Air taxi an upgrade for the private jet set

Sleek and fast, these Very Light Jets could bring air taxis to a community near you.

from the September 5, 2007 edition

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"The advantage of the air taxi is that it would call into use the over 5,000 under-used smaller airports around the country," says Bill Strait, the CEO of VLJ Group, an aviation consulting group in Jupiter, Florida. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that in the next ten years, as many as 7,000 VLJs will be delivered to air taxi companies, charter services, and private pilots by manufacturers. Experts are split on whether there's enough demand for affordable air taxi service to keep them all flying profitably. Proponents, like Mr. Herp, believe there is. Three years ago, Linear started a point-to-point air taxi service using turboprops between New York, Boston and Washington. "We have some pretty good data based on actual results from flying actual customers that tells us there's a substantial opportunity to deploy very light jets," he says. "The issue is really speed. For a trip of an hour and a half you can go twice as far [as in a turbojet.]"

But skeptics abound in the aviation community. The idea of creating a thriving air taxi industry has been around for a long time. But the economics – the cost of the jets, the fuel, the insurance, the pilots – have never made it affordable except for the rich. Aviation experts like Robert Mann question whether VLJs will fundamentally change that. In part, because he doubts there's enough demand in any one area to make an air taxi service feasible.

"With the numbers of jets that are being talked about and the number of hours that you'd have to fly to make them economic, there just has to be a huge demand," says Mr. Mann, of R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York. "It is absolutely the case that a lot of high-time-value individuals, entrepreneurs and corporate executives are opting out of the commercial airline system because of the delays and the inconvenience and are looking for alternatives." But, he adds, it's not clear that the VLJ model will be more successful than the larger corporate jet services that have grown dramatically over the last five years.

Major airlines are particularly concerned about the projected growth of the VLJ market, because of their impact on the nation's already congested airspace.

"The business aviation community is fond of telling people that they use only 4 percent of the capacity at the 25 major airports in the United States," says John Meenan, executive vice president of the Air Transport Association, which represents the major commercial airlines. But he contends that's misleading, because business jets use a significantly larger percentage of the air traffic control resources.

"For instance in Southern California, they use 37 percent [of the air traffic control operations,] while the commercial sector uses 40 percent," he says.

Mr. Meenan worries the introduction of thousands of VLJs could eventually create aviation gridlock. But VLJ proponents like Mr. Strait, contend that since the microjets will be flying to smaller airports, the concern is nothing more than "a red herring."

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