Hey, everyone. Good morning. Welcome to the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. It's my pleasure to welcome the team from Blade. We've got Will here, Will Heyburn. He's going to do a presentation. Then we're going to have some Q&A, not just my questions. Hope to have the audience involved as well. He's going to walk us through Blade company history and kind of what's going on right now with the company. And Will, good morning.
Good morning. Thanks for having me.
I want you to figure out.
Yeah.
Am I in the way?
No, no, no.
It should be down here right there.
There we go. Great. Thanks for having me. I'm Will Heyburn, CFO of Blade. Really appreciate everybody's interest. Just quick disclaimer, talk about some forward-looking statements subject to risk and uncertainties. Please read all the disclaimers in our 10-K. Let's dive right in with a quick introduction for folks who are maybe new to the business. Blade is an asset-light transportation and logistics company. It's focused on two segments. In medical, we are the largest dedicated air transporter of human organs in the United States. In the passenger business, we are the market leader in what we believe are the largest and best urban air mobility markets in the world. We'll start by just going into a little bit more detail and what do we really do in both of these business segments.
So in our medical business and organ transportation, we enter into long-term contracts with hospitals and organ procurement organizations to move all of the organs that they need to import for transplant recipients. In organ transportation, time is of the essence. You have about four to eight hours to get a heart, liver, or lung to a recipient once you complete the procurement surgery. So the way we do this is we have aircraft. The majority is through an asset-light network, but we do own about 10 airplanes. That represents about one-third of the flying that we do in the medical business. They're pre-positioned all across the United States, crewed 24/7, 365, ready to go at a moment's notice to carry a surgical team from one of our customers to the location of an organ donor and fly that organ back for an immediate transplant surgery to save someone's life.
It's a great growing market. It's extremely fragmented and lots of opportunities to grow both organically and through share gain. In the passenger business, we're laser-focused on what we believe are the two best markets in the world for urban air mobility, so that's New York City, where we're flying folks between Manhattan and Newark or JFK Airport. We're doing that for prices that are competitive with Uber prices. Starts at $195 a seat, available 12 hours a day, six days a week, and we also offer seasonal services to places out on Long Island, extremely popular, and it's a great business for us here in New York City. Additionally, we have service in Southern Europe. We're flying primarily between Nice, Monaco, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, and the winter months. We also fly Geneva, Courchevel, other ski destinations. In both places, we're by far and away the market leader.
And a really important part of this business is we have exclusive infrastructure. Infrastructure is very scarce in these markets. And that's what allows us to do what we do at scale and deliver the great passenger experience that we're known for. We'll start by going a little bit more into the medical business and talk about why we're excited to be in this market and where we expect the growth to come from. So when we think about just the market intrinsically, there's a number of really exciting changes that have taken place over the last few years and that are continuing to take place today. If you rewind the clock, organs used to be matched in very specific and small donor service areas, somewhat arbitrary. And in fact, there was a dividing line along the Hudson River.
So if there was a matching heart for somebody in New Jersey, but the recipient was in Manhattan, you wouldn't be able to match that organ to the person who needed it. Over time, people realized this didn't make a lot of sense. And so these rules have changed to a continuous matching program that now gets organs to the recipient that needs it the most, irrespective of where they are geographically, so long that it's possible to make that trip and keep the organ viable. That's resulted in a significant increase in the average length of trip, about a 50% increase over the last five years. Helping that trend is new technology that's enabling two things. One, it's enabling you to actually preserve that organ for longer in flight.
There's perfusion technology that pumps oxygenated blood through the organ while it's in flight, or there's just temperature-controlled preservation technology that can enable some of the same things. Also, that technology is allowing us to utilize organs from donors whose hearts have stopped. It's something called a DCD donor, donor circulatory death. If you go back four years, there were essentially zero DCD hearts available in the United States for organ transplant recipients. Now that's the fastest growing part of the market. So perfusion technology is what has been the unlock here for this part of the growth story. And that pumping of oxygenated blood through the organ is able to repair the damage that's done when the donor's heart stops. So really exciting multi-layered growth opportunity here that's leading to both more organs becoming available for transplant, and it's also leading them to coming from farther away.
