AIRHITCH® PRINCIPLES OF OPERATION

1. Under certain conditions, you can hitch rides on commercial jet aircraft, just as you can hitch rides in cars cruising down the highway. This is possible based on SPOT AVAILABILITY, that is, the contingency of what sort of ride turns out to be, or not be, made available to you at the moment you are ready to travel.

2. Hitchhiking is nothing more than making known to the operators of passing vehicles in the traffic-stream that you would like a ride if the operator of the vehicle is kind enough to take you.

3. There is nothing illegal about Airhitching, just as in most municipalities (except for a handful of rather misguided ones which have passed laws against it), there is nothing illegal about road-hitchhiking. And there is certainly nothing IMMORAL about it; in fact, it is an excellent exercise in collaborative mutually-beneficial exchange, when managed correctly.

4. Hitchhiking can assume a variety of forms, along a continuum ranging from the highly formalized (e.g., rides-board in a campus union), to highly informal (signalling by sticking your thumb out, the universally recognized convention). Airhitching is one of the more organized forms -- it has to be, because the world air-transport system is so much more tightly organized than any highway system.

5. Hitchhiking in general, and Airhitching in particular, though they depend on locating a vehicular traffic-stream along the corridor you want to hitch across, are processes which you yourself initiate and conduct. However, Airhitching, because of its high level of organization, in order to be possible at all, requires the assistance of other Airhitchers throughout the world, who join forces, using the Internet as our major communicational tool, to help each other position themselves to hitch rides on commercial jets. These rides primarily take people across oceans (although it is possible to do it on other corridors as well), precisely by locating the traffic-streams (across oceans), wherein Airhitchers® are most likely to be offered rides.

6. Airhitch® is also an ORGANIZED SYSTEM, which makes the process possible. "Airhitch®" is the sine qua non of Airhitching, and the system is described both in overview and in detail on our website, www.airhitch.org (where you are probably reading these principles of operation!).

7. The process is a four-phase process:

     I. REGISTRATION (REG), whereby you formally commit to participation in the process and use of the system by transmitting to the Airhitch® Online Staff (AOS) the information necessary for us to help you optimize your Airhitching possibilities, by, in turn, helping you make known your need to travel to those who can help you, i.e., those persons or entities who operate and control access to jet aircraft across oceans (known generically as "transportation-providers" or TPs);

    II. FLIGHT-BRIEFING (FB), wherein you determine, based on the information you provide in your reg.,  the best possibilities and opportunities for catching rides on flights, and, the procedural mechanics of how to take advantage of these possibilities/opportunities as they occur [NOTE that the exact form and content any given FB may take depends on a variety of factors which combine uniquely around any specific instance of Airhitching]; 

   III. DECISION, whereby you resolve to attempt boarding on one of the possible flights you have learned about in your flight-briefing, as a first attempt (and, usually, only, for normally no other attempts turn out to be necessary); and

   IV. BOARDING-ATTEMPT (BA), wherein you implement your decision, together with the knowledge gained in the FB phase, by actually going to the airport and executing the operations discussed in the FB.

8. In order to encourage TPs to offer rides to Airhitchers, we offer to "share the gas" with them, i.e., pay a relatively nominal amount in order to contribute our reasonable share of the operating expense of the aircraft. However, although this payment is agreed to and authorized in advance by the Airhitcher (normally during the decision phase (III above), it is not actually remitted, nor does any payment "change hands", until AFTER travel has commenced, i.e., until after a departing aircraft has been boarded. These costs are known as "expected Airhitching costs", and hold constant a large percentage of the time.