I just thought to follow up on this 2007 story about DayJet, a high-flying air taxi service that planned to operate tiny, three-passenger Eclipse 500 jets. The story doesn’t deviate from economic trends: DayJet ceased operations in September 2008, and the aircraft manufacturer entered Chapter 7 in February 2009.
The Air Taxi Association says their operators save big money over scheduled airline service, but finding the price of that service can be hard.
Aside from DayJet’s inventory of planes, the company has a lot of transportation research and service algorithms that may stand as assets. The research includes a “Sim City on steroids” that models “the entire U.S. transportation system. They’ve mapped travel patterns into 10-square-mile blocks, complete with income levels, demographics, historical driving patterns, airport drive times, and airline schedules and fares.” Further, they’ve developed an algorithm that supposedly could manage the resource allocation issues and estimate the cost for passengers trying to hail such a taxi.