Our unit in this business is a flight hour. That's how we bill per flight hour. So we're seeing growth from both of those areas. It's also an extremely fragmented market because it was very limited in terms of the geography you could travel historically. Most transplant centers contracted with a mom-and-pop operator of a couple of airplanes based near their hospital. You never needed anything more than a light jet. And what's happened is that those legacy mom-and-pop operators no longer have the flexibility or even the capability at all to perform these longer trips and then still be able to scale up and down as needed. So a huge competitive advantage we have is that we have a very broad-based asset-light network of different kinds of aircraft so we can match the right trip to the right aircraft.
If we're going locally, we've got lights and sirens SUVs. We can charge a hospital maybe less than $1,000. If we're going nearby in the Northeast, say New York, Philadelphia, we'll use a helicopter. We can land on the roof of the donating hospital, land right next door to the receiving hospital. We can do the whole thing for less than $10,000 and less time than it would take to go to the airport and fly in a jet. So you put that all together and we're able to save hospitals significant money relative to the competition, which is mostly 100% asset-heavy, and they operate the same kind of plane. So if you're an operator of two Gulfstream IVs, every day is a pretty good day to fly a Gulfstream IV. Doesn't always make sense for the customer.
So we're very good at making sure our customers are in the right kind of aircraft. We have invested in a very limited number of aircraft purely based on the return on invested capital that we get. When you think about the growth in our medical business, going from $20 million of revenues about four years ago to nearly $150 million of revenues today, almost all of that growth was when we were a 100% asset-light business. What we've realized is we have so much scale in certain markets that we get a three or less year payback on used aircraft that we purchase. These aircraft cost less than $3 million apiece.
And they also provide us some operational benefits, being able to place aircraft closer to our customers, eliminating repositioning and saving them money, all while making 10-20 points more margin than we would make if we used our average non-dedicated third-party operator. So it's really a win-win investment for us in terms of saving money for the transplant center, making our service more reliable, and also generating more flight profit per flight hour and more flight profit per trip. We're going to invest in a limited number of additional aircraft. We said single digit over the next 6-12 months. And I want to stress that this investment is not required for our growth. It's something we do opportunistically when we see an opportunity to make that return. And there's a similar opportunity on the ground. So we're building out ground hubs all across the United States.
This allows us both to serve our existing customers, moving teams and organs to and from airports, but it also opens up new markets for us that we've already started to attack. We're moving blood samples. We're moving tissue samples. We're doing last-mile courier service for organs like kidneys that are most often shipped rather than flown on dedicated aircraft. So once we have that infrastructure in place to serve our primary customers, we've got big opportunities to grow into ancillary markets. We've also launched some new services that are helping our existing customers. The most exciting one that we launched about a year ago is something called Organ Placement. So when we talked about how the industry works, those organ procurement organizations that I mentioned, there's 55 of them. They divide up the country into geographic areas, and they're responsible for dealing with the donor.
Organ procurement organizations, when they have an organ that looks like it's going to be a match for a transplant center's recipient, they will make what's called an organ offer. Historically, that's waking up surgeons in the middle of the night. There's a human element where you might not consider every organ. It might not be technically or even physically possible to open the aperture as wide as you would like to do. What we do is we hire clinicians that are trained by our customers to evaluate those organ offers on their behalf on shifts 24/7, 365. We get paid a flat monthly fee for this on an annual basis. It ends up being between $250,000 to $1.5 million a year per customer.
