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PALO ALTO — I’m flying high above the San Francisco Peninsula during the afternoon commute, watching cars cluster as they queue to get onto the Dumbarton Bridge.
Traffic looks terrible down below, and I suspect motorists are staring at a sea of red brake lights as they inch across the bay.
But the skies are clear. My helicopter trip from Palo Alto to Oakland takes about 10 minutes. I barely have time to enjoy the plush leather seats or indulge in some complimentary cookies before we land. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually wished my commute was longer.
Within another 15 minutes, I’m home. It’s a trip that would normally take two hours or more to complete during the peak commute, but for me was shortened to 25 minutes — an experience an increasing number of companies in the Bay Area want you to have, too.
As the economy surges, traffic congestion, measured as the time a car spends slogging along at 35 miles an hour or slower on the freeway, has gone up, increasing 80 percent between 2010 and 2017. It hasn’t helped, either, that as housing prices skyrocket, more people are moving farther from job centers in search of cheaper homes, putting even more pressure on the region’s transportation arteries, as workers continue to commute to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Oakland and the Tri-Valley.
As Andrew Huang, a 35-year San Francisco resident and my Uber driver from Oakland to the Palo Alto Airport, put it: “Traffic here has gotten so bad, it makes people crazy.” Who wouldn’t want to skip over it entirely?
That’s the thinking behind Blade, a New York-based company that’s been offering public commuter and charter helicopter flights around the Bay Area since April. (They let me and a photographer tag along during a recent flight.) They’re one of a growing number of companies that are looking to offer commuters an alternative to traffic congestion by literally flying over it.
It’s an industry so potentially lucrative, researchers from UC Berkeley and the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton estimated in a 2018 study for NASA, that it could generate a market value of $500 billion in a “best case” scenario, with easy access to air taxis and airport shuttles whisking commuters and tourists to their destinations in a fraction of the time it would take on the ground.
But the path to this Jetsons-like future won’t feel all that revolutionary, at least not the way Will Heyburn sees it. He’s Blade’s head of corporate development, who chatted with me over the phone about where he thinks urban air travel is heading.
In his view, it will start with the kind of traditional — and expensive — piloted flights in gas-powered helicopters that have been around since the 1950s. But as electric aircraft technology develops, Heyburn said, the price for shared flights will drop dramatically. Soon after, automatic technology will take over for pilots, decreasing the cost even further.
That future is fast approaching, with industry experts estimating electric aircraft could start carrying passengers in five years or less. And as Heyburn told me, “You have to start somewhere.”
Increasingly, that “somewhere” is right here.
Hot on Blade’s heels is Voom, a subsidiary of Airbus that quietly launched last month in the Bay Area, providing commuter helicopter flights to family and friends, with an expected public launch in the fall. Silicon Valley tech titan Uber announced last month it would start offering flights on Uber Copter in New York on Tuesday. Its larger corporate parent, Uber Elevate, is leading the industry in developing short, shared and affordable electric-powered flights, through a program called Uber Air. Three more startups — the Hayward-based Skyryse, Joby Aviation of Santa Cruz and Mountain View’s Kitty Hawk — are also in varying phases of developing commuter flight services.
Bucking the trend is BlackBird, a company that has opted for small, fixed-wing airplanes, as opposed to the rotocraft of its competitors. BlackBird has been connecting passengers to charter flights in and out of the Bay Area since 2017. But the company’s CEO, Rudd Davis, told me that will help the company get to electric flights — read cheaper, greener urban air travel — much sooner, even as early as next year. When that happens, the cost of operating the aircraft will drop from about $150 per hour to as little as $35 per hour, he said.
“It will be faster and cheaper than driving,” Davis told me.
It’s already cheaper to fly with BlackBird than to take comparable flights on Blade, Voom or Uber Copter. BlackBird’s trip-planning tool gave me an estimated price of $19 one-way from Oakland to Palo Alto, cheaper than the projected $25 cost of driving, and way cheaper than the $195 ticket Blade offers. Davis did his best to diminish my expectations, though, telling me the actual price depends on the availability of pilot and plane. I got the impression that, similar to Uber’s surge pricing, the cost can vary significantly.
It still feels like a steal compared to Uber Copter, which starting this week, will fly passengers from Manhattan to the John F. Kennedy International Airport for $200, a price that also covers the cost of ground transportation. Voom wouldn’t disclose details of its pricing with me, saying it would release more information when it launches publicly in the fall.
But Michael Hirschberg, the executive director of The Vertical Flight Society, a nonprofit advocacy organization, shared with me a screenshot listing Voom’s offerings that he managed to grab before the company took the page off its website, which it posted by accident. Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco International Airport, Oakland and Hayward were all included as possible departures or destinations with prices for flights ranging from $147 to $294.
When I asked Heyburn, he told me the high price hasn’t stopped people from using Blade for commuting. The company began its New York service in 2014, anticipating it would mostly be operating leisure flights out of Manhattan. It wasn’t until customers began using Blade to fly between airports that the company realized it had struck a chord with road and transit-weary commuters, he said. Recognizing the traffic gridlock that grips the Bay Area, the company decided to expand out here, Heyburn said.
“We get people who just want a day or two a week to have breakfast with their family and drop their kids off at school,” Heyburn told me. “And we get a lot of people with a specific use-case.”
But getting to that projected cheaper-than-driving sweet spot will take some time. Unlike electric fixed-wing planes, Hirschberg, says electric rotocraft aren’t likely to be ready to carry passengers on commercial flights until the early to mid-2020s in the best of cases. Much will depend on how quickly battery technology advances, which right now is limiting the size and number of passengers, as well as how far the aircraft can fly, Hirschberg said.
There are still federal regulations to work out and local rules to promulgate. And then there are societal barriers to overcome, said Adam Cohen, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center. Noise could be a huge issue, though it’s not as bad in electric aircraft, Cohen said, not to mention concerns about privacy, with aircraft flying over people’s backyards.
Challenges aside, Davis likened the emerging industry to the way Uber got its start — as a somewhat maligned luxury service before becoming so ubiquitous its changed the way we get around or between cities. In his version of the future, urban air travel will unlock the potential for shortening commutes — both within dense city centers and from rural communities into the big city — in ways that were only possible when trolleys and trains usurped horses and cars supplanted trains.
“We really think we’re the next step,” he told me. “You may still be commuting an hour a day, but now you can travel 100 or 150 miles and that enables a lot more freedom.”
The only other passenger on my recent flight with Blade fell into the luxury travel category. A sandy-haired, lanky fellow who looked to be in his mid-20s, he blushed when I told him I’m a journalist and asked not to be named in any story I wrote. It was his first time flying with Blade, he said, something he might not have considered if it weren’t for the fact that he’d already booked a flight out of Oakland when he got stuck with a meeting late in the day he couldn’t miss. There was no way to get from his Sunnyvale office to Oakland International in time to make the flight, so he decided to give it a try.
“I’ve never ridden in a helicopter before, so I thought it’d be a pretty good opportunity,” he told me before take-off.
After landing, he was sold, vowing to try it again, he said, “If I can afford it.”
