Very happy to have Will here from the CFO of Blade. You want to go ahead with your presentation? I'm sure we'll have some more folks coming in late here.
Well, thanks so much for, for having us. Will Heyburn, CFO of Blade. Before we get started, we'll talk about some forward-looking statements during the presentation today. They're subject to risks and uncertainties. Encourage everyone to look at our most recent SEC filings for more information. But for those of you folks who aren't as familiar with Blade, Blade is an asset-light air mobility and logistics company, and we're focused on organ transportation and short-distance passenger transportation. We're doing this today, growing with conventional aircraft. In fact, we just had our very first profitable quarter, on both a free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA basis, and we've got a lot of opportunity for continued growth across both of these two business segments.
And then as we look farther out in the future, we see an incredible opportunity to revolutionize what we're doing by transitioning to eVTOL, or electric vertical aircraft, as we call them, which are quieter, they're carbon neutral, and they're going to drastically expand our addressable market in terms of places to land. Because right now, one of the biggest limiting factors for how we can grow is having places we can land that are convenient for our customers in the passenger business. So I'll talk a little bit more, just high level about our business segments. In medical, we are the largest dedicated air transporter of human organs in the United States. We're doing this with a combination of fixed wing and rotorcraft, moving primarily hearts, livers, and lungs, coast to coast in the U.S., and we'll talk more about this later.
In the passenger segment, we have two business lines. In short distance, we're using primarily rotorcraft and seaplanes to move people between 10-100 miles. That's in places like Vancouver, New York, and southern France, that are either congested or geographically contested, or in best case, they're both. And so we can save folks a lot of time without having to fly very far. So some of these products are competitive with ground transportation in terms of their cost. If you think about flying between Manhattan and one of the commercial airports in New York, it starts at $195, and I would bet that most folks, their car service costs more than that. Jet and other includes our jet charter service and payments that were received from partners that want to get in front of our customers.
So there's a lot of value that we get from the density of passengers, from their engagement with our brand, and partners will pay to have that connection with our customers and with our brand. And then we have a great jet charter business, and importantly, when you think about the aircraft that we're using, exact same equipment is being utilized for our medical and our passenger business. The same helicopter that could fly you to the airport today in New York, will be flying a heart for NYU Langone tonight. So it gives us these great economies of scale with our business. The jets that we utilize for organs are also VIP-configured passenger jets, so you can move them back and forth across the different businesses.
We have enough scale that a lot of these aircraft are dedicated to specific business lines, but it helps us manage the risk because you know you have all the use cases, and you have all the demand. And in aviation, the most important thing is scale. And so though we are asset light, we don't own or operate any of these aircraft, what we do for a significant portion of the flying, kind of the base load capacity, if you will, is we contract through capacity purchase agreements, where we're committing to a certain number of hours we're going to fly per year, per aircraft. This allows us to push our pricing down lower, get better availability, get the 24/7, 365 crewing that we need for medical.
And in many of these agreements, we're actually emulating the same fixed cost leverage you would get if you owned aircraft, because once we hit those minimum hour guarantees, we're flying at a much lower rate that's close to just the cost of your fuel and your hourly maintenance. So we've kind of been able to strike this great balance, where we have the flexibility and the capital efficiency of the asset-light model, but we have the economics and the fixed cost leverage that you would only be able to get if you were owning aircraft, except we don't have to own them. So it's really been a fantastic business for us, and we sell our services in two different ways, but we always pay for them the same way. We always pay by the hour.
So, whatever agreement we have, it rolls up to some hourly rate for that aircraft. And then we have by the seat products and charter products. In the passenger business, it's about an even split of both. So when we're flying by the seat, we've paid for that entire flight, because we're paying by the hour, and we're paying our landing fees directly, and then we need to get our passenger load factor up to a certain level in order to start making money. For an example, in Airport, we have to have 2.5 out of 6 seats full to start making money. And we had an important milestone this quarter, where it's the first quarter where Airport made money on a flight profit basis, too.
So there's a process of getting to that break-even utilization, but once you do, we can get paid more because we're taking that risk. So this is 20% plus flight profit margins, and when you think about our more mature businesses, like flying from New York to the Hamptons, we can get 35% flight margins. So as we get more mature, we have extreme pricing power, and we're able to really leverage the model. In charter, our unit on the cost side and on the revenue side is the same, so we're not taking risk. In medical, we're getting paid on a per-trip basis to go pick up an organ and fly it back, and so we're able to have predictable double-digit margins. In jet charter, not as complicated logistically, probably closer to 10%.
