When you first see the management team's background - past leaders from companies such as thin-client pioneer Citrix and VoIP vendor NetSpeak - you might think: "Here we go again, another network start-up."

But in this case, you'd be flying off course. DayJet, the brainchild of Citrix co-founder Ed Iacobucci, is a tech company at heart, but its focus is on simplifying air travel for business executives in areas under-served by major airlines.

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"Many techies like me grew up watching NASA moon shots and reading Popular Science, and they get into airplanes as a hobby," says Iacobucci, who retired from Citrix in 2000. "I wanted to design airplanes since I was little, and now I can help change a market that is in dire need of some big changes."

Much in the same way he looked to wring expenses out of running Windows and Unix by starting Citrix in 1989, Iacobucci is seeking to squeeze the high cost of air travel.

DayJet has raised more than $18 million to unite two leading-edge technologies. The first is Very Light Jet aircraft, which can fly at about 400 mph, seat four passengers and reportedly operate at half the cost of today's small jets. The second technology has highly sophisticated software systems to determine the most efficient way to route those aircraft. The software is based on what's known in some aviation circles as "the magic algorithm."

Iacobucci says the company has had some 20 mathematicians, former Citrix programmers, demographers, scientists and market planners working for more than two years to develop the real-time automated operations system. The system takes into account a raft of data, from income statistics and business traveler preferences to prices and schedules of local bus and train services, to come up with a sophisticated model showing how a traveler would use the system. The package runs across a cluster of 20 dual-processor 3-GHz Pentium computers.

The software is the backbone of DayJet's service, which is something between a private jet charter and an airline. It will cater to people who might drive 200 to 400 miles for a business trip, because using the airlines for that jaunt would be a hassle, Iacobucci says. In the Southeast alone some 87% of business trips are by car.