What we've seen that's really exciting is it's allowing hospitals not only to evaluate more organ offers, but actually to accept more organs. So that's really an important selling point as we go to our existing base of logistics customers and say, "Look at the experience that we've had. Look at the positive impact, not just on the transplant center, but on all the folks that are waiting for organs." So really exciting growth opportunity. We'd point out that it also gives us some visibility into movements that might not always have been part of our initial contract. That could be the kidney movements. That could be the ground tissue and blood sample movements as well. So we've built this platform now. Though we're primarily using it to move organs today, what we've really built is what we believe is the largest 24/7 time-critical logistics aviation platform.
It's suitable for much, much more than just moving organs for hospitals. We see a lot of opportunities to grow into other time-critical cargo. Some examples are radiopharma, have very short half-lives, has to get to the destination very quickly after manufacture. Parts for aircraft that are stranded on the ground need to get moving very quickly. And parts for manufacturing, whether that's aerospace, automotive, other industrial, you need to get the microchips to the Ford plant. Otherwise, they have to shut down the assembly line at huge cost. We've begun hiring salespeople for this new growth area, and we're really excited to start leveraging the aircraft and vehicles we already have to get into this business. Finally, on the medical side, we've been very successful strategically deploying M&A to grow. This is just one case study of Trinity Air Medical, which we acquired about four years ago.
They were doing about $15 million of revenue. We were doing about $5 million of revenue at the time. And you can see how taking what was a fantastic sales platform and a fantastic customer service platform, but that did not have scalable aviation supply and coupling it with our asset-light network allowed us to supercharge the growth. So really cool opportunities. In the last couple of years, we've been able to grow so quickly organically that we haven't focused as much on M&A. That we did do a tuck-in last quarter on the ground side, but we see many more opportunities like this. I'll quickly talk about Passenger, and then we'll get into some questions. So in Passenger, we've really built a moat around what we believe are the best markets in the world for passenger vertical transportation.
One of the most important parts of this competitive advantage is our exclusive infrastructure. These are terminals that only we can use in places with the most scarce infrastructure in the world that also happen to be the places where the value proposition for the consumer who wants to fly is the strongest. Places like New York City, places like Saint-Tropez, places like Atlantic City. You need this infrastructure in order to be able to process passengers safely at the scale that Blade is already operating, and it creates a great customer experience. That customer experience is managed by a proprietary software application. That's not something that's just on a whiteboard. It has successfully moved hundreds of thousands of people. It's a product of our experience moving folks in three dimensions for 10 years now.
Very difficult to replicate because if you're trying to build this software from scratch, there's just some things that you don't know because you don't have the experience flying. All of this comes together in terms of the experience on the ground, the significant installed base of users, and it creates a really great opportunity for us to generate high-margin ancillary revenue through partnerships with great brands. What we do is we create mutually interesting introductions between our flyers and the brands. Ambient advertising generates more revenue, and in fact, our customers enjoy it. So you put all these things together and creates a great flywheel that helps us have even more profit opportunities in this great business line. What we're doing here is not just trying to be a helicopter and seaplane business.
We have built a platform where you can change just one thing, the aircraft that you're using, and transition to an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, eVTOL or EVA, as we call it, and now you have something that is quiet, that's emission-free, and that is going to be welcomed by communities rather than have communities be skeptical of it, as some are of the noise generated by helicopters, so this is an area that we believe is going to unlock huge growth for us because you're going to create more places to land. It's something that you can see already. Communities are welcoming. Manhattan did a test flight of one of these aircraft down at the Wall Street Heliport already.
It's exciting to see that these things are already flying, that communities are embracing them, and it's really, really a great opportunity for our growth in the future. We're focused on the places where the infrastructure already exists. The value proposition for the customer is already there. We've solved the two most important problems in aviation, which is we've already got enough people on every aircraft to make money on the flight, and we've already got enough flights to utilize the aircraft so the aircraft can be profitable as well. These are difficult things to solve, and it's taken us some time to get our passenger business to where it is today, which is profitable on a segment-adjusted EBITDA basis because you have to build that utilization. You have to build that load factor. We're only in the early innings of profitability on the passenger business.