In medical, we're about 18.5% flight profit margins, and we have a goal to get above 20 over the coming quarters. Then we have a bunch of revenue that comes in on top of that that can juice our margins. We have fare classes, where people pay for additional flexibility. We have car services that can be connected in the medical business. We have our own lights and sirens, SUVs. They're on the ground in key areas, moving organs from airports to hospitals. So we're able to put all that together and create a business that's seen consistent improvement in our flight profit quarter- over- quarter. So I'll dive into to each of the business lines in a little bit more detail. In short distance, key markets are really Vancouver, where we're flying between Victoria and Vancouver.
Here, your alternative is driving to a car ferry, taking an hour, or in the summertime, we do compete with some seaplanes, but they have a disadvantage in that they can't fly at night, and they can't fly with instrument flight rules, so in bad weather, we have a big advantage. In Manhattan, we're competing against the tunnel, and that's not always a fair fight for us. So we're able to take a two to three hour drive, turn it into a 5-minute flight, and we can charge as little as $195. We sell airport passes for $795 a year. That gets your price down to as low as $95 every time you fly. You're beating UberX pricing with that in New York City.
And then in Europe, we're flying between Nice and Monaco for around EUR 200. Again, similar, flying a very short distance, taking a 5-minute flight that could be a multi-hour drive, and it's a beautiful sight along the French Riviera as well. We also have a joint venture in India. This is, this is the Holy Grail of congestion and geographic barriers because you're flying over mountains on windy roads. If you were to drive between Mumbai and Pune, it could be anywhere between two and six hours, and you don't know until you're three hours into it. So, so we really have an opportunity to save folks a lot of time for a great price. And from a unit economic perspective, you really have a great position. We're finally above this 2.5 seats breakeven on airport.
Then once you get there, once you have that base load of demand, now it's 100% incremental margin on every additional seat you sell. So we're really excited. It's been a long two-year process of building this up, but we're excited about the airport market because there's 27 million people every year that drive between Manhattan and the three commercial airports, and we're flying a small, small fraction, in the tens of thousands of that today. So huge growth opportunity for us in airport. We, we talked about jet. It, it's a nice strategic business for us, though it's non-core, because the same aircraft that we're chartering for our customers on the passenger side are the ones that we'll use to move organs on the medical side.
So it gives us more of that throw weight, and ultimately, the more hours we have that we can promise to operators, the better pricing we can get and the better availability we can get for our medical business. So now going to medical, which is our, our biggest business by far. We're focused on hearts, livers, and lungs, and that's because you have just between four and eight hours to get these organs to their recipient if it's gonna be a viable organ. So you have to move really quickly. You need dedicated air transportation. You need pilots available 24/7, and you're using every tool at your disposal, flying a helicopter to connect to a jet, having a lights and siren SUV on the tarmac to make that trip work.
We believe we are the largest in the United States in terms of moving hearts, livers, and lungs, and it's an end-to-end transportation product. We have the cars, we have the catering, we know what every doctor wants to eat, and, and that's really important because, you know, our customer service DNA comes from serving some pretty discerning customers in New York, and I don't have to tell you that healthcare is not known for its customer service. So we're able to bring both a lower-cost product and better customer service, and that's how we've grown so quickly. 65% growth organically in the most recent quarter, been 100%+ growth for the quarters preceding that.
And it's really a combination of being able to have the scale to get our prices down, but also have that great customer service, because these are complicated trips and someone's life is at stake. And generally, for folks who aren't familiar with how organ transportation works, you know, what's happening is there's been some kind of accident somewhere, someone's on life support, and their information is uploaded into a database that's maintained by UNOS, which is the United Network for Organ Sharing. They coordinate all organ matches in the U.S. There's a match that's created algorithmically based on information that's already been uploaded about potential recipients, and then an offer is made to a transplant center. They'll look at some additional tests, they'll have their own criteria, and then they'll either accept or reject that offer.
Historically, that's been the attachment point for Blade. Once the organ is accepted, they'll call Blade and start to arrange the logistics of flying their own surgeons from their hospital to the donor to remove the organ themselves and fly back. What we're very excited about that we just announced this quarter is a new service offering called Trinity Organ Placement Services, where now that offer is gonna come directly to Blade. So we're moving up the value chain in organ transportation. For this, we'll get paid an incremental flat fee, typically between $500,000 and $1.5 million per transplant center we serve. We have 70 contracted transplant center customers today. There's 270 in the United States, so this is a really important and exciting growth area for us.
