Gotham Air: Manhattan to JFK in 6 minutes for $99
gothamair.com
gothamair.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Helicopter
It took just a few minutes to get to EWR or JFK and cost $159. The biggest selling point was not only the short commute, but that you went through security at the helipad very quickly, rather than waiting at the airport.
I believe they were a victim of the financial crisis and died around that time.
New York Airways had one notable accident: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/may-16-1977-hel...
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/helicopter-crash-timelin...
As for the concept, it's Uber for helicopters. As long as there is a need (I don't and would never live in New York so I have no idea what the demand for this is) then it may very well be successful.
It's hard to compare cars and helicopters. From the article:
"Between 2005 and 2009, there was an annual average of 1.44 fatalities (PDF) per 100,000 flying hours in nonmilitary helicopters. Over the same period, there were 13.2 traffic fatalities per 100,000 population in the United States annually. Since the average American spends around 780 hours per year (PDF) in the car, that means the fatality rate per 100,000 hours of driving time is just 0.017. Based on hours alone, helicopters are 85 times more dangerous than driving."
The annual risk of dying in the helo crash (taking the numbers from above) is 12 minutes flying RT * 12 RT/year = 144 minutes per year / 60 mins/hr * 1.44/100K or a risk of dying of 3.456 per 100K years. (overstated as the figure is fatalities per 100K hours, not fatal accidents per 100K).
The annual risk of dying in a car crash if you took that instead is 240 minutes * 12 RT/yr / 60 mins/hr * 0.017 = 0.816 per 100K years.
Over 50 years, your life expectancy has been shortened by about 12 hours. (This is the math I'm least sure about.)
Over that same 50 years, the helo has saved you 2000 hours of your life, for a net addition of almost months of life (assuming, as I do, you derive no value from the car ride to the airport).
Said differently, each roundtrip saves you about 3 hours of your life, plus gives you a fantastic view of the city on the way...
If you really can't use a laptop in a car there is still, getting something to eat, making a phone call, or even just listening to music.
Big question here of what's being measured. If this includes search and rescue helicopters, fire fighting, weather, and similar, then it's not at all comparable to routine transportation driving.
There's also a bunch of complexity about what happens to helicopter safety rates when that kind of flying becomes routine. Maybe it'll get way safer, because there are so many less risky flights, maybe it'll get more dangerous because pilots get complacent.
fwiw, i walk to work, so i hardly drive at all. If i was in a situation that i could take the flight, i'd take the flight.
Could just mean that pilots can be irrational too.
Air Car
Miles driven 40 450
Risk (millionths) 0.60 6.75
edit: that was a shallow misreading of the data. But the end concludes that air travel is roughly slightly less than an order of magnitude safer.
Per trip would be interesting Not to mention, a minor crash or serious failure in a car is usually a walk away event. A minor crash or serious failure in a plane or chopper is usually fatal. Its okay if my car breaks down on the interstate. Its not okay if my plane does over the ocean, like Air France 447.
I'm not saying air travel is unsafe. I just think we're selling the point incorrectly.
(That's one of the advantages of TSA PreCheck - not only are there fewer people in line, but the people who are in line are frequent flyers who tend to move fast.)
Google Maps tells me Manhattan to JFK Airport is a 32 kilometre taxi ride and takes three hours, plus it takes two hours to clear security at the airport.
I'm a little astounded by those numbers. Five hours to get from the couch at home to the airport. Astounding. I'm through the airport and in Melbourne city in under 2 hours.
I would definitely pay $100 to reduce that. I think $100 helicopter flights is something I would do with friends just to get a drink across town occasionally. How novel!
Compare that to anywhere in Australia where you can be sure security won't take more than 10 minutes - you can arrive at the airport with 45 minutes before your flight and still be waiting 20 minutes after you check in and pass security before you board.
I'm not too big of a fan of the AirTram + Long Island Railway (LIRR) route, which ends up at one of the major train stations, has on outside terminal (not great in the winter and slow with a lot of things to remember to do), but is about half price of that.
I've recently started doing Penn Station -> Jamaica w/ LIRR -> AirTrain, it's miles better than subway and almost preferable to car if you're paying for the car.
The subway to JFK is cheaper, but most people who live in Manhattan and can afford to fly semi-regularly are going to spring for a taxi.
