E.B. Boyd of Fast Company describes yet another breakthrough sharing platform:

Brokers, who arrange charter flights, have historically focused on wealthy individuals and companies, because the brokers could only sell whole planes, and those were the only groups that could afford to shell out the bucks.
But now with the social web, people don’t have to rent the whole plane. A member of Social Flights can simply post an itinerary they’d like to take. If enough other people want to travel to the same place at the same time, a plane gets booked, and each flyer simply pays the cost of their seat.

This reminds me of James Fallows’s enthusiasm for air taxis, which he championed in his 2001 book Free Flight. From a book review by Otis Port in BusinessWeek, published a month before the 9/11 terror attacks:

The solution lies in a new generation of small, high-tech planes designed to fly into thousands of local airports, thus bypassing the snarls at the 31 hubs and 700 spokes now served by scheduled airlines. These planes, the first of which is already flying, would put an air-taxi service at your beck and call. They would buzz from the airport near your home–and 98% of Americans live within a 30-minute drive of a small airport–straight to a local airport close to your final destination. This approach would slash travel time, often by 50% or more. Fallows cites a NASA estimate that local airports can handle a lot more traffic than they do today. The 5,400 best-equipped ones now accommodate 37 million takeoffs and landings annually, but they could handle 500 million. Any opposition from local residents should be muted, NASA believes, by the fact that the new planes will be much quieter.

Later on, Port identifies a familiar problem:

Critics of air taxis charge that high prices will relegate it to a perk for senior execs. Eclipse admits to Fallows that hailing an air taxi will probably cost almost as much as a business-class ticket. But split the cost between just two people and avoid the overnight stay that hub-and-spoke routing often necessitates, and the tab may be less than flying coach. Eclipse figures air taxis could grab 20% of the business market during the 2010s–and generate sales of perhaps 35,000 planes.

Much has happened in the decade since, and Eclipse Aviation hasn’t exactly flourished in the intervening decade. But it is at least possible that a social technology, the sharing platform, will do what very light aircraft could not, i.e., make low-cost point-to-point travel economically viable.