Chismillionaire wants to start hailing air taxis

Tired of security nonsense and no cell phones. Here's the solution.

It may sound like something out of The Jetsons, but the era of affordable personal air travel appears to have arrived.

At least that’s the assertion of writer James Fallows, who reports in this month’s Atlantic Monthly that a company called dayjet is looking to change the way people look at air travel. How? By using a fleet of tiny Eclipse 500 Jets to inexpensively shuttle passengers back and forth to wherever it is they need to go, whenever it is that they need to get there. Anyone who has spent two hours sitting on a runway while sandwiched into the middle seat of a 25-year old MD-80 can see the appeal of this idea.

People are calling dayjet an air taxi service, and that’s essentially what it is. Let’s say I need to go from Melbourne, Florida to Mobile, Alabama. I log into the dayjet website to book my trip, entering the time that I need to get to Mobile, and when I’m available to leave. The site calculates the cost of my trip, giving me a discount if I have some flexibility in travel times.

I show up at my local rinky-dink airstrip (a big part of dayjet’s sell is that they use congestion free community airports) and a few minutes later I’m strapped into my seat and we're cleared for takeoff. There might be two other passengers on my flight, but no more than that. No security screening (I would have been fully vetted during the "membership process"), no waiting for my zone to be called. And when I’m ready to head home, my return flight is waiting for me.

dayjet doesn't always beat the commercial airlines on cost (I priced out a dayjet flight between Atlanta and Charlotte and it came to just over $1,200. The same flight on Delta: $512). But the company is betting that business travelers would rather pay the extra cash than spend three hours at the Cinnabon in some big airport because their connecting flight is late.

It’s the advent of the very light jet (VLJ) that makes an operation like dayjet feasible. The Eclipse 500 weighs 3,500 lbs (5,520 fully loaded), and travels at a maximum cruising speed of 425 mph. And with a list price of $1.5 million, it's far less expensive than the typical private jet.

But what about the likely environmental impact when scores of VLJs take to the skies? After all, a plane carrying three passengers uses more fuel than one carrying 150 (unless you’re American Airlines, and you like to fly your widebody jets nearly empty). The airline’s Bruce Holmes says that dayjet's short-haul routes target customers who would otherwise be driving, and that the the Eclipse jets match or beat automobiles in fuel consumption and carbon output per passenger mile. But Eclipse Aviation says its 500 jet gets 10 miles per gallon. That's way better than any other passenger plane out there, but not necessarily something to be bragging about when looking at the larger environmental picture.

In any case, dayjet has big plans: by the end of the year it wants to be flying to 100 cities in six states.