As a frequent travel destination for me, Bangalore has been living hell sometimes. I’ve missed meetings in the past because in spite of an on-time arrival into the city at 11 AM for a 1:30 PM meeting, well, I’ve been found to be still sitting in the cab two hours later because of the arterial nature of the connectivity in Bangalore.

But it seems some people will finally be able to get a respite from being in a situation like this today onwards. Bangalore is going to get a helicopter taxi service to start operating from today, from the Electronics City and HAL Airport to the BIAL in Devenahalli.

A new operator called helitaxii.com is taking to the skies today with a couple of Bell 407 helicopters which can fly passengers to and from the Bangalore Airport to Electronics City & the HAL Airport, cutting short the tumultuous journey of 2 hours to approximately 15 minutes. Once this operation settles down, there are plans to open up another couple of helipads in the city.

The service can be booked via the HeliTaxii app, and offered currently between 6:30 AM to 9:30 AM and 3:00 PM to 6:15 PM. Each chopper has 6 seats.

However, just like everything Bangalore Airport related, this service doesn’t come cheap. Tickets are priced at INR 3500 + GST (INR 4130). It includes the drive from the airport terminal to the helipad, and 15 kgs of baggage allowance, which would ideally come with your flight. Anything more needs to go by the ground extra. I’m not sure how that would work in practice though.

Bottomline

Clearly, this service won’t cost cheap. I pay lesser for tickets from Mumbai to Bangalore sometimes. But if it works out, I’d expect the cost to go down and some other frequent user packages to be sold as well. Let’s hope it all works for them. I’ll try and review the service when I can.

Would you use the HeliTaxii service to save yourselves time?