Air Taxi Service

Today, our Air Taxi service offers immediate, cost-effective air travel choices for tens of millions of airports in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Bill previously established a number of successful enterprises, among them the e-Dialog leader in the field of e-commerce. Recently, he led a number of airline acquisitions and airline sales initiatives to expand the company platform. He has established several corporations, among them e-Travel, the first enterprise on-line reservation system.

Air Taxi" stops, which can carry 10,000 passenger per workday.

It' s not enough to just have a cool-looking plane that can take off and landing upright. They also need a city-wide system of airfields, load and unload areas for passengers. Over is working on its own infrastructural map, and now the English start-up Volocopter is willing to present its own visions for a fully-fledged air taxi system to an air taxi station in a nearby town.

Today, the airline presented its corporate strategy for a roof-mounted "Volo-Ports" service where up to 1,000 people per hours can get on and off their own private "flying taxi". This corresponds to 10,000 passenger per stop and per working day, according to the group. Among these are sophisticated belt conveyors, replaceable batteries and lifts that lead to huge loading harbors - all engineered to carry as many people as possible while at the same time making sure their fleets of short-haul planes are fully loaded and operational.

Apart from the readiness (or unwillingness) of air travelers to step into the substantially high jumping drone just so they can shaver a few moments from their ride to the terminal, Volocopter's concept for an urban air taxi system is clearly very ambition. Volocopter is planning to build round take-off areas that will protrude from the top levels of a skyscraper, from which Volocopter's 18-run 2X power plane could take off and landing.

Once landed, these VTOLs are transported on a conveyer system to an overhead trailer where they can get off, and the robot replaces the battery with a new one. Subsequently, the planes are transported by lift to a kind of multi-storey car park on the lower level, where servicing work can be carried out before the planes are used for further transport of people.

Mr. Zosel said that the objective is to have a volocopter plane take off and landing every 30 seconds to reach sufficient seating space to make sure that air travel is cost effective and available. To put it another way, Volocopter must cope with a high traffic volume, or this whole air taxi approach will be just a gag used only by tourist and one percent members.

Volocopter effort is remarkable because electrical flying is very difficult - some would even say it is commercially infeasible. This is probably the reason why Volocopter imagines that its planes only operate over shorter routes. While Volocopter says the battery can be replaced quickly to balance these numbers until technology is improved, the 3X offers a 30 minute flying distance and a 17 mile max distance.

Mr Zosel said that Volocopter hoped to have a prototyping facility on site sometime next year, but confirmed that it would take up to 10 years to set up a complete city-wide system. Costs for these complex locations would probably be shared among a number of different parties, among them property groups, loading facility managers, ride-hailing firms and volocopters themselves.

It has shown 2X's flying capacity in Germany, Dubai (where the airline is likely to introduce its air taxi service for the first time) and recently at CES in Las Vegas, where it announces a partnering with Intel.