On the other hand if they're too successful maybe the company they're chartering from could decide to offer service themselves and cut them out
That said, someone's got to pay the mortgage on a $2.6 million ship, plus fuel and maint and salaries etc etc.
Gotham Air is not a direct air carrier but rather provides technology and information services enabling consumers to obtain aircraft charter and shared aircraft charter services from FAA certified and DOT registered air carriers who exercise operational control over all flights .
Interesting thought that the picture of the heli contradicts that (says "Gotham Air" on the side). That's no small point actually. Gives someone who doesn't read the fine print the idea that they do operate the aircraft. I understand why they do that but it is a bit deceptive.
Original: http://hereandtherewithoutacare.com/wp-content/gallery/new-y...
Faked, from Gotham Air site: http://static.wixstatic.com/media/b49883_4bfd352941a043ba83c...
Likewise if there was an accident someone would have to say they relied on that information and was mislead. Unlikely (especially in the case of death how do you prove that?). Plus it is common practice to operate like this by similar parties.
Here is a similar company for jets:
Note how they do the same thing but don't have any logos on the jets.
http://www.bluestarjets.com/?page=company-payment-legal
My guess is that the "Gotham Air" will disappear from the home page picture.
I have no idea if Gotham plans to actually operate that way, but I'd be shocked if there were actually a legal problem if they did.
HeliNY, for which they are a reseller, charges $925 for that trip as a charter. Aircraft capacity is 5 (maybe 6). So the regular price, assuming they make you wait for a full helicopter, is probably about $200.
All kinds of services advertise one-time introductory rates that way.
Which country do you live in ? I know nobody does ISP introductory prices in France.
The prices in bold are only for the first 12 months
So an $800 phone costing $60 a month for 2 years ($93 per month) gets advertised as 'free iPhone at just $30!'
Not sure if it works on our generation. On the one hand, obviously it does to some extent, else they wouldn't do it. I know I always made spreadsheets of monthly-average-costs (taking into account resell value of the phone) everytime I got into a 2-year contract. I know a few friends operate like that, too... In any case I think the fake advertised rate may not convince anyone in and of itself, but it does grab the attention, and that's such a key facet of marketing. For example here I'm sure plenty of people would be interested in paying $200 for the helicopter trip, but they probably wouldn't have immediately paid attention to it or had friends tell them about it or have it stuck in their minds if it wasn't priced $99.
You really have to read the fine print of their promotions.
* Where we actually mean "a smaller airport 150km away from that city and you're on your own for getting to it"
† Plus €20 ticketing fee, €20 payment-processing fee, €20 boarding-pass issuance fee, €20 checked baggage fee, €20 carry-on baggage fee, €20 fee for no baggage, €20 plane-boarding fee, €20 airport use fee, €20 fee-handling fee and other additional fees as indicated in the terms and conditions
http://mikeash.com/tmp/screenshot_F1E1DACD-A595-455E-A5C1-E2...
And it wouldn't let me proceed until I chose something; leaving it at the default wasn't allowed. Very tricky.
Certainly not great. But at least it's reasonably clear that the number they give you isn't the full story, even if finding the real one takes a bit of legwork. Not trying to defend them, but this helicopter thingy is a bit worse.
In my experience with these things (although I haven't tried with Cox), month 25 is usually when prices go back down, because that's when they might lose you to a competitor.
Another issue is if they are flying to JFK the idea is you are taking a flight obviously out of JFK. So given that helis are small and weight sensitive I wonder if the app collects that info and/or what the baggage restrictions are.
> A beautiful new Bell 407 helicopter is just minutes away!
Now it really is for the 1%. At $99 I can imagine a family wanting to take one to reduce stress and complexities.
How long until drones can take us? :)
Why? Because they have to meet the same safety requirements as existing aircraft, but carry enough electronics to fly the aircraft as autonomously and as safely as a human pilot, which I think is actually a substantial hurdle to overcome.
If you assume you're taking out the pilot and replacing him with electronics, and assuming your average pilot is ~80-90kg, that's a fairly substantial amount of weight available for computing systems.
The theory between small and large craft autonomous flight should be the same, we've already got plenty of aircraft sized drones flying about that are packed with ordnance and axillary sensors for imaging and surveillance.
