Meet Blade, the Uber for Helicopters in NYC
Uber may be convenient, but New York’s Hamptons set doesn’t always have the time or patience to deal with the traffic getting out to their summer spots on Long Island’s East End.
Blade, which calls itself “the first digitally driven short distance aviation company,” says it has a solution for those who want to get to East Hampton within the hour, or Southampton in 35 minutes: Ordering their own chartered helicopter via an app.
Related: 10 Biggest Tech Flops of the Century
Once you download the app, you can select your flight time, chill out in a Blade lounge at a Manhattan heliport and then enjoy “a snack, a drink, a newspaper and lots of other fun things” on your flight. Passengers are allowed one carry-on weighing 25 lbs. maximum — but no golf clubs.
The service, which launched in May 2014, doesn’t come cheap, at $595 per seat to go to Quogue, Southampton, East Hampton, Montauk or Fire Island. Blade can also be booked for trips to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod and some other destinations in the Northeast as well as to the New York area’s major airports.
The website advises that if your flight is grounded due to bad weather, you’ll be offered a ride to your destination in a chauffeured Mercedes at no extra cost.
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
- The Best Things to Charge on Your Credit Card
- The Wealthy Worry, Too—And It’s Not All About Money
- 10 Best Islands in the World
Will Trump's Tax Cuts Really Happen? Economists Are Surprisingly Optimistic
Despite all the thorny questions swirling around President Trump's nascent tax reform plan, 29 of 38 economists surveyed by Bloomberg in a monthly poll said they expect Congress to cut taxes by November of next year.
The hitch: The economists don’t expect the cuts will help the economy much. The median projection of a larger group of 71 economists is for 2018 growth of 2.3 percent, up only slightly from 2.1 percent this year — and by 2019, the economists see growth slipping back to 2 percent.
