Fly Louie has hired Dan Morrison, previously the director of sales and business development for SC Aviation in Janesville, Wisconsin. With nearly 20 years of experience working in private aviation, Morrison joins the Fly Louie team as director of business development and will focus primarily on developing new charter demand and partnerships for Fly Louie Connect.

Adding to the success of the Fly Louie Fuel programme, Connect is the latest membership benefit available to the more than 160 independent charter operators in the Fly Louie Alliance. Connect uses advanced data collection and algorithms to capture and distribute full plane charter demand, while identifying scheduling efficiencies across the Alliance fleet, reducing empty legs and boosting operator profitability. Launched in August 2020, Connect has almost 300 aircraft enrolled in the free programme, with the potential to scale to more than 1,300 aircraft in the Alliance network.

Fly Louie CEO Julia Takeda sees this latest hire as an exciting component to the expansion and success of Connect. “We are thrilled to welcome Dan to our team. His robust industry experience and strategic thinking will help us to harness the power of Connect for our partners and Alliance members. Dan's reputation, entrepreneurial spirit and perspective will be tremendous assets to our team,” she says. Adding more partnerships with leading travel platforms and agencies is another core responsibility that Takeda expects Morrison to tackle as he generates more charter demand for the Connect platform.

Morrison comments: “Joining the Fly Louie team will be an exciting challenge for me professionally. I've worked with the team over the past year through SC Aviation's Fly Louie Alliance membership. Fly Louie's vision for the future of our industry is inspiring, and I am excited to be a part of it. I value my relationships with SC Aviation colleagues and the many operators I've worked with over the years, and I'm excited to create new opportunities for them in this new role.”

The Connect platform routinely identifies significant opportunities for charter operators to benefit from more efficient scheduling and referred charter demand. By year-end, Fly Louie expects to see meaningful value creation from Connect as the result of exponential growth and scale, as well as new leadership from Morrison.