We're launching with two of our biggest customers, sort of a pilot program that'll cover all the fixed costs of this business expansion. But we hope that most of our existing customers will want to use this service over time, and we think a lot of folks that maybe have another logistics solution will see the value in having 24/7, 365 resources from Blade. And just quickly, while we're talking about organs, wanna point out how we've been able to use M&A really effectively in this business. About a year and a half ago, September 2021, we acquired Trinity Air Medical for $23 million. They were doing about $16 million of trailing revenue. At the time, Blade had built the largest organ transportation business in the Northeast, but we were doing single-digit millions of revenues.
Fast-forward the clock, you know, we're nearly $140 million run rate of revenues between those two businesses, and what it shows you is our ability to take a great platform, great management team, but that doesn't have our scale in terms of aircraft, plug in the supply side, and really supercharge the business, not only in terms of its growth on the top line, but in terms of its EBITDA contribution. You've seen consistently our segment EBITDA and medical grow faster than our revenues, and you've seen our flight profit margin increase consistently quarter-over-quarter. That's the leverage of Blade bringing in those dedicated aircraft, where the more we fly, the less it costs.
And ultimately, it's saving money for our transplant center customers too, because we bring in aircraft that are located closer to where they fly most often, and you eliminate that repositioning flying. So it's less expensive for everybody, and we're able to increase our profit margins a little bit. When you think about all this coming together in terms of what Blade has built, we've built a great moat around the urban air mobility markets that we serve, and it's helpful for us now using conventional aircraft, but it's also a huge competitive advantage as we start to make that shift into eVTOL in the future. The asset-light model leaves us very nimble, allows us to change aircraft types very quickly, and leaves that open to transition to electric in the future.
In fact, our operator in Canada recently announced a firm order for the BETA ALIA eVTOL aircraft. We're looking forward to having our flyers that are already flying on helicopters in Canada, fly on that aircraft in the future when it's delivered. Infrastructure, I can't overstate the importance of the infrastructure that we have. Though heliports are public use, if you own your own helicopter, you can land there and walk through a hole in the fence into the Hudson River Park bike path and go into your SUV. If you're trying to coordinate six people arriving in six Ubers that don't know each other, and you need to weigh bags and check IDs, you simply can't scale a service without dedicated terminal infrastructure. We have exclusive, dedicated terminal infrastructure in the markets we serve: Canada, United States, southern France.
This is absolutely critical to be able to operate urban air mobility at scale, whether it's with rotorcraft or whether it's with electric vertical aircraft. The technology that we use to coordinate all these flights on different continents and organs moving from all different parts of America, it's not something we dreamed up on a whiteboard. This is something that we've built slowly, methodically, with feedback from customers over almost a decade now. It's been battle-tested, and it's very difficult to create something like that from scratch when you don't know what your customers are gonna want. We call it Customer-to-Cockpit because it coordinates everything for us, right down to invoicing our operators with prices that are built into our software. We know what every flight's gonna cost before we fly it, so it makes the whole thing much simpler.
Disputes are simple, and we know we're getting charged the right amount. The brand is absolutely critical, particularly to the passenger business, because when you're flying people, it's all about trust. And trust builds loyalty, builds repeat flying, and that, as an industrials conference, comes back to scale. And doing aviation subscale is a very expensive and frustrating proposition. And so Blade is able to come in with that competitive advantage of, we've already got the break-even utilization on the flights that we're flying by the seat. We already have enough hours between medical and passenger to make that cost lower than the competition. Anyone trying to compete with us is gonna have to build that up from scratch. You know, and talking just a little bit about the electric vertical aircraft or eVTOL opportunity here.
You know, there's crawl, walk, run, and I think Blade is unique in the industry in that we're set up to thrive in all three phases. There's a world a few years out in the future where these aircraft are much less expensive, where cities have built new infrastructure and multiple locations. You can land exactly where you wanna land, and that's a world that we're excited about, and we think we're gonna be a key player in that industry. What people sometimes forget about is the path from where we are today with helicopters to there. And what we believe is going to happen, and what we believe we're extremely well prepared for, is a world where the people who fly in helicopters now fly an eVTOL. The places helicopters land, eVTOL now land.
The places you would need terminals to offer that kind of service, you're gonna need terminals for eVTOL, and the unit economic costs of eVTOL are better, but are not a paradigm shift from the costs of flying in a helicopter. And I think that's where Blade is really gonna shine, and most importantly, where with what we believe is gonna be a cohabitation phase, where we're using helicopters for some trips, we're using eVTOL for other trips, we're still using seaplanes, we're still using instrument-capable aircraft when the weather's bad. That's where it's most important to get your customer where they need to go.
