Unless they have a whole new airport and flying experience, I don’t think a lot of people are going to fly just 125 miles. That’s less than two hours of driving. It would be 2 hours of just airport shenanigans much less the flight itself.
Unless they have a whole new airport and flying experience, I don’t think a lot of people are going to fly just 125 miles. That’s less than two hours of driving. It would be 2 hours of just airport shenanigans much less the flight itself.
Depending on the cost, and availability, 125 miles gets you within easy public transit range of NYC from Boston.
Now, of course, most of the hassle of getting to NYC from Boston is transit to and from the airport. And of course, transit from JFK, Laguardia, etc into the city.
There are at least 5 capable airports/airstrips closer to me than Logan or T.F. Green. Only one of them, Worcester, offers NYC flights. Worcester is almost an hour from me on average, and a bit more expensive. It’s an hour from takeoff to landing (I’ve arrived 10 minutes before takeoff, at the PARKING LOT many times without it being an issue).
If they can get this in and out of even smaller airports, like in Stow, MA, which is beyond capable, it will be a gamechanger.
> 125 miles … That’s less than two hours of driving.
I don’t know where you live or what you drive, but I just punched in a destination 200 km away as the crow flies, the Alps are in the way and I’m looking at five hours of driving.
Also, water.
Rookie numbers. As the crow flies it's 250km between me and my old town. Used to drive back and forth a lot back in the days and it takes everything from 8 hours to 10 hours depending on the route you take and whether you hit the ferries on schedule or not. Plus 30 minutes for resting and eating. Flying takes 50 minutes in a propeller airplane + travel to and from airports and airport shenanigans (not too bad at these small airports). If you take the morning flight you'll be in town by the time people start showing up for work. If you drive you'll be in town by the time people start leaving work.
SFO to sac and Monterey, lax to (SD, Santa Barbara, etc) could be good for those “I live in a 50k person town and need to get to a hub” flights.
Of course those -should- be easy on trains too…
Could be useful for hub and spoke type systems, where you fly from a smaller city to the main hub, and catch a connection from there.
Even then there are lots of flights in Europe that are between cities less than 1 hour apart.
This idea generally makes more sense in Europe than the US, I think.
Their first customers were from the Nordics, if you watched the video
Without noise, over time, travel will change.
There are a fair number of connecting flights that this is a good fit for. For example, I fly out of Madison, WI regularly and almost always connect through Chicago, which I believe is right around the 125 mile mark.
Used to regularly take the shortish flight from Boston to Chicago, and then a bus >3x as long to Madison to see family, because the puddlejumper was too expensive or not even running.
Mandalay to Bagan, Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, Chiang Mai to Pai… shitty mountain and hill roads can make short plane distances take forever