One of the biggest headaches of traveling or living in big cities is traveling. Sitting in huge traffic jams moving a foot every ten minutes is something that everyone hates, but not something that they can avoid. The super rich are an exception. Individuals that need to get to the airport during peak times can do so while bypassing traffic problems. Blade Bounce, an app-based aviation service, allows customers to book various aircraft for their travel needs. For example, the one hour drive from the surrounding area to Teterboro airport in New Jersey can be transformed into a five minute flight for $800 for six passengers. The average price for similar services of direct competitors of Blade Bounce is about $3500 which makes Blade Bounce an attractive service.
This company originally only had service range in California and the northeastern part of the United States but has plans to expand. Overseas, Blade Bounce has chosen Mumbai, India as its first location outside of its birthplace, the United States. India is experiencing strong growth in many sectors, especially technology. One of the main reasons Blade Bounce decided to open up in Mumbai is because of the city’s strong economy. The transportation infrastructure has not grown as quickly as the population of the city, which in turn induces friction in transportation that the company hopes to ease. Blade Bounce isn’t the only company working on these air taxi services with companies such as JetSetGo looking to take over the industry in India.
Methods of transportation are always evolving and changing, especially thanks to technology. Ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft are examples of this. More recent and slightly different, are Lime and Bird with their bikes and scooters. Autonomous vehicles are next on the list with companies such as Waymo spearheading the effort to make this new technology more widespread. New legislation had to be passed and new technologies/infrastructure had to be developed for these technologies. Even further in the future, with autonomous air taxis, a travel dream/current project for many companies, there will be a whole new level of regulation and infrastructure that will have to be considered. Will this technology hit the market and do well or crash and burn? People are already nervous to travel in autonomous land vehicles. How will they fare with these small or large autonomous aircraft? There are many questions to be considered if these autonomous air taxis are to become the new norm. And most of all, it needs time.