We've made some tough choices to shut down routes that were not going to be profitable for us, and you still haven't seen the full year impact of that in Canada, and you still haven't seen the full year impact of a restructuring that we recently completed in Europe. So more to come on the passenger profitability side of things. But I think when you roll it all up, you're really seeing incredible improvement in the overall profitability of the company as we march towards full year profitability, which we expect in this year and 2024. And we continue to have an extremely strong balance sheet, which is going to allow us to complete more of those tuck-in acquisitions that we can complete at favorable multiples and then supercharge with our supply base, focused really entirely on the medical business and the asset-light time-critical logistics space.
Finally, before I go into some questions from the group, just want to briefly address a recent short seller report that was targeted at a manufacturer of an organ perfusion device that's very popular in the industry. The report included a transcript of an interview with one anonymous source who alleged unethical business practices in the industry more broadly, which the report noted were unsubstantiated and based on rumors. I'd like to take this opportunity to make it clear that Blade and our subsidiary, Trinity, don't engage in any of these unethical practices that were described by this individual, and we're not aware of any ongoing investigation in our company. In fact, it's quite the opposite for Blade. Our medical relationships are based on transparency and trust. When we give invoices to our customers, we show exactly the number of flight hours that were flown on our aircraft.
We disclose any repositioning legs that may have occurred, and you've seen us invest nearly $30 million in owned aircraft that we were moving closer to our customers to save them money, and that's already shown up in our numbers as we've actually seen a headwind to revenue from making that important strategic decision to have great long-term relationships with our customers, and it's this transparency and trust that we believe has led to our incredible growth in customers and has led to our 100% customer retention rate in 2024 and 2025 year to date, so with that, happy to take some questions.
I'll get it started. First of all, thank you for your time. Thank you for the presentation. We had Joby here this morning. We have Archer tomorrow.
I'd kind of love to hear about, you know, you guys have been running high-frequency on-demand helicopter traffic in New York. I'd love to hear about, you know, what the roadblocks have been and sort of what happens if we do have eVTOL certification. What changes sort of do you envision for your business?
Look, the biggest roadblock to growth today is the existence of suitable infrastructure, and that's the biggest roadblock that gets bulldozed right through once you have the introduction of eVTOL. You know, communities are reluctant to build more heliports primarily because of the noise, and what's been really exciting for us to see is communities all across the country embracing vertiports that are going to be used by these new quiet aircraft, so I think that's the big unlock that happens for us with these new machines, and we're really excited about it, and we're really excited to see the traction that we've seen.
Okay. And your business right now, would you say it's demand constrained, supply constrained? Does it vary by time of day? Does it vary by the price of an Uber? Like, how do you structure your business so that you can get, you know, load factors that drive revenue and work with?
Yeah. Well, look, you take a product like the airport, you know, you've got to be available when people want to go to the airport. So you can't aim it too much. We're available from 7:00 A.M. till 8:00 P.M. So people know they can rely on us to get to and from the airport. And in fact, if there's bad weather, we have a built-in product where we're going to send a car for you so you know that once you've booked your seat on Blade, you're going to get to the airport one way or another. So what we've seen is continued growth in products like that where we're just a fraction of the 27 million people that travel between the New York City airports and Manhattan every year. And that's why we're continuing to gain market share.
However, there are some dead zones in the city because of lack of infrastructure. You know, the heliports that we can utilize today are along the water, West 30th Street, East 34th Street. So our ability over time to have more places to land, maybe more central towards Midtown, would unlock additional micro-markets and create more growth. But we're seeing great growth today in products like our airport transfer service.
Okay. And is it an on-demand service or is it people book 24 hours, 40 hours ahead of time when they know they're going to the airport? Like, what is sort of the model right now? Or is it both?
Whatever you prefer as a flyer. We have customers that book very far in advance. We have customers that land, look at the traffic and say, "No way am I doing that," and they book us and we pick them up.
