they formulated a problem that tried to minimize the cost of serving the demand with either commercial flights or the new airline.

“We knew we couldn’t serve all ten schools in the PAC 10, so we chose those that would derive the most benefit--which turned out to be what we called ‘schools in the middle of nowhere,’” explained Gupta. Those included the University of Oregon in Eugene, and Oregon State in Portland, Washington State in Pullman, and the University of Arizona in Tucson. Currently, teams flying from Washington State to University of Arizona typically have to make two connections, for example with flights from Pullman to Seattle, Seattle to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Tucson.

With flight information pulled from online travel sites, the team formulated and built a computer model to see how the proposed airline compared in terms of time and cost to commercial flights serving the same four universities. The researchers plotted the trade-off between fleet size and the percentage of the demand that could be served. “If we have three planes, how many of those games can we serve? If we have four planes, how many?” asked Goodchild.

What they found pleased Hareland. In this very small market, his niche airline could compete financially, and outperform the commercial airlines in terms of time saved—up to 500 hours per team—and still make a profit while exceeding current corporate or commercial aviation company safety standards.

In September, Goodchild and Gupta flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to explain how they’d arrived at their conclusions to potential investors. The meeting went well, and if all continues to go well, the new company—now called MVP Air—may be in business by spring.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. “We realized there’s really no room on these planes for the cheerleaders,” said Goodchild. “But usually the home team provides the entertainment.”