Originally Posted by
wiggy
Oh boy......welcome to the world of carrying non-aviation people around (schedule or charter).
Imagine you arrange a share sight seeing flight that just so happens to go from A to B. Despite your warnings about the possibility of the flight not going Lady or Gent you arrange to share the flight with then goes off and arranges a meeting/family reunion at B based on the expected flight.
He/she turns up at the airport A on the day and finds you saying "in my opinion it's too windy/cloud base to low/forecast poor at destination".... or worse still you are in flight, wx turns to pants, you tell him/her you are turning back...........
In the commercial world regardless of the warnings on airline tickets/websites there are commercial pax who book flights that they regard as simply having to operate, and operate exactly on time, in order for them to get to meeting/wedding/make a connection on time, and believe me they will apply pressure/make noise if there is a hiccup, even it is just a few minutes late due a slot delay........and many are not interested in any airmanship reasons you can offer as to why you are not operating as planned - they had arrangement, they want to travel..now.
I think you are being naive if you think that because you use wingly and pre-warn fellow travellers you are going to be exempt from "commercial" pressure.
I can only repeat my previous opinion I see wingly being fine for local area flights - I think it's a completely different and "iffy" game using it to offer to take non-aviators flights from A to B.
I think that this is where much of the misunderstanding about cost sharing flights arises.
As soon as the rider makes their request, they need to be made clearly aware that the flight is NOT commercial transportation and that the flight may not happen as planned due to weather or simply because the pilot's plans change.
When I did the few Skyuber flights I mentioned in earlier posts, I always made that clear at the time the rider made the request and, on those occasions when it happened never had a problem. I simply called or emailed the rider, explained the situation, and it was fine. As regards payment refunds: I don't know about Wingly, but Skyuber only debits the rider's card after the pilot confirms that the flight has been completed.
The concerns that some posters have about these flights crossing the line into illegal charters are entirely reasonable: that is not what cost sharing should be about. However, the solution of declaring all aspects of cost sharing to be "dodgy" is, IMHO, chucking the baby out with the bath water.