The New York Times

February 28, 2006 By Joe Sharkey We have a getaway place in Tucson, near Saguaro National Park. Usually, we've noticed, the coyotes get to yowling around 4:30 in the morning. There must be a thousand of them in the desert and the Rincon foothills, and why they set up this commotion just before dawn is a question I cannot answer. The yowling chorus lasts no more than a minute.

Then, inexplicably, they stop, the desert solitude returns and we drift back to sleep. Clang! It's a few minutes after 4 a.m., and I accidentally let the iron front gate bang shut as I lug a suitcase out to the rental car. I haven't had coffee and my mood is as dark as the moon-limned landscape. My wife shushes me. ''You'll get the coyotes going,'' she whispers. ''The coyotes,'' I point out, ''can go right back to sleep or do whatever it is they do after 4:30. We, on the other hand, have to get to the airport by 5 o'clock to start a whole miserable day of flying home.

And the coyotes will manage to scrounge up some kind of an edible meal today. Unlike us.'' Away we went, another day of air travel. Or, I should say, another day and night. With delays in Houston and congestion in Newark, including a misrouted bag, we got home at 10 p.m. As every business traveler knows, it is taking longer than ever to get from Point A to Point B. That is partly because the schedules of domestic airlines are shrinking. According to eSkyGuide from American Express, an online guide to flight schedules, the average number of weekly domestic commercial flights scheduled for March is 189,271 and the average number of weekly available seats is 17.5 million -- down 5.3 percent and 5.1 percent respectively from last March. Time being money on most business trips, is there any hope? Maybe, assuming that the nascent air-taxi business -- built on the imminent introduction of low-cost so-called very light jets -- has a real future. Say you are a business traveler who works in the White Plains high-tech corridor and you have a meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Flying commercial, you would leave a day early. ''The next day, you have your meeting, but chances are you won't be able to get back that day,'' said Rick Adam, the chief executive of Adam Aircraft. ''So that's a three-day trip.'' Adam is one of several aircraft manufacturers that are about to introduce very light jets -- little fuel-efficient four- to six-seat aircraft with ranges of about 1,200 miles and price tags in the $1.8 million to $2.4 million range, well under the current entry-level prices for business jets. But the betting is that these very light jets -- also known as V.L.J.'s and microjets -- will eventually be the workhorses of a new air transportation system providing on-demand, or air-taxi, service with limousine-size little jets.
One key is the fact that 5,000 general aviation airports around the country can handle these very light jets. Right now, 70 percent of domestic commercial air traffic is concentrated at just 30 major airports. The Federal Aviation Administration predicts that about 4,500 light jets will be in service by 2016. Besides Adam Aircraft, the top players in this market are Eclipse Aviation, which is marketing a very light jet that its founder, Vern Raburn, refers to as the ''Model T'' of aviation. Other players include major aircraft manufacturers like Cessna, which is developing a very light jet that it calls Citation Mustang, and Embraer, which recently announced a model called Phenom 100. Serious players are entering the air-taxi business. One is POGO Jet Inc., which expects to begin air-taxi service next year and is being run by entrepreneurs including Robert L. Crandall, the former chief executive of American Airlines. Another is DayJet, founded by Ed Iacobucci, a former chairman of Citrix Systems. Hurdles still abound, including increased demand on larger secondary airports that already have heavy general aviation traffic, like Teterboro in New Jersey and Westchester County Airport north of New York. A viable air-taxi system needs to be able to draw from enough potential passengers to keep the planes as full as possible. Air-taxi operators are ''going to want to fly into airports where it's highly likely that when you drop somebody off you can fairly quickly find somebody who wants to hop in the taxi and go someplace else,'' Mr. Adam said. And what would the fare be? That is perhaps the biggest question. Assuming the air-taxi model works, how much of a premium will business travelers pay for on-demand air travel? Based on current projections, an air-taxi trip would probably cost ''two to three times'' a commercial flight, Mr. Adam said. ''But you get back two days in return,'' he added.

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