Here in New York. He had a really long commute. Anyway, we invite—I will ask a couple of questions to get started, and we would really appreciate your participation with questions that you might have. With that, Rob?
Great. Thanks for having me. I'll give a little—just a brief overview of the company, how we started. We're now into our 11th year of Blade. We started Blade from whole cloth here in New York, and flying passengers by helicopter on leisure routes, eventually expanding to airports such as JFK, Newark, and then moved into Europe, where we're flying between Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, and in the winter, the Alps, Geneva, Courchevel, other areas. The thesis of the company was very simple, which was, how do we best transition consumers and commuters from helicopters to electric vertical aircraft, or what you may call EVTOL in the future? What kind of platform would that look like?
What we did was we developed and acquired captive infrastructure here in Manhattan at all three heliports, infrastructure at Newark Airport, infrastructure at Nice International Airport, and two terminals, infrastructure in the two most important markets in the world, which are the greater New York area and southern Europe. In short-distance aviation, specifically in helicopters, we do not have a lot of landing zones. What's interesting about our model in terms of facilitating that transition is that we're asset-light, which allows us to have an asset swap at some point in the future. Those new aircraft will be a huge unlock for us because they're quiet and they're emission-free. With that, communities and stakeholders will be much more comfortable about having landing zones.
Because right now, if you guys are in New York, some of you may live in New York, you'll notice that all of the heliports are on the water or away from residential areas, with the exception of our largest terminal, which is on the West Side in Hudson Yards. Back in the day, Hudson Yards was literally just warehouses and the Lincoln Tunnel. Eventually, the Hudson Yards development was built towards the heliport, and a park was actually built around it. Now it actually is kind of like City 2.0, if you think about it, because people can take buses, the 7 train, walk across the street, and get a helicopter being JFK in five minutes for the price of an Uber. We do this on an asset-light basis. We do not own any of our aircraft.
We can track with a number of operators that are vetted for safety by our pretty large safety team, Financial Worthall. They have to use our technology. They have non-competes. We're basically better positioned, I think, than any other company to take advantage of this transition to next-generation electric aircraft. At the same time, what we did was find other use cases, specifically medical. We are now the largest air transporter of human organs in the United States: heart, livers, and lungs. That business today is a $150 million business, actually even larger than our passenger business, quite profitable. Over 70 hospitals we work with. We're improving outcomes every day and making it much more affordable for hospitals to move organs in order to really help save lives. It's a terrific business located here in the United States.
That is on jets, helicopters, and we call lights and sirens SUVs. That is a business that we have grown literally from zero, as I said, to $150 million. In 2005, I think we had about—we made an acquisition of a company called Trinity Air Medical, got us to $25 million. This year, we are about $150 million on that. It has been a terrific acquisition for us. That is kind of just a quick overview. We are based here in New York and in Europe.
That leads me into my first question to get this going. Rob mentioned these electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles to replace helicopters as we know them today. It's looking more and more like these vehicles are going to arrive in the not-too-distant future, maybe even the end of this year overseas and next year here in the U.S. I'd like Rob to talk a little bit about when they might arrive and how he makes the transition from electric, from our standard helicopter to the electric vehicles.
Sure. I mean, obviously, to get the best sense of when these aircraft are going to be commercialized, you have to ask the manufacturers themselves. That being said, we do have great relationships with the manufacturers. I think right now it feels like Q4 2025, Q1 2026 for the Middle East for two of the manufacturers.
Did you mention?
Adobe and, I believe, Archer. I think you'll probably be seeing them either very late 2027 or 2028. Again, there's going to be a cohabitation phase. These aircraft only go about 30 mi for the most part. I think you're kind of going to have this kind of cohabitation. We'll have helicopters probably for larger loads in terms of weight, number of passengers, longer distances.
But then clearly EVTOL for short missions like what we do today for the airport, which frankly, with 28 million people going by private cars between all the airports in New York City and Manhattan, it's a huge addressable market that we're really excited about, especially since we kind of broke through the Uber Black Barrier with $195 pricing on conventional helicopters today and actually $95 for people to purchase a $695 airport pass so they can fly all year for $95. I think that's the kind of timeline we're looking at. In terms of what we bring to it, why we can facilitate this, because we believe we have the entire ecosystem for this, from captive infrastructure at all the heliports now in New York area. We have southern Europe, which is the second largest market in the world.