And if you were trying to compete using a pure-play eVTOL solution that, for example, doesn't have instrument flight capabilities for the first two years, you know, I'll let them tell our customers they're not gonna make the summer gala at the Hamptons. I don't think that's gonna fly just because there's a cloud in the sky. You know, you're gonna need the flexibility to be able to fly people consistently in all weather conditions. You're not gonna be able to tell a hospital that you can't bring the organ from Philadelphia that day because the weather's not good. You know, that's not an acceptable answer. So you're gonna need to have all the solutions available to you.
You use eVTOL when it makes sense, and then over time, as the capabilities become better, the range becomes better, the instrument capabilities evolve, you're gonna be able to use those aircraft for more and more trips. And so our strategy is really about being the one platform that can evolve with the industry, stay in that leading position in terms of market share for vertical transportation, both with helicopters and transitioning to eVTOL. And we kind of think of ourselves as the best risk-adjusted return in air mobility, because you don't need to make a bet on which aircraft is gonna make the most sense. You don't even need to make a bet that eVTOL is gonna make more sense than helicopters. You don't need to try to steal market share. We already have market share.
You don't need to guess how long it's gonna take to ramp up your load factor to be able to be profitable. You know, all those things come with the Blade value proposition, and most of our business is a non-correlated, mission-critical medical service that's growing incredibly quickly and is already profitable. And just sort of moving to the financials briefly before we take some questions, you know, we're really excited that the operating leverage of the platform is finally being demonstrated. You know, this was a milestone quarter for us, our first quarter where we're profitable both on a free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA basis. And really, in my mind, the, the best is yet to come. Got a lot of continued improvements we've talked about that we can make on the flight margin side and the medical business.
We've got a new margin-accretive business that's launching. Hadn't even had our first dollar of revenue, but we did already hire a lot of people to start servicing that Trinity Organ Placement Services business line. We're bringing in more dedicated aircraft that are gonna improve margins, and this is only the first quarter of break even for that game-changing Blade Airport product that we talked about, and there's a lot of growth ahead that'll grow profitability almost as quickly as revenue, right? Because it's 100% incremental margin on those additional seats. So I think the position we're in right now at Blade is really the most exciting time that I've seen at the company. Growth in all business segments and profitable segment EBITDA this quarter in both the passenger and medical segment.
You know, we've talked about how we're gonna have some more information to share with our investors as we get to Q4. We'll, we'll talk about an outlook then for both 2024 and 2025. But, but, but I really think we're in the catbird seat, as they say, where I grew up in Kentucky, for, for urban air mobility, and, and would, love to take some questions with the time we have left.
Thank you so much, Will. Maybe just to start out, you mentioned a few of the highlights from your report, your Q3 report, but maybe if you want to just talk about some of the, you know, the milestone operational highlights.
Absolutely. You know, I think, I think the big things, Airport has been a product that for two years, our management team has had to be patient, and our investors have had to be patient. You know, we talked, same quarter last year, it was 150-200 basis point drag on our total flight profit margins across the company. Gives you a sense of how much we were investing and flying low load factor flights. But we saw everything moving in the right direction. We saw average price per seat going up. We saw seat volumes going up. We saw customer engagement in terms of number of times you fly per year going up.
We saw more people buying those passes, those $800 per year passes, that tell you that they believe they're gonna fly at least 8 x a year to break even, and probably many more. And so we knew if we stuck with it, we'd see the milestone we saw this quarter, which was finally getting to be a positive flight profit contributor. On the medical side, you know, continued strong growth, 65% year-over-year, all organic. But really what I'm excited is, you finally are seeing the ability to consistently increase those flight profit margins and grow adjusted EBITDA faster than you're growing revenues. In a business that already, you know, just this quarter, did $3.3 million of segment adjusted EBITDA.
I think the final thing that was really you know, got a lot of questions from investors about the corporate cost base. You know, you saw a more than $2 million year-over-year reduction in our unallocated corporate expenses, the expenses just related to the platform. We've been very focused, and we've been telling people we're gonna drive those efficiencies. It's almost 30% reduction year-over-year, and you're seeing it come through. And so we don't, we don't ask investors to take our word for anything, but I think this was an exciting quarter for me, because we're demonstrating with our financial results, a lot of the things that we've told people we were in the process of doing, but it was a wait and see on some of these, and now you can see it in the numbers.
So it just, it's really exciting, and I think there's even more ahead.
