A new on-demand charter app claims it can deliver a selection of charter aircraft in just 30 seconds. If the potential charterer lets the “reverse auction” run for 60 minutes, he or she can watch the price drop on their phone screens, as different aircraft owners bid against each other for the trip. The FlyHouse app, the company claims, eliminates traditional middlemen like charter brokers that take a longer time to find available aircraft, add sizable fees and commissions to the final bill, and operate in an opaque manner.

“We’re bringing clarity, community, and flexibility to an industry that has often felt impersonal,” said FlyHouse CEO Jack Lambert in announcing the new app. “This is shared luxury, reimagined.”

“We’ve removed the friction from private aviation,” FlyHouse founder Sanford Michelman tells Robb Report. “We’ve made it super easy.”

The company’s claims about the app are so enthusiastic and self-congratulatory they sound like snake oil—especially since a half-dozen startups have entered private aviation with similar claims but have so far failed to gain much traction.

The difference between most of the startups and FlyHouse, however, is that the company has some big investors, while both Lambert and Michelman have track records in private aviation. Lambert founded Jet Access in 2005, sold it in 2021 and exited two years later. Michelman has started several private aviation firms, including aviation-management firm Jet Edge, which he sold to industry giant VistaJet. The two understand the nuances of private aviation along with the pain points of consumers trying to navigate an often-murky booking experience.

Michelman whips out his phone during a zoom call to set up a charter flight on the new app, which is publicly being launched today, using the FriendShare feature. One of his favorite terms during the demo is “frictionless,” meaning the process is straightforward, fast and transparent. With a few clicks on his iPhone and in less than two minutes, Michelman had booked a private jet from Las Vegas to Van Nuys, greater L.A.’s leading business-aviation airport, to demonstrate the simplicity.

The FriendShare feature is a social-media-like design organized around creating friends groups for different trips and shared interests. On Michelman’s profile are an F1 Group, LA to Cabo trip, and even a Pittsburgh Steelers fan clique for business colleagues in New York who are Steelers fans. “For the first time in private aviation, you can create a group and trip exactly as you want without going through a broker or, more typically, a WhatsApp group,” he says. Once one member creates a trip, they can invite others in the group, or if there are not enough takers, they can offer individual seats to the “public,” or the 40,000 individuals who have downloaded the app and are now on the platform.

Other apps from jet-card and on-demand charter providers promise similar fast, seamless experiences, but FlyHouse uses an automated technology on the backend rather than the human labor charter brokers typically employ. FlyHouse built its platform from its June 2024 acquisition of JetASAP, an app for charter bookings, along with its own development.

Most brokers must cull through listings of potential charter aircraft on third-party sites like Avenode, a time-consuming process. The app has a pre-loaded directory of jet operators vetted for safety, with prices for any given trip already in the system.

Initially, says Michelman, FlyHouse set up an hour-long booking process. But the public’s demand for instant results prompted it to reduce wait time to 30 seconds. “You have the option of pushing the booking window out to an hour and you can watch the prices drop as the jet owners bid for business,” he says.  

Prices for different jets are displayed across the screen. Users can use filters that include pricing, jet size and type, age of aircraft and others. On the Las Vegas to Van Nuys sample flight, for instance, Michelman’s preferences for the seven-seat jet were to limit it to five passengers for extra space. Once five were signed up, he pushed submit and the app booked the flight, automatically deducting funds from the other group members so there are no awkward moments trying to figure out the final bill. The demo’s only stressful moment was Michelman making sure his ops center knew he was not planning to really book the flight.

“From the consumer’s perspective, nobody is picking the plane for me and I have a wide selection of planes in real time,” says Michelman. “This lets us take the slack out of the system as brokers and management companies are artificially driving up the price of a charter. And that process can take two or three days.”

At the moment, there are about 100 groups on the FriendShare feature, most devoted to specific trips or activities. “This is not about the transaction, but about the memories made along the way,” says Lambert.

Whether this friends-based, Facebook-like approach revolutionizes on-demand charter, as FlyShare forecasts, remains to be seen. But the app’s transparency and rapid response time are likely to gain followers who want to try something different than a human-based system that hasn’t changed much in decades.