Monday, June 4, 2012

John McGinnis' Synergy Aircraft got funded in Kickstarter

Roughly 4 hours ago, John McGinnis succeeded to raise the goal for funding his Synergy aircraft on Kickstarter. The funding exceeded the goal by couple of tens of thousands. I think this is a remarkable achievement and it proves that also aircraft projects can be crowd-sourced. Congratulations to John and good luck with his project. Now it is his turn to finish the plane and get it on the air. This is now on critical path since as the plane is funded, the reputation of crowd-funding aircraft projects in the future will have this as a case example, so he better succeed. Looking forward to seeing Synergy to fly to Oshkosh! Please make it happen!

1 comment:

Robb Greathouse said...

I have been looking into the practicality of flying private plane on business travel.

Factoid. I used to travel nearly 50 weeks a year, predominately in North America. I found that my "average" speed on a flight was about 135 mph. I calculated this based on the distance that I would have flown in private plane and dividing that by the total time it took me to get there.

Time included difference between checking in in time for security vs pre-flight, delays, flight time, the transfer time in a hub and delays due to missing connecting flight, etc and dividing that by miles I should have traveled. So, being force to fly to Chicago to catch connecting flight to Atlanta slowed the air speed since I was flying hundreds of miles out of my way.

My conclusioin was that matching speed is not the problem; but cost per mile. A 200 mph aircraft with 25,000 ft operating ceiling could do the job, if it could do it economically.