Okay. And would it look like your medical business where you acquire the aircraft and amortize it over time? Or what does the business look like?
No, the passenger business is 100% asset-light. We don't own any aircraft in that business. You know, and I'll point out if you look at the total aircraft we own across the entire company, it's only about 15% of the flying we do is on owned aircraft. So we're really an asset-light business. And then certain areas, medical only, will make those investments in assets because we see the return on invested capital.
Okay. And can you talk about the limiting factors for these vertiports? Like, is it, I mean, there's not demand 24 hours a day, but are there certain times that you can't fly because of helicopters and that goes away with eVTOLs? Or does something need to change to the infrastructure so eVTOLs can land there and charge? Like, what is the?
Our busiest heliport, West 30th Street, is 24/7, 365. You know, but there are times when there are more flights at airports. There's times when there's more traffic, so we take all that into account when we think about the amount of inventory that we put on the shelves, and the great thing about the way we program this product is the same aircraft flying back and forth all day long, so if you have periods of more intense demand, you can fly that same aircraft a little more frequently. If you have periods of less demand, you can space out the turn times a little bit more, so if there's no demand at a particular moment in time, you're not incurring any cost if you don't run a flight, so we're able to match supply to demand pretty well.
And if you think about our leisure routes, lots of concentrated demand at specific times. And so you fill every flight and you add one more, and maybe that last flight doesn't get full all the way at that particular time. So because you're talking about aircraft with six to eight seats, actually we do have the capability to move supply around to match demand pretty efficiently. Though on the airport product, it's taken us a couple of years to kind of fill the cup so you've got enough seats full on every flight in that 12-hour service period. But now that we're there, you've seen the massive improvement in profitability that's created in our passenger business.
Okay. And those lounges that you showed on the slide, is that a subset, a special area for Blade passengers only within these vertiports? Or like?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah. That's an exclusive infrastructure. And you know, when you think about the alternative, you know, some of these places are exclusive landing sites just for us. Like our landing zones in Santa Fe, no one else can use those. In some cases, like big city like New York, these are public use heliports, but the alternative to our exclusive infrastructure is a hole in a chain link fence along the Hudson River Park bike path. So that might work if you own your own helicopter and you're coming up in your own SUV, but if you have six people coming in six different cars, you need to weigh all their bags, you need to check all their IDs, and it's raining, pretty hard to create the customer experience and the safe customer experience that we provide without having that exclusive infrastructure.
So we think that's a really important part of the story.
Okay. Question back there?
I had a quick question. It has to do with your medical and organ department or division?
Yeah.
Okay. So with your mergers and acquisitions or stuff that you're tucking into your business, do you have a team that identifies companies to acquire, or are people mom-and-pops coming to you? Like, can you speak a little bit to that? And then also the branding, like how do you brand it so that it's your brand?
Yeah. Look, it's a little bit of both. You know, given the scale we have in the industry, we've got relationships with a lot of the folks that might be interesting acquisition targets. In fact, that's how Trinity came about. You know, they had come to us because they didn't have enough aircraft supply, and so we were a supplier to them. And that supplier relationship developed into a great thesis for all of us to build a much bigger business together. So, you know, that's obviously the preferred way for us to find acquisitions because you have that element of mutual trust from having worked together.
A couple of questions on medical business. One just on the composition of it. Can you give us a sense for transplant volumes? And to the extent you know, we'd love to know how that breaks out, DBD versus DCD?
Yeah. We don't give sort of specific numbers on the number of transplants that we do. You know, it's not going to be the best indicator because going on the ground is going to be much less revenue than going in the air, and it's highly variable depending on what mode of transportation you're utilizing. I would say we generally track the market in terms of the split between DCD and DBD, and we are seeing DCD grow much more quickly than DBD, just like everyone's seeing in the marketplace. Those trips tend to be more complicated. They tend to have more instances where multiple aircraft need to be utilized because there's a timing element that's more difficult to synchronize.