You have more things to worry about regarding subsystems on larger craft, but even those will likely just be additional code rather than extra heavy hardware on board.
I think the most likely pathway for a passenger drone will be retrofitting existing aircraft, and that could amount to a bunch of sensory equipment, a main control unit and a bunch of servos. Nothing too heavy, and it would just eat into a helicopters existing weight limits which are often fairly substantial.
> Gotham’s going rates are higher than the initial $99. After the introductory flight, prices will range from $199 to $219, depending on the time of day and the airport, Hayes said, adding that the choppers will depart from three Gotham Air terminals in Manhattan.
A helicopter flight is cool, sure...
...but "2 hours" is complete nonsense. Even if traffic is terrible, you can always take LIRR+AirTrain from Penn Station to JFK for less than $15, and it's basically guaranteed to take 35 min or less, straight to your desired terminal. Heck, I took it this morning, and there was a new train every 10 min.
And most people are going to find it quicker to get to Penn St than to get to the heliport in the first place, so it doesn't even have an advantage there...
And that's from Penn Station. Add the time it takes to get to Penn Station from where you're going, it can easily be between 1h30m and 2h. I did this trip yesterday, and from where I started in Soho until the airport, it was 1h45m.
This is absolutely a service I would use, provided it's $100 per person max. If it turns out to be $300 after the intro period then forget about it.
Sadly one of their copters crashed into the ocean in 2005, killing all 14 aboard. The reason was purely technical. The hydraulic steering system got stuck due to debris that had came loose from an inner coating. The copter was impossible to steer and started spinning around its axis, and spun 13 times until hitting the ocean.
It was the beginning of the end for the company. Later in 2008 they started again with two AgustaWestland AW139 copters. I was aboard once, and it was a fantastic experience. However, it boggled my mind how much even a modern helicopter vibrates. It's a wonder to me how copters can withstand the constant violent vibration. Apparently they can, except in rare cases.
In 2004 Copterline transported 75 000 passengers. If all flights were full (12 passengers and 2 pilots) it means about 17 flights a day, every single day.
Copterline went out of business in December 2008 because it was unprofitable. It's sad, because flying on a helicopter is a cool experience mortals like me usually can't experience without commercial flights.
You have no idea what you're talking about
It's one thing for Amazon to put your stuff in there, another, for a drone carrying people fly next to an airport
Is it really hard to describe services in plain English?
BTW, it's a good idea. Lagos used to have one before.
These guys are on top of their buzz game
A taxi from central London to Heathrow can easily cost 90 quid unless it's a booked minicab which then drops it to 40-60 quid, you can take the heathrow express but thats also 40 quid both ways + additional fare to get to paddington.
I would love to use this service both for the speed and the experience (unlike the scenic traffic jam you get otherwise) just to get a sky high tour of NYC...
Too bad it's never gonna scale, there probably will be huge limits on the amount of luggage you can take (which will make it either very expensive or completely unusable for international travelers) and the costs are going to go trough the roof quick enough.
You can get to LGA via public transit for $2.50 (subway+bus). For JFK there's an extra $5.00 for the airtrain.
Technologists are the new "hedge fund brats". I agree it's not a huge price-tag given how awesome it sounds compared to the similarly-priced alternatives, but let's be careful when we talk about what might "break anyone's pocket."
Getting to JFK in public transport might work for a domestic flight but i won't want to go trough NY's public transport with 2 full suit cases.
When I travel it's usually for business and the time savings of the Express vs. the Tube just makes it a complete no-brainer for me.
People often complain that it's a very expensive and very short train ride but they forget that the short travel time is a FEATURE.
The express is sometimes worth it, but it very much depends on where you're going; the express simply dumps you out at Paddington which does not have great onward connections. Whereas the Piccadilly line, being a tube line that goes right through the centre, can often take you directly where you want to go (particularly as a tourist) - Piccadilly itself, Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Kings Cross, ...
If you're fine with lugging baggage up and down the tube stairwells, then fine by you, but I prefer the Express for any number of reasons and time of travel/distance traveled isn't the sole determinant of my choice.
For business I figure if the privatized transport from the airport is 1/2 as long and not silly costs I'll expense it without guilt. At supposedly $99 from JFK it sounds legit for a short business trip. Granted they claim PMV, so YMMV.
Certainly 1 full suitcase?