We have a consumer-to-cockpit technology stack that not only allows people to book, but to have that connection directly to our operations center, to our operators, to our flyer relations people. All of the sausage-making that hopefully our passengers do not see is happening behind the scenes and there is redundancy. As you can imagine, in aviation and in logistics in general, it is all about redundancies because things do go wrong in terms of you could have everything from delays, weather, all sorts of things, mechanical issues. We have to make sure that we are there for our customers and get these things right. We talked about infrastructure, technology stack, and then just being the best routes in the world. Until there is new infrastructure, it is all about greater New York. You have heard about this from all the EVTOL manufacturers in southern Europe. It is the brands.
We're the most recognized—excuse me—we're the most recognized brands in vertical transportation today. Because we're asset-light, it's really just an asset swap for us where we can facilitate our operators for getting this new next generation of aircraft because we supply so many hours to them and we're the largest part of their business. We know that we can both accelerate and de-risk the go-to-market strategies for EVTOL manufacturers.
Go ahead.
Couple of questions. Considering all the actions we've had recently in helicopter travel, do you have any plans with battery-operated.
I'm sorry, what?
Battery-operated helicopters.
We've been talking about electric vertical aircraft.
Also with AI incorporated.
I think.
Second question, yeah.
From a safety issue.
Okay. There is one incident with respect to fatalities for every 170,000 hours of Part 135 charter and A to B flight like we do. It is incredibly safe in terms of helicopters. Obviously, what happened with this tourism helicopter—we are not in the tourism business—was catastrophic. Going back, the last time there was an incident that had to do with the kind of work that we do, which is charter and moving people A to B, is 1990. We are now looking at 35 years ago. It is quite safe. I think as EVTOL gets commercialized and moves into new generations of aircraft, I think off the top, I think because of fewer moving parts, redundancies, I think they will be quite safe. Everyone is aiming for as close to commercial aircraft, which is the safest form of travel.
In terms of AI, what I would really say is it's clear that while autonomous is not—we don't see that in the immediate future. I think you will see kind of virtual second pilots that kind of can aid with everything from instrumentation, airspace, collision avoidance, best practices. There's no question that the technology is going to make things safer as we move forward.
Do you produce your own equipment?
No, we do not. We do not. We work with our equipment is both from Bell, which is owned by Textron here in the U.S., and our airframes in Europe are made by Airbus.
Thank you. Go ahead.
Can you elaborate a little bit more on the next generation aircraft? Maybe a little bit more on that, but then also timing. How should we think about timing of when we should start to see some of those new aircraft come out?
I think we just said looking at Middle East, late 2026, again, this is coming from the manufacturers, early 2027, and then probably late 2027, early 2028 for the U.S. Probably, I do not want to say it is going to be performative, but they will just start being worked into the ecosystem. You will probably be seeing a lot more helicopters still than you will be seeing EVTOL. It is not going to be like a light switch.
I happen to live in Utah, and Utah is gearing up for the 2032 Olympics, the Winter Olympics. The county and city are already trying to make plans for urban air facilities for the Olympics. Government officials are starting to look at this. My next question is, you mentioned brand image and brand recognition. I know you're going to do the UF Sofan Golf Tournament.
We're doing the Ryder Cup.
The Ryder Cup.
Correct.
Can you talk a little bit more about, I mean, if you're outside the greater New York area, how do people find out about you or what do you think your perception is out there?
As I said, I think by far the most recognized brand in what I call vertical transportation today, as evidenced by the Ryder Cup seeking us out, where this is probably the most important golf event in the world that happens every two years. For those of you who know golf, we'll have eight helipads in Bethpage. We'll be flying passengers who are guests at the Ryder Cup over the week from Manhattan to Bethpage across eight helipads. In Monaco, the heliport and our terminal are literally trackside. As you could probably imagine, when Monaco becomes this weekend a racetrack, you can't really drive. People will literally fly from Nice and land in Monaco. We'll be doing it probably every 15-20 minutes.
In the past, it's probably the largest military movement of people by helicopter in the world during those three days for qualifying practice and race day. It is something we're really excited about. We do a lot of events, and I think it's important because generally those are first-time flyers, and you get to see what a great use case turning literally, call it, three and a half hours that can be on race day from Nice airport to Monaco into kind of five-minute flights, getting people used to what urban air mobility is all about. I think that it's in the cities we are, but we also do kind of pop up in areas. We've done music festivals in the past. We've done other types of big events. Yeah, Taylor Swift, others, fly to a lot of concerts, that's for sure. It is great.