That's actually a really great segue on the cost point. Could you maybe talk about how you think about customer acquisition costs and maybe cost per landing pad or cost per unit of infrastructure that you mentioned, and where that fixed leverage, fixed cost leverage comes from?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, a couple of different questions embedded in there. On the infrastructure side, you know, think a little bit about the incentives of the municipality or the operator of the infrastructure, which, you know, it might be an Atlantic or a Signature, you know, someone who runs FBOs. They want business. They want volume. They want people landing and paying fees and buying fuel. So we have this huge competitive advantage on the infrastructure side, and that we already have the scale. We have, we have flights to give, if you will, and so because of that, infrastructure operators are actually incentivized to make it easier for us to fly more volume.
It's actually not a huge part of our P&L in terms of the leases that we have to pay to get that dedicated terminal infrastructure, because we're aligned with our landlord in that sense. You know, they wanna give us exclusivity, they wanna make it easier, they want us to have space to process passengers because that means more money for them. So that's really an interesting piece where that cost is not going up in terms of the cost to lease that terminal space, and you're paying a landing fee that you're covering with 2.5 seats full out of 6 on a helicopter. Another big point of leverage is on the operator side.
We talked about that a little bit, but the more scale we have, the more we can create win-win contracts with our third-party operators, where we're incentivized to fly more, and the more we fly, the less we pay, but everybody still makes more money. And so again, weaponizing that scale in order to create a better financial outcome, both for our partners and for ourselves. And so those are really the key areas of leverage on the economic model. In terms of our marketing costs and our customer acquisition costs, the most important thing is getting people to fly more and more. So that's what we've seen consistently, and we got asked the question on the earnings call, consistent improvement in terms of the number of times that folks fly.
For multiple flight users, you know, people who are in that bucket of flying more than once, the average now is above five in terms of how much they fly, and then we have a cohort of super users, you know, people who buy these airport passes. They're telling you that they're gonna fly more than 8 x, or actually, we're gonna make money off the pass. And we have people that are flying much, much more. So increasing that engagement is really important. You know, we're not gonna go into specific details around kinda how we think about CAC and LTV on a product-by-product basis, but that's those are the building blocks. How many times do people fly? How much margin do we make on every flight that they take?
What I can tell you is that we're acquiring customers in the airport product, which is really where the lion's share of our marketing dollars are targeted today. We're acquiring people for less than we're gonna make off them, and that's based on a pretty limited runway of data. You know, when you think about how often people are gonna fly, product's only been around since COVID, for two years. So I think we're being a little conservative in terms of how much we're willing to spend to acquire customers because, you know, you give them a little more runway, the lifetime value of that customer is probably a lot more.
How do you think the mix is gonna be? I mean, I remember when, probably when we first talked was around when you acquired Trinity, but just between the medical, how much do you think that mix grows to? Does it become the lion's share?
You know what? It is, it is the majority today, and I think about it a little less about mix and more about what's the market opportunity. So, you know, thinking about medical, we're probably high 20% share for heart, liver, lung logistics today, in an extremely fragmented market. So we've said we see no reason we can't be the majority of that market over time. So I think there's a huge opportunity to continue to consolidate scale, mostly organically in heart, liver, and lung, and then you've got vertical expansions that you know, just doing the math, $500,000-$1.5 million per transplant center. There are 270 transplant centers.
We can't get all of them on our Trinity Organ Placement Services, but that's a huge growth area for us, too, that we're attacking right away. So I think huge market opportunity there, and just, you know, in the couple of seconds we have left, there is an inorganic opportunity as well. We talked about it a little bit on the call. We've seen so much growth, not having to pay a multiple, that that's where we've been focused. But there are opportunities and maybe even opportunities that come with some aircraft, where you can have a couple aircraft that are underutilized by our standards, that come with some contracts, and we can maybe buy that operator for single-digit EBITDA and then double the amount they're flying, right?
So from the perspective of the hours we're gonna put on from our existing customer base, you're flying at the cost of fuel at that point, because whatever contracts they had, if they're making money, they're covering all their fixed. So those are the kind of things we're looking at, where you just buy down your multiple really quick, and you've got a great opportunity.
Before we let you go, when's your best guess that we have an eVTOL landing and taking off in Manhattan?
I can't possibly guess. But I think you'll see them. You know, we did the first test in the New York City Airport area with Beta this year. So I've seen these things. They fly. I think you're gonna see more and more of them fly in cities that you're in, and so I think it'll be really important for people to see that they're real, 'cause they are. I've seen them. I've seen them with people flying them.
Thank you, Will.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.