Shirts, pants, socks, underwear, perhaps a suit or two, and a pair of extra shoes? I can easily fill a suitcase with that stuff.
Do you do laundry on your trip? That would certainly significantly reduce the quantity of clothes required. Now that all airlines are charging per bag (previously all airlines allowed two free bags) it probably makes more sense to figure out how to wash clothes abroad than to lug around a lot of extra clothing.
There is the connect which is about 60-70% of the rate of the Express but it tends not to run late at night, and every time there are any works done on the line it takes a back seat to the express.
The problem with the Piccadilly line is that it takes ages, it doesn't run late (service stops around 11pm and doesn't renew till about 5.30ish iirc) and it's the most delayed line of the tube system, especially the parts towards Heathrow. So many people don't take it, most people that do are young people that take it during the middle of the day since it's also when most of the low cost airliners operate.
I think that most people in London at this point are just used to paying the premium of living in London even tho at this point i don't really see a point for that. The salaries are double at least than pretty much anywhere else in the UK, but the cost of living is also at least as high.
$500+ a week (double that for the return) is a phenomenal amount of money to spend on commuting. If you value your time at $50 an hour and someone else is paying, then sure it may be worth it, but this won't scale simply because its impractically expensive for most people.
But I agree, $99 for a helicopter ride over New York is probably a lot cheaper than the experience companies.
If i would go to NY for fun i would consider this as part of the tour, if i go there on business as i usually do it would be quite hard for me to expense it not because of the price but because i would have to put a helicopter ride on the expense report which might raise more than a few eyebrows at work...
This service might actually be worth it, from an economic point of view -- it probably cuts between 30 and 60 minutes commute time depending on the time of the day, and it also cuts another 30-45 minutes of security time. Depending on how much you value your time, this could be worth it. Doesn't seem too scalable though, which is unfortunate.
Given there are many people who value their time quite highly in Manhattan, I expect seats on the helicopter(s) will actually be sold out most of time.
(One more aspect to consider in the utility-calculation: what's the probability the helicopter crashes?)
Yellow cabs are fixed rate $55 + tolls. I can get an uber for around the same price, often less depending on time of day.
While the idea of having a helicopter fly you out to your airport is great, the actuality of it is likely pretty much on par with car travel.
The biggest value I see is in transportation to the Hamptons or Nantucket. There's no security transfer/terminal concerns, the drive out there on the weekend is a nightmare, and you potentially save time.
I didn't realize it until now, but they've done Uber Chopper in quite a few places: http://blog.uber.com/tag/uberchopper/
My first thoughts as a layman are, if the service takes off [0] it could be made really feasible if they find a way to rent, land and operate a monster like the Mil Mi-26 [1], which takes 60 civilians or 90 troops.
People would use the service just to fly to the airport for fun.
"You never need to share the car strangers and we can pick you up and drop you off at your front door. [double asterisk] "
And the [double asterisk] means you need to book the flight 48 hours in advance if you want the car as backup. That would preclude any crowd-sourced flights via their app. Lol. So much for chopper-uber.
So what's the standard rate?
Under "Our Promise to You": "You never need to share the car [?] strangers [...]"
Then, on the footnote to that same section: " Ground travel guarantee available for tavel to JFK & EWR for travel booked [...]"
This is very similar to how private charters operate at commercial airports they have their own security checks which are usually much much more lax than the commercial passengers.
Some airport shuttles (in some countries) also allow you to do a security precheck and to turn in your luggage prior to even reaching the airport.
>The biggest selling point was not only the short commute, but that you went through security at the helipad very quickly, rather than waiting at the airport.
As a side note these things are like venture debt - they seem to only work in boom times. Every time there is a tightening in the financial markets these businesses tend to fold, as in US Helicopter, NY Airways, et al. Bubblicious!
You guys can take the helo, I'll be fine leaving extra early for the airport and possibly sitting in traffic :)
Still not as good as having a private helicopter. I hear NYC to PHL is 30 mins by heli.
Doubtful, unless you're in some kind of military helicopter. NYC to PHL is close to 100 miles, no helicopters go 200 miles per hour.
> You never need to share the car strangers and we can pick you up and drop you off at your front door.
I live near the 34th street one, and I am amazed by the number of people that use them during rush hour on weekdays. There might be 50-100 people that commute by helicopter into the city each day at that heliport. That's certainly more than I would have expected.
