From liftoff at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) to touchdown at Downtown Manhattan Heliport (JRB) takes about 10 minutes. In one fluid motion, a US Helicopter Sikorsky S-76B sweeps its eight passengers across New York Harbor like a flying carpet. For the advertised nominal one-way fare of $159 (taxes or fees, which are not published separately on the booking Web site, bring the cost to $167.25), or perhaps twice the going rate for a car service, US Helicopter customers enjoy the satisfaction of looking down at the surface traffic swarming (or creeping) into and out of the city and counting the 60 to 90 minutes they've just saved.

The basic value proposition of trading money for time, convenience and freedom from hassles is what US Helicopter is all about. A passenger checking in at one of the Manhattan heliports can expect a boarding pass and bag check through to a final destination on partner airlines Continental or Delta, and the line between you and the TSA security screeners at these modest-size facilities is never longer than seven people.

Says Jerry Murphy, CEO of US Helicopter, after more than two years of operations, "We're pleased with our progress." But he wouldn't have to look back many years to be pleased simply to survive.

Beginning in the 1950s, New York Airways operated scheduled helicopter service from downtown heliports -- among them, one atop the former Pan Am building that sits astride the Grand Central railway station at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue -- to three major terminals and outlying airports, including Teterboro, N.J., and Westchester County in White Plains, N.Y. Cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco briefly experienced similar services, but none of these helicopter "airlines" survived. In the case of New York Airways, accidents, including a gruesome landing gear collapse atop the Pan Am roof that caused the aircraft to shed rotor blades, which fatally struck passengers waiting to board and killed a pedestrian on the street below, may have been as much of a cause for failure as a fuel price spike similar to what we're experiencing in 2008. So can a concept with a trail of past failures succeed today? Maybe.

Things have changed, according to an October 2007 report by Michael J. Ritger of The Research Works, a stock analysis firm specializing in small-cap and microcap stocks. Ritger wrote that newer technology makes all the difference: The direct operating cost of the Sikorsky S-76 is less than half that of the S-58s and S-61s and requires 3.6 maintenance hours per flight hour compared to seven for the earlier generation.

Murphy would add that the killer for New York Airways and others was that they got fixed-wing-style handling by ATC, often being vectored well off the desired route and experiencing holding delays that added hours of flying time. Murphy believes that US Helicopter's dedicated IFR route system and precision GPS navigation capability provide immunity from the vagaries of weather that doomed earlier operators. Minimums are ceiling 500 feet, visibility one mile. While there are no precision instrument approaches for US Helicopter aircraft, in the real world they don't need them because they can fly better than 98 percent of the time without them. High winds, fog and freezing rain are the only showstoppers and account for the 2 percent downtime.

Although it operates on a schedule and describes itself as an "airline," US Helicopter is actually a scheduled FAR Part 135 operation, which imposes certain burdens over and above plain-vanilla Part 135. Its problem is that it wants to expand, and it needs to.

The carrier has been operating at a loss for some time and surviving on a succession of capital infusions. It's an extraordinarily lean and austere operation, the only apparent frills being for the benefit of passengers.

The company has four Sikorsky S-76Bs, two of which it operates flying the published schedule (www.flyus helicopter.com) on a typical day, with one handling flights to Newark, and the other to JFK (the two aircraft not flying are usually at Sikorsky Memorial Airport (BDR) in Stratford, Conn., undergoing maintenance). At the end of the day's schedule, one aircraft overnights at Newark, where the company has arranged for hangar space to perform overnight maintenance and inspections. The other flies to Stratford, where it can be serviced at the company's main maintenance base on the airport's south side not far from the control tower. The evening BDR flight, which is published in the schedule, carries revenue passengers from 34th Street (TSS) with an intermediate stop at JFK before the 20-minute leg to Connecticut.

The company has also found niche markets that it operates on a seasonal schedule as charters. For 10 weeks during the summer, US Helicopter serves the high-end market in eastern Long Island with weekend schedules to East Hampton (HTO). Another aircraft operates from Monmouth Executive Airport (BLM) in Belmar, N.J., to the 34th Street Heliport on three roundtrips a day; a group of "season ticket" commuters uses the service to get to work; for some of them, the attraction is to return home on Friday evenings in time for religious services.