Australia: Start-up Airly aims to disrupt how you fly from Sydney to Melbourne

Frequent travellers between Sydney and Melbourne face several frustrations: traffic to and from the airport, long security lines, regular ground delays and often the need to circle the congested air space before landing. It can turn what should be a one-hour flight into more than four hours door to door.<br/>Enter the disruptors, Luke Hampshire, 28, and Alexander Robinson, 32. The young pair, both of whom have aviation experience, are looking to take a business model proven by the successful start-up Surf Air in California and transplant it to Australia. The idea is as follows. Several hundred members will pay a $1000 joining fee and a $2550 monthly fee for effectively unlimited flights between Sydney (Bankstown Airport), Melbourne (Essendon Airport) and Canberra on an eight-seater King Air 350 turboprop. The company, Airly, will offer an initial 54 flights a week between those centres, with plans to expand to Adelaide and Brisbane at a later date. "It is going to save them about two hours per round trip. We are working off a membership number. We have a lot of people showing significant interest in it now. Once we reach that break-even number we launch."<br/>