They also have more instances, what we call in the industry of a dry run or what medical professionals call non-arrest DCD, where you go to pick up an organ and you unfortunately come back empty-handed. For a lot of reasons, the number of organs actually transplanted, particularly when you have a third or more of DCDs where you're coming back empty-handed, is not the best KPI for our growth and revenue always.
Yeah. And I'm going to get another one. On TransMedics, with their launch of their logistics network, like how do you view that? Are they a customer also? And like how do you view them competitively with their own? I think they've got like 19 points or something now.
Yeah. We view our customer has a contract that says they're going to use us for transportation irrespective of what device, if any, they're utilizing. We see the vast majority of our flying just using regular cold storage on ice, nothing at all. So we're moving the TransMedics machine every single day on behalf of our contracted customers. That's our interaction. And we've seen it grow the market. And what I would say is that it feels like we're in very early innings in terms of the positive impact that technology is going to have on the market because you really haven't seen the competition get in and force yet. So we're starting to see new therapies, new devices that are able to provide access, particularly to DCD organs at lower cost. We're seeing our customers embrace those new therapies and technologies in lots of different ways.
One of the most exciting ones that we've talked about that's growing really quickly within our customer cohort is NRP, normothermic regional perfusion, so what that is, if it's new to you, that same oxygenated blood pumping that you can do in some of these great devices that companies like TransMedics have created, what you do is you pump oxygenated blood through the body of the deceased and perfuse the organ inside the body, and there's actually some doctors that see a lot of benefits to doing it that way, and what we've heard from our customers, particularly large sophisticated hospitals, you utilize regular heart bypass machines or ECMO machines that these hospitals already have, so it can be very inexpensive for them to perform that procedure versus having to pay for a device, so really sophisticated hospitals, they have everything they need to do NRP.
They put the equipment in one of our planes, they go do an NRP DCD recovery, they come back, they're able to access that DCD organ at much lower cost. Now, hospitals that aren't as big don't have as much experience. It was harder for them to access a DCD organ using that therapy. A couple of really interesting developments are now making it easier. One, you have the proliferation of great third-party services that kind of have NRP in a box. Keystone, ProCare, great companies that can for $20,000-$30,000, something in that range, go complete surgical recovery and NRP of a DCD organ, and so that's allowing more transplant centers to contract with folks like that and actually recover the DCD organ. The other thing that's pretty new is you have OPOs initiating the use of NRP focused more on the abdominal organs.
And so now you have another expert that's on the ground locally that's able to put, particularly that liver might be a liver that wasn't accepted before the DCD procedure took place, but you put it on NRP, you get to see some data, you can offer it again and actually match a liver that wasn't going to match before. So these are both very early innings in terms of seeing adoption across our customer base and across our partners on the OPO side, but really exciting developments that could grow the adoption of DCD organs.
Does NRP ever result in an ECMO flight for you guys when you're moving a perfusionist to put them on an ECMO device or no?
Yeah, it could. If we have OPOs that are customers, if they cover a very large geographic area, then we would be moving equipment and a perfusionist to support that NRP. And then if it enables the retrieval of an organ that wouldn't otherwise be retrieved, that's an incremental flight as well. So you can actually see on both sides of the equation. Obviously, if it's ever possible to drive, you want to drive. You know, you're trying to save money for your centers, for your customers, and for the system. And so you're always going to drive if you can. But large geographic area OPOs, they do need to fly.
Okay. One more back.
So, I know you can't do everything at once, but you have like the luxury market where you go to Nice and stuff like that. And then you also have the medical division. And you also spoke to just like logistics with ships and things like that. Where do you see like your business kind of putting its spotlight over the next six to 12 months?
