high speed train and completely replaced air travel for certain journeys.
I think that is right for some (major) city pairs.
However if we look at the 20-25 most populated cities/city areas in Europe with their 500 million inhabitants, they create hundreds of citypairs.
Take the train from London to Berlin, from Turin to Bruxelles, Milan to Amsterdam. Madrid to Manchester, it doesn't work (yet?) to get to that 10 o'clock meeting.
And those are bigger cities, dozens of <1 million places. Same in California, US and China East Coasts.
I think city to city VTOL flights have been sought after for decades and they never became profitable. The only aircraft in service capable of carrying such loads is the Boeing Osprey, it's reliability is questionable, its seat mile cost are staggering, how much it has costed during the last 25 years, nobody wants to know / be reminded of..
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...rald_Coast.JPG