Air Taxis :-) Cool...

A private engineering company servicing the British air force says it's 18 months away from introducing a flying taxi that could ferry passengers from the outskirts of London to the city centre in three minutes, and for the cost of a conventional fare.

The Jetpod T-100, a virtually silent, six-seat, twin-engine jet replete with horizontal and vertical thrusters that allow it to hover like a helicopter, will reach 560 km/h and needs just 125 metres of space to take off or land.

Priced at under $1 million US each, the Jetpod will coast onto grass or dirt runways less than one-tenth the normal length, dotted throughout a city. It isn't meant to travel between cities or ferry monied folk to weekend homes, but will concentrate instead on winging suburbanites downtown for about $60 to $75.

It's a cheap solution for cities that are looking for creative ways to reduce traffic congestion -- and a gamble for entrepreneurs looking to tap into what is predicted to be a lucrative commercial market for urban micro-planes in the near future, its inventors say.

"It's the right moment for flying machines, I guess," Mike Dacre, managing director of the plane's developer Avcen Limited of London, said Tuesday. "If you live to be 300 years old you don't expect to get the kind of response we've had so far."

Interest from investors and the public has been frenzied since the design was unveiled last week. Dacre has given non-stop interviews and received inquiries from as far as New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates. The firm's website shut down after receiving 16 million hits.

Jetpod's rugged undercarriage is being built to withstand multiple daily flights over low terrain, and a proprietary noise attenuation system reduces the whooshing of its engines by 50 per cent over today's light jets.

The demo now under development will be flight tested over the coming months, and should be certified to fly in Britain within five years, Dacre said.