DayJet has announced an event on Oct 4 in Lakeland to officially launch their air taxi service. Well known blogger Jon Udell recently talked to the CEO of DayJet about the operations/logistics of their company. There is also a podcast of their talk.

In this interview, Ed describes how he worked through a false start, realized that on-demand air travel would require a platform, decided that Eclipse Aviation’s line of precision-engineered, mass-produceable, and affordable jets would be the platform’s equivalent to the personal computer, and then conceived and created its network operating system and software service infrastructure.

There were two major research and development challenges. First, how do you find an optimal routing solution when there’s no fixed schedule and when every new reservation ripples through the entire network?

What's interesting in the comments of Jon's post is that two people talk about rail as an alternative to travel for distances under 500 miles. I don't care it it's rail or air taxi, I'd love to have an easy solution to get from this area to Tallahassee or Jacksonville. In each of those two cases, driving is a huge pain and saps a bunch of time. Too bad that commuter rail thing won't extend to Polk County :-)

As for DayJet, I know I'll be taking a few trips via their service. Once I do I'll post review of the experience.