How U.S. Airlines Are Preparing To Offer Air Taxi Service

Millions of dollars have flown into the nascent electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) sector over the past several years, as investors bet that quiet, emissions-free air taxis will unlock a new wave of demand for urban air mobility (UAM).

While those services are not expected to reach scale until the next decade, air taxi startups are looking toward the airport shuttle mission as an initial launch application in the coming years, promising to shave long trips on congested urban road networks down to 10-20 mins. or less.

There are several reasons why the airport shuttle mission is a suitable launch application. Rather than building out a full UAM network with many distributed nodes, airport shuttles can kick off with just two facilities at the airport and city center.

While air taxi startups ultimately aspire to operate from dedicated vertiports, industry watchers expect it will take years for the scale and level of investment to be sufficient to justify the build-out of greenfield infrastructure. In the meantime, they plan to go to market using existing aviation infrastructure like heliports and fixed-base operator (FBO) airports.

As such, air taxi startups like Archer and Joby have partnered with FBOs like Atlantic Aviation and Signature Aviation to use their facilities located at hundreds of airports across North America. They are also collaborating with infrastructure groups looking to electrify heliport locations in city centers in key US launch markets.

To make the airport shuttle journey seamless, carriers plan to integrate the air taxi option directly into their apps to allow customers to add an air taxi shuttle—with optional rideshare service to the vertiport—as part of an itinerary.

Passenger seat mile costs are expected to be elevated at launch, meaning initial services will likely be oriented toward premium- and business-class flyers. But as the number of eVTOLs in each market scales, air taxi companies hope their costs will gradually decline to a range of around $2-3 per passenger, indicating a ticket price roughly on par with an Uber Black rideshare.

Air taxi operators will therefore face a strategic dilemma: either debut with premium offerings for wealthy travelers, or price the product at a loss to grow market share, similar to the early days of Uber and Lyft.

“If these companies want to sell the tickets for what it costs to operate the service, then it will have to be a very premium offering,” SMG Consulting founder and partner Sergio Cecutta said. “You’re talking something like $8 per passenger mile at entry-into-service. Maybe over time you could make it more accessible, but if you want to be affordable from day one, then it means the price needs to be subsidized.”

Archer and Joby are each developing piloted, four-passenger tilting-propeller eVTOLs. Both aim to certify their aircraft in time to launch services in the U.S. by late 2026, and possibly sooner in international markets, such as the UAE.

Both startups have partnered with major carriers; Joby with Delta Air Lines, and Archer with United Airlines and Southwest. American Airlines, meanwhile, has placed a conditional order for 50 air taxis from Vertical Aerospace, although the UK startup is in a weak financial position and there are doubts about its future.

Archer and Joby plan to operate their own aircraft on behalf of their airline partners, and FAA has approved their own Part 135 airlines. Both companies have partnered with training organizations for future eVTOL pilot training—Archer with Etihad Training and Joby with CAE.

Unsurprisingly, major carriers plan to introduce air taxis first in some of the country’s most crowded cities. In New York, for example, Joby plans to operate shuttles from downtown heliports in Manhattan and nearby New Jersey to New York JFK and LaGuardia on behalf of Delta. Archer, meanwhile, plans to operate shuttles between the city center and United’s base at New York Newark (EWR).

In both cases, the companies say their shuttles will greatly reduce the time typically spent in road congestion. For example, Joby’s shuttle between Kearney Heliport in New Jersey and JFK takes an estimated 7 min., while Archer’s route from downtown Manhattan heliport to EWR can be completed in 10 min., compared to more than an hour by car for those journeys, according to the companies.

In addition to New York, Archer and Joby are planning to launch services on the US west coast: both startups in Los Angeles, and Archer in San Francisco. In LA, Archer has announced plans to operate from FBO sites at numerous airports including Orange County, Santa Monica, Hollywood Burbank, Long Beach, Van Nuys, and Los Angeles International (LAX). Joby hasn’t yet announced the details of its Los Angeles network yet beyond an initial site at Long Beach.

In Chicago, Archer is planning an initial route between the downtown vertiport Chicago FBO and O’Hare International.

So far, Archer is the only air taxi startup with two major airline partners. The company’s United partnership will concentrate on large hubs, allowing it to serve mid-sized, non-hub and secondary airports in collaboration with Southwest.

“We’re taking advantage of what is really Southwest’s key to market penetration—being able to take over those really convenient, smaller airports that other folks don’t fly out of, like Burbank and San Jose,” Archer CCO Nikhil Goel said. “It’s a great opportunity for us to offer more flexible travel options while doing things the Southwest way, staying focused on providing a cool customer experience that is low cost.”

Goel described Archer’s vision to provide door-to-door journeys in under three hours from “basically anywhere” in California.

“Imagine you live in Santa Monica and you’re going to Napa County,” he said. “Today, you’d have to go to LAX, fly to SFO and then do a third leg to Napa. It would probably take around five hours.”

“Soon, you’ll be able to take an Archer from our Atlantic [Aviation FBO] location in Santa Monica, fly up to Burbank and take your Southwest flight and hop on,” Goel said. “You then fly to SFO and take an eVTOL from our Signature [Aviation FBO] location there up to our Atlantic location in Napa. You could do that in three hours on a compressed timetable.”

UAM presents a compelling business case for major carriers and an excellent option for time-sensitive travelers. But is the airport shuttle application big enough for these eVTOL startups to establish a firm enough toehold in the market to enable scaled operations besides airport transfers?

Some skeptics point to the failure of helicopter-based airport shuttle services that have been tried and failed historically in U.S. markets. For eVTOL shuttles to work, therefore, they ultimately have to achieve low enough operating costs and high enough utilization rates to warrant mass adoption.

Otherwise, air taxi services run the risk of ending up as another luxury transport option for the ultra-wealthy.