Importance of Aircraft Type and Operational Factors for Air Taxi Cost Feasibility

Air taxi is an emerging, near-on-demand service that promises to provide affordable and fast transportation to possibly large number of travelers. This paper presents an approach to study the factors affecting the feasibility of such a transportation service and their impact on the success of this enterprise. Models of aircraft performance, airline operations, and air taxi operations provide input into the study. The approach followed here provides "effective range" and "traveler travel-time value" as output that can assess the feasibility of an air taxi service. Using these models, the approach compared several aircraft types against each other to determine the three "best aircraft" for air taxi operations. Similarly, the approach compared best-case, nominal-case, and worst-case operational scenarios for the top three aircraft choices and provided a measurement of the impact and the importance of operational considerations on the feasibility of the air taxi. The observations made in the paper strongly rely on the input models; however, the approach to assess air taxi feasibility presented here appears capable of accommodating other aircraft performance and air taxi or airline performance models.