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Sky Cabs
Photo courtesy Eclipse Aviation Corporation
Air taxi is the next best thing to flying your own plane. Although you can’task the pilot to fly anywhere you want—and barking out orders to “Follow that plane!” probably won’t work either—you can go whenever you want, and hailing an air taxi costs less than chartering. Flying cabbies already serve resort areas with small prop planes. Now a fleet of upstart air-taxi companies is betting that new, low-cost, and highly efficient “very light jets” (known as VLJs) will enable them to tap into a market that the major airlines can’t touch. Florida-based DayJet will likely be the first to fly the jets, offering on-demand flights linking five cities in the Sunshine State; the company hopes to expand to 40 southeastern cities by the end of 2008. A round-trip DayJet flight between Tallahassee and Boca Raton will cost as little as $625—not much spendier than a last-minute coach fare and without the check-in lines or Transportation Security Administration shoe inspections. The company’s guiding theory: Connect the dots of small-market cities better than the major airlines do, and passengers will come running. Anticipating their arrival, DayJet has ordered 239 jets from Albuquerque-based Eclipse Aviation, the manufacturer at the head of the VLJ revolution that already has some 2,500 orders on its books. Linear Air, an East Coast air taxi now flying propeller planes, has also ordered 30 Eclipse jets. Here’s what they’ll get: The Eclipse 500, the company’s flagship model, is a four- or five-passenger, two-engine jet that weighs about 500 pounds less than the average SUV yet can fly above 40,000 feet and cruise at more than 400 miles per hour, about 50 percent faster than high-end piston planes. Eclipse pilots can land at some 5,000 general-aviation airports, more than 80 percent of which have no commercial service. And it doesn’t hurt that this sleek little jet sells for just $1.5 million, compared with $3 million and up for existing corporate jets and $1 million to $3 million for slower, six-seat prop planes. Whether the anticipated consumer demand for VLJ flights actually (ahem) takes off, of course, hinges in large part on what it’s like to ride in one. The short answer: It’s not exactly like hitching a lift on Air Force One, or even a traditional corporate jet. Eclipse compares its jet’s interior to a well-appointed BMW—rightfully so, since the luxury automaker helped design the plane. (The Eclipse 500 sports leather bucket seats, and the doors even open with a key.) On the downside, the Eclipse is not much bigger than a car, so you’ll be rubbing elbows with your fellow passengers, not stretching out. And lavatories don’t come standard. The plane is designed for short flights covering less than 1,000 miles, explains CEO Vern Raburn, a longtime pilot and early Microsoft exec who founded Eclipse in 1998. Think of it as riding in a limo—without the option of pulling over at the next rest stop. |
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