Are the air taxi good times really over for good almost before they got started?

Impossible.

Are they over for the next ten years?

Almost certainly not.

The next five years?

Unlikely.

How long then?

According to a surprisingly large number of industry insiders, the good times are not only not over, they’re about to get rolling in earnest.

“This country didn’t just have an economic meltdown; it has had an airline meltdown,” says Andrew Schmertz , who earlier this month put a substantial sum of money where his mouth is by launching Hopscotch Air to provide on-demand air taxi service between metropolitan New York and hundreds of mid-Atlantic and New England community airports.

“Airlines are reducing and, in some cases, canceling service along many routes … the (traveling public) is clamoring for a solution to the airline mess,” Schmertz said. “People still need to fly and time is still money.”

Linear Air CEO Bill Herp who, when interviewed by AirTaxiFlights.com last September believed there was “a big opportunity in efficiently and economically connecting people who live and work near major metro areas with their business interests in secondary and tertiary markets ” has seen nothing in the recent economic crisis to make him change his mind.

Herp is so sanguine about the VLJ/air taxi future that he recently announced formation of Eclipse Services and Support LLC, a co-op venture which hopes to buy certain key Eclipse assets including parts and manuals needed for maintenance and upgrades on current 500s.

More interesting, is the Herp group’s plan to walk away from the Eclipse bankruptcy sale with so-called intellectual property which could include blueprints, engineering documents, computer applications, patent rights and other items that could someday facilitate production of a new Eclipse.

Atlanta-based ImagineAir Co-founder and President Benjamin Hamilton is still another industry insider who sees no reason to revise his company’s mission statement to meet new economic realities.

Interviewed by ATF several months prior to last fall’s stock market crash, Hamilton said “our goal is to use everything the major airlines do wrong as the basis for what we do right. Among other things, that means we are tightly focused on ease of use and customer service. It means we want to offer a fast, easy, personalized and pleasurable flight experience for our customers by removing the hassle and time-intensive processes that plague the airline industry.”

Avoiding the airline industry “plague” like, pardon the pun, the plague has done wonders for ImagineAir’s bottomline … it closed 2008 with a 90 percent increase in sales and a 117 percent rise in flights.

Meanwhile over at Cirrus Design, where the economy has driven production of current piston-engined models down to about 20 percent of pre-crash levels, CEO Brent Wouters remains bullish about the Cirrus Vision single-engine VLJ and affirmed that the Vision is still on target to be certified in late 2011.

According to Wouters’ boss, Cirrus Chairman Alan Klapmeie, the Vision, formerly known as the CirrusJet, will be “easy to learn, intuitive to operate, fun to fly, forgiving and safe as state-of-the-art technology can make them.”

To which Wouter adds this: The Vision is “our future engine of growth.”

And Honda, despite cutting North American automobile production by almost 50 percent in January, celebrated the February opening of its $100 million dollar HondaJet R&D campus in Piedmont, North Carolina by announcing plans to expand the 190,000 square foot facility to 500,000 square feet, starting with construction of a 250,000 manufacturing plant this summer.

Even better, Honda Aircraft CEO & President Michimasa Fujino used the occasion to report that a.) an influx of new orders has forced the company to hike its initial annual production estimate by roughly 30 percent (to about 100 aircraft) and b.) Honda still expects to attain certification and begin deliveries in 2010.

So here’s the good news:

– Quality air-taxi operators who didn’t over-promise and un-deliver on service, who didn’t binge-order aircraft without any idea how they would eventually pay for them, who did devise and follow a market-savvy, sustainable business model are doing well.

– VLJ makers at both end of the price-sticker spectrum — Cirrus with its roughly $1 million Vision and Honda, which has taken over 100 HondaJet orders at just under $4 million per — are optimistic about the future.

And here’s the bad news:

– VLJ air-taxi service will probably not be coming to a community airport near you as soon as you had hoped.

– You will have to continue using scheduled airlines instead of air taxis for awhile and those flights are going to get continually more unpleasant and expensive as airlines deploy ever more tools for draining blood from their stonily suffering passengers. (In fairness to the airlines, rumors that the industry is planning to put parking meters on the washrooms and offer peeping-inclined passengers a $25 fee to watch closed-circuit telecasts from those being used by couples struggling to ravage the smoke detector — or each other — seem to be unfounded.)

Weighing the good news against the bad and comparing the results to the prospects facing other segments of the aviation industry, not to mention the auto, retail, hospitality and consumer electronics industries, one conclusion is inescapable … the air taxi/VLJ business isn’t really doing so bad after all.

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The date is sometime around 2012 and you’re doing a bit of high-intensity lounging somewhere deep in the keys. Warm and wonderfully enjoying the majestic vision of a giant orange ball of a sun slowly descending into the bottomless depths of the Atlantic with a gorgeous 93 percent-naked significant someone of your preferred gender second-skinning against your side.

