Flight Plan

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Solving for X: Once the FAA clears the way for the Eclipse 500, Iacobucci will get to see how good his models really are.

 

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  Round-trip options for a business trip with three days' advance notice.

It's only fitting that a service pitched to traveling salesmen should find itself confronting an especially nasty version of what's known as the "traveling-salesman problem." Stated simply: Given a salesman and a certain number of cities, what's the shortest possible path he should take before returning home? It's a classic conundrum of resource allocation that rears its ugly head in industries ranging from logistics (especially trucking) to circuit design to, yes, flesh-and-blood traveling salesmen: How do you minimize the cost and maximize your efficiency of movement?

Back in 2002, that was the question facing DayJet, a new air-taxi service hoping to take off this spring. Based in Delray Beach, Florida, DayJet will fly planes, but its business model isn't built around its growing fleet of spanking-new Eclipse 500 light jets. It's built on math and silicon, and the near-prophetic powers that have in turn emerged from them. "We're a software and logistics company that only happens to make money flying planes," insists Ed Iacobucci, an IBM veteran and cofounder of Citrix Systems, who started DayJet as his third act.

The advent of affordable air taxis has been heralded by a steady drumbeat of press over the past few years, with an understandable fixation on the sexy new technology that's generally credited with making the market possible: the planes. The Eclipse 500 is a clean-sheet design for a tiny jet that seats up to six and costs about $1.5 million (the Federal Aviation Administration may clear it for mass production as early as next month). It is also the most fuel-efficient certified jet in the sky. Cessna, meanwhile, has rolled out its own, if pricier, "very light jet" (VLJ), with Honda's set to appear in 2010. No less an authority than The Innovator's Dilemma author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has mused in print that the E500 and its ilk "could radically change the airline industry" by disrupting the hub-and-spoke system we all know and despise.

But Iacobucci, who wrote a check long ago for more than 300 orders and options on Eclipse's first planes, isn't relying on the aircraft to make or break him. Instead, it's his company's software platform--and the novel way it attacks the traveling-salesman problem--that will set DayJet apart. On day one of operations, flying from just five cities in Florida with only 12 planes, DayJet's dispatchers will already have millions of interlocking flight plans to choose from. As the company's geographic footprint spreads (with luck) across the Southeast--and as its fleet expands as well--the computational challenge only gets worse. Factor in such variables as pilot availability, plane maintenance schedules, and the downpours that drench the peninsula like clockwork in the summer, and well, you get the idea: Finding the shortest, fastest, and least-expensive combination of routes could take every computer in the universe until the end of time.

"I knew what the complexities were and how the problem degenerates once you reach a threshold," Iacobucci says. So he didn't try to find the optimal solution. Instead, DayJet began looking for a family of options that create positive (if imperfect) results--following a discipline known as "complexity science."

For the past five years, with no planes, pilots, or customers, DayJet has been running every aspect of its business thousands of times a day, every day, in silicon. Feeding in whatever data they could find, Iacobucci and his colleagues were determined to see how the business would actually someday behave. When DayJet finally starts flying, they'll switch to real-time flight data, using their operating system to shuttle planes back and forth the way computers shuttle around bits and bytes.

Iacobucci is an expert at building operating systems--he did it for decades at IBM and Citrix. Because of that, he has zero interest in the loosey-goosey world of Web 2.0. He sees the next great opportunities in business as a series of operating systems designed to model activities in the real world. DayJet looks to be the first, but he has no doubt there will be others, and that new companies, and even new industries, will appear overnight as computers tease answers out of previously intractable problems.

Which brings us back to the traveling salesmen. Iacobucci says his computer models predict that DayJet's true competitors are not the airlines, but Bimmers and Benzes--he says 80% of his revenue will come from business travelers who would otherwise drive. In other words, DayJet, which closed an additional $50 million round of financing in March, is creating a market where none exists, an astonishing mathematical feat. To get there, all Iacobucci needed was five years, a professor with a bank of 16 parallel processors, two so-called Ant Farmers, and a pair of "Russian rocket scientists" who, it turns out, are neither Russian nor rocket scientists.