About
The problem that wouldn’t let go.
Regional air mobility has been stuck for sixty years. Five thousand small airports built for a country that stopped using them. Soar is the culmination of a lifelong obsession with unsticking it — and a decade of failures and iterations that made it possible to try.
The problem
The math hasn’t worked. So nobody solved it.
There are more than five thousand paved airports in the continental United States. Fewer than five hundred of them see a commercial flight in a given month. The other four thousand five hundred are infrastructure the country built and then abandoned.
Meanwhile, ninety percent of American trips under three hundred miles happen by car. A four-hour drive that could be a forty-five-minute flight. Not because the aircraft don’t exist — they do, in tens of thousands, sitting in hangars — but because the operating model that made regional airlines viable in the 1960s stopped working by the 1990s.
The gap between what the aircraft cost to fly ($100 an hour of fuel plus maintenance for a Cessna 172) and what riders have to pay ($1,500 for a charter of that same 172) is not aircraft. It’s software the industry never built.
The obsession
I’ve been trying to solve this since I was a kid.
The obsession started early. Watching small planes take off from regional fields and wondering why nobody I knew ever flew on them. Reading everything I could find about Cessna, Beechcraft, Cirrus. Sketching booking systems in notebooks. The pattern was obvious to a teenager and apparently invisible to the industry: the aircraft were there, the pilots were there, the airports were there, and the software layer that could connect them at scale simply hadn’t been written.
For years I thought the answer was a better plane. Then a better business model. Then a better regulatory approach. Each pass got me closer to understanding whythe problem was structurally hard, and each pass ended in a version of Soar that couldn’t work. Not for the reason I thought going in — always for a deeper reason underneath.
The version of Soar we’re building now works because of what those earlier attempts taught me. About aviation. About FAA Part 135. About maintenance economics. About how pilots actually think about which operators they’ll fly for. About the software layer that has to exist for on-demand regional flight to be safe, legal, and affordable at the same time.
What we built
Soar is the software layer aviation was missing.
Not a new aircraft. Not a new certification. Not a new business model dressed up in different language. The software layer that makes on-demand regional flight safe, legal, and affordable at the same time — the thing the industry never got around to building.
01
A software-defined air carrier, not a marketplace.
Soar operates the flights — we hold (or are acquiring) the FAA Part 135 certificate, we onboard the pilots, we control the dispatch. That’s the difference between an on-demand airline and a booking layer on top of somebody else’s risk.
02
Aircraft with a sixty-year track record.
We didn’t design a new plane. We picked Cessna 172, Beechcraft Bonanza, and Cirrus SR22T — three airframes with combined production histories of over 150 years — and built the software layer to run them safely at consumer scale.
03
Every constraint enforced by software.
Weather, duty time, pilot qualification, aircraft airworthiness. Every dispatch runs through a check. If any one fails, the flight doesn’t launch. Airline-grade safety operating at ride-share cadence.
04
Priced like software, not private aviation.
Dynamic pricing, aircraft utilization optimization, and empty-leg matching bring seat prices as low as $60 on routes that used to cost $2,000 an hour to fly.
Where we are
Real deposits. Real pilots. Real aircraft.
Soar isn’t a deck. The core product is built, the pilot onboarding platform is live, and the regulatory path is in motion.
What’s next
Regional air mobility, for real, this time.
Soar goes live in the Bay Area first, then California, then the Tri-State, then everywhere else where the drive is longer than the flight would be. That’s most of the country.