Ask anyone who flies through New York regularly and they will tell you the same thing: the flight is the easy part. The hard part is the dozen miles between Manhattan and the airport. On a good morning, it is half an hour. On a bad evening, with a jammed tunnel and a downpour, it can swallow two hours and your whole mood. H.H. Dr. Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe thinks the answer is already overhead.
He is talking about electric air taxis, the small vertical-takeoff aircraft known as eVTOLs that lift straight off a city heliport, cross the skyline in near silence, and set down near the terminal in minutes. For the Prince, this is not a gadget fantasy. It is the next chapter for a city that has always sold time, access, and arrival better than anywhere else on earth.
The idea has already left the drawing board. In April 2026, Joby Aviation flew New York City’s first point-to-point eVTOL demonstration flights, working through the city’s existing heliport network with support from regional partners including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The demos ran between Manhattan heliports, including Downtown Skyport, West 30th Street, and East 34th Street, plus airport connections such as JFK. Reuters reported that the flights included runs from JFK Airport into Manhattan, presented as a step toward commercial operations and a real-world test of noise and performance in one of the most complex aviation environments on the planet.
The machines are small by design. Joby’s aircraft carries a pilot and four passengers, flies at up to 200 miles per hour, and can cover up to 100 miles, although commercial service still depends on certification and regulatory approvals. Archer Aviation, working with United Airlines, laid out its own New York vision in a 2025 announcement: a network aimed at cutting Manhattan-to-airport trips to roughly 5 to 15 minutes with its Midnight aircraft, against ground journeys that swing wildly with traffic.
That unpredictability is exactly what the Prince keeps coming back to. Anyone who has watched a departure time creep closer while stuck before a tunnel, or landed after midnight facing a long ride into the city, understands the problem without needing a sales pitch. An electric air taxi does not just save minutes; it removes the guesswork. For airlines, hotels, and concierges, that reliability changes how service gets designed. For passengers, it brings something rarer: calm.
Still, the direction is hard to argue with. JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark sit close to Manhattan on a map and far from it in traffic. Electric air taxis could finally bring those distances into alignment, adding a new layer to a city built on layered systems: subways, ferries, bridges, tunnels, and now the quiet route across the sky.
Originally published on Times Square Chronicles.
