The interior photo of the spacious Caravan says it all to us air charter believers. While we have linked twice to Linear Air in the last month, we could not resist this story. What Peter Howe of the Boston Globe gets right is that Linear Air is chipping away at the airline model today with a Cessna Caravan that costs $438 roundtrip between Bedford, MA and Teterboro, NJ. When fares are at that level, larger airlines should worry and see the Darwinian pressure over the horizon. What the author of the article fails to see, however, is the that "build it and they will come" does not apply to VLJ's, but certainly does to Linear Air's air taxi model. In other words, many experts have made a strong case that it is the culture of entrepreneurs that makes air taxi happen, not the creation of inexpensive jets that are underutilized by the same old crew that can't fathom operating an aircraft more than 800 hours per year.

While we must certainly sound like a broken record at this point, all the evidence point to the fact that this story illustrates a small air taxi firm doing the VLJ thing today with existing equipment. (A Caravan that costs less to build and operate, yet hauls MORE than a microjet or VLJ.) Either way, once the small jets fall into the right hands, certainly the air taxi revolution will be at hand. The only question is, who will be able to operate them 1000 + hours per year without breaking down or snivelling about how this is just too much flying.