The airline industry is in the worst shape it has ever been in. After the dot.com bust, 9/11, recession, the Iraq war, and now SARS, it seems that starting an airline would be about the last thing an entrepreneur would want
Er... Who's Flying the Plane?
to do. But where others see doom and gloom, Dirk Maan sees only opportunity. Although Maan has never worked at an airline, he was a frequent flyer as a salesman for dowlaoaditforfree.com before it went bust due to lack of sales.
One day on a flight from L.A. to Detroit, Maan was thinking about the airlines. Thinking about how carriers like Southwest and AirTran had succeeded by undercutting the major carriers with lower labor costs. Maan started to wonder where it would lead. It's a free market, he reasoned. Either the Southwest type's employees will demand higher wages or the major carriers will lower theirs. Either way a sort of equilibrium will be reached in which the low cost carriers won't be low cost. That's when it hit him. "It's like in the movies," Maan recounted. "I was on my third martini when it t hit me like a brick. I realized that the only way to achieve long-term success would be to have permanently lower wage costs. And the only way to do that would be to eliminate employees."
On that flight to Detroit, Maan came up with the basic structure of the new carrier which he would eventually name Spartan Airlines. Radically different from most airlines, Spartan would hire as few employees as possible. Rather than hire flight attendants, Spartan would use customer volunteers who, after going through an rigorous eight hour training course, would get receive a 20% discount on all flights they took. As Spartan doesn't serve food or have other amenities, the flight attendant trained customers won't have much to do anyway.
Look Ma - No Employees!
The cockpit would see dramatic change as well. Maan signed an agreement with a consortium of Florida flight schools that allows the schools to do flight training on Spartan's scheduled flights. "Everyone benefits," Mann asserted. "The students learn to fly for a lot less. The school's costs are dramatically lower. And we doesn't have to pay pilots $300,000 a year for part-time work. No less important is that our customers gets fully qualified flight instructors in the cockpit rather than some guy who only flies twice a month."
Other areas of savings and convenience will include: on-line only ticketing, subway like turnstile boarding, and the placement of quality vending machines located near the gates including ones that serve beer and other alcoholic beverages.
When Spartan launches later this summer it will outsource maintenance, but Maan is working with a number of vocational schools so he can eliminate that cost as well.
Mann is bullish on Spartan's prospects. "The real beauty of it all is that I'll be competing against other airline executives who are embroiled in and distracted by labor problems. Before they know it, I'll be their major worry. Muhahaha..."
