Airbus-owned Voom brings its on-demand helicopter service to the US
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The only thing that is moderately interesting to someone that's not a billionaire are the flights to Napa. At first I thought it was competing with some of the wine tasting buses that drive up and back but they only do 2 flights a week (Friday-Monday). That implies a weekend trip. I guess that make sense.
Overall, seems not super useful. I guess I am not the target demographic.
I hope we see more of this type of alternative options...opt-out of TSA (until its so big it gets attention), P2P, nimble, small-scale.
I don't think they target PA<->SF traffic. This looks more like a last mile connection for people who want to get to Palo Alto, from outside of bay area. Given how many VCs are there, there's some potential market for it.
1) SFO to Downtown PA: 30 mins 2) Palo Alto Airport to Downtown PA: 15 minutes
for $250 one way? Better be some pretty good VCs/Lawyers to pay an extra ~$400 round trip.
I'm not saying that this is a good business and they'll have lots of clients. But there's some possibility of it.
I was astounded at the frequency, low altitude, and cacophony of police helicopter missions in Fresno when I spent about 6 weeks at @dmpayton's house. Like, WTF. It feels like they just want to remind you that they exist every couple hours.
They were frequently low enough to be deafening or painful to the ears. On several occasions, I was able to feel the ground effect.
One of them was so low (I estimate, based on my fairly humble amount of experience at drone flights, that it was around 80-100ft, perhaps briefly even lower than that) that it blew all of the leaves off of a tree (this was in November, when they had already turned). The next morning a bunch of neighborhood kids had a ball playing in the enormous pile of fresh crunchy leaves.
I'm confident that the number of helicopter missions in Fresno can be reduced by 95% with no noticeable impact on public safety.
I'd rather just ban assholery than create a steep asshole tax. It doesn't bother me that a few rich people will have to wait in traffic like everyone else (or better - stop traveling for cross-town meetings and take a phone call!).
Leave low altitude flight to emergency services.
There is a pretty well developed theory of econ & law of when it makes sense to have financial penalties and when it makes sense to have criminal penalties. I don't think I could do justice to it in this comment box, but suffice it to say, "only criminal penalties, no financial ones" is wrong.
Just ban the bloody things outright.
Obviously, it's impossible to give that money to the people who heard the helicopter, but if you amortize all the flights in the area (say, all of LA) over all the people who live there, and reduce their taxes by that amount, then financially it works out the same. That still leaves some problems (complexity in setting a new tax on helicopter flights, differing value on not-having-helicopter-flights, difficulty of estimation, and so on), and many people want to discourage the mentality of "you can throw money at a problem to get rid of it", but conceptually it seems plausible for taxing the flight to be better than banning it entirely.
This solution pays me for my inconvenience. It doesn't prevent the inconvenience in the first place or from happening again.
Instead we're left with the alternative of wasting half a day or more running down and up. I get that you shouldn't hate the player but hate the game but in this case the game kind of sucks and that's just for local folks.