It's great because that's how you get people to start thinking about use cases. If you just think about UBS Stadium, where I think we did a Stevie Nicks concert, right? We have an ability to actually move UBS Stadium from Long Island to Manhattan. How does that happen? In Manhattan, when you go to Madison Square Garden, maybe you can walk 15 minutes. If you're going to UBS Stadium, your concert's at 7:00 P.M. You are fighting traffic across the Long Island Bay, Midtown Tunnel, wherever you're going, as opposed to flying for five minutes right outside UBS. If you're at UBS Stadium or you're a sponsor or you have a box, what a great way to get your guests there. Also, when you're making your decision of where you're seeing whatever show, UBS becomes much more competitive. That's another good example.
Okay. I want to switch gears to the medical side.
Sure.
You've landed, I think, three new contracts in the last six to nine months or so. You're talking about a ramp going forward in that side again. Could you elaborate on that?
Sure. I think for this year, we're expecting revenue growth in the double digits. We have about 15% margins now. Our target is high teens on that. I think we're going to see margin expansion because unlike the passenger business, we actually own a fair amount of jets. About 30% of our missions are done on Strata-owned jets. Those have higher margins. As we move more towards our own fleet, and the reason why we own them there as opposed to passenger is because we're flying them 24/7, 365 days a year. In medical, you need a lot more control over it in terms of how these aircraft are positioned. In fact, we're positioning them in hospitals, which does two things.
Number one, it creates a competitive moat in terms of our competition because our jets are at the hospital as opposed to calling someone else to fly a jet in. It also creates better outcomes for patients because the jet can be scrambled immediately. Additionally, because of perfusion technology, which allows organs to live out of the body longer, the missions that we started with were really just lights and sirens, SUVs, and helicopters. Now we have done missions from Maine to Alaska. The regulatory environment changed also where the radius of where you can move an organ was very small just four years ago. Now that has increased. The combination of that, the perfusion technologies, you are seeing longer flight distances, and that also enhances your cash flow growth as well.
You said you're the largest provider.
Air transporter of human organs.
Do you know what percentage of the market you own?
I think when you look at the overall market, I think it's a lot of mom-and-pops. I think we're about 30%-35% at this point. There's a lot of runway there. Because again, we're competing with kind of very small companies. In addition to that, we have a lot of ancillary businesses, some that we've started, some that we're building, trying to leverage these great relationships that we have with hospitals. We have an organ matching service where we have clinicians that help hospitals determine whether or not there's a match for an organ. We are actively looking at organ recovery, which makes the whole process of obtaining an organ much more efficient. Also, since we have so many aircraft in the standby, there are a lot of things that we call critical cargo that have to be moved quickly.
Things like an aircraft that's stuck on the ground, which they call AOG, or radiopharma, where there's a small half-life of certain types of pharmaceuticals that need to get somewhere really, really quickly. Leveraging our infrastructure, logistics, and aircraft for these critical cargo is a great growth opportunity for us.
Could we expect acquisitions in the future on the medical side?
Yeah. I mean, right now, we've got $120 million of cash on our balance sheet, no debt. Our focus is on the medical side. Our great unlock and exponential growth on the passengers is going to come from EVTOL. On the medical side, it's doing what we do better than anybody else, but also acquiring companies that can kind of be, I would say, snapped on and leverage our relationships to the hospitals and our infrastructure and our skill and logistics. We're looking at acquisitions that are single-digit multiples, EBITDA accretive day one, and most importantly, easily integrated. That's what our model is for doing that. We see a lot of great stuff.
Target-rich environment?
You know, it's interesting. There is a lot out there, but some of these are smaller companies. And smaller companies, to do the kind of work that you need to do on a diligence side, get comfortable with the numbers, comfortable with management teams, make sure that the right people are going to stay around when you buy them. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it. The valuations will be fair. I think what's really interesting is when you get some of these companies, they have hospital relationships that we don't have that we can leverage with our air transport. We have hospital relationships they don't have where they can leverage, say, their organ recovery business or their business of moving radioisotopes, whatever it may be.
I think there's definitely it's not only going in at a single-digit multiple on the acquisition, it's buying that multiple down by what you can bring to the acquisition.
There's about a minute and a half left. Any questions from?
Okay. I'd just like to point out one thing then. Financially, the company's, I'd say, what, a year, year and a half, maybe even two years ahead of their original projections for profitability. Some of that's come from the medical side, which has been a really nice surprise over the last couple of years. Some of it is proven in the passenger side.
Yeah. We're actually one year ahead of where we thought we would be in terms of achieving profitability, year early.
Yeah.
Passenger.
If you look at the financials, last year, the bottom line Adjusted EBITDA was just over $1 million. I think analysts like myself are projecting somewhere over $10 million for 2025. It is a pretty impressive growth rate. I think it is worth all of your attention. Anything else you'd like to say?
No. Thanks for the time. It's always a pleasure.
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for coming.
Always.