The 30th St heliport is due to close...at some point due to its location in Hudson River Park but I suspect there will be some sort of negotiated solution to relocate it.
You never need to share the car strangers and we can....
On top they are saying "Call your friends or meet some new ones on board."
At the Tesla section, they are saying - "You never need to share the car strangers". Although there is a typo here (missing 'with')
Typo here, just FYI
it's plausible, since only the first ride is $99. Travel time is correct too:
JFK is a ways out. Newark is much less of a big deal because there's good train service between that airport and Penn Station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9c4I3nRIFA (Explained by the same guy who explains the differential in that old instructional video)
But helicopter crashes are frequently survivable. Here's some anecdotal evidence. Long ago I knew an ex South Vietnamese Army guy who crashed two helicopters in a single day during the war. Also my old boss, Annapolis grad, once mentioned crashing a helicopter somewhere in Texas. Even knowing that, I still flew with him in his Beech and in his Aeronca Air Knocker. The younger we are, the more we believe in our own invulnerability and good luck.
Having said all that, I share your trepidation. Fortunately, today's commercial jets are orders of magnitude safer (as measured by actual crash statistics) than helicopters and general aviation fixed wing aircraft.
That would be my intuition as well--especially for that route as traffic will frequently make driving pretty slow (and, indeed, that's sort of the point of the service).
A very large amount of private aircraft related accidents happen because of extreme conditions in which a commercial airliner would have not been flying under in any case. Privately owned aircraft also tend to be much less well maintained and their pilots have considerably fewer flight hours than big or small commercial aircraft.
This is when "safety" takes a backseat to private ownership and responsibility, it's not because smaller aircraft are inherently less safe.
When embark on a private flight in a private aircraft there's virtually almost no circumstances in which you will not be cleared off for take off. Not to mention that anything upto a small jet can does take of from any sufficiently long patch of dirt rather than a fully staffed airport with ground crew that services and clears the aircraft.
If these guys will follow the same rules there is nothing much more inherently unsafe in being in a smaller or a rotary wing aircraft than in a brand new 747-800.
If you apply napkin calculations you can also make it sound that military aircraft are much more less safe than civilian ones, even in such cases in which they are the exact same aircraft in a different color scheme. It's not that the aircraft is less safe it's that the conditions it operates under are inherently more dangerous both in peace time and war.
For this specific service, there are a couple of things that do make it inherently less safe than being in a brand new 747-800. Specifically, there's much less redundancy and fewer emergency options for when something goes wrong. If you lose an engine on a 747 then you just keep going. If you lose an engine, or rather the engine, on a Manhattan-JFK helicopter flight then you're going down extremely fast and you have few or no good options for where to put the thing. It's similar for suddenly encountering a flock of geese (the odds of a safe landing in the river with a 100% survival rate are considerably lower with a helicopter than with an A320), fuel exhaustion, or a sudden pilot heart attack (I'm guessing there aren't two pilots in these things).
Mid-air collisions are another potential danger. I'm guessing that a helicopter like this doesn't have a TCAS system, and not all of the airspace in question requires ATC clearance. Nine people died in a helicopter/airplane collision in NYC in 2009, and it could happen again.
I don't mean to paint an excessively bleak picture here. I'd have no qualms about taking a flight on one of these helicopters, aside from the price. But at the same time we shouldn't kid ourselves by thinking that it's safer than taking a car, let alone as safe as an airliner.
Also, a skilled pilot can autorotate a Bell 407 without damage or injury. In fact, it would be easier than ditching a A320.
A friend of mine had a near mid-air in a Bell 407 over a city, flying between buildings, due to the other helicopter operating on an IFR clearance below authorized IFR altitude, shortly after takeoff. Luckily, this particular Bell 407 had EVS(Enhanced Vision System) FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed) and they were able to descend hard and passed under "IFR" helicopter. The FAA busted the other pilot for failing to set their transponder correctly, and failing to maintain proper lookout, among other things.
As for autorotation, my worry isn't so much the procedure (although it sounds much trickier than a gliding landing in an airplane) but the fact that you don't get much horizontal maneuvering and there aren't many good places to land in a dense city, and the fact that there are many single points of failure that make it much more likely to happen.