Birth of an Industry: Will Jet Taxis Take Off?

It's a tough time to be a pioneer in a new industry, especially air travel.

But the early companies offering "jet taxi" service are playing the economic hand dealt them and attempting a Clay Christensen-like disruption of the commercial air travel industry. Their weapon: "Very Light Jets" that weigh under 10,000 pounds (good fuel economy) and seat just three or four passengers.

What VLJ operators offer the business traveler is convenient, relatively cheap nonstop travel from big cities to small ones without the usual big-airline delays, security lines and other delights of modern air travel. Because the craft are relatively tiny they can land on short runways, so they have access to regional and even small-city airports that the big boys can't fly into.

Typically a company will book an entire jet for a day, for a cost of $600 to $1,000 per person. One savings: The travelers return home the same day, negating the expense of an overnight stay.

Here's one scenario as written by Harvard Business School's alumni magazine, The Bulletin, which profiles several HBSers in the industry.

"What if a business team needing to travel from Boston to Syracuse, New York, for example, could simply phone in the night before and book a nonstop sixty-minute flight for not much more than the cost of last-minute business-class tickets on a commercial airline? The team could show up ten minutes before their flight, hop onboard, conduct business in the private cabin, attend their meeting, and fly home later the same day. The same would hold true for a Bostonâ€"New York traveler using the area's smaller, regional airports."

What do you think of this idea? Will the recession force businesses to ground their execs and dry up business for jet taxi operators such as Blink and Linear Air? Or is the value proposition of convenience and overall reduced travel costs a winning hand in bad economic times?