And this dude comes stumbling over. Not from the left side of the beach, not from the right side of the beach, but from right in front of you — seriously blocking your view of the sunset. He looks kinda like an affluent beachcomber. He’s barefoot and shaggy haired, but his Hawaiian shirt, straw hat, and draw-string beach pants are neither ripped nor worn. Plus he’s clean shaven and pleasantly devoid of bottle brushes of wayward ear and nose hairs.

He smiles, leans toward you and says, quite distinctly, “How’d you like to check up on Fidel for a few hours? Gimme $350 and I’ll take you and your friend over for a visit and some cigars and get you back here in time for the last 30 minutes of Happy Hour at Crabby Dick’s.” He straightens up, broadens his smile, and waits for a response.

You make a quick scan for guys in white coats, but there don’t seem to any. Finally, you say something on the order of “Ah, but I think it’s still illegal to visit Cuba from the states and even if it was legal, there isn’t any room to stuff a thing next to our privates in these minimalist bathing suits so we left our passports back home in Toledo. Even if we did have our passports, we don’t happen to have visas from the Cuban government.”

The intruder’s smile stretches even bigger. “Not to worry,” he says, “we’ll just hop over in my rig, set down in the Bay of Pigs, walk around a bit and come back. Nobody official will ever know we were there or, for that matter, know we left here.”

Welcome to the latest evolution of the air taxi industry, the dawn of the gypsy air cab era. A new age empowered by advanced technology so “disruptive” that it’s difficult to even comprehend it without giggling. A technology so “out there” that it’s almost guaranteed to eventually change the definition of a word that’s been in common usage since at least the days of Queen Victoria.

The word CAB, which future generations may know only as an acronym for Car/Airplane/Boat.

For the dubious blessing this technology will confer upon a somewhat less-than-widely enthusiastically waiting world, we should thank an inventor named Moulton B. Taylor, who built the first — and apparently to date only — FAA-certified flying car (or drivable airplane, if you prefer) back in the mid-’50s. (Note for trivia buffs, Taylor’s Aerocar turned up in some James Bond movie or other a few decades later.)

The second acknowledgment should go to the FAA, which in 2004 created the Sport Pilot license to enable people to take up flying without going through all the tedious learning processes previously required to become a pilot. (Think of it as a rather edgy equivalent to the FAA’s decision to issue Ham radio licenses to folks who just can’t master sending and receiving Morse code.)

Anyway, the FAA decision to create a category of semi-pro pilots seems, at least in theory, to offer the promise of a commercial market for what might otherwise have been strictly experimental aircraft. Several entrepreneurs, therefore, picking up where Moulton Taylor left off, have established companies to build multi-tasking vehicles for the masses.

(In the interests of full disclosure, the triple-play CAR (Car/Airplane/Boat) referenced above is not, at least publically, on anyone’s current production schedule. But it does seem an inevitable refinement of vehicles currently undergoing prototype testing. )

Icon Aircraft’s folding wing Light Sport Aircraft, for example, is a combination trailer, land plane and seaplane. Putting aside silly issues like legalities for the moment, you could hook it up to your car, trailer it to a strip of highway or boat ramp, unhook the trailer hitch, fold out the wings, take off and fly pretty much wherever you wanted as long as you kept under the radar.

In other words, the prototype LSA could — technically speaking — be towed to Florida behind a standard sedan (since it has wheels, it requires no trailer) right now, put into the water in the Keys, taxi to the shore of our mythical beach, pick you up, and land you in the Bay of Pigs in about 40 minutes. The only part of our scenario it can’t perform is taking you, your pilot and a companion because the current prototype only holds two people. (But you can always become your own pilot — Icon says you can learn to fly the LSA in a mere two weeks.)

The Terrafugia Transition is another twin-mode vehicle that could someday spark development of a true “CAR.” Called a “roadable aircraft” by its developers, the Transition is a front-wheel drive automobile that can also fly at over 110 miles per hour (ground speed in car mode has not yet been established, apparently.)

Perhaps the neatest thing about the Transition is that stowing its folding wings for road use and deploying them for flight is controlled from inside the cabin by an automatic electromechanical system.

“This unique functionality,” Terrafugia says, “addresses head-on the issues faced by today’s private and sport pilots.”

Perhaps so, but it does seem to us that deploying the wings and getting off the ground fast enough to avoid a “head-on” with an oncoming semi would require something more like a catapult-launched F14 than an LSA with a 100 horsepower Rotax engine.

Be that as it may, you’re probably sitting in front of your computer thinking that the original premise of this post is pretty stupid. That Sport Pilot license holders can’t operate air taxi services with LSA equipment. That requires things like Part 135 certifications and commercial pilots licenses.

The truth is we agree with you. The idea is pretty silly. Outrageously stupid, even. Air taxi operators have to have all kinds of expensive, hard-to-obtain licenses. Just like hack drivers in every major city from New York west to the Pacific do.

Or did … until all those gypsy cabs started picking up passengers everywhere from Old Broadway to New Market Street.

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