The Urban Helicopter Dream Is Rising Again

A thousand-plus feet above Silicon Valley, I watched the quilt of tech campuses, cul-de-sacs, and forest groves below unfurl. The pilot of the helicopter that was shuttling me the 30 miles from Palo Alto to San Francisco crackled in via intercom. He expected business to be booming soon. “That’s why,” he said, pointing downwards at the rush-hour traffic lurching below.

If you’ve got an important meeting to make and a few hundred bucks to burn, Voom, the Bay Area’s new passenger helicopter service, wants to be your new commuting option. The company began offering regularly scheduled flights from five airports around the region in September, joining a handful of other on-demand chopper providers running in other U.S. cities, such as Uber Copter and Blade. Voom’s slogan: “Helicopter flights for everyone.”