Over the next six to 12 months, continuing to grow that medical business and then build our beachheads in time-critical logistics markets. You know, that's the big opportunity that's right in front of us in terms of growth. And there's growth in all of those areas. There's the organic growth in the market that we already talked about. There's the ability to consolidate share in a really fragmented market. There's the ancillary service lines that are very early days, like organ placement, like tissue and blood samples. And then we haven't even begun on the other time-critical logistics markets, but we've begun hiring salespeople. They're going to help us get to the right customers, and we know we have the right aircraft to do that.
I would say on the passenger side, it's really a story about continued growth and things like airport, which are relatively early days in terms of our adoption, and then continued growth and profitability as you see the full year impact of changes that we've made, and you see us continue to focus on cost rationalization.
So then just a follow-on, do you need to educate the markets in the logistics and the ships and all that other stuff? Do you think that you need to raise your profile there more?
Oh yes.
You already know about that.
No, absolutely we need to raise our profile. This is something we're not doing yet. You know, so we're hiring folks that have those customer relationships. We know we have the right aircraft to perform this mission, but we got a ways to go. We're building a whole new business line within that part of our company, and we believe that we're set up for success, but it's early days. We definitely have to raise our profile.
On raising your profile and demand stimulation, like, who's responsible for demand stimulation in New York? Just that falls on your shoulders? Do you partner with Uber? How do you kind of?
Lots of partnerships. You know, you'll see ads for our services in Uber. In fact, you can redirect your Uber. If you get an Uber to the airport, you can click the redirect button, go straight to one of our terminals, and then take a helicopter in five, 10 minutes instead of being in traffic for two hours. Lots of great word of mouth just because of the brand profile that we have, people's familiarity and, you know, interaction with it. We have lots of partnerships with folks like Bilt, with hotels, with other companies that share similar customer bases. So we're able to acquire a lot of customers without paying anything because of those great partnerships, because of that word of mouth, and then, you know, we do some great performance marketing, search engine optimization, all the above.
In places like Europe, we've got code shares with Qatar, with Emirates. So you can actually book a flight directly to the Monaco heliport, and you'll have a flight on your Emirates ticket that takes you all the way there using the Blade service from Nice Airport to Monaco. So we're open for business and things like that. And we provide real value to our partners. You know, they're excited to meet our customers. Our customers are excited to meet them. We've got a lot of opportunities uniquely to create these win-win customer acquisition opportunities without much, if any, cost to us.
Okay, and just lastly for me, you guys have done a lot of work on, you have some slides out there about the cost to operate the network you run now. And then we hear Archer and Joby, we talk about $5 per passenger mile. I'd just love to get your sense of, there seems to be a disconnect between how much it costs to run one of these versus how much, you know, your sense of versus the prices that you're charging now because it's a helicopter versus an eVTOL. Like how do all those pieces fit together?
I think there's probably just, there's a long-term opportunity, which is huge cost savings. And I think you hear a lot of that from the folks at those companies that are making these incredible aircraft. And then there's probably the day one, you know, what are the nuts and bolts of how aviation works? And we're pretty familiar with the costs of hiring pilots, getting insurance, having hangar space, hiring maintenance techs, doing required recurrent training. And so you add all those things together, you think about how many hours a year you're actually going to fly the airframe, and we come up with a number that is slightly less than what we pay today for helicopter lift, but it's not a paradigm shift. And I think over time, you start to see that paradigm shift. But I would love for those companies to be right on day one.
That would be fantastic. That would be awesome. I think the great part about our business is we built it in such a way that they don't have to be. If actually the costs are only incrementally better on day one, the best markets in the world, maybe the only markets in the world where you see a huge positive impact from eVTOL are going to be the ones that we're in. Then that puts us in the catbird seat, as they say where I'm from, to go expand to other markets. So you know, I think both can be right. This is what we see on the ground today in terms of the fixed and variable costs of operating aircraft, and then we swap in something else. But I think over time, you start to see some of the numbers you're talking about.
Okay. That's very helpful. Appreciate your time this morning.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks, guys.