AVIATION Taxis in the Sky

The man at the wheel does not jabber, there is no traffic to sit through, tips are often forbidden and the view is exhilarating. This is a taxi? In many parts of the U.S., it is -an air taxi, the fastest-growing segment of U.S. aviation. Air taxis link the 600 cities served by scheduled airlines with more than 6,000 communities that are not, carry businessmen, government officials and celebrities where they need to go in a hurry, and perform hundreds of functions from serving as ambulances to charting forest fires. In the past ten years, while 13 major airlines have shrunk to eleven and the ranks of feeder lines have remained at 13, the number of air-taxi operators certified by the Federal Aviation Agency has nearly doubled, from 1,560 to 3,026.

Specializing in Newsmen. There are almost as many jobs for air taxis as there are planes. During the Florida season, Chalk's Flying Service of Miami ferries as many as 5,000 vacationers a month to the Bahamas, often runs 18 flights a day. Chicago's Executive Airlines specializes in flying newsmen to the scene of riots and disasters, also frequently carries such luminaries as Bob Hope, Barry Goldwater and Jackie Kennedy. Every weekday a Cessna 172 floatplane from Lake Union Air Service whisks Chip Prentice, 7, between his island summer home on Puget Sound and school in Seattle 15 miles away. Cost to his dad, the owner of two manufacturing firms: $16 a day, round trip. When Winthrop Rockefeller or ex-Labor Tycoon David McDonald travels from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, he makes the trip by air taxi in 30 minutes (v. two hours by auto) at a cost of $60.40.

Most flights are quite expensive -largely because taxi outfits have neither federal subsidies nor fare regulation. Taximen usually charge 250 a mile or $35 an hour for the hire of single-engine planes, 400 to 700 a mile or $75 to $120 per hour of flying time for twin-engine models. For busy men, the time saved makes the cost worthwhile. Fully one-fifth of the passengers on Jacksonville's Gateway Aviation are lawyers, who for $85 each can zip 170 miles to Tallahassee, the state capital, and back in 2 hr. 10 min. v. an eight-hour trip by auto. Many taximen provide sandwiches and drinks, sell flight insurance, even let holders of well-known credit cards charge their flights.

Feeding on Customers. Helicopters, costly to buy and operate, constitute only a tiny fraction of the nation's 9,000-plane taxi fleet. Taxi companies range from one-man, one-plane outfits to Detroit's 28-plane Tag Airlines, which has 100 employees and takes in $1,000,000 a year. Typical of the type is nine-plane Pilgrim Airlines, which has tripled its business in five years (to 15,000 passengers a year) by offering six scheduled flights a day from New London, Conn., to New York's Kennedy Airport. The trip costs $14.50 and takes only 50 min. instead of the three hours by car. Such regular commuter flights have become important sources of traffic for the major carriers. United Air Lines recently began reserving seats on connecting air taxis for its customers, and taximen would like the airlines to sell tickets too.

Loot Aloft. In emergencies the air taximan's problems can become hair-raising. Rushing a tiny electronic component to a Cape Kennedy rocket being held in a countdown, Florida Taximan Stuart Campbell had to land after midnight on a road marked only by auto headlights. When Pilot Robert Winsor of Executive Airlines learned over his earphones that his passenger was an escaping bank robber, he coolly switched his landing (blaming it on "weather") from Detroit to a suburban airport. There, police leaped from behind bushes along the runway and seized the suspect -and his briefcase of loot.

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