Looking for a fly-on-demand air-taxi service that's still thriving after more than 12 years of competing for business in an area overflowing with scheduled national and regional carriers and traditional air charter operators?

If so, come with us to the home of Rose Air, aka the Hillsboro Airport, a 900-acre executive field in suburban Portland's Sunset Corridor region.

Flying Rose Air is simple ... so simple that it's a refreshing reminder of what air taxis can and should be. Pick up the phone, call the office, tell manager Jane Rosevelt where in Oregon or Washington you want to go, when you'd like to leave, and where you want to depart from. That, assuming Rose Air isn't completely booked up for that time slot, is about it.

For $230 an in-flight hour (billable hours include the time it takes the plane to fly from its base to your departure airport), a Rose Air aircraft will pick you up (window seating guaranteed), take you non-stop to your destination and, upon request, wait to take you back.

As might be expected of a specialized air service that has survived so long in as highly competitive a market as the Portland-Seattle corridor, Rose Air has a few unique attributes. For one, Jane Rosevelt, the person who took your reservation over the phone, is also the pilot who will be meeting you at your departure airport.

Ms. Rosevelt, as it happens, is Rose Air's founder, chief pilot and only full-time employee.

For a second thing, you can fly with Rose Air as often as you want without having to familiarize yourself with more than one cabin. Ms. Rosevelt's 2001 Cessna T182 Turbo Skylane is the Part 135-certified operator's sole aircraft.

To find out more about this uniquely successful air-taxi service and learn how a one-time nurse became a do-it-yourself air-taxi mogul, we asked the only person who really knows, Jane Rosevelt.

AirTaxiFlights: Excuse me for starting this interview with a pretty prosaic question, but how did a seemingly sane person like you get into the business of running a single pilot, single plane air-taxi service in a part of the country that isn't exactly bereft of scheduled carriers, commuter lines and charter operators?

Jane Rosevelt: Somebody gave me a flying lesson about 20 years ago. I was 46 at the time and had never even thought about becoming a pilot until that moment ... after that moment I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I got my private pilot's license in September of 1990 and, like all pilots who enjoy piloting, began looking for excuses to fly, which involved using a lot of gas and cost a fair amount of money even back then.

Since I had my license and I wanted to keep flying -- frankly, you have to keep flying, you can become a disaster waiting to happen if you don't -- I went right back to school to get my instrument rating. After that, over a period of two years or so, I got my commercial rating, my instructor CFI rating and my CF double (CFII instructor rating). I picked up a few flight students, but discovered I really didn't like to teach. I'd also inherited a bit of money and bought an aircraft and I certainly didn't want students flying that. So I needed another way to put my piloting skills to work.

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