Travelocity, for the Learjet-Set

Like many promising Internet start-ups, the idea behind FlyMiwok is so basic that it’s hard to believe it didn’t already exist. The company has created a Travelocity-like Web site to allow users to book charter flights online.

“We are basically bringing the on-demand side of commercial aviation into the 21st century,” said Gad Barnea, the company’s founder.

Barnea, speaking on the phone from a coffee shop in Northern California, described the prevailing business practices of the charter industry. Charter operators “get phone calls either directly from people who want to fly or, typically, from brokers — and it’s an actual phone call,” said Barnea, a 42-year-old Israeli-born software entrepreneur. “It’s an extremely time-inefficient process, and [charter operators] lose a lot of business that way.”

With FlyMiwok — the name comes from a peripatetic group of Native Americans who lived in what is now Northern California — Barnea and his team have created a package of management tools for commercial operators of nonscheduled flights. There are 3,000 charter-flight operators in the United States, Barnea said, and FlyMiwok will help them to move from a system of notes on paper and whiteboards to one organized by the new Web applications. Using FlyMiwok, operators will be able “to manage their resources, manage their marketing and all kinds of maintenance-operations data,” said Barnea, “as well as pricing and availability.”

It’s this pricing and availability data that make the other half of FlyMiwok’s operation — the one that consumers will experience — possible. At FlyMiwok.com, individuals can book on-demand travel without talking on the phone or waiting hours for a quote. Just enter the origin and destination airports as well as the desired date and time of departure, and FlyMiwok will search for available planes and generate a price for the itinerary.

Need to fly from Santa Monica to Santa Ana? Recent one-way prices started from $338. Burbank to Santa Barbara: $563.

The companies that FlyMiwok will work with operate small planes like the Cirrus SR 22 — Barnea called it “a Lexus with wings” — and they have small prices to match, often as low as $1,000 to $2,000 per hour, depending on airplane type. By comparison, according to the NetJets Web site, the least expensive way to fly with the Berkshire Hathaway-owned company will run you $5,400 per hour — although Barnea estimated that the cost could be much higher ($8,000 to $12,000).

FlyMiwok, Barnea explained, was not competing with NetJets. While NetJets requires customers to commit to using the plane for a certain number of hours every year, FlyMiwok makes no such demand — a strong selling point in a down economy.

“There has been a pretty big backlash against corporate travel on jets,” Barnea said. “[Yet companies] still want the benefit of flying on-demand, so our goal is to provide the end-to-end, on-demand flight department, with no long-term commitment whatsoever.”

That’s a tall order. “There’s a reason that no one has done what we are doing before,” Barnea said. First of all, instead of dealing with scheduled flights (much like Travelocity and other online travel service companies), FlyMiwok is attempting to systematize nonscheduled flights. Then there’s the large number of companies in the sector — 3,000 — as compared to only 56 operators of scheduled commercial flights in the country. (That’s according to Barnea, and his number includes the small regional airlines.) And each of those 3,000 companies has its own system. “It’s just extremely inefficient, extremely dysfunctional, for lack of a better term.”

Developing the software is the least of Barnea’s concerns, in part because he has so many years of experience. Barnea started working with computers when he was 13. After serving in the Israeli Air Force as an air traffic controller, he went to university, where he did not study computer science: “I didn’t really think they had anything to teach me,” Barnea said.

He founded his first software company in Paris in 1991, went back to Israel’s “Silicon Wadi” — the area just north of Tel Aviv — where he founded another company in the late ’90s, and then moved to the United States in 1999. In 2003, he “started thinking about how to combine [his] software and aviation backgrounds into a successful business,” and, for the last four years, Barnea has been working on FlyMiwok.

FlyMiwok launched last October with just one operator — New Vectors Aviation, a charter company based out of Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. “In many ways it’s a public beta of our system,” Barnea said. He hopes to add “a dozen” more operators this year.

What Barnea is testing, more than anything, is the FlyMiwok business model. To that end, FlyMiwok Concierge offers customers a more full-service option — booking limousines and making reservations for meals. FlyMiwok also experimented with special packages, like a romantic weekend to Las Vegas — complete with flowers and chocolate and champagne on the plane ($1,500, including limousines to and from the airport).

There is one thing that FlyMiwok does not do: own or operate airplanes.

“If you book a flight on FlyMiwok.com,” Barnea said, “